Sandi Wheaton: Legacy Costs: Burden or Benefit?
Main Gallery Jan 18th – April 25th, 2014
Based on a three month project initiated by the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre in 2009, Legacy Costs: Burden or Benefit? Was the result of a three month long collaboration between Windsor-based artist Sandi Wheaton and the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers.
The project sought to explore the human and environmental impact on workers, their families and their communities in Essex, Kent, and Lambton counties, following the departure of major industries. In other words the true “legacy costs” of companies, as opposed to the way in which the term was deployed during the 2008 global recession, to refer to costs such as financial settlements to injured workers, environmental fines, and pensions.
The project resulted in the creation of an archive of stories, images and video that forms the bulk of the exhibition on display.
Legacy Costs: Burden or Benefit? was created with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers.
Jim Eller: Great Depression & Workers Series
Community Gallery Jan 18th – March 1st, 2014
The Workers Arts & Heritage Centre is pleased to welcome a new addition to our city’s artistic community, Jim Eller. Hailing from California, Eller was at the forefront of the burgeoning conceptual art movement in the United States during the 1960s, exhibiting having work in the permanent collections of prestigious venues as the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian Institution
This latest body of work focusing on images of workers created from or inspired by depression era photographs of working people, marks a departure from his conceptual practice and a reevaluation of the “human process of making art by using ‘the basics’; including application of materials, composition, subject, lines, edges, colour values and temperature”.
Together these two exhibitions create a dynamic and interwoven narrative that speaks to the ways and roles the arts play in helping to tell the stories of working people and shaping ideas and representations of work and workers .
