Unidentified Portrait #2 – Story by Freda Jepson

This past fall, I put a call out to the community to submit creative writing entries to accompany unidentified portraits in The Thomas Bouckley Collection. With ten portraits to choose from, submissions included diary entries, letters, short stories, poetry and even a dating profile. I was so pleased with the number we received and the quality! The project resulted in an exhibition that is currently on display at the RMG until May 1st. Due to spatial restrictions, I wasn’t able to include all of the submissions, however, I will be posting two additional stories each week on the blog for all to enjoy. A huge thank you to everyone who participated!

On April 7th, join us for an evening with the Durham Folklore Storytellers. Using the submissions to the Their Stories exhibition as inspiration, the Durham Folklore Storytellers will take listeners on a journey to imagine the lives of these unidentified people.

– Sonya Jones, Associate Curator

Portrait #2

Loneliness

Am I to know no one as me

And to be known by none

To have no one to walk with me

As I approach my home.

Other lonely paths ‘longside of

mine run parallel

Yet join not mine to make a road

That leads where love can dwell

Should kindred spirit call to me

“We two now one shall be”

I’d kindle then the fire of life

To blaze for eternity.

By: Freda Jepson

The RMG Celebrates Hometown Hockey

This holiday season, visit the RMG as we celebrate Rogers Hometown Hockey in Oshawa with a special display in our lobby! We have gathered together artworks and historical photographs from our collection, as well as incorporated a display of hockey-inspired artwork by Peterborough artist Jeffrey Macklin. Learn more about the display below and visit us with your family (and hockey fans)!

Photos from the Thomas Bouckley Collection:

Dupont Hockey Team, c. 1919

Dupont Hockey Team, 1919
Eleven team members pose for their photograph on the open-air ice rink at the General Motors plant at Division Street and Elgin Street. This hockey team was the American Championship Team, 1919-20.

Cedar Dale Hockey Team, c. 1925

Cedar Dale Hockey Team, c. 1925
The official team picture is photographed by G. Potter, a professional photographer. All team members are identified.
Back row, left to right: Wes. Kirkpatrick, Howard Gunn, Matthew Redmond, Bill Jackson, Lou King, Charles Barriage.
Second row, left to right: Bill Lloyd, Willfred Whalen, Tom Riordan, Fred King, Norman Mallett.
Seated in front is Hugh King, probably the mascot, and a cocker spaniel dog.

Bishop Bethune College outdoor hockey rink, c. 1925

Bishop Bethune College outdoor hockey rink, c. 1925
A girls’ hockey team plays at the back of Bishop Bethune College. The private school for girls was sponsored by the Church of England, and operated from 1889 until 1932 at 240 Simcoe Street South.

Sculpture from our Collection

Donna Gordon (Canadian, b. 1942), The Save, 1992, painted papier-maché with wood, stainless steel

The Save
Donna Gordon (Canadian, b. 1942)
painted papier-maché with wood, stainless steel
1992

“Donna has embraced the often misunderstood and little known art of papier maché. She feels the medium has, as yet, untapped potential for creative expression and innovation. She believes that…paper maché is a building process that artistically evolves, growing almost organically to take on a shape which is meaningful to both the artist and her audience.” – The Russell Gallery of Fine Art

Contemporary Hockey Puck Artwork by Jeffrey Macklin

Jeffrey Macklin is a Peterborough based artist, working primarily with relief printing (letterpress) and mixed media. He often employs words as visual triggers, as well as Canadiana and present-day/historical pop-culture icons and figures in both his print work and his mixed media pieces.

Macklin prints relief from the raised surfaces of hand-set wood and lead type. When he requires an image for a broadside or chapbook project, he carves from lino-block, plywood or end-grain hardwood. He also uses old neglected wood boards and rough cut plywood for backgrounds or texture, and in 2014 he begun using found hockey pucks.

Hockey pucks are resilient, pliable, and easy to carve. Printing from the surface of unusual materials has always been a primary driver in Macklin’s letterpress shop.

