|
Lebanon art exhibit at High Prairie museum
|
High Prairie and District Museum manager Ellen Badger looks at some of the art of Catherine Hamel, which depicts the effects of the war in Lebanon on Hamel and others.
|
|
This is one piece in a 17-piece exhibit of Catherine Hamel’s presentation, which is entitled displace/graft/retrace to mark Hamel’s experience in the Lebanese war.
|
|
Through this weaving piece, left, Hamel represents the interweaving of her old life in Beirut and her new life in Canada.
|
Theresa Seraphim
For Spotlight
The civil war which gripped Lebanon from 1975 to 1991 caused many people to leave the country and adapt to new ways of living.
Artist Catherine Hamel, one of those people, parlayed her experiences of terror and uncertainty into a series of pieces currently on exhibit at the High Prairie and District Museum.
In the travelling exhibition, entitled “displace/graft/retrace”, Hamel uses ink and ink wash to depict the feelings behind the displacement which occurred when she and her family left Lebanon for Egypt and then the United States.
“You often hear the personal view of the soldiers during war, but this is the artist’s view as she lived it as a child,” explains High Prairie museum manager Ellen Badger.
“The people had to pick up their lives and grow.”
The 17 pieces show people/tree figures torn up, then rerooted, and then growing. One picture shows ropes intertwined with bandages. Another, bigger picture depicts a Beirut scene, with bullet holes in buildings and people clinging to one another. Another shows a heart-shaped figure wrapped in bandages, presumably symbolizing the binding up of a heart wounded by war.
Hamel also described the experience in words in her essay “Beirut, Exile, and the Scars of Reconstruction.”
“Forced migration due to war outlines a particular space. Survival abducts one from tradition, friends, culture – all that is familiar. An origin is lost and in its place a rift settles. It is conflict between two spaces that never ceases.”
According to the web site Globalsecurity.org, an estimated 100,000 were killed, while another 100,000 were left handicapped, during the war.
“Up to one-fifth of the pre-war resident population, or about 900,000 people, were displaced from their homes, of whom perhaps a quarter of a million emigrated permanently,” says the site.
Hamel’s exhibition, sponsored by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program, will be at the High Prairie museum until June 22.
Copyright © 1999-2009 Spotlight. All Rights Reserved.
No part may be reproduced without written permission.
View our Privacy Statement.
Send website suggestions to the Webmaster
|
