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| Grad takes rhymes to new level |
| By Rebecca Tucker |
Published
03/18/2009
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A&E , Off-campus news , Campus news , Ryersonian Print Edition , Features
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Grad takes rhymes to new level
As a child, did you view nursery rhymes as clever bits of superficial poetry, or as rhyming couplets aimed at teaching messages relating to subservience, moral character and issues of hegemonic power struggles?
If your answer tends to lean towards the latter, you have a friend in photographer Jonathan Hobin, whose current exhibition explores the darker side of children’s nursery rhymes.
“I don’t want to say I was one of those weird kids because I certainly wasn’t – but I was fixated on this darker element to childhood,” Hobin said from his home in Ottawa.
“I was able to see past the politically correct side of these rhymes and see the darker undertones, even as a kid.”
Hobin’s Mother Goose exhibition, which is showing until March 31 at the Dale Smith Gallery in Ottawa, is a series of tableaux depicting children in nursery-rhyme scenarios:
Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater sits beside his wife, who peeks out of a pumpkin with her hair and face covered in the fruit’s innards; a Butcher, a Baker and a Candlestick Maker sit atop one another in a darkly affectionate embrace; and Little Miss Muffett sits, filthy, in a garden, strewn with curds, whey and spiders.
“A lot of the nursery rhymes, at a time when literacy wasn’t a high priority, were a way of having a repetitive pattern to get stuck in kids’ minds, and each one carries its own sort of moral or expectation,” Hobin said.
“It was basically a way to instil morals or life lessons, and they were never easy – the rhymes would be talking about pregnancy, physical abuse, things like that.”
The children in Hobin’s photographs – there are three of them who appear throughout the series – are family friends of his who he said he knew could handle the project’s darker subject matter.
“The three kids who I used in the project had experienced a lot of death in a short period of time, including the death of their father,” he said.
“So I knew they’d be able to evoke the sorts of emotions I was going for.
“People have asked me about the most positive aspect of my own upbringing. For me, it was the idea that, as a kid, my opinion mattered and that I was an actual person with real thoughts and feelings. So I feel like, in the same, involving these kids in my project was a way to get them to be part of something where they could express emotion in a real way.”
Hobin is a Ryerson alumnus – he graduated from the school’s Image Arts department in 2003 – who now spends much of his time working in film in Ottawa.
He first conceived and began working on the Mother Goose project while at Ryerson – he’s not sure of exactly when, but says it could have been as early as 2002.
“It was always the intention to put it together as an exhibition,” he said. “I’d shown it in a couple galleries in Toronto, but not in its entirety. So I was glad to have the gallery approach me in Ottawa.”
While working on films, Hobin is also at work on a new set of photos called In the Playroom, which evokes the same dark themes of childhood, but with a different twist: Hobin will have children acting out, again in tableau, significant news events of the 20th century.
“At first glance it looks like kids in a normal play environment. When you look closer, you see that the kids aren’t just playing, but it’s almost like they’ve incorporated this bombardment of news media that they see on a day-to-day basis into their play,” he explained, citing 9-11, the death of JonBenet Ramsay and Hurricane Katrina as examples of some of the events he’s photographed.
“I never grew out of exploring childhood in art,” Hobin said.
“To me, it evokes a guttural response, ruled by emotion. I find that it’s a source for me, getting back to that place of innocence that was actually punctuated by a lot of darkness.”
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