CC Trubiak’s latest project and appreciation for classic country chanteuses has gone around the world and back again. The local musician’s work is now in the midst of a month-long art exhibit at the NorVA Centre gallery.
Trubiak has brought his CC’s Vinyl Closet project to the NorVA Centre this month for a full exhibition, showing the visual art he created as part of the project and including an artist’s talk and performance at the centre July 16.
The project encompasses Trubiak’s Honky Tonk Angels project, a series of online videos, performances, sketches and art pieces detailing seven of Trubiak’s personal heroes, seven women who all are prominent country singers.
“It's evolved into opportunities for me to do visual and performing arts,” Trubiak said.
“It's there (at NorVA) and it's there for all of July. It's turned into an exhibition-slash-performance. All of my work, which includes my sketchbooks and drawings, my caricature paper dolls of all seven of the Honky Tonk Angels, all of that stuff is available for people to view, right in person, instead of just being featured in the episodes.”
Since launching the project last winter (and starting work on the project back in 2020), Trubiak said it had increased in scope over time. Back before COVID-19, the Honky Tonk Angels and CC’s Vinyl Closet projects were meant to be a series of live performances - the pandemic pushed him to get creative and take the shows online.
“The show was originally just going to be a full band with me doing cover songs of those seven ladies. That was going to be it - that was going to be all - but when COVID-19 hit and it shut everything down, the project was born out of me not having anything to do with all of that time, inspiration, investment,” he said.
“I sort of ended up returning to my art and just making stuff alone, so it was really just an organic thing that is now translated into something that I can get out back there in the world and share live.”
Much of the projects have been based in Trubiak’s living room and home or online. In order to fit the exhibit into the space, Trubiak has tried to make the exhibit at NorVA feel more like home to further compliment the work.
“I tried as much as I could to make that space in the NorVA Centre look like a version of my home, because I did all the filming in my home, all the music in my home, all the art in my home,” he said.
“I want it to feel like you're in my living room and you're getting to look at all my shiny little objects.”
At the exhibit, people can interact with Trubiak’s art, watch the videos and even check out some of Trubiak’s extensive vinyl collection - some records have been moved to the centre from his own house.
Trubiak’s July 16 performance at the centre will include bare, acoustic covers of songs by each of the seven singers featured - Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Olivia Newton-John, Tanya Tucker, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.
Since the project was released, Trubiak said he has had hundreds of thousands of total views for the 22-video project, taking his work to a much larger audience that it may otherwise have. Viewers have come in from across Canada, from the U.K., the U.S. and other, more far-flung locales.
“I couldn’t be happier with it,” he said.
“It was really mindblowing, to be able to reach so many people from my living room and not even having to get out and put on performing clothes. It was really cool and then then locally, it's really nice to see or go out and have people say they appreciate the project. That's very valuable for me.”
Trubiak’s exhibit will be at NorVA for the rest of July.
