Desiree DeCoste
Beaver Staff
A new exhibit at the Museum of Lennox & Addington called “Our Ordinary, Extraordinary Lives” will be on display starting Friday.
The exhibit, a display of photographs of families within Lennox & Addington (L&A) County by photographer Viara Mileva, addresses moments which often go unnoticed, the ‘everyday’ moments for which people don’t often pay attention to.
“The project itself was to photograph ordinary life in Lennox & Addington County from all sorts of families,” Mileva stated. “This is something that I specialize in as a photographer outside of this exhibit, so documentary photography, documenting ordinary moments, families routines, traditions, everyday kinds of things fall into that umbrella. When JoAnne (Himmelman), the curator of the museum approached me because I followed her family around for a day, she said wouldn’t it be great if we could profile life in L&A County in a similar way and have a cluster of families that we could kind of follow around for an hour or two and document their ordinary moments, so that’s basically what the project was, it was meeting with, initially 10 families but we later expanded to 11 to try and capture a bit of the uniqueness of L&A and also some of the diversity that exists in the county and some of the more traditional things that represent L&A.”
The display will run until Jan. 7, 2022 and admission is $3 per person.
“My favourite memories from this project is being able to meet all these families that I may not otherwise have gotten to meet,” expressed Mileva. “A lot of them were very new to this type of photography, or maybe families that were photographed in a more traditional way before or maybe not photographed at all so the fact that they opened up their lives to us meant a lot. It was really exciting because each family is different, I already knew that going into it because that’s what I do for a living is I photograph different families but this was a really geographically bound L&A. It’s a fairly big county but even within the county there is so much diversity and how each family spends their days, what their everyday looks like and so that was exciting and surprising.”
Mileva was born in Bulgaria, and has lived in the United Kingdom, Saskatchewan, Toronto, and the Netherlands. Before becoming a photographer, she was a parenting scientist. Viara earned her PhD, analyzing thousands of mothers playing with their babies and she noticed tiny changes in facial expressions, small movements, and family dynamics. These are important to her photography today. She now lives on acreage in Lennox and Addington County, with her husband, three children, and a menagerie of animals.
For more information visit https://www.lennox-addington.on.ca/museum-archives/ordinary-extraordinary-lives