Art for the ages

Rather than slowing down in her twilight years, ninety-five year-old artist Kay Ivey will be out and about tomorrow night when she and her daughter, also an artist, unveil several of their respective works during a vernissage being held at a Ste. Anne de Bellevue art gallery.

Pamela Plumb, a practicing architect and artist, says she and her mother approach their craft from opposite perspectives.

“We work very differently,” Plumb noted, adding, “My mother paints and draws and I do assemblages made from things I find… you just can’t believe the treasures there are in the trash, or on the side of the road,” she said.

Both women create their art in separate studios located in Plumb’s Pointe-Claire Village home, where Ivey also lives.

And though Ivey has been confined to a wheelchair for a number of years, Plumb says her mother’s mind is still sharp.

“Her zest for life is incredible, but her body is betraying her.”

Ivey’s painted scenes, which often depict worn-torn areas, are intended to make people “reflect on the un-necessary inhumanity that we have brought into the world,” she says.

Plumb’s art, by contrast, features cast off objects such as a guitar that was refitted with an hour glass. Together, says Plumb, they represent a woman’s biological clock.

She says her art combines a variety of materials including plaster, steel, plexiglass, wood and whatever else insinuates itself into the moment.

A vernissage of Kay Ivey and Pamela Plumb’s art work will take place tomorrow evening, April 3, at Galerie Ouest, 37 rue St. Thomas, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, from 7:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

The exhibition will continue until April 8, 2008.