As one of Powell River’s longest standing non-profit organizations prepares its main celebration for its 60th anniversary, Harvey Chometsky is finding his own way to pay tribute—though community art.
inclusion Powell River, formerly known as Powell River Association for Community Living, is planning an inclusion Festival with a number of events to celebrate the beginning of its seventh decade of providing advocacy and services for families of children and adults with developmental disabilities. The festival will run over four days, from February 4 to 9 and include a variety of events including theatre and dance performances, a night of comedy and film night at Max Cameron Theatre.
For the past few months, Chometsky has been working on a video project which aims to celebrate Powell River’s diversity and has fostered the community non-profit.
“It was truly a community initiative that started,” he said of inclusion Powell River and its origins in 1954. “There was no help, [families] had to support one another. That’s what communities used to do. It’s so basic and something we so need to return to.”
For him, community is something that is created when people come together to see each other and to help out, “not because you’re paid to, but because that’s what you do.”
The idea of how to foster community is something which appeals to the 62-year-old artist and volunteer with inclusion Powell River.
Over the span of Chometsky’s 40-plus years as “a working artist,” he has been employed in publishing and acted as curator for both commercial and public art galleries. He has exhibited his art in Berlin, New Orleans, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. As an artist, he has worked in many mediums including poetry, photography, cars, drawing, metal, mill felt and now in video.
Throughout it all, stimulating the community imagination, no matter the medium, has remained a constant for Chometsky.
The project he is working on is a community video art installation which he calls “I am Us,” and aims to provide Powell River with a mirror image of itself by introducing the wider community and making it more visible, “in comparison to the enclaves that we create,” he said.
When he thought about how to celebrate community it was one of the best ideas he came up with. “It’s an inclusion festival, so let’s include all the people,” he said.
Using his Nokia smartphone, Chometsky is recording community members saying hello, introducing themselves and taking about who they are in the community.
“It would be cool to have footage of people introducing themselves on screens around the community, so the community is literally reflected back at itself,” he said. “This is what we look like. This is what we sound like. These are our aims. We are real people.”
Since coming up with the idea, he has had to temper his enthusiasm with the reality of how difficult it will be to capture 20,000 introductions. So instead he has settled on collecting around 1,000.
This is an ongoing project for Chometsky and the artist will present some of the introductions at inclusion Powell River’ anniversary festival. He hopes to be able to create a video art installation at this year’s Aurora Festival in Townsite, if the innovative arts festival goes forward this year.
He was the first presenter of the initial TEDx conference in Powell River, a talk where he discussed how he sees the role of artists in society and the importance of celebrating diversity.
“It’s our job [for senior artists], to maintain and renew our culture,” he said. “If we’re not doing that we are failing human continuity. I feel strongly about this and I’ve chosen art as my vehicle to make that happen.”
For too long art has had its focus of the marketplace or as something for a small group of elites, often other artists—not for regular people, he said. “Art is in all of us. It’s an essential human quality that we all have to develop to our various degrees of ability and devotion. That’s something which is essential to bring back to any community, in my opinion. I’ve taken that on as my life’s mission—to return art to the people.”
He said he has facilitated a number of community projects involving getting as many people to participate as possible. “At first it looks like a mess, but by the time enough people have gathered and participated it turns into this extraordinary thing,” he said.
“It taught me that diversity is beautiful,” he added. “It creates beauty when we all gather together with our various expressions. It’s always beautiful.”
Chometsky said that the project is for the good of the community, but it also is helping him to get to know Powell River better.
“I’m quite isolated as a working artist,” he said, explaining that he does most of his work out of his home studio. “I don’t see many people. It’s a challenge for contemporary artists to be in the community in a meaningful way. There are less and less opportunities all the time. I think that’s got to change.”
Chometsky will be recording introductions at the festival and after. He encourages everyone to participate and is happy to go to any group, family or individual if they wish to be included in the project. Chometsky can be contacted by email at [email protected] or by phone 604.358.4453.
inclusion Powell River’s festival will also include a number of free events at Community Living Place on Artaban Street including a theatre and storytelling workshops, a video shorts afternoon where the entries from inclusion Powell River’s Everyone Belongs video contest will be screened as well as a Family Day pancake breakfast.
For more information about the festival and the many events planned, readers can visit inclusion Powell River online, or phone Yvonne Russell at 604.485.6411, extension 229, [email protected].
