There were 21 central Vancouver Island area artists represented in the Mayworks 2007: Making a Living exhibition. The show was once again ably organized and curated by Marci Katz and Bill Friesen and contained a number of surprising and elegant works.

Vancouver artist King Anderson was represented by a video titled John & Claudia's Cabin. This 10 minute DVD chronicles his day job for a couple of months - restoring, renovating, and adding on to a smallish cabin on the beach near Deep Cove. The artist's eye reflects on numerous details of the environment and the process and only incidentally shows us "before" and "after".

Donna Balma, from Sechelt, presented a humourous soft sculpture, The End of Day, consisting of a pair of socks sprayed with gold paint. "When we pull our socks off at the end of our work day that action signals the beginning of rest... My affection prompted me to enshrine them and honour them rather like parents do when they bronze their small children's first shoes."

Parksville artist, Laurie Broadhurst, made a monumental column for this exhibition covered with 365 work "tickets", each representing a day Making a Living at the Registrar of Companies. She says "The use of text is pertinent in my works, allowing me to more directly convey some of the difficult conumdrums that we face in day to day living."

Wayne Cameron's raggedly disjointed 3D collage on wood, No Shots (The Donut Hole in the Frankfurt Flag), contains amid the visual debris a quote from a joint work by social critics Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer: "The individual who supports society bears its disfiguring mark. Seemingly free, he or she is actually the product of its economic and social apparatus." Wayne currently lives in Parksville.

Nanaimo artist, Rod Corraini, presented two challanging assemblages. Geek, an assemblage picture of a tomato red bum penetrated by an ice pick, refers to the medieval "geek" who would shove objects up his rectum as a form of low public entertainment. Stud Part, a ceramic penis in a fire alarm box with a hammer on a chain, refers to the occupations of stud and/or sperm donor.

Anita Friesen, from Courtenay, showed a large impressive work created by weaving strips of paper containing textured paint which represented fibres used in the logging industry. Not Knitting comes from a artist who says that not all fibre art is knitting. Anita made her living as a log scaler, was injured and found herself unemployed, but refuses to abandon the "feel" of her trade.

Patrick Hughes created an exquisite chicken and an egg container with six eggs, called Chicken and Egg, from small shards of plywood screwed together. The artist, from Celista, writes "The human and the hen have been working together forever. When the humans and cocks are kind, it's a beautiful and rewarding relationship."

Vancouver artist, Martha Jones, displayed a large luminous canvas depicting a night scene of a shift change at a factory titled Midnight Shift. The scene was painted in her studio overlooking the docks of the east side and is filled with artificial light and the shadows of workers coming and going.

On the Wings of Maybe, Lori Knorr's acrylic on canvas, shows a tree planter with a shovel and a handful of trees. The canvas is slit down the middle and then stitched together with copper wire representing the physical pain resulting from her work. Lori is from Smithers.

"For several years, I have been depicting manual labourers in an ongoing series of figurative and portrait paintings", writes artist Bonnie Laird, from Victoria. For this show, Bonnie contributed the sombre and moody paintings Under Pressure, an expressive portrait of a man resting his head on his arm, and Driver, a generic bus driver seen at work from above and behind.

Bill Lynch, who lives in Parksville, contributed a black and white painting to the show titled This could be it, this could be the day I die. The painting, uses almost abstract forms to depict "coal miners heading underground to work, facing the always present dangers there". Bill also wrote the play Ginger (see Event Schedule below), based on the life of union activist Ginger Goodwin, who was killed near Parksville.

Coombs artist, Virginia Moon, presented a small assemblage figure of a woman seated at a table with a cake - all cunningly made of wire, rods, mesh, and found objects. Cake is from The Woman's Work is Never Done series of "small figures in domestic settings with embedded symbolic found objects... that observe daily domestic realities."

Jim Muir showed a very moving video documenting his despairing abandonment of a job in Vancouver's downtown east side working with young addicts, for a job looking after horses for rich folk in the Southlands of Vancouver. This amazing piece of work, Cleaning Out the Shit, uses the personal to illuminate social conditions. He also showed a large collage of "to do" lists pasted on canvas partially covering job lists titled Do-List Built Upon Job List.

Burnaby's Donna Polos contributed a lovely fabric piece, Power Dressing, hand embroidered, quilted and painted, of three folded men's shirts and ties. "As much as women have fought for equal rights, men still dominate the work place" she writes.

