PHOTO ESSAY
That '60s Show
The National Gallery embraces the flower power decade
By Liz Hodgson
 Ironing Board (Cape Canaveral) by Serge Lemoyne. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada. |
Serge Lemoyne (1941-1998)
Ironing Board (Cape Canaveral)
1963
Oil and commercial enamel paint on wooden ironing board with cotton batting and fabric
Serge Lemoyne’s Ironing Board (Cape Canaveral) is teeming with enough symbols, ironies and metaphors to give you psychic overload. Where to begin? Done in oil and commercial enamel paint with a clunky wooden ironing board for a canvas, it transforms an ordinary object into a work of art, like Wieland’s blankets. It also bids adieu to another era, namely the ’50s: during the ’60s, ironing was less of a concern for those disheveled types intent on turning on, tuning in and dropping out. The ironing board was a symbol of the indentured housewife. By re-jigging a domestic object into a rocket, Lemoyne is saying: send your ironing board to the moon, and all the cultural constraints with it. Lemoyne was a member of a group of radical-chic Quebec artists and intellectuals who were part of the Quiet Revolution, the period from 1960 to 1966 when Quebec was on fire with political and artistic upheaval. Boomers across the province were casting off the shackles of Maurice Duplessis’s era, a political reign characterized by traditionalism and conservatism. Revamping a rustic ironing board was a metaphor for that transformation.
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