Preternatural means exceeding what is natural or regular. For Ottawa, this means shedding the boring, button-down perception and showing its creative side.
Beyond the natural wonders of the standing exhibits at the Canadian Museum of Nature comes the exhibit “Preternatural.” Running until Feb. 12, artists from Ottawa and Gatineau showcase their work alongside creators from South Korea, Norway, India, the United States and Germany. They are displaying pieces of art that explore the themes of nature, wonder and the extraordinary.
But having local artists show their work in a national museum alongside the works of international artists is preternatural in its own right.
Ottawa is often overlooked as a creative hub, paling in comparison with Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
It’s a government town, where the only national attention comes from what happens on Parliament Hill.
It’s this perception of the city that keeps local artists from gaining recognition.
National institutions such as the Museum of Nature and the other museums like it across the city have the opportunity to show local talent to visitors from across the country and around the world. And if museums here in the city won’t give our artists a chance to show the world what they’re made of, who will?
There are plenty of boutique galleries around the city that give painters, sculptors, photographers and other creative folk a venue to showcase their work. But these venues don’t have the same prominence as do the national institutions that are right on our doorstep.
Marie-Jeanne Musiol of Gatineau and Andrew Wright of Ottawa are the local artists featured in the show.
Musiol’s art features ghost-like imprints of plants revealed in electromagnetic fields. Wright of Ottawa has four curved panels showing inverted landscapes of vast expanses of arctic snow fields, contrasted with a pitch black sky. Both show the beauty of nature when it collides with natural creativity.
The curator of the show, Celina Jeffery, is also from Ottawa, proving that the creative drive comes from within a city.
She has been planning the event for two years. In the hopes of attracting a non-traditional arts audience. To do so, she selected unique venues, including the nature museum. The other venues are St. Brigid’s Center for the Arts and the Patrick Mikhail Gallery.
Walking through the exhibit at the museum, it is easy to see that the artists who are from right here in Ottawa can compete with creative talent from all over the world.
To have this level of talent in a single exhibit is a good start to showing Ottawa’s creative side. But to do it once is simply not enough.
There must be a concerted effort to bring the best and brightest creative talent in the city into the spotlight on a regular basis.
To do so is to show that this is a place where creative people can be creative. It also shows they can stay put and not defect to Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver in order to make it.
For Ottawa to shed its dowdy cultural perception others from outside the city may hold, we need to support the people who create the art.