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Show highlights Potato House historical artifacts

If you enjoy a little intrigue with your history the Station House Gallery has the shows for you this month.
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Nathan Hornby with the coat rack he created using salvaged juniper branches and other salvage wood along with a few pieces of wood salvaged from the Potato House renovations.

If you enjoy a little intrigue with your history the Station House Gallery has the shows for you this month.

In the downstairs gallery is a collection of art pieces assembled by the Potato House Sustainability Society created by woodcrafters who worked on the renovation project and volunteers and staff also found expression for the little pieces of history discovered under the floor boards and in the walls and attic of the building.

As executive director Mary Forbes explained during the opening of the show, the receipts, newspaper clippings, menus, and even a collection of a child’s  paper dolls were placed face down between newspapers and wood floors and walls as though the builders intended them to be discovered and preserved one day.

Pieces of art deco linoleum have been repurposed into hangings which also incorporate waste wood from the renovations.

One little collection of linoleum cutouts resemble little faces and running figures.

There are also albums and art featuring newspaper clippings, old menus from local hotels and other historical information.

One clipping in the album is about a 1941 raffle for the Sacred Heart Church bazaar in which the first prize was a live pig valued at $15 that was donated for the cause by the old St. Joseph’s Mission.

The show is called The Art of the Frame because many of the frames used to feature the collection are for sale with replicas of what they are exhibiting while the originals will stay at the Potato House.

Crafters creating the frames and art work include Pat Teti, Jamie Regier, Oliver Berger, Bill James and Nathan Hornby. Contributions to the show were also made by Stampede Glass, Frames by Bruce and Staples.

The Potato House is now 75 years old and many of the frames are priced to match at $75 but donations above that amount are appreciated.

In the upstairs gallery there is another intriguing show featuring modern day interpretation of undergarments that might have been worn by early women explorers in the arctic.

The fragile looking undergarments are also the subject of a slide show of short films showing the pieces tied to an anchor on a glacier.