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Forms, Faces and Spaces features in 26th annual Scotia Bank’s CONTACT Festival

May 12, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The Scotia Bank annual CONTACT Festival includes photographers exhibiting in galleries around the greater Toronto area, including Mississauga, Georgetown and Norval among many others at a greater distance from the city centre.

The Opening Reception for the Munson and Friends Studio Gallery, Forms, Faces and Spaces, figuratively speaking! is this Saturday, May 14 at the Parish Hall, next to St. Paul’s Anglican Church (circa 1847), 16 Adamson Street, Norval.

Connie Munson conceived and organized this month-long multi-media event to invite artists and photographers to participate in an exhibition that asks, “What does it mean to human?” To share, as she coined it, “the iconic that unites through diversity.”

As a person, who am I? The theme has been embraced by the photographers and artists to interesting, beautiful and surprising effects.

The Scotia Bank CONTACT Photography Festival is “an annual month-long celebration of modern photography [that] has shown 1,000 local, national and international photographers in more than 200 venues… This is the largest photography event in the world.”

Ms. Munson’s current project, Forms, Faces and Spaces is included on the list of venues by perusing the map of Ontario on the Scotia Bank’s festival website. Sherry Prenevost and Sabrina Leeder curated the event in Norval with Installation Design by Colleen Dee and Connie Munson, creating an “organic flow” to the whole. Initially, the stage back wall was an early focal point. Usage of a grid, the 15 foot high walls and assorted groupings have made for a space that is compatible to maintaining distance between patrons and still give ample opportunity to comfortably view the 120 pieces by 40 photographers and artists.

Not only photography is a part of this exhibition. Visual artists have been invited to participate. There are paintings, textiles and prints. In the first week of patrons visiting the gallery prior to Saturday’s Opening Reception, more than 100 people came to see the wonders within it. 

Live artist, Sherry Park was there to begin her portrait painting as a demonstration. It had a strong beginning and she is looking forward to its being finished by the end of the show.

Jolanta Jung, ceramicist of Inglewood will be displaying her work at the Forms, Faces and Spaces show as of this weekend. Born and educated in Poland, Ms. Jung came to Canada in 1981. Over the ensuing years, her reputation and work as a sculptor, first and primarily in ceramic but eventually other mediums, has led her to hold the position as Artist in Residence at the Living Arts Centre in Mississauga. Her works have been exhibited in Terminal One at Pearson Airport, Toronto University Mississauga Campus and many other venues. 

At an art auction in benefit of the Burlington Arts Centre, her piece “All Dressed Up” sold for 50% over the asking price. In 2013, Ms. Jung was commissioned to design the 14 Marty awards for the Mississauga Arts Council and being as she is determined not to repeat herself, Ms. Jung made every one of them different.

The antique village of Norval, home for nine years to Lucy Maud Montgomery and her husband who was minister to the local Presbyterian Church, still maintains the home and boasts photographs from L.M. Montgomery’s residence there, in her house and in the Parish Hall itself where she and many others produced theatrical events. Those photographs are on display at the exhibition, fine examples of faces and spaces nearly a century ago.

Norval has not so many years ago been amalgamated into the umbrella of Georgetown which would be reason enough for citizens of that town to attend but people are coming from further afield as Connie Munson is a Caledon artist and other members of the Dufferin Arts community are there too. 

For the Opening Reception this weekend, Marnie Cooke who is formerly an instructor for the National Ballet will perform a Flamenco dance. Another beautiful take this is on what it is to be a dancer filling the space, with the passion and power that is the Flamenco. 

To present the theme of forms, faces and spaces in many ways is to open the viewer’s mind to the possibilities of imagination which are basically, unlimited. For space, one could think of outer space and all the aspects of travel or space walking. To a large degree, there are similarities between space walking and moving about deep in the ocean, both weightless and in an environment that is quite diverse from our usual life on “earth.” Each is an environment that equally requires us to protect ourselves from it, in order to survive being part of it.

A panel discussion of several of the artists and photographers is to be headed by

Steve Wilson, internationally acclaimed artist and photographer.

Luis Cordoba from Columbia joins the month-long event with four of his pieces from Tibet, offered as a special folio or as singles.

Norval is a village tucked into a corner at Winston Churchill Blvd, which is sign posted as such but is also Adamson Street within the village, at the corner of Hwy 7, called Guelph Street at that point.

Forms, Faces and Spaces is open until May 29, Thursday through Sunday from noon to 4:30 pm. For more information, Studio by Design is on Facebook and the website is www.studiobydesign.ca


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