The Current22:00She found beautiful art in a bargain bin. How’d it get there?
When Sonja Krawesky found a pair of bright and beautiful sculptures in a bargain bin at a Hamilton, Ont. store, she knew there had to be a story behind them. Her quest to find out where they came from led to a new friend — and a lesson about the kindness of strangers.
Sonja Krawesky was wandering the aisles at a Krazy Binz Liquidation store in Hamilton, Ont., last November when she spotted something bright and beautiful.
Sticking out among the piles of lamps, phone cases, skincare products and fake moustaches was a bright wave-shaped object made of small, painted tiles and held together by threads of wire.
Krawesky wasn’t immediately sure what it was, but she already loved it. Turning it over in her hands, she was shocked to find it wasn’t dented or scratched at all.
“It was amazing,” she said. “My heart was pounding.”
A few bins over, she found another piece — this one with different colours, but the same construction and wave shape.
“They’re not the same, but you could completely see that it was exactly the same type of item,” Krawesky said. She took it as a sign, scooped both items back up and brought them home with her.
She figured they were artworks of some sort; they were nothing like the reams of cheap plastic goods that usually filled the discount bins. But a mystery remained: what were they exactly, and how did they get here?
Krawesky set out on a mission to find out where they came from — one that left her with a new friend, and a positive tale about the lengths others will go to help a stranger.
Artist’s missing mail
A few thousand kilometres away in Nova Scotia, artist Sydney Blum was having a bad couple of weeks. Two of her wavy, fluorescent sculptures were lost in transit some time in early October while en route to a Montreal gallery.
Blum says she tries to “make colour bend” with her designs, a style reflected in these latest works.
She poured about 300 hours into the sculptures worth thousands of dollars before carefully wrapping, labelling and shipping them off. They were scanned in Montreal before disappearing from Canada Post’s radar.
Several back-and-forth correspondences with Canada Post — and a promise from the company’s ombudsman to physically search the Montreal sorting facility — offered no answers. Eventually, the gallery told Blum to give up her search.
“They’d never been shown yet. I was crushed. I couldn’t work in my studio. I just was very depressed,” Blum said.
But she refused to give up. She contacted local politicians and anyone she thought could put pressure on Canada Post, “putting out all this energy” in hope a miracle could bring her sculptures home.
And then she received an email from Krawesky.
Reconnecting art and artist
After bringing the sculptures home from the Krazy Binz, Krawesky began searching for their creator.
A little online sleuthing brought her to Sydney Blum — through the Montreal art gallery’s website that displayed pictures of nearly identical sculptures.
Eventually, Krawesky found posts of the exact sculptures found at Krazy Binz — with a caption detailing their disappearance — on Blum’s Instagram page.
“Right away, it was ‘OK, I now know these are hers … I need to get these back to her,'” Krawesky said.
Krawesky emailed Blum to tell her the good news. Blum couldn’t believe it at first, suspicious it might be a scam.
“It [was] the strangest email … I lost my breath when I read it,” Blum said.
Blum found information online about a person with Krawesky’s name who works as a teacher. She contacted the school board and verified it was indeed the woman who reached out to her.
Blum couldn’t be more grateful for Krawesky’s help.
“Somebody else would have just brushed them off and thought, I’m not interested in that,” Blum said. “[But] she’s a voracious sleuth…. It’s remarkable.”
But how to get them back to Nova Scotia, nearly 2,000 kilometres away?
Luckily, a friend of Blum’s named Piotr Banasik who used to be a truck driver connected them with a friend of his own, Robert Mietus, who was travelling east for Christmas.
Mietus — a stranger to both Blum and Krawesky — accepted the mission, picking up the carefully packaged sculptures in Ontario and transporting them back to Nova Scotia.
Now, Blum is glad to have them hanging on her wall once again.
‘It’s a beautiful story of generosity’
In a statement to CBC, Canada Post said they conducted an investigation but still aren’t sure how the sculptures wound up for sale in a bargain bin. The company says they do not have a business relationship with Krazy Binz — though the store’s website says they do sell some undeliverable items.
“Our teams conducted a thorough search of our facilities and the parcel’s checkpoints,” Canada Post said in part of the emailed statement. “Our teams continue to investigate, however, we can only speculate at this point as to what may have happened.”
The company said in a later email that it was likely the packages were incorrectly sorted and delivered to the wrong customer, who then sold them to Krazy Binz.
The owner of the Krazy Binz store told CBC that he buys goods from suppliers who source lost or undeliverable items from companies like UPS.
While Blum is still hoping for answers, she says the story is about so much more than a lost package.
Since connecting over email, Blum and Krawesky have bonded over shared interests and become friends.
“The connection that we have is, I think, pretty special … one of those kindred spirit type things,” Krawesky said.
It also helped the teacher find some more joy in a dark time. Krawesky has been off of work due to struggles with her mental health, but she says meeting Blum has helped her learn more about herself and about art.
“Maybe I’ll be inspired to get back and to do more of my own creative things,” Krawesky said.
Blum says their tale is really about how good people can be to one another.
“It’s a beautiful story of generosity,” Blum said. “It’s not about me and my work. It’s about how much people can reach out to each other … and do the right thing.”
