Holiday '08

I went some places over the holidays! I took some photos!

The Canadian Museum of Nature, where I was awed by dinosaurs as a child, is undergoing massive renovations. Part of it is still open, and I revisited the giant skeletons, above. Also, my mom curated a nifty show there -- paintings by Barbara Gamble, juxtaposed with century-old plant specimens collected & pressed by Catharine Parr Traill (sister of Susanna Moodie).

Mom, Rene and I went to Montreal for the weekend, where we visited Rene's sister & went to the Canadian Centre for Architecture. There's a fantastic show on until April 19 called Actions: What You Can Do With the City. It's an encyclopedically thorough collection of urban interventions -- performance art, guerrilla gardening, parkour, anything you can think of in that vein -- from cities around the world.

Then we went to Rene's little house in Cornwall, which is stuffed with an eclectic collection of outsider (and insider) art and toys.



The next day, we toured a semi-derelict cotton mill, part of a complex where Rene dreams of creating a private museum, which would be like his house, but larger & open to the public.



Full photoset here.