For the next few days, Victoria Park and City Square Plaza will be the focal point of a whole lot of football related hoopla. Most of the hoopla will be of the traditional variety, like the photo that appears after the jump. But the Dunlop Art Gallery and Central Library are also entering into the spirit, albeit in a slightly subversive way.
Pictured above is a three-part art work by Daryl Vocat. Born and raised in Regina, Vocat now lives in Toronto. In September 2012 he had an exhibition at the Dunlop’s Sherwood Village Gallery called The Secret of the Midnight Shadow. You can read more about the show in this interview I did with him, but the gist is that Vocat used photos from an old Boy Scouts’ manual to create nighttime tableaux that explored notions of gender, sexuality, authority and rebellion.
A sport like football has a lot in common with Boy Scouts. Both champion ideals like teamwork, hierarchy, obedience and duty. And both tend to skew toward the male end of the spectrum as far as participation goes. So there’s some interesting parallels between the above work and Vocat’s previous exhibition.
Both images can be enlarged by clicking on them.
