This weekend, cultural activities will be on display all around Alberta to mark Alberta Culture Days.
The annual festival runs this Friday to Saturday, Sept. 26-28, and features various activities highlighting Alberta’s cultural mosaic in communities all over the province.
In Westlock, both the Westlock Community Art Club and the Westlock Library will be hosting their own activities to mark the occasion.
Art club treasurer Kathy Nelson said the club’s activities will be limited to extended hours at the gallery in the Westlock Rotary Spirit Centre, as well as children’s art activities on Sept. 27.
She explained the dearth of activities was the result of Culture Days falling in late September when a lot of people are out in the field for the harvest, leaving few people free to run more in-depth activities.
“We decided we would just have our gallery open longer hours and have a show,” Nelson said.
The gallery will be open 12-6 p.m. on Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday.
While the adults are busy taking a look at the art on display, the kids will have the opportunity to take part in Patricia Mackonka’s children’s art activities from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday.
However, other than the activities being hands-on, Nelson would not provide much more information.
“That’s secret,” she said when asked what the kids would get to do.
In October and November, the art club is holding a series of classes and workshops to continue to bring art to the community, she added, including a watercolour activity for kids on the Nov. 7 school PD day.
Over at the library, a plethora of activities will be packed into four short hours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, said library assistant director Wendy Hodgson-Sadgrove.
Taking place in the library’s Makerspace, she said the activities planned for Saturday all touch on the very foundation of art.
“It’s all about creativity, discovery and experimentation,” she said, adding everything is self-directed and on a drop-in basis.
“It’s you interacting with art.”
Some of the activities include making a thaumotrope, which is one of the earliest forms of animation, Hodgson-Sadgrove said.
A thaumotrope is a piece of paper or cardboard with a different image on either side. The sheet is attached to a piece of string and spun so the different images blur together, or superimpose on each other, to create a third image.
While the art on offer this weekend is largely visual, there will be some textual art to try as well.
“For those who really love the word and are poets or wannabe poets or just like to have fun with words and letters, they’ll have an opportunity to do what we call the page poetry,” Hodgson-Sadgrove said.
How that works is you take a book and blank out either selected words or random ones, and what is left visible becomes the poem, she explained.
Hodgson-Sadgrove said the idea behind Alberta Culture Days is that “art exists everywhere.”
There are many different facets of art, she added, all of which touches on a unique interaction every person has with the art itself.
“How personalized are you?” she asked. “What relationship do you have with art?”
