Launching Saturday Studio at Home - staying connected through art!

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Saturday, August 25th, 2018
9:30 AM to 12:30 PM

Saturday Studio at Home - April 2020

Hello Saturday Studio families! We miss having you join us in Art Lab to create artworks and explore our exhibitions, but we will continue to connect, inspire, and create with you through Saturday Studio at Home. Every month we will send you the featured artwork from our collection to inspire our investigations and creative activities.

Through emails, Art Lab, Facebook, and Instagram we can stay in touch, share ideas and artwork!

Featured Artwork for April 2020 Mary Okheena, Song of Animals, Lithograph, 1986, Collection of Nanaimo Art Gallery, Gift of Dave and Fran Barnes. Song of Animals was featured in our Notes from the Collection section, alongside Sandra Semchuk's 2020 exhibition: A Generational Retrospective. Mary Okheena, born in 1955, is an Inuit artist from Ulukhaktok (Holman) a small community on Victoria Island in the Northwest Territories. She is a third generation artist who studied printmaking, drawing and embroidery. Her father Jimmy Memorana was a sculptor and printmaker and her mother, Nora Memorana, was an expert sewer. Both Jimmy and Nora were respected drum dancers in their communities. Her family is full of artists!

INVESTIGATE TOGETHER! Spend some time looking at the image of Mary Okheena's print Song of Animals and Follow the See | Think | Wonder routine, developed by Harvard Project Zero, to investigate!

What do you see? This artwork contains different animals merging together with a human. How many different animals can you see? What colours do you see? Notice the many details in her drawing of the animals and the face against the blank background. What else do you see in this artwork? What do you think about that? What do you think about when you look at Song of Animals? Is the person in the artwork singing or are the animals singing? What story do you think the artist is telling? Do you think these are the artist's favourite animals? Why do you think the artist picked these particular animals? What does it make you wonder? What questions would you ask the artist about her work? Can animals sing? What does this artist make you wonder about our relationship to animals?

CREATE!

Saturday, April 4 ~ Hybrids and Stories Song of Animals shows us how Mary Okheena merges animal and human figures to illustrate the transforming power of story and song. What animals do you see in her artwork and what stories are being told? Draw a portrait of yourself or someone in your family. Then choose two or three animals and add animal features to your portrait - a bird's beak or wings, horns or antlers, a fish tail or elephant's trunk! Have fun creating your own hybrid animal human and tell us a story to go with it!

Saturday, April 11 ~ What does the animal say? Sidewalk messages for friends! Go for a walk in your neighbourhood or forest, stand in your backyard and listen for animal songs! Let's continue our Song of Animals inspired work by Mary Okheena and create cartoonish animal creatures on the sidewalk with chalk pastels for our friends and neighbours. To make it pop use bright colours and outline your drawing. We can draw large speech bubbles above our animals and share kind and funny animal messages for everyone who walks by!

Share with us! Take a picture of your artwork and email it to [email protected] or tag us on social media #artlabnanaimo for a chance to be featured on our channels! Have fun!