| rev:text
| - This review is for the exhibition "Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John and Yoko" (April 2 - June 21, 2009) only.
Imagine love.
Imagine a love story of two people: a man named John Lennon and a woman named Yoko Ono. It is a tale of two misfits who somehow found each other, and who fit together to present peace and love to the world.
Imagine peace.
I don't know why, really, but the love story of John and Yoko has always been dear to my heart. So when I planned my trip to Montreal and booked a room at the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, I was excited to learn that this hotel was the very site of one of the couple's famous bed-ins for peace, in 1969.
In the lobby of the hotel I saw a poster promoting an exhibition called "Imagine Peace" at the Museum of Fine Arts (or Musee des Beaux-Arts de Montreal)--a tribute to John and Yoko's vision of world peace.
Imagine joy.
The exhibit begins with brief bios of both John and Yoko and photos of when they were younger, before they met. The entryway is filled with the sound of John and Yoko calling each other's names, one of their "experimental" recordings. The next gallery documents their meeting, relationship, and subsequent marriage in Gibraltar, with many multimedia artworks interspersed throughout: an interactive artwork of Yoko's that encourages visitors to hammer a nail into a wooden board, a voice recording of Yoko reading her poetry, and videos of the couple.
But it wasn't until I entered the next gallery that I had that rare realization that I had been exactly where I was supposed to be exactly when I was supposed to be there in Montreal. In the introductory text for this gallery, I read that John and Yoko had their bed-in for peace on June 1st, 1969, and recorded "Give Peace a Chance"--exactly 40 years earlier to the day that I checked into the Fairmont.
The exhibition's curators did a fantastic job of staying true to John and Yoko's aesthetic of making art accessible and interactive. The bed-in gallery is actually dominated by a real bed, and visitors are encouraged to pose on the bed and take photos (in fact, photography is allowed throughout the exhibit).
The next gallery focuses on the "War is Over" years, with a forest of video monitors showing footage of the protests against the Vietnam War. Another gallery is dedicated to the song "Imagine," which was written by John but heavily influenced by some of Yoko's earlier poetry. In contrast to the other galleries, almost everything in this one is white--including the famous white Baldwin piano, at which people can play along to "Imagine" as it sounds throughout the gallery.
The exhibition concludes with a forest of wish trees. Taking inspiration from a Japanese tradition of writing messages on small pieces of paper at shrines, this interactive piece asks people to write their own wishes and then hang the inscribed paper tags from the branches of the trees clustered in the gallery.
Imagine hope.
Note: Admission to the exhibition is free, but there is a donation box at the exit to the exhibition. I encourage people to make even a small donation to help to fund equally wonderful exhibits in the future.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)