Vacation memories inspiration for festival entry

Faces AND Places

Mar 21, 2006
Simone Joseph, Staff Writer

As young as age six, Markham native Cheryl Mackey remembers spending summers with her father and sister exploring museums, exhibits and memorials across the United States. Her father, a former principal at Brother Andre Catholic High School, took his daughters on these trips in part for their educational value.

But instead of recalling the dates of wars, descriptions of exhibits and the vastness of the memorials, Ms Mackey remembers experiences such as admiring the widescreen television in her cousin’s house and the time she threw up right before entering a cave.

Ms Mackey has created a miniature scene, or diorama of these trips, called Historical States, the same kind of exhibit she gravitated toward during her journeys with her family.

A diorama is a representation of a scene with three-dimensional figures, often with a painted background.

“It (dioramas) is what I was most attracted to at the time. They give me an erie feeling. Everything would be still. There would be this mountain of dead bodies, the sounds of death, guns. They almost look like toys but (were on) a serious topic,” she said.

Ms Mackey’s work is on display at Ryerson University’s New Media Festival, FUSE, which presents the work of graduating students in the new media department. The exhibits will be critiqued by people in the new media industry.

What interests Ms Mackey, a fourth-year Ryerson image arts student, is just how fragmented and random her memories are. Her work brings together many different elements of her family’s trips together.

The exhibit will include the home of her distant cousin — an Olympic medal winning gymnast as well as the hotel where Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address.

The work of another Markham native, Samantha Ngui-Hon-Sang, is also on display at the festival.

When Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang and her partner on the project, Luelle de Vera, started out working on their project for the festival, they were most interested in how fairy tales have changed.

They read the original Grimm brother version of the fairy tale Cinderella and found it quite gruesome. In this version, the stepsisters cut off part of their feet to try to fit into Cinderella’s tiny shoe.

“A lot of (fairy tale) stories are like that, but Disney romanticized them,” Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang said.

But rather than focus strictly on how fairy tales have changed, they researched how the culture inside and outside of elementary school has changed.

Their exhibit, called Kibitzing, showcases a grade school classroom that looks quite ordinary but as you look closer, it gets more political. There is a chain of ‘word worms’ that snakes around the classroom. One of them, surprisingly, has the word ‘capitalism’ written onto it. On the chalkboard is the story of Goldilocks and the three Bears but the story has been re-written with a modern twist. In this version, Goldilocks meets baby bear in a chat room.

“We’re poking fun at the education system and talking about how it needs to change,” Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang said.

The exhibit includes the playing of taped interviews. Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang and her partner asked elementary school students a variety of questions about how they spend their time inside and outside of the classroom.

One boy, Mitchell, said he spends lots of time playing video games and seemed to know a lot about guns and how to use them.

“There were a lot of kids who knew stuff like that,” Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang said.

What Mitchell failed to understand was the seriousness of what he was saying. When the students were asked what they wanted for Christmas, Mitchell said he wanted a machine gun to blow his brothers head off.

“He (Mitchell) told us his parents did not pay attention to what he does after school, which was the case with a lot of the kids,” Ms Ngui-Hon-Sang said.

The opening reception for Ryerson’s New Media Festival FUSE is Thursday, March 23, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The exhibition continues Friday, March 24 and Saturday, March 25, from noon to 5 p.m.

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