The city's new artist in residence is calling on community members to share their memories so they can wear them.
For her Golden Guelph project, this year's artist in residence Jenny Mitchell is asking community members to share a high-resolution image that represents local history with a personal short story. Mitchell said she's looking to tell stories of all kinds that include familiar and unfamiliar places with an unheard of perspective that cannot be found in history books.
There will be 20 submissions selected for the visual project. Each submission will be silk screened on a T-shirt by Mitchell, and she will record the participant's story. The rest of the submissions will be available in an online gallery.
“I print out a photo that is the size that would go conveniently on a T-shirt that is usually nine inches square or rectangle and I overlay transparency and I hand-ink it so I guess its like artful tracing,” said Mitchell.
“I liked the idea of people being able to wander the streets of Guelph and maybe it’s a conversation starter that you see a very specific silk screened t-shirt and you're like ‘Hey I remember that place’ and you can talk to that person about that story.”
For her, silk screening has been a way to honour and remember places of the past.
“I grew up working at my dad's thrift store (Family Thrift Store on Wyndham Street) and when that shut down after my dad had it for 16 years and I worked there for 12 years, it was kind of a big deal,” said Mitchell who continued to see other places she grew up with shutting down over the years.
“As a lifelong Guelphite, I was sad to see things go and I had taken up silkscreening and it was kind of therapeutic practice to spend time rendering these buildings that had importance to me in my silk screening.”
each person who's submission is chosen for the silkscreening will receive a copy of the shirt and the shirts will also be duplicated to be preserved for the project..
“The original plan was to have the 20 shirts displayed in a gallery style at the city hall but now it will have to be online,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell is a versatile artist and has been very active in the arts scene in the city. She is well known for her business Gone Guelph, which honours businesses from the past by silkscreening them on T-shirts and selling them to the public. Mitchell was also the City of Guelph’s inaugural RBC Market Mornings Artist in 2014 and the mastermind behind The Golden Bus, a portable, collaborative art space. She's also released 11 albums of music.
Currently the mobile studio coordinator at the CFRU where her main role is to create radio initiatives that encourage different voices to share their perspectives about the community, Mitchell said the Artist in Residency project was the perfect opportunity to kick off Golden Guelph because it embraces the community, an essential component of the project.
“At some point my work through CFRU and my passion for history and hearing about these losses and the various ways they impacted people, the Golden Guelph project was born out of the intersection of those two things,” said Mitchell.
With her Gone Guelph business, she said she expected people to enjoy seeing their favourite landmarks silkscreened but was surprised to learn that people especially enjoyed telling her why they wanted the shirt.
“So people would buy a shirt of the Apollo and be like ‘Me and my father went there every night we went to a Storm game and had french fries,’” said Mitchell.
Mitchell said the name Golden Guelph is an intersection of projects she completed in the past such as Golden Throats Karaoke, Golden Community Guelph and the Golden Bus. She said there is no wrong submission for the project and submissions aren’t limited to memories tied with places that don’t exist anymore.
“I also didn’t want to have to focus on well-known losses in the city. I thought maybe for every 100 stories there are about the Apollo, there’s probably 100 people with one story about somewhere I’ve never even looked twice at,” said Mitchell.
She said sharing these memories especially during the pandemic is a way to connect with one another and reminisce about past memories while people are physically distancing.
“I think now we’re all realizing that we should share our history and make sure we haven’t forgotten the things that we’ve lived through,” said Mitchell.
She said Guelph is very unique in its approach to this art project where it gives Guelphites a platform to create art for their city for the community to engage with rather than giving a platform to an artist from another city.
“I personally thought that was really magical. I didn’t have to leave my town to celebrate my town,” said Mitchell.
