Senate expenses climbed to $7.2 million in 2023, up nearly 30%
Senators in Canada claimed $7.2 million in expenses in 2023, a nearly 30 per cent increase over the previous year.
When the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opens his new show in April, visitors will encounter a familiar scene at London's Design Museum: Claude Monet's famed water lilies. But rather than being composed of the French painter's Impressionist brushstrokes, the monumental recreation is made from the studs of Lego bricks — a whopping 650,000 of them in 22 different colours.
Titled "Water Lilies #1" the nearly 50-foot-wide piece is the largest Lego artwork Ai has ever made, according to the museum.
His version depicts the idyllic lily ponds of Monet's home in Giverny but includes, on the far right-hand side, a "dark portal" alluding to Ai's childhood in China's Xinjiang region. The patch of dark Legos represents the door to an underground dugout where the artist lived with his father in exile during the 1960s, according to a museum press release.
"In 'Water Lilies #1' I integrate Monet's Impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and concrete experiences of my father and me into a digitized and pixelated language," Ai said in a statement. "Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era where human consciousness is constantly dividing."
Ai has used a range of materials in his installations and conceptual artworks, from pottery, wood and porcelain to film, photography and found objects. In the late 2000s, the artist and activist added Lego bricks to his repertoire.
These colorful, meticulous works include hundreds of portraits of political prisoners and exiles, created by Ai for a 2014 exhibition. The following year, the artist made headlines when Lego refused his studio's request for bulk orders of the bricks for a new project, a move he described as "censorship" (The Danish company later reversed its decision).
During the controversy, Ai's fans and members of the public sent him their own Lego blocks, and these donated bricks will also be displayed at his new London show in an installation called "Untitled (Lego Incident)."
The exhibition, "Ai Weiwei: Making Sense," will include other installations created on a colossal scale, including 200,000 porcelain spouts from Song dynasty-era teapots and thousands of fragments of Ai's own sculptures that were destroyed when his Beijing studio was demolished by the city's authorities in 2018.
The scale of Ai's installations are "unsettling and moving," said the museum's chief curator Justin McGuirk in a statement. "And in trying to make sense of these works the visitor is challenged to think about what we value and what we destroy."
On "Water Lillies #1" McGuirk said: "On the one hand (Ai Weiwei) has personalized it by inserting the door of his desert childhood home, and on the other he has depersonalized it by using an industrial language of modular Lego blocks. This is a monumental, complex and powerful work and we are proud to be the first museum to show it."
Senators in Canada claimed $7.2 million in expenses in 2023, a nearly 30 per cent increase over the previous year.
Police say a baby and a pedestrian suffered non-life-threatening injuries after a vehicle struck a baby stroller and dragged it for two blocks before stopping in Squamish, B.C.
Former NDP leader Tom Mulcair says that what's happening now in a trash-littered federal park in Quebec is a perfect metaphor for how the Trudeau government runs things.
Individuals being barred from entering Ontario’s legislature while wearing a keffiyeh say the garment is part of their cultural identity— and the only ones making it political are the politicians banning it.
The RCMP says it has uncovered a plot by two men in Montreal to sell Chinese drones and military equipment to Libya illegally.
The U.S. Justice Department announced a US$138.7 million settlement Tuesday with more than 100 people who accused the FBI of grossly mishandling allegations of sexual assault against Larry Nassar in 2015 and 2016, a critical time gap that allowed the sports doctor to continue to prey on victims before his arrest.
The Vancouver Canucks will be without all-star goalie Thatcher Demko when they face the Nashville Predators in Game 2 of their first-round playoff series.
A 35-year-old man wanted in connection with the murder of Toronto resident 29-year-old Sharmar Powell-Flowers nine months ago has topped the list of the BOLO program’s 25 most wanted fugitives across Canada, police announced Tuesday.
The Canadian Medical Association is asking the federal government to reconsider its proposed changes to capital gains taxation, arguing it will affect doctors' retirement savings.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.
Kevin the cat has been reunited with his family after enduring a harrowing three-day ordeal while lost at Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
Molly Knight, a Grade 4 student in Nova Scotia, noticed her school library did not have many books on female athletes, so she started her own book drive in hopes of changing that.
Almost 7,000 bars of pure gold were stolen from Pearson International Airport exactly one year ago during an elaborate heist, but so far only a tiny fraction of that stolen loot has been found.