Vendredi 06 Mai 2016 11:19:47 par Nour Alahiane-lechevalier dans Expositions

Brigitte Carnochan has been a VERVE Gallery artist for over 10 years. In that period she has had five major exhibitions with distinct bodies of art at the gallery. Her first show at the gallery was in 2005, and since then she has shown works entitled Ancient Gifts, Bella Figura, Natural Beauty, Terpsichore's Daughters, Floating World: Allusions to Poems by Japanese Women of the 7th-20th Centuries, and Imagining Then: A Family Story, 1941-47. Each exhibition was well received and admired. Images from each are on sale at the gallery.

Brigitte now brings us a new collection of prints entitled Love, Kisses & George.

Here is what she says about her artwork in this exhibition:

Some years ago I came upon a shoebox full with 73 love letters dated 1929-‘32 from George Daniels, a bank official for the Royal Bank of Canada in New York City, to Edna Josephine MacInnis, a nursing student at Columbus Hospital.

© Brigitte Carnochan

The letters, all from George, trace the story of two young people introduced by mutual friends. They begin seeing each other for walks, they go bowling, they have dinner with friends. They fall in love. They have doubts. They write each other at least once every day. Before he goes on vacation she asks him to destroy all her letters so his roommates won't read them (he does). However, she keeps all of his letters, which talk of his love for her, his inexperience and uncertainty in terms of "technique" (kissing), their deepening love for each other and his desire to marry her despite feeling he is too poor, telling her that "I continually doubt that I can make you happy." On the October day after the stock market crashes (the Great Depression 1929-‘39), he apologizes for not seeing her-"between this stock market slump and boom and locking up the vault, I've been here every evening this week." Two months later, after "the thrill of a kiss on Terrace Hill" and a letter he signed "xoxoxo with every expression of love ever thought of," they elope.

© Brigitte Carnochan

In this series I use photos of my imagined Edna's responses to excerpts from the letters that I believe she might have singled out. She was a modern woman. She smoked and wore makeup (which George worries about telling his mother), she loved to dance, she voiced her romantic expectations, and she wanted a career. There is nothing momentous about their story--one of the reasons I found it so compelling.