Lethbridge living May/June 2017 | Page 19

living talk Put your best face forward with Lethbridge’s only time capsule project celebrating our country’s 150th birthday. The future of Lethbridge art is tubular! roots in the long tradition of self-portraiture in the arts and a basic human impulse to fi x themselves in a time and place. “We like to make fun of selfi es,” says Kelaine. “We think of them as being vain and narcissistic, but lots of people engage with the selfi e as a regular form of self-expression.” Not only are selfi es a distinctly contemporary phenomenon, digital photos, unlike physical objects, can offer a more intimate portrait of people’s lives in 2017. “We are programmed at a very basic level to recognize faces and bond with faces,” Kelaine explains. “When we see historical pictures of people from the past, we have a sense that they were real people rather than from reading a history text or looking at an object. I think it changes our relationship with the past and hopefully that will have the same effect on the people in the future.” “I hope people have fun with it and think of their surroundings and what they are wearing and the messages that those things communicate,” Kelaine states. Anyone interested in participating in the selfi e project will have all day June 24 to take their photos and send them to the AAC at selfi [email protected]. S O U T H E R N A L B E R TA A R T G A L L E R Y 601 3 AVE S. LETHBRIDGE, AB | 403.327.8770 | www.saag.ca LETHBRIDGELIVING.COM M AY- J U N 2 0 1 7 19