When we first arrived in Nicolet, before Christmas, we went to the Musée to check out the exhibits (exposition, en Français) and spent a lot of time in the Noël exposition. (Mostly because it is the only one without English information as well as French and translation was timely.)
This is the Noel exhibit at the beginning, on the other side of the wall on the right there was a "salle secret" where school group kids would go and do activities.
The tree held different items that would typically be given at Christmas in each of the 5 major religions of the world. The showcase pieces were all of different nativity scenes made from various mediums.
A quaint little chimney.
(this is the secret entrance to the secret room.. shhhh)
But alas when the jolly season ends there is little need for an exhibit about it and so the destruction began.
First stages - taking down the info panels, removing the fake snow and presents, and Noémie putting the nativity scenes back into the archives.
My large heap of presents, which later inspired impromptu Christmas card photoshoots.
Goodbye Christmas.
I found Santa.
I also found a small girl in the corner wrapping wire around a stick. I fed her my lunch and nursed her back to sanity.
Jessie's sanity levels plummeted drastically when we took on the task of disassembling the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree was constructed of pipes, fake tree pieces and ornaments, and it was all strung up to the ceiling by wires. Wires which demanded full attention and precision of fingers when dealing with. Because this giant tree was right in the middle of the exhibit and mass amounts of children visited the exhibit every week I am quite thankful for said supportive wires.
My sanity levels took a plunge when Jessie and I were given the task of placing all the boxes and decorations from the Noel exhibit into the shower, a locked room inside the ladies washroom. We dragged boxes and boxes from the exposition over to the shower and proceeded to play puzzle trying to make them all fit. We realized along the way that things would need to be cleared out first because our shove-everything-in method simply wasn't working very well. I was meticulously placing the lower portion of a Santa Claus in the shower when a noise like thousands of beads hitting the floor rang in my ears and a blast of something very cold hit my forehead. It was after I jumped backwards into a bag of incense sticks and told Jessie in a considerably loud voice to "AHH do something!" that I realized I had turned the shower on full blast and Santa was getting a nice Arctic quality rinse. I turned it off when I realized Jessie was helplessly lost in laughter at my.. erm.. miscalculation of placement.
After full belly laughter for approximately 10 minutes we decided it would be a good idea to find some paper towel and dry the things I had inadvertently decided to drench. We hung the fake snow up on the children's coat hooks in the vestiare. Jean-Francois shook his head a lot at us for a few days afterwards.
Moving everything out.. for some reason I always get photos of Guy's back.. hmm..
Suddenly very empty!
When we took the drywall down a mysterious window was revealed.
Blue trollies = also great for racing.
A brief description of what we did can be summarized in just one word.
Chiseling.
Jessie and I chiseled everything.
We chiseled the walls, we chiseled the showcase stands; we chiseled paint off pieces of trim, we chiseled sticky tack off walls. We chiseled paint off the carpet.
In fact, we spent a good amount of time chiseling the carpet, and for lack of a more gracious description we nearly died of laughter upon realizing we were chiseling the carpet.
WHO CHISELS A CARPET?
Now whenever we go somewhere with walls (which, believe or not, is pretty a pretty common occurrence) we catch each other examining the walls with the desire to chip away impurities from them. It's a disease of the mind, but watch out; it is strangely contagious..
I haven't posted an update since we started the destruction and since then we have continued into what one might describe as the "Making of an Exposition".
We have helped put together showcase stands, painted all the showcases stands, chiseled old paint off painting equipment, chiseled new paint off painting equipment, chiseled more carpets, helped Denis put up some walls, painted walls, and vacuumed for more hours than I care to count. It's been lots of work and lots of moving things back and forth because of limited room but it's so rewarding to look back at the photos of the Christmas exhibit and see how much progress we made in just three weeks time. The whole room is yellow now, and filled with paper statues of various religious and historic characters.
Claude LaFortune is a man who had a biblical television show in Québec in the 70's ("L'évangile en papier") in which paper dolls played the characters. His works, both then and since, have inspired puppeteers everywhere and my boss Jean-Francois commented recently, "You cannot comment on other puppets and say Claude's work looks like theirs. He is the pioneer; their work looks like his."
The paper statues are enticing and unique and his entire collection is made of recycled materials; namely, paper. Mr. LaFortune is the showcased artist for this new exposition at the musée and yesterday and today the three of us Katimavictims met him and looked at all his amazing projects. Photos to come.
12 days left of Katimavik - I should have posted more over the last 6 months!
home soon!
Petra
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