Karen Haines, Caroline Ji, Cathy Ross & Gillian Willans, May 13 – July 10, 2020

Jointly presented by Sivarulrasa Gallery and the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum. Curated by Sanjeev Sivarulrasa and Jennifer Irwin.

From May 13 to July 10, 2020, Sivarulrasa Gallery is pleased to partner with the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum to present KITCHEN, an exhibition that elegantly combines works by four contemporary Canadian painters with artifacts of kitchens past from the Museum’s collection. This exhibition has been more than a year in the making, and we are grateful to our artists for completing their paintings despite many challenges posed by the current pandemic. The exhibition is now open to the public and can be viewed during gallery hours Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm (please follow our physical distancing measures).

The kitchen is often called “the heart of the home”. The act of cooking, and of sharing a meal, has always been a powerful symbol of our culture, our history, and our identity. What we do in the kitchen connects us to our past, to our bloodlines. Covid-19 and stay-at-home orders have forced upon us a togetherness in our homes. The pandemic has led us back to the kitchen, the traditional gathering spot. The constant of the kitchen, and the joys and comforts we experience there, are helping us adapt to isolation. These joys and comforts will be there still, when the pandemic recedes and we open our homes once again to welcome friends and family.

Artist Karen Haines sees the kitchen as a place of safety, where families gather, share stories and make memories for a lifetime. Her still life paintings pulsate with the energy of the everyday. Artist Caroline Ji explores the intermingling of the kitchen and the artist studio, a space that combines brushes, cups, studio props and sinks. Artist Cathy Ross aims to convey the uniqueness and special character of everyday objects in her watercolour works, exploring the intimacy and subtle joy of the ordinary. Artist Gillian Willans’ depictions of interiors, including kitchens and everyday spaces, is both nostalgic and critical, steeped in questions of gender and social structures. Devoid of figures, her paintings invite the viewer to imagine each private space as a stage on which a range of social interactions play out.

The artifacts from the collection of the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum invite us to imagine and recollect the joys and tribulations of kitchens past. A cast iron frying pan #3 produced at Findlay’s Limited in Carleton Place, Ontario, recalls the company’s range of frypans, numbered from 1 to 10. In operation for over 100 years, this family-owned foundry produced iron cookware, furnaces and woodstoves, including the best-selling Findlay Oval Cookstove. The Five Roses Cookbook was a compilation of almost 600 recipes carefully chosen from the contribution of over two thousand successful users of Five Roses flour throughout Canada and was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company in 1913.

KITCHEN can now be viewed at the gallery Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm. In keeping with health directives, we will not have a vernissage for this show. We are offering FREE SHIPPING of art within Canada on orders placed before May 31, 2020, or free delivery within a 100km radius of the gallery. Visit our Virtual Gallery to see available works and pricing information, and call us at 613-256-8033 or email [email protected].