After a 30-plus year career in contemporary installation art, Buckhorn-based artist Michele Karch-Ackerman reminisces as she discusses the inspiration behind her latest exhibit Flower Orphanage, now on display at Minden’s Agnes Jamieson Gallery.
“Really, it’s something of an ode to my 92-year-old mother, but also to myself and all the things I’ve done since entering the business,” Karch-Ackerman tells The Highlander. “It’s the story of my life, of my mother’s life, and all the things we’ve encountered, been inspired by, and overcome.”
The exhibit explores what it means to be a mother, wife, and daughter, she said, while growing and navigating life. It features close to 100 individual pieces that interconnect, peeling back the onion so people can learn more about, and understand, the person behind the art.
Growing up in the city, Karch-Ackerman said she was an “artsy kid.” By the time she was graduating high school, there was no doubt in her mind she wanted to become an artist. She enrolled in the Ontario College of Art to chase her calling.
It was a risky move – she remembers the late 70s and early 80s as a time when people were fixated on Wall Street.
“I wasn’t interested in the rat race at all,” she said. “I still remember telling one of my friends I was going to become an artist, she said ‘OK, but how will you make a living?’ That was the attitude then.”
She met her husband at art college and, upon graduation, connected with Av Isaacs, one of Toronto’s most renowned art dealers. He took Karch-Ackerman under his wing, showing her how to pave her own path in an oft-ignored industry.
After getting married, she and her husband left the city – coming north to Coe Hill. She took a break from drawing and painting to become a mother.
“The break lasted a long time,” Karch-Ackerman laughs. Her focus shifted to textiles, specifically stitching and dress making. Rather than go the designer route, she focused on creating memorial pieces for traumatic events.
Her initial focus was the First World War, spending three years developing a show she toured across Canada in the late 1990s. A miniature version ran for several weeks at Rails End Gallery years later, KarchAckerman recalls.
Other exhibits focused on the tragic Swissair Flight 111 crash in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1998, child loss, and the brutality of tuberculosis pre-vaccine. She also produced a show based on the Dionne quintuplets – the first known to have survived their infancy having been born May 28, 1934.
Her career has taken her to many wonderful places – including Haliburton School of Art + Design, where KarchAckerman taught for several years. Now 62, she sees her career winding down, certainly when it comes to the usual bread and butter. Karch-Ackerman said she typically spends two to three years on a single exhibit.
Flower Orphanage was like a time capsule, she said. While preparing, she sifted through boxes of old photographs, each sparking vivid memories.
“I found an undergarment nightgown I had worn when I was 19 in art school – it was vintage 1930s style and reminded me what it meant to be that age. It also reminded me of the kind of things my mother would wear – she and dad went out a lot when I was a kid, she’d spend hours getting dressed up, doing her makeup. I’d stand there watching her, mesmerized,” she said.
Her mother drew from the likes of Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor when dressing up, and always wore Chanel Number 5 – developed by Coco Chanel. All three are featured prominently in Flower Orphanages, so too is American poet Emily Dickinson.
While her mother isn’t well enough to see the show in-person, Karch-Ackerman said the pair spent an afternoon going through the show’s catalogue, smiling and laughing more and more with each turn of a page.
“She absolutely loved it – especially once we got to the piece centred around her wedding dress. It brought all sorts of memories flooding back.”
Closing the book on the ‘Ghost Seamstress’, as Karch-Ackerman refers to her textile self, she plans to pursue other modes of art in her golden years.
She is hosting a talk at the gallery Aug. 7, where she will further delve into her inspiration and share stories about her favourite pieces. Flower Orphanage will be on display until Aug. 17.