Hidden Mothers and “Tall Tale” Postcards

This post comes from the desk of Associate Curator and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection, Sonya Jones.

Researching and selecting images for the exhibition Mindful Manipulation was fascinating! Not only did I learn about darkroom manipulation processes but I also discovered some interesting things about early studio practices. For example, hidden mother photography. In the Victorian era, with long exposure times, mothers would often disguise themselves in different ways to hold their children still. Photographers would try to put the focus on the children by camouflaging the mothers as chairs, couches or curtains.

John Aubrey Morphy Portrait, 1891, Oshawa Public Libraries

There is one example of this in Mindful Manipulation where the mother is draped to look like a chair. The photographer went even further in drawing attention away from the “chair” with a white vignette. This was done by dodging, a process that decreases the exposure for areas of the print that the photographer wished to be light. As a mom, I know firsthand how difficult it is to capture a squirming baby even with today’s technology, and I guess I’m technically hiding too, but behind the lens versus disguised as a couch! The example of the Morphy baby isn’t as creepy as other examples from this time period. If you Google hidden mother photography the results are hilarious and spooky.

“How We Do Things At Oshawa, ONT.”, 1911, Oshawa Public Libraries

The other subject I found interesting in my research was Tall Tale postcards. These postcards began around the turn of the 20th century, and were especially popular in smaller communities where they would exaggerate food sources specific to the region. In Oshawa’s case, the tall-tale is that Oshawa’s rich soil produces gigantic turnips, and that fish were an abundant food source. Photographers would take two prints, one a background landscape and another a close-up of an object, carefully cut out the second and superimpose it onto the first, and re-shoot the combination to create a final composition that is often ridiculous but fun.

Join me on November 17 for a lecture about the history of manipulated images as well as the emerging field of digital forensics by Deepa Kundur.

For more information please visit https://rmg.on.ca/mindful-manipulation-tbc.php

Top image: “How We Do Things At Oshawa, ONT.”, 1917, Oshawa Community Museum and Archives

Their Stories – Call for entries!

Deadline: 1 December, 2015

Help tell the stories of 10 unidentified portraits in the Thomas Bouckley Collection. Whether it is a fictional diary entry, poem, letter, short story, storyboard, or character sketch, imagining an identity to these unknown portraits brings the characters to life.

Submissions will be reviewed by a jury, and selected entries will accompany the photographs in an exhibition at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery or displayed on our website. Please click here to submit.

Unidentified portraits are not commonly displayed. By bringing these images forward, we hope to engage the creative side of the public of the public, and possibly in the process discover a clue as to their true identity.

For more information contact Sonya Jones, Associate Curator and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection at sjones@rmg.on.ca

To for more information and to submit, please visit https://rmg.on.ca/their-stories.php

New Acquisition to The Thomas Bouckley Collection – Oshawa Strike

This post comes to us from the desk of Sonya Jones, Associate Curator and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) in Oshawa, Ontario holds the Thomas Bouckley Collection. The Collection was donated to the RMG by the late Thomas Bouckley, amateur historian and collector of Oshawa’s history. The entire computerized collection comprises over 2,300 historical photographs of Oshawa and about 100 works are featured in three exhibitions per year.

Earlier this year, the Thomas Bouckley Collection received a donation of images that capture the General Motors Strike of 1937. The gift, from the McGrath family, includes 57 images, 37 of which depict the famous strike. Prior to this wonderful addition to the collection, there were only 3 images of the strike in the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

General Motors Strike, 1937

What’s interesting about these images is that they capture candid moments between strikers on the picket line. They weren’t just taken to document the strike but seem to be snap shots between friends, giving a general sense of what the mood was like during this time.

On April 8, 1937, 3,700 GM workers punched in as usual and then walked off the job. They didn’t return to the assembly lines until a settlement was struck two weeks later.

