Jane Hobson, Centretown News
The Door Youth Centre recently unveiled this mural on a wall beside the sidewalk on Somerset Street West. The mural project aims to promote the positive contribution youth can make to the streetscape.Many members of the Centretown community and The Door Youth Centre gathered together earlier this month to celebrate the unveiling of a new mural created by local artists and youth volunteers.
The Door Youth Centre is a non-profit organization located in Chinatown that offers support to at-risk youth aged 12 to 18 by teaching them the knowledge, skills and behaviours to become active members of the community. The Door provides many different programs and activities like painting this mural that allow young Ottawa residents to express themselves in a positive artistic way according to Malik Ayass, executive director of The Door Youth Centre.
The centre partnered with Paint It Up Ottawa, which donated $5,800 to The Door to allow its young members to showcase their artistic talent along the Somerset Heights streetscape. The mural is intended to deter youth from engaging in graffiti vandalism and show them there are more productive ways to display their art.
Paint It Up Ottawa is part of Crime Prevention Ottawa, which offers funding for outdoor mural projects. Paint It Up Ottawa supports graffiti prevention, community safety and the beautification of the city.
The mural located at The Door Youth Centre took four weeks to complete and was produced by a new Centretown-based design agency, Salt, as well as many youth volunteers.
Graphic designer Jared Lebel, 28, founded Salt with two other partners and says that this mural showcases a sense of community, friendship, multiculturalism and diversity.
Since the mural is located in Chinatown, the four characters present in the piece are influenced by Asian artwork. According to The Door’s programs coordinator, Dominique Murphy, the characters remained neutral because the artists didn’t want to single out one specific Asian community. The characters are created in different colours, shapes and sizes, which Lebel says symbolizes the idea of diversity. The two main characters in the mural are high-fiving, which represents the friendship and community that is found at The Door.
Lebel says the colours he used in this piece were modeled after the other artwork found in Chinatown such as the murals produced by the public art project, Chinatown Blossoms, which created mini-murals for the shops and restaurants of Somerset Street West. The murals found in Chinatown are primarily painted using a verity of primary colours and Lebel said he wanted to stick with the vibe of the community.
Outgoing Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar says projects like this mural are important for the youth as it provides them with an opportunity to take part in creating art that is valuable for the community.
“This is about making communities stronger,” he said at the unveiling. “When you see graffiti and tagging you don’t like, the best way to deal with it is what we see here, because everyone including the taggers will appreciate that this is someone’s art who decided to contribute something for all of us to enjoy.”
Ayass says that projects like the mural are important for the mental and social development of the young members of The Door.
“This is an opportunity for the youth to be apart of a team and to discover certain skills that they may not even be aware of,” he says.
The Door Youth Centre has been helping at-risk youth for more than 20 years by providing hot meals, homework help, clothing, and a safe place to stay. It allows the youth to become involved in the Ottawa community through many different projects such as city-wide cleanups, bake sales and the arts.
“Murals do something for us in our community that nothing else does,” says Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney. “It makes us want to come out to that community, it makes us want to hang out with each other, it makes us want to walk more, it makes us want to slow down and think about where we are and who we are.”
She adds: “Art takes us out of our everyday reality and it shows us what can be possible and that’s what The Door does for so many of our youth.”