The Canadian War Museum is revamping its Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times exhibit once more as it prepares for the 100th anniversary of the First World War.
This exhibit is just one of many that will be commemorating the centennial of the First World War and the 75th anniversary of the Second World War. The museum will be introducing 14 new exhibits that showcase Canada’s role during these two wars over the next six years.
The exhibit is free to the public and located along the wall outside the Barney Danson Theatre. It has been running since the opening of the Centretown museum in May 2005.
But the permanent feature changes over the years to keep up with current events and special anniversaries.
The current version of the exhibit covers a 100-year spread in military involvement. It features 10 paintings depicting human experiences in war, from fighter pilots in the First World War to soldiers in training for the war in Afghanistan.
"It was important to us to show a range of service, a range of contribution, a range of experience," says Laura Brandon who has been curating the exhibit since 2005. "Just looking at the portraits and then reading about the people depicted, you realize how people from all sorts of backgrounds had experiences that were far removed from their regular lives."
The images shown also emphasize the war involvement on the home front. One of the paintings shows women taking up work in an orchard after the men went overseas during the First World War. The vibrant Manly Macdonald painting features headscarf-adorning women in jumpsuits and work boots emptying their bushels of apples to be sorted and placed in barrels.
"One of the things that gives me pleasure every day is watching people interacting with what they see on that wall," says Brandon. "When you see that kind of interaction, that response, you realize that this display of art is providing on an ongoing basis a quite wonderful way of helping people understand what kind of people were involved in this conflict."
The artwork featured is taken from the War Museum’s Beaverbrook collection of War Art, which has over 13,000 images, paintings and sculptures.
The next edition of the exhibit – which is focusing exclusively on the First World War to mark the 2014 centennial of the start of the conflict – will feature 12 bronze statues, each no taller than a metre, from the Beaverbrook collection.
The statues, made predominantly by Canadian artists emphasize the roles that soldiers took on during the First World War, says Brandon.