Annual Culture Days celebrations saw a wide variety of activities take place in the city, including film screenings by the Yorkton Film Festival, live painting, and tasty food from the Festival of Cultures.
The day also featured the opening of Nest - Nest Egg - Empty Nest by Monique Martin at the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery. The Saskatoon-based artist, who will be an artist in residence at Disneyland Paris, created a show about nests and what they mean.
The inspiration for the work was the economic crisis, Martin explains, with the nests being red to symbolize so many people living in debt. There are prints which have bank statements as the eggs within the nest.
She was inspired to use the nest as a theme because of different events happening in her life, with the nest being a common term used to tie them together. Starting with the nest egg, Martin says that he also had an empty nest of her own, as her children moved away and she felt conflicting emotions, enjoying their absence but feeling as though she should be sadder about her kids moving on. These ideas all found their way into the work, and Martin says it fits together.
Martin also places a priority on making work with waste material. There is a selection of nests made from clay scraps from Martin's art classes, as well as larger nests constructed out of discarded pianos, window blinds, bedsprings and newspaper bundle straps. Martin did not pay for any of the materials used, taking things people would otherwise have found their way into the landfill.
"Birds find their things, so I was mimicking being a bird and understanding the complexity of a bird flying to find a twig, and flying it back to their nest. It's a long, hard task that we take for granted," Martin says.
It's also about not putting more things into the world, Martin explains. She says that she sometimes feels uncomfortable sitting behind a new canvas with new paints, putting more art into the world, but by using discarded materials she's reassembling things that are already there.
The use of recycled materials also lead to Martin's residency at Disney in Paris, and she says that the company was interested in raising awareness about how much waste was in their own company, and her art is part of that program. She notes that one of her upcoming projects will be a large nest constructed using coat hangers which Disney gets when their costumes go out to be dry cleaned.
"You get a lot of materials that have to go to the garbage. It's an awareness for the staff, it's an awareness for the people visiting, and it's an awareness for the whole city."
Nest - Nest Egg - Empty Nest runs until December 12 at the Godfrey Dean.
