Stephen Nunoda: Ghostown
The Military Museums :: Founders Gallery
Feb 7, 2020 - Apr 13, 2020
Opening Reception: Thurs, Feb 6, 2020
Time: 5:00 - 9:00 pm with remarks at 6:30 pm
Exhibit
This solo exhibition is based on Nunoda’s research into Japanese-Canadian internment during World War II, addressing social, familial and personal fallout. Comprising a large-scale sculptural installation, Nunoda explores questions of culture, memory and community, supported by an adjunct interpretive exhibit organized by Founders’ Curatorial Coordinator Dick Averns. Recently exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, Ghostown is the first of three 2020 exhibitions at Founders’ marking the 75th anniversary of the end of WW II.
The Ghostown shacks are scale models based on the cramped housing built by Japanese-Canadian work crews for the internment camps. The act of erecting the installation’s 230 tarpaper models following the arrangement used in camps recalls and memorializes the displacement of some 23,000 persons of Japanese descent during the Second World War.
The term “Ghost-town” was used by many people of the artist’s grandparentsʼ generation to refer not only to the camps (many of which were established in abandoned mining settlements in the interior of British Columbia) but also to their internment experience. The work is intended to provide a focus for community remembrance: a crucial undertaking as the internment itself passes out of living recollection. In presenting these stories it is Nunoda’s intent to comment on wider issues of immigration, displacement, cultural survival and racism.
Looming over the camp is a video projection of the phases of the moon compressed at a rate of one minute per day on a thirty-minute loop, making the moon’s changes barely perceptible. The video is an excerpt from another work entitled Ladder to the Moon which deals with the aspirations of Nunoda’s family after the internment. In the context of this installation, the moon acts as a timepiece and a watchful presence over the sleeping camp.
Steven Nunoda is a Calgary-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice takes the form of long-term thematically interrelated research projects. Although oriented towards sculpture and installation, his work is physically and aesthetically diverse, acquiring form to suit the subject. Employing a variety of media including miniatures, woodcarving, found-objects, photography, digital imaging, text and time-based strategies, Nunoda’s art explores questions of family life, culture and place, memory and identity. The work in this exhibition from Nunoda’s ongoing Ghostown project was exhibited most recently at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as part of Being Japanese Canadian: Reflections on a Broken World.
Photographs by David Brown, UofC
Untold Stories
The Military Museums : Founders' Gallery
May 8, 2020 - September 7, 2020
Exhibit: They Never Talked About it: Untold Stories WWII
The year 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, affording opportunities not just for reflection on the world’s largest conflagration, but also the manner in which art and heritage can recalibrate humanity in times of crisis. They Never Talked About it: Untold Stories WW II details Canada’s wartime involvement across multiple continents and campaigns, through the lens of more than forty personalized stories including recorded oral histories from veterans, artefacts, artworks, and historical accounts.
Drawing on the holdings of multiple collections and archives at The Military Museums (TMM), plus loans from other public organizations, this exhibition is co-curated by eight partnering institutions at TMM. The art component, organized by U of C Founders’ Curatorial Coordinator Dick Averns, features art and images and produced by both Allied and Axis powers. Notable inclusions are artworks by Canadian artist and POW Maxwell Bates, nose art from Royal Canadian Air Force planes, and a series of original propaganda pictures from Hitler’s offices in the Reichstag that are being exhibited for the first time since the fall of Berlin in 1945.
Photos by Dave Brown, University of Calgary
