Labour of love
Short Stories gallery busier than usual
Photographer Leebly Brown is getting ready to close his Short Stories gallery for the season and said it’s been busier than usual.
“I’ve noticed it’s been more steady. People are just stopping in,” he said.
This year, Brown has seen more traffic on the road in Victoria County and decided to open daily from 4-6 p.m. instead of just taking appointments.
Brown designed the gallery, which closes on Labour Day weekend, to look like an old Cape Breton fishing shack.
“I wanted it to have the aesthetic of here. None of the new places have the aesthetic of the old (Cape Breton),” he said.
“It literally is like an old fishing shack — there’s no power or anything.”
Short Stories features one, seven-piece series, done by Brown, and is open during the summer.
His current exhibit is called “Empty Spaces.” Black-andwhite landscape photos of the Palm Desert in California are plastered on used skateboards. Underneath each picture are a few lines from the song “Empty Spaces” by Bad Religion.
The song is about people having a cause they fight for but as they get older they realize it might not be the right cause.
This is part of what 36-yearold Brown was aiming to depict with the series.
“For me, right now, everything is black and white. You have the far right and you have the far left… things are biased more than before,” he explained.
“There’s a lot of passion, but the truth is, as time goes by it’s going to be someone else’s empty cause.”
Brown, who studied photojournalism at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont., had no specific reason why he chose to mount the images on skateboards.
“I wanted them to fit snuggly to the board, kind of like they would do with propaganda, during the war… that was the idea,” he said.
“They had to fit the skateboards but I also cropped it that way so when you are reading it, like they are empty landscapes, you see that they’re empty but there’s something that’s confining you… when you are looking at it, it’s going to make you wish you could see more.
“Like my thing with the bias, when you believe in one side and after you find out the truth, you kind of wished you had waited until you heard the other side. I wanted that empty feeling but also that feeling like you want more when you look at them.”
Brown admitted Short Stories is more of a labour of love than a money maker but that might partly be from his reluctance to sell his art.
Originals are never for sale but Brown does sells copies and folk art. This year he made copies his series “I Live in a Yellow House,” which is about his grandmother and her life with dementia. He sold one copy but said it was hard.
“The guy who bought it was emotional. He wanted to buy it. And I was emotional selling it. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to get rid of this,’ even though I have other copies,” Brown said.
“I guess I put so much work into these things. That one took five years, maybe seven… so to let them go, I can’t put a price on them.”