OTTAWA - You might know Joni Mitchell as an artist and a revered songwriter, but did you know she was a polio survivor?
How about NHL legend Jacques Plante - a goalie, a hockey innovator, but wait ... a knitter too?
A new travelling show of the Portrait Gallery of Canada - an institution that doesn't actually have its own physical home - turns on their head some of the assumptions Canadians might have about their national icons.
Called "Double Take," the exhibit features 100 rare and familiar portraits, photographs, advertisements and even a dress to create vignettes of a cross-section of Canadian personalities. Video interviews with some of the featured figures will form part of the final package, which will stop first at Charlottetown's Confederation Centre Art Gallery between January and May next year.
"It's encouraging people to explore a little further some of these people who fit within a particular kind of framework - there's more to them," says Stuart Campbell, senior director general of business integration at Library and Archives Canada.
"And the idea of the portrait programming generally is to encourage people through portraits, which are very powerful obviously, to explore more of Canada's documentary heritage."
That dress, made of paper, is part of a section on former Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, and features a photo of his face. It was worn by some of his supporters during the 1968 Liberal convention. That's juxtaposed with a Yousuf Karsh portrait of the prime minister, and a paper doll book from the 1980s with his caricature.
Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, is featured in three equally unique pieces - a rarely seen locket with his picture (his son's image is on the flip side), a funerary ribbon and an early portrait of the young lawyer from 1843. Three words encapsulate his section: Prime Minister. Risktaker. Bon Vivant.
"It's up to the visitor to piece that together and decide on his identity," says Carolyn Cook, curator of the portrait program at Library and Archives Canada.
Other interesting works in the show include a portrait of the Dionne quintuplets as teens, roasting marshmallows by a campfire. There's a photograph of singer and poet Leonard Cohen looking into a mirror wearing only a bath towel, and a collection of drawings Jean-Joseph Girouard made of his fellow imprisoned patriotes after the rebellion of 1837-38.
The $250,000 show is a chance for the public finally to see some of Library and Archives Canada's vast collection, and especially the languishing pieces of the portrait gallery.
The former Liberal government established the gallery a decade ago, with the goal of finding a home for some of the tens of thousands of pieces that Library and Archives had collected since the 19th century.
But the Conservative government nixed the plan to locate the gallery in a building across from Parliament Hill that previously housed the U.S. embassy. Later, private entities across Canada were invited to bid on the construction of a gallery, but that idea was also aborted.
Apart from smaller-scale displays of some of the portraits, most of the works have stayed within the Library and Archive vaults in Gatineau, Que. Some of the collection can be viewed on the gallery's website.
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