Doors Open with ‘Places, Patterns and Plans’
Now a cultural mainstay, and this year, a nice twist: Art
Doors Open Waterloo Region, a fixture on the cultural calendar for 16 years now, returns a week from today.
The theme is “Places, Patterns and Plans.” As always, there are many more opportunities to view hidden architectural treasures than anyone can possibly cover in one day.
Doors Open Waterloo Region 2018 includes 34 sites, 15 of which are participating for the first time, along with seven talks, a number of musical presentations and a visual art exhibition. Dovetailed into the program is a parallel event called Startup Open House.
The printed map and guide to all this comes with today’s paper. A week is plenty of time to work out an itinerary.
Rather than try to identify highlights or make recommendations, I’ll mention only one program item: that visual art exhibition, which I believe is a first for Doors Open Waterloo Region. But it’s the location of this exhibit that immediately attracted my attention. For many years, this has been one of my favourite buildings in downtown Kitchener. It also happens to be almost directly across the street from the Commons Studio, where I work.
The address is 243 King St. E., a block or so up on the other side of the street from the Kitchener Market. It’s that diminutive, free-standing Art Deco-style building that those of us with longer memories will recall as Pinto’s Youth Shoppe.
This is a business that was owned and operated by two sisters, Caroline and Victoria, daughters of Rose and Michael Pinto, who built the store on a vacant lot in 1929. Originally a grocery outlet with living quarters upstairs, it was transformed into a place to buy quality children’s clothing when the daughters took over the business in 1941.
Waterloo also had a Pinto’s Youth Shoppe, which was demolished to make way for the uptown parking garage. The Kitchener location remained vacant for many years, but it was never allowed to deteriorate like other boarded up historic properties so often are. I remember passing by and looking at it with longing and affection, imagining it as an ideal location for the Waterloo Regional Arts Council or some other civic amenity I cared about.
So I was only too glad to have a reason to connect with the current owner, Laird Robertson of NEO Architecture Inc., and go across the street to talk with him. What he told me about the history of 243 King E., and how he became the owner, is fascinating. Terry Pender wrote a full length article on this subject for these pages a couple of years ago (“Tin box packed with memories tells the uplifting story of a Kitchener family,” Sept. 3, 2016).
When Doors Open Waterloo Region organizer Karl Kessler proposed that Robertson curate an art exhibit, he was happy to comply. He started with a piece by Kitchener printmaker Michelle Purchase that he’d bought at an Art$Pay show and sale event. Like many of Purchase’s works, the print depicts an “imaginary world” — in this case, a tree house.
From there, Robertson chose four more artists who work with architecture as a subject. Heather Kocsis, with her “dimensional wall-sculptures” made of layers of wood, was a logical choice. Photographer Brian Douglas is an artist he’d worked with before, on a souvenir calendar for his firm. The connection with Joe Martz, another photographer who specializes in architectural themes, was also facilitated through the Art$Pay roster.
When the other artists recommended Melissa Doherty’s work exploring the “materiality and fabrication of landscape,” they weren’t sure if she’d be available given her rising Canada-wide reputation as an artist. But she readily agreed.
The end result is “Memories of Utopia: A visual art exhibition, architecturally themed.” The show will open as part of Doors Open Waterloo Region, Saturday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It will remain on view at the NEO Architecture office from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the following Saturdays to October 20.