For a little background as to why the strike began, an interview with Arthur Shultz, who had worked on the assembly lines in GM from 1922–1937, describes the conditions of the plant and community prior to the 1937 strike:

“Work on the assembly lines was hell, speed ups, no rest periods, afraid to complain for fear of permanent layoff. The pay was good while you worked but yearly earnings were in the $600 range. Work was only available for six to seven months of the year and many employees were forced to apply for City welfare.” – Arthur Schultz, 1951

Female Employees, General Motors Strike, 1937

The Toronto Star reports the strike as an orderly event:

“A stand-up strike not a sit-down strike” with 260 women joining the men on the picket line. It begins quietly with workers first filing into work as usual at 7 a.m. and then five minutes later, just as peacefully, exiting the plant. Simultaneously, 400 pickets are flung up around the works with pre-arranged precision” – Toronto Star, April 8, 1937

While these photographs depict an important event in Oshawa’s history, the smiling faces and sociable atmosphere give it a human side.

Top image: General Motors Strike, 1937

Reflections on the Thomas Bouckley Collection

Assistant Curator Megan White reflects on her year at the RMG and shared with us her favourite photos from the Thomas Bouckley Collection. For more photos from the collection, follow vintageoshawa.tumblr.com

Town Clerk’s Office, 1912
I love the photographs in the Thomas Bouckley collection that strongly capture a single fleeting moment. Even though this photograph was taken over 100 years ago, the connection made between the subject and photographer in this split second is so striking.

King’s Family Residence, 1890
There are so many great things about this photograph. The great outfits, the women posing with their bicycles, the beautiful house and plants on the porch, and of course the dog!

R.S. Williams Piano Workers, 1910
Oshawa has an incredible history of industry. The photographs taken inside some of the old factories, such as this one, are simply remarkable.

Looking East at Harmony Corners, 1909
This is a photograph that I can look at again and again- it reminds me of a still from an old film. Like many photographs in the collection, I would love to know the story behind why this photo was taken!

Interview with artist Margaret Rodgers

“Hot Topics” blog posts come from the desk of Sam Mogelonsky, our Communications & Social Media Coordinator.

The RMG caught up with artist Margaret Rodgers to discuss her new exhibition Closeups.

The RMG: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Margaret Rodgers: As an Oshawa-based artist I am especially interested in local history but my work ranges across subject and medium quite extensively. Recent exhibition activity includes No Man’s Land (Erring on the Mount festival, Peterborough), The Tree Museum: Easy Come, Easy Go (AGP), WhiteOut, TAC Art/Work Gallery, Toronto, and OshawaSpaceInvaders, 2013-14. Earlier works relative to the Closeups exhibition include Out of Time at Oshawa City Hall, Money etc. (installation in a bank vault at 20 Simcoe N Oshawa), and (site/cite/cité/city) SPECIFIC: “The Shwa” a downtown Oshawa project exhibited as RENEWAL at Red Head Gallery Toronto.

I founded the IRIS Group, a collective of women artists, taught at Durham and Centennial Colleges, and was Director/Curator at VAC Clarington. My writing includes Locating Alexandra (Toronto: ECW, 1995) about Painters Eleven artist Alexandra Luke, and various reviews and essays for catalogues, journals and blogs.

In 2008 I organized IRIS in the North Country at BluSeed Studios and Hotel Saranac, Saranac Lake, NY, and showed there again in 2010 and 2013. For 2015, I am Guest Curator of Crossing Borders, an exhibition exchange with BluSeed for VAC Clarington. International exhibition activity includes Deviant Detours, Kunsthaus Gallery, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and the Beijing World Art Museum, with seven Durham artists.

As a member of Heritage Oshawa I worked on DOORS OPEN and organized Heritage Week events at the Oshawa Centre.

Margaret Rodgers’ studio

RMG: Where did you get the idea for Closeups?

MR: I have always found it interesting that our photos are peopled with strangers who happen to be there in the background and to speculate on where our own images have ended up incidentally. In the IRIS at Bola show and later in Out of Time at City Hall I drew from images that included the 20 Simcoe N. environs–once a bank, then Burns Jewellers, Tribal Voices, and Bola. There was also a photo of a pub that existed there before the bank, and in all of the pictures there are people on the street, rarely posing but caught anyway, tiny and frequently blurred images that I found fascinating to contemplate.

