{"id":14715,"date":"2015-09-18T00:09:03","date_gmt":"2015-09-18T07:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=14715"},"modified":"2015-09-17T13:55:47","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T20:55:47","slug":"memorials-to-millions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2015\/09\/18\/memorials-to-millions\/","title":{"rendered":"Memorials to millions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Penn\u2019s exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Pole, \u201cisn\u2019t happy but it\u2019s genuine.\u201d (photo by Olga Livshin)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The poignant tale behind Pole, Ian Penn\u2019s new multimedia exhibit at the Zack Gallery, is a bleak travelogue detailing his recent journey to Poland.<\/p>\n

Although Penn\u2019s family came from Poland \u2013 his parents were lucky to have escaped the Holocaust and settled in Australia \u2013 he never wanted to visit the country of his ancestors. \u201cMy mother said she would never set a toe in Poland,\u201d he told the Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Australia, Penn moved to Vancouver, where he worked as a cardiologist for many years. He is mainly retired now but still teaches at the University of British Columbia and works as a medic with the emergency-response ski patrol in Whistler.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I retired, I enrolled in Emily Carr,\u201d he said. \u201cI graduated in 2010 with a bachelor\u2019s in fine arts but I\u2019ve always kept a visual diary, since university. I have hundreds of little albums at home. Wherever I am, wherever I go, I draw and write in them. It\u2019s how I explore the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paints regularly, landscapes and figurative images. \u201cFor me, painting is a way of telling a story, one of many. There are other ways, too: words, sculpture, video, photography. I used the multimedia approach for this show because I wanted to bring all those ways together, see how they fit. The show is a story of Jewish soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penn found his subject in Poland. He had resisted making the trip for a long time, until a couple years ago. \u201cMy daughter said to me then, \u2018It\u2019s time to visit your history,\u2019 so I made the decision to go,\u201d Penn explained. \u201cI have a friend in Australia. We have known each other for a long time. He is a Pole, he speaks Polish, and he wanted to take me. He said we should both read a few books first to prepare ourselves, books about the plight of Jews in Poland during the war, but written by Poles, not Jews. We didn\u2019t want to go as tourists. We wanted to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Poland shocked him. \u201cThere are almost no Jews left there, and the ones who remain don\u2019t know anything about Jewish culture. I went to a synagogue and I had to say Kiddush because nobody there could speak Hebrew. But the Poles \u2013 they exploit Jewish history. They charge 23 euros for a trip to Auschwitz. They have those happy golf carts all around Krakow and they take you to the Schindler\u2019s factory and to the ghetto. They sell Jewish souvenirs, but who made them? Not Jews. This is not how you engage in history. They made a commodity out of our tragedy, of the Jews killed by the millions. It\u2019s like Horror Disneyland. I couldn\u2019t stay there more than one week.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penn found most of the Jews of Poland in the cemetery. \u201cThere, every stone has a name written on the tombstones, remembered, while those who died in Auschwitz are just dust. I learned that Nazis burnt 1,000 people an hour in the ovens in Auschwitz. I tried to wrap my head about the number. That\u2019s why I did this show. It\u2019s about those thousands of souls.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of the works displayed in the show bear the same name, \u201c1000 Marks.\u201d By creating the paintings, Penn wanted to visualize his non-memories, remember something he had never witnessed. Five paintings are similar: dead trees, brown and dreary, wooden poles striving to reach the sky, one pole for every Jewish soul that didn\u2019t have their name written somewhere. Together, they form a memorial.<\/p>\n

A couple other paintings have a subtitle: \u201cFrom the Village to the Ramp.\u201d They are painful to view, powerfully evoking the horrors of the Holocaust. So does the entrance to the gallery, decorated with two real wooden poles, with bark still on in some places, unpolished and branchless. The \u201cWelcome Back\u201d mat underneath them doesn\u2019t look particularly welcoming either. There was a sign at the entrance to Auschwitz, too, and the correlations reverberate in the air.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis show isn\u2019t happy but it\u2019s genuine,\u201d said Penn. \u201cIt\u2019s my response to the entertainment industry they made of the catastrophe. Their tourist trips have nothing to do with our dead families.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show also includes a few short videos, two of them filmed at the Jewish cemetery. The screens are mounted to the walls like paintings, continually running loops of footage. \u201cI shot them myself,\u201d said Penn. \u201cThere is serenity at the cemetery. And lots of greenery, living trees. I saw a man restoring the text on one of the tombstones and filmed him. I didn\u2019t talk to him, didn\u2019t ask him anything. He was doing a holy job. That was enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few more wooden poles, also part of the exhibition, are placed outside of the Zack Gallery. They are suspended above the atrium, where the stairs lead down to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are uprooted, like all of us whose parents left Europe,\u201d said Penn. \u201cThe poles come from the UBC Endowment Lands and from the Whistler area. They remind me of the trees in the Jewish cemetery but they are also my connection to this place, to Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show Pole opened on Sept. 10 and continues until Oct. 11.<\/p>\n

Olga Livshin<\/strong> is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at olgagodim@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ian Penn\u2019s exhibit at the Zack Gallery, Pole, \u201cisn\u2019t happy but it\u2019s genuine.\u201d (photo by Olga Livshin) The poignant tale behind Pole, Ian Penn\u2019s new multimedia exhibit at the Zack Gallery, is a bleak travelogue detailing his recent journey to Poland. Although Penn\u2019s family came from Poland \u2013 his parents were lucky to have escaped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[989],"tags":[53,4583,4582,40],"class_list":["post-14715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual-arts","tag-holocaust","tag-ian-penn","tag-poland","tag-zack-gallery"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}