Many Hands Exhibit
The Corridor Gallery
2nd Fl – 200 Crichton St
613-745-2742
www.ottawalumiere.com
Dates: The exhibit is free and open to the public from July 17th until August 7 (see below for times)
The Ottawa Lumière Festival
When Joanne Hughes, Community Facilitator at the Crichton Community Cultural Center, started the Ottawa Lumière Festival five years ago she had a simple idea: that her community had the capacity to create a magic night.
“It’s really not complicated,” she points out, “the basic materials are all there: glass jars and other materials from your recycling bin, candles, bamboo and tissue paper. It’s just a matter of putting them all together.”
Simple, maybe, but not easy. As the festival has grown from a small community event to a city wide phenomenon, Joanne and her team have put on hundreds of lantern-making workshops and assembled a small army of volunteers. Together they work thousands of hours making the festival happen.
Festival after festival, the jars, paper and candles, and a little magic, have become one of the major fixtures in the city’s festival calendar. No longer a little community festival, this year—despite rain on the day of the event—Lumière drew more than 10,000 people from all over Ottawa.
Many Hands…
What attracted Matt Carrington to the Lumière Festival was the creative dynamism of the process; the swirl of activity that brought the night to life.
“It’s this amazing, freewheeling thing that just unfolded in front of the camera. All kinds of people from around the community—visual and performing artists, kids, seniors —getting together and creating lanterns to light up Stanley Park. But it’s not just lanterns: the community creates wings and tents, sculptures, light installations and all kinds of costumes as well. In the end, they have produced not just a bunch of lights, but a whole, amazing, festival.”
And this is where the idea for “Many Hands…” comes from. They say that “many hands make light work,” and Matt’s job was to show with his photos just how it was with Lumière that a whole community of hands makes these lights work.
The 18 images in the exhibition are selected from more than 3,000 frames that he shot in July and August 2008, and on the night of the festival itself.
Matt Carrington
Matt’s documentary approach was formed working as a photojournalist in the Middle East. His work has appeared in American, European and Egyptian newspapers and magazines. His recent work documenting the lives of refugees in northern Iraq appeared in the Pittsburgh Herald-Tribune.
Exhibit Times
10 am until 4 pm: July 17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, Aug 4, 5, 6, 7
10 am until 8 pm: July 21, 29, 30
1:00 –5:00 pm: July 18
Crichton Cultural Community Centre www.crichtonccc.ca
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:
Joanne Hughes, Producer
(613) 745-CRIC (2742)
communitycentre@rogers.com