Fanny Bay sculptor emeritus George Sawchuk showed three large outstanding pieces. The first, Man With a Hoe, consisted of a reproduction of a painting by Jean François Millet depicting a man with a hoe, a similar hoe (with a handmade handle) hanging from the wall, and a copy a poem of the same name by Edwin Markham. The second work, titled 1935, was a stepped wooden ziggarut with a hammer and a guage attached. Patch of Green presented a shovel, a pick, a stone, and a gravestone on a flat wood slab with a large piece of green astroturf. Percy Bysshe Shelley's words "Countrymen wherefore you plow for Lords that lay you low" is inscribed on the tombstone.

Peter Stoddart's Return 4 Refund, a shopping cart bulging with plastic bags full of cans, bags, and other recyclables, sat in the middle of the gallery floor. A hidden tape recorder blared out sounds of garbage trucks alluding both to those who pick up garbage and those who pick through it.

Burnaby artist Bill Thomson "transforms found and recycled materials into assemblage sculpture". The Money Painting consisted of shredded money glued to a large canvas with a metal object and a shower curtain (containing silhouettes of hand tools) which partially obscures the surface of the canvas. "Can the substitution of real money for paint influence our understanding of the 'value' of art?" he asks.

Jim Varney's dark sculpture, Joseph of Arimethea, sat in a corner of the gallery. It consists of a shovel, a figurative element set in a knothole and a wood plank. Joseph of Arimethea is the biblical character who obtained (bought) the body of Christ from Pilate and entombed it in his own sepulchre.

In Original Art, Richmond artist Loraine Wellman's intention "is to show an artist and her sales booth as being as worthy of our attention as a French Impressionist's bartender." This is a contemporary art worker in her milieu, a self portrait of the artist making a living selling her work.

Courtenay's Evy Wessel presented two mixed media collage works. Dream Work: A Night in the Life of a Jungian Analyst, is as intelligently quirky as the title, a robot and a skeleton in a boat confront a strange apparition made of light. In The Self Employed Buddha, a enigmatic buddha figure sits in front of mass produced furniture parts surrounded by a circle of projected images.

Alanna Wood's strong artwork, Elbow Grease, featured those two words apparently scraped out of black grease smeared on a board. It wittily self-referenced an idiomatic saying that means "hard work". Alanna is from Sechelt.

Unless otherwise noted, all events take place at The Oceanside Arts Centre.

Tuesday, MAY 1st - Opening Events

• MAKING A LIVING • Exhibition Opening, 7:30 - 9 pm
  In the main Oceanside Gallery, launch of an exhibition exploring contemporary themes of work and survival. Show continues to May 30th.

• INTERNATIONAL POSTCARD EXHIBITION • Exhibition Opening, 7:30 - 9 pm
  Work, Work, Work, held in the Arrowsmith Gallery in conjunction with Mayworks, featuring work-themed postcards made by artists from around the world.

Saturday, MAY 5th

• GINGER • Live Theatre, 7:30 pm, admission by donation
  An original play by Oceanside author Bill Lynch, about murdered Canadian labour activist Ginger Goodwin. Starring CUPE member Harvey Lalonde in his acting debut. In the Arrowsmith Gallery.

Saturday, MAY 12th

• SONGS & STORIES OF VANCOUVER ISLAND • Admission $10, 7:30 pm
  St. Anne’s Church in Parksville is the venue for popular folk balladeers Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat.

Wednesday, May 16th; Wednesday, May 23rd

• FILM NIGHT • 7:30 pm, Admission FREE, refreshments by donation.
  Dead in the Water • A disturbing documentary revealing how politicians in affluent countries are in collusion with private corporations in an attempt to control the world's water supply.
  Venezuela Rising • This documentary gets behind the headlines and into the neighbourhoods of Caracas to find out how participatory democracy works at the community level. Both showings in the Arrowsmith Gallery.

Saturday, MAY 19th

• SOUP KITCHEN • Empty Bowl Event, 4:30 pm
  For $10.00 you can purchase a delicious bowl of soup and take the bowl with you! Pottery soup bowls supplied by Arrowsmith Potters' Guild. All proceeds to the Food Bank. In the Arrowsmith Gallery and the OCAC classroom.