The Current - She found beautiful art in a bargain bin. How’d it get there?

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

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.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current wherever you're getting this podcast. Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. There is a lot of news that's out there these days. We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some

of that news too. So if you already follow the program, thank you. And if you have done that, maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well. The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that, appreciate it, and on to today's show. Wanna bring you a different story of friendship.

This one crosses provincial borders and it starts with a lost package. This is what I'm doing. I'm creating this potentially curved surface. Another person described them as bending color. And I liked that. The colors are, in my mind, beautiful. Have you ever seen anything like it?

No. And I hope I never do. Because it just came out of my head. It came out of my heart. It came out of my mind. And then I had to figure out how to do it. So I went through a lot of stages of experimenting, like how could I make color bend?

The Nova Scotia artist, Sydney Bloom, has always been fascinated by what is considered beautiful. She's painted nearly every surface in her Tata Magoosh home, luminous shades of blue, green, and yellow. He even painted the handle on her butter dish. In the fall, Sydney sent two sculptures to an art gallery in Montreal through Canada Post, but the sculptures never arrived. They were worth thousands of dollars. Took her over 300 hours to complete.

You have to see these pieces of art. Go to our website, cbc.ca slash the current. They're really quite something made from architectural chipboard, acrylic wire, pencil, vibrant colours, patterns and textures seem to jump off of the wall. When those sculptures went missing, Sydney thought, well, they're gone forever. But as she is about to describe for us, losing them helped her find something unexpected and beautiful. CBC producer Mary Catherine McIntosh has this story. What happened is I got an email from the gallery inviting me to be part of Art Toronto this

year which I was thrilled at and they selected two of my sculptures. I packaged them. They were sculptures I had just recently finished. So many, many, many hours worth of work, probably about 300 hours worth of work in the two pieces. I wrapped them up, very carefully labeled them, put them in a box, but boldly labeled. I mean, no question about where they were being mailed to. They were insured modestly only for some, hopefully nothing, but basically some mild repairs if the box got damaged or something, and sent them on their way. And then they disappeared.

I filed a ticket to start the process of searching, like where are they? Then they wanted to know the value of the contents, a professional appraisal of the sculptures. I said, okay, that's going to take me at least a week to do. I got the gallery in Montreal to take care of that. I emailed it to Canada Post and Canada Post closed the ticket without any response. Then my only option was to contact the Ombudsman's office. They said they were going to send a physical person to the sorting facility in Montreal to look for the package, which seemed

kind of ridiculous to me. But if anybody could help me, just help me find out where, what happened to these pieces. They're really important to me. I put so much of myself into these. They're really just an extension of me. It just was very personal. It's, um, personal. It's just my life. So a part of it got cut away. So I was very depressed by it. They'd never been shown yet. I was crushed. I couldn't work in my studio. I just was very depressed. I have a streak in me that doesn't give up, too. What happened to these? If they're gone, I still want to know why and where. Where did they get kicked off the truck?

Where did they, you know, where? Who's responsible here? So it was that level of frustration that had me calling anybody I know who might know somebody in the press or politicians. I called any and emailed any politician I know, can you help me? Can you put a fire under Canada Post to give me answers? This is just not right. Again, I was putting out all this energy over a couple days, again, contacting everybody I could think of, people who knew people who knew people. And the next, next literally like the next morning, and I attribute it to all this energy output because I really believe in these kinds of things, but I get an email and it's the strangest email. I don't know. I was floored by it. I was,

I lost my breath when I read it. It was from a woman named Sonia who lived in the Hamilton, Ontario area who was an elementary school teacher. She introduced herself in all these ways. It was a very long, lengthy email and she said, your sculptures are alive and well. And she had them. And she had them. And I had chills. And I thought it was a scam. I thought, oh my God, somebody has found me. I live a pretty isolated life, has found me, is going to extort money. They're taking off on the story that my work was missing. And I did some research on her. Her name was unusual.

