Museum exhibit all about playtime

The usual hands off mantra is about to take a breather at the Musée Héritage Museum. Starting Friday, a new exhibit will be encouraging guests to play it up a bit with a variety of games on site.

Take Your Best Shot is the cultural institution's youth digital photo contest and exhibition, now in its third year. This time, the theme was “play” and curator Joanne White said that there’s no reason why people can’t get into some games at the same time.

“They can sit on the toboggan and in the raft,” she explained, noting that the dartboard and badminton net are perched high out of reach. “We’re trying to avoid projectiles.”

Apart from the crokinole table, Twister, hopscotch, and ring toss, there are numerous photos on the wall, of course. The contest gets kids in grades 3 to 12 to take digital pictures using the theme as their starting points. The results range from dogs in piles of leaves, to people engaged in all manner of activities, to a horse rider and a hang glider doing circles around a hot air balloon.

“Some of these you look at and you don’t really think of play necessarily like the balloon, but the description says that the hang glider was playing with the balloon. He was going around and around. The observation was that you don’t often see a hang glider and a balloon playing together in the sky,” she laughed.

Another shot of a crow perched on a branch seems beguiling but the description explains that the photographer was watching the bird while it was watching other children play.

There is also an interesting picture of a boy’s silhouette against a Ms. Pac-Man arcade game. True to the zeitgeist of photography, there’s also a selfie on display. It’s a girl standing next to Threshold, Robert Spaith’s 1999 bronze and steel statue of a peregrine falcon in flight. The photo makes it look like the child smiles in the face of mortal danger from the immense metal bird.

“There’s always great stuff!”

The public response was excellent with nearly 30 entrants from the three age categories: grades 3 to 6, grades 7 to 9, and grades 10 to 12. First place winners from each category won a $200 gift card to McBain Camera while the second and third place winners received gift cards worth $150 and $100 respectively.

The winning photographs will also be posted on the museum's website.

The contest will continue again next year but the theme won't be announced until late summer or early fall of 2014.