Snow: New exhibit opening at Museum of Civilization

By Diana Matthews and Mara Selanders with Brett Throop We love it, we hate it, and we live with it. Snow. It is a vital part of Canadian identity and now the focus of an exhibit opening at the Museum of Civilization on Friday. Whether or not the white blanket leaves you cold is irrelevant, exhibit curator Bianca Gendreau said. The installation isn’t about changing popular opinion. “We don’t plan to change people’s minds,” she said. “People are invited to discover the cultural history of snow.” The exhibit will focus on adaptation, innovation and inspiration, three key cultural aspects of how snow is a part of our daily lives. The adaptation section will show the methods First Nations people and European settlers after them used to cope with winter . This section will feature items like snowshoes alongside excerpts from the travel diaries of explorers and merchants who recorded ways of coping with snow and learning to adapt to a snowy climate. These diaries illustrate pioneering ways of living with snow, innovations that form the basis of the middle section of the exhibit. “It’s really about transportation and snow clearing, and all of the different things that have been put forward, or adapted, or modified, by Canadians,” Gendreau said. Once Canadians learned to live with the snow, they also learned to have fun with it. The exhibit has a section on how Canadian Olympic athletes show their passion for winter. From passion comes inspiration, which is the theme of the third section, about some of Canada’s foremost artists and the work they have done on snow. Snow is also essential for Canadian agriculture, tourism and the economy. Chris Maxwell and Melissa Mourez, both fine arts students at the University of Ottawa, spent part of Tuesday rolling snowballs and tossing them to each other. Chris Maxwell talks about the exhibit. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41691394/Snow_Chris%20on%20Exhibit.mp3 “It would be interesting to see because our winters are a little different from the winters of some of the settlers that might’ve come over here at first,” Maxwell said. “To see the transition of how they would’ve adapted and gotten into the whole concept of snow – how they would’ve utilized it or how it would’ve treated them or how they would’ve seen it.” Chris Maxwell talks about how much he loves snow. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41691394/Snow_Chris.mp3 Melissa Mourez talks how snow makes her nervous. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41691394/Snow_Melissa2.mp3   The exhibit will run at the museum from Dec. 6, 2013 to Sept. 28,...