The 2012 Special Olympics Canada Winter Games will always live on in the hearts and minds of St. Albert residents. Now there's a permanent visual reminder for the rest of us as the city unveiled its newest piece of public art on Friday afternoon.
"It was just a great thing to be part of the Games," said Dan Roy, one of the three co-chairs of the Games' executive committee, during the rainy ceremony at Kingswood Park. "The legacy piece that we unveil today allows us to refresh the memories created during our national winter Games."
Flags at the Finish Line is an "oct-tych" mural in eight landscape profile pieces. It shows a single image of two athletes engaged in sport, triangle banner flags surrounding them and a prominent red, white and blue scarf – the trademark symbol of the Games – ribboning its way across the bottom.
Artist Samantha Williams-Chapelsky explained that the design was inspired by how so many people came together in a groundswell of support to host more than 1,000 enthusiastic athletes from February 28 to March 3 last year. She was the winner of the Emerging Artist Award during this spring's Mayor's Celebration of the Arts gala, and has become one of the city's most prominent rising stars of art.
She added that she was one of the hundreds of volunteers during the Games as well, and got to experience first-hand the togetherness and the triumph of the human spirit.
"The artwork intertwines the athletes, the flags of celebration and the scarves, which became a symbolic aspect of a country and community uniting to support the athletes and the volunteers," she stated in a prepared news release.
There were only a handful of applications for the $25,000 commission. Williams-Chapelsky confessed that it was no small amount of effort from concept to completion.
"It was actually a really long process," she said.
The finished work first started with a 1.8-metre-by-1.8-metre acrylic painting. Williams-Chapelsky took dozens of high-resolution photographs of the painting then digitally manipulated the images in Photoshop, adding the 651 athletes' names into the picture without losing any of the detail of the underlying picture.
After that she divided the single large image into eight smaller ones: four panels at 0.9 metres long and another four panels at 1.8 metres long. Those were then sent to a company in New York that created the end product using digital printing on high-pressure laminate plastic.
"I wanted to find something that was conservation friendly," she said. "We've had a few murals in the past that have just faded out in less than 10 years. I wanted to find something that was going to last, and would stay looking beautiful but would also be vandal resistant. Someone spray paints over top of it, it's safe."
Art direction
This is another marker on the road to how the city is adapting its public art collection to be more durable. Last year, the massive Cultivate Life mural was revealed on the south wall of the Gaffney McGreer Building at 20 Perron St. That piece replaced a similar work called What Inspires a Child Growing Up in St. Albert. It was installed in late 2004 but the ravages of time and weather left the paint and framework in a state of disintegration that was beyond salvaging.
Cultivate Life, on the other hand, was printed with ultraviolet cured ink on a Dibond aluminum surface, much as outdoor commercial signs are, and mounted on an aluminum frame as well.
Flags at the Finish Line was installed on the south-facing wall of the Kingswood Park's day-use shelter located at 395 Sir Winston Churchill Ave.
Larry Green was also on hand for the unveiling. The local alpine skier was a star of the Games, bringing home a single bronze and two gold medals before moving on to a larger podium earlier this year for the 10th annual Special Olympics World Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea where he garnered another two bronze medals.
Now in his 22nd year with the Special Olympics, he said that he was "damn proud" to be on Team Alberta and to compete in his hometown.
"The citizens of our awesome city who volunteered at the Games gave me the sense of unity and pride that is St. Albert," he remarked. "I live that pride every day. This experience will stay with me for the rest of my life. Dreams do come true."
He now has his sights set on the 2017 Special Olympics World Winter Games set to be hosted in Graz and Schladming, Austria.