In 2011 I installed Money, etc in the vault there. Subsequently we held an IRIS at Bola show in the store, and the following year The IRIS Group rented the space to create our own work and hold a series of workshops. Through exploring the building I found these old battered jewellery trays that had been used when Burns Jewellers was the owner. It was IRIS member Jan Prebble who suggested hanging them by their handles, and with permission from the manager we used a few in the workshops. When I was asked to make art relating to the Bouckley collection I thought that the trays would make perfect bases for the historic subject matter and got permission from the owner John Aquilina to take them.

RMG: What other artists have influenced your career/artistic practice?

MR: I am a huge Joyce Wieland fan for her gutsy exuberance and her use of any medium that fit her purpose. Also Gerhard Richter, but who isn’t? I studied with Krzysztof Wodiczko in a tiny Trent class that he called The Crown Donut School of Cultural Studies . His projected interventions were just becoming famous, and his brilliance was obvious. I think the idea of using unconventional methods and media probably comes mostly from him.

RMG: What is your favourite image from the Thomas Bouckley Collection?

MR: I loved all of the ones I worked with, since I pored over the collection trying to make choices, the images of children are particularly appealing but the entire collection is engrossing.

Margaret Rodgers, Fireman and Fan, Prospect Park 1900, 2014

RMG: What draws you to using historical photographs in your work?

MR: I think it comes from looking at similar photographs in my family collection, trying to see into the past and think about those long gone relatives, who they were and what they were like. I have inherited albums from a dear aunt who was born in 1890 and who told me many stories about her early life. In the 1980s I did a series based on this personal history, and have been thinking about it again.

Also my son and I visited Thomas Bouckley one time when he lived in Bond Towers. I remember his apartment being crowded with photo equipment and his stories about bribing the garbage collectors to watch for any discarded photographs. We were thrilled to meet him since we loved his books.

Working on Heritage Oshawa also brought home the great loss that the city has suffered in the destruction of its earlier architecture. While there is definitely something about sentiment and nostalgia, both frowned upon in the art world, incidentally, there is also this desire to reach into the past and establish a connection to what once was.

RMG: What do you hope visitors will take away from seeing the exhibition?

MR: In terms of the photographic work of art, consideration is also given to point of view, to the photographer’s choices, to the overall cultural construct in play. It’s always interesting to contemplate the unseen, the undocumented. We are given images that show a busy prosperous city, or families at leisure. I tried to find that person off to the side, or engulfed in a crowd. I would like people to think about the images within the context of a comfortable middle class, but to understand that this would have been only a part of society.

Aside from simply appreciating the artworks of themselves, I hope they will have fun with it, make a game out of trying to match the Bouckley pieces with the figures I have pulled from them, and enjoy a bit of our local history.

Closeups: Margaret Rodgers
Selections from the Thomas Bouckley Collection

23 January – 7 May, 2015
Opening: RMG Fridays, 6 February, 7-10pm
Artist talk with Margaret Rodgers: Sunday 22 February, 1-3pm

Closeups: Margaret Rodgers

Selections from the Thomas Bouckley Collection

23 January – 7 May, 2015
Opening: RMG Fridays, 6 February, 7-10pm
Artist talk with Margaret Rodgers: Sunday 22 February, 1-3pm

Local artist Margaret Rodgers has created a new body of work as an extension of her ongoing interest in Oshawa’s heritage. Using photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection as a jumping off point, Rodgers has created a series of mixed media works that ask the viewer to take a closer look at scenes from Oshawa’s history.

Rodgers places a spotlight on captured moments of figures that are otherwise easily overlooked in these photographs. The act of featuring these people in her work is a subversion of the original intent of the photographer, but allows the viewer to look at the image in a new way. Rodgers deals with incidental images, often grainy or blurry, but those that are suggestive of daily life at the time. Most of the mixed media work centers on bystanders from various historical Oshawa events, calling up the manner in which we all become background strangers captured in other people’s photographs at one time or another. The works featured in Closeups are displayed using recovered jewelry trays from the basement at 20 Simcoe Street North, a building formerly owned by Burns Jewellers and further referencing Oshawa’s past.

Margaret Rodgers is an Oshawa-based artist who has exhibited internationally and locally for many years. She founded the IRIS Group, a women artists’ collective, in 1996, taught art subjects at Centennial and Durham Colleges, and spearheaded many projects as Director/Curator at VAC Clarington.

Curated by Megan White.

For more information, please visit www.margaretrodgers.ca

Image – Margaret Rodgers, Fireman and Fan, Prospect Park 1900, 2014

The Curator’s View: Thomas Bouckley Collection, An Art Perspective Part 2

This post comes from the desk of Sonya Jones, Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

While studying and reviewing the photographs in the Thomas Bouckley Collection, I’m always looking for new ways to re-contextualize and interpret the Collection. What’s refreshing is that no matter how well I think I know the collection, I’m always pleasantly surprised to discover something new, or see something in a different light. For example, in a blog posted in 2012, (click here to view) I put on art historical lenses and selected a number of images from the collection that reminded me of famous artworks.

Since then, I’ve discovered more images that have similarities to artworks, whether through subject, composition, or both. Just for fun, here are a few more examples:

Jean Antoine Watteau Mezzetin, c. 1718

Jimmy Jacques With A Williams Banjo, 1910

Hans Holbein The Ambassadors, 1533

William and Wilkie White, 1890

L.S. Lowry The Fever Van, 1935

Traffic Signals at the Four Corners, 1920

Edward Hopper Office at Night, 1940

Tax Office, City Hall, 1957

Isabel McLaughlin Untitled, undated

Sand Filter Plant, Oshawa Harbour, 1919

Interested in exploring the Thomas Bouckley Collection? You can browse the collection online through our website here.

Sharing Our History: Augmenting the Thomas Bouckley Collection

The Curator’s View this week comes from the desk of Sonya Jones, Assistant Curator, and Curator of the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

Thomas Bouckley’s fascination with his father’s collection of historical photographs of Oshawainspired his passion for documenting Oshawa’s past. He was concerned with the condition of the historical photographs, and took it upon himself to learn how best to preserve and reproduce them for future generations. Thus began his collection, which continued to grow in various ways, one of the more unique being from local garbage men who found photographs and albums in the trash. Oshawa families would also provide him with copies of their historical photos. Additionally, Bouckley took up photography himself capturing images of Oshawa as it existed in his lifetime—for example these photographs documenting the demolition of Centre Street United in 1967 (located where Rundle Tower is today).

His vision for the Thomas Bouckley Collection when it was gifted to the RMG in 1985—in addition to it being preserved, a community resource, and used in public programming—was for the collection to continue to grow and also to carry on his practice of documenting Oshawa. Throughout the years Then and Now projects have been done to show the transformation of the city, and donations have added to the collection. There are, however, still areas and time periods that are not well represented in the collection. In the spirit of Thomas Bouckley’s desire to visually document Oshawa’s history, I’m always interested in augmenting the collection and encourage anyone who would like to share their historical photographs to contact me. Seeing as Bouckley himself received copies of family photograph collections, I would continue this tradition by scanning photographs in order to enhance the collection. Everyone will benefit as the collection is a community resource that is available to search online, and in person.

Some time periods that are not well represented in the collection are:

1940s- WWII years
1950s
1960s
Oshawa Generals
Oshawa Airport
Early photos of North Oshawa
Smith Potteries (located on King Street West near the Hollows)
Parkwood Estate
Lakeview Park 1940s onwards

With questions or to share photographs, please contact Sonya Jones
sjones@rmg.on.ca or 905 576 3000 x110

Photos from the Thomas Bouckley Collection:

Sculpture from our Collection

Contemporary Hockey Puck Artwork by Jeffrey Macklin

Deadline: 1 December, 2015

Closeups: Margaret Rodgers Selections from the Thomas Bouckley Collection

Closeups: Margaret Rodgers
Selections from the Thomas Bouckley Collection