It referenced the fact that she was a teacher. And so I called the Board of Education in that area and they said, well, we do have a person of that name. And I said, I just want to know if this is for real or if this is a scam. And yes, she had sent me this email and yes, she had found this work. So I was aghast at that, but it gave me confirmation and some grounding that I was not being scammed and that these pieces had been discovered at a crazy bins, which I'd never heard of. I looked that up too on Google, crazy bins

in Hamilton, Ontario. Crazy story. Well, my name is Sonia Kroeske. I'm a grade four teacher from Caledonia, Ontario. Grew up in Hamilton actually. So I was at crazy bins and I was wandering around like usual going up and down the rows. And basically what they do from what I gather is they buy up returns from online stores and they don't know what they're going to get. It's just basically like going into a big kind of like a big flea market or a garage sale in a big giant garage. There are so many random things there. Phone cases,

lots and lots of phone cases, air filters for furnaces, bits and pieces of metal that probably came from lamps. One time I came across a bag full of fake mustaches and that one was my favorite actually. And it was actually my second day off of work. I'm an elementary school teacher, but I've really been struggling with my mental health lately in terms of being able to focus depression and anxiety. And that's been a big part of my life. I live in a small town and I've been a teacher there for 20 years so a lot of people know who you are.

I'm off of work and I don't want to even go to the grocery store because somebody will see me and wonder why I'm off work. And going to crazy bins was just a way for me to get out of the house. It gave me that opportunity to just go. I looked up and I saw this gorgeous, beautiful, colorful, giant piece of something. I didn't know what it was at first. I couldn't tell. And as I walked towards it, I thought it is so unique. It is so different.

It was wavy and had all of these curves in it and such a brilliant mix of colors. And the closer I got to it, the more I thought, I don't want it to be broken. I want to see this. Hopefully it's not destroyed because a lot of things that crazy bins get ripped open or things get tossed on them, or people shove articles out of the way with sticks or whatever they find. And of course, when you pick it up, you realize it's pretty fragile

and you see what it's made out of. And it was held together with little black pieces of wire. And as I picked it up, I thought, don't be broken, don't be broken, don't be broken, please don't be broken, don't be, don't be, don't be wrecked. And as I flipped it over, I thought for sure it's going to have some scratches on it or dents or something busted. And it wasn't, it was amazing. And my heart was pounding and it was just, okay, wow, just big old wow. And then the next part was, but this, how is this here? Why is this here? This doesn't even make sense that this is here. This doesn't fit in crazy bins. And my mind was just whirling.

I was just so in love with it and so bewildered by, like, I just found this thing here. How in the world did that happen? So the other thing that I was going through my mind was, I know it's only $5, but do I need it? Do I want it versus do I need it? Because that's another thing that I have to work on is, you know, can't just buy everything that I would like. And at that point, I thought, you know what, no, no, I'm going to practice and I'm going to put it back down and I'm going to walk away and just keep wandering around. And that was a hard decision. But I thought, no, I need to practice. So off I went, put it down, wandered away up and down the rows a couple more times. And then I came across another one.

Another one was there. Not the same, but you could completely see that it was exactly the same type of item. Again, that one wasn't broken either. And it was, whoa, this is mind boggling. And I need to get the other one. This is a sign. I need to get this." And I was so worried that the other one would be gone or that somebody else had picked it up or thrown something on it. And I couldn't remember exactly where it was. So it was that panic feeling, go, go, go, find it, find it. Where is it? Where is it?

And there it was. And so I was just completely relieved and still not sure what they were or where they came from, but I knew I loved them. I thought, okay, it's somebody's art. Didn't find a signature. So I thought, okay, well, what I'll do is I'll do a Google lens search. So I took a picture of them, threw it into Google lens and typed in a few names of online stores to see if it would find a match. And it didn't. And that didn't surprise me because I mean, the mystery was still there. I still didn't know what was happening. You know, a little bit searching further on, I found an artist named Sydney Blum. I found some pictures of her through her art

gallery or the art gallery that represents her in Montreal. Clicked on the picture and it opened up and I didn't see the exact pieces, but you could tell that was where these things had come from. But I was still confused because I thought, okay, if these really are pieces done by this artist named Sydney Blum, how in the world did they wind up here and why? Some time went by and eventually I wound up searching again and this time I came across Sydney's Instagram account and I didn't have Instagram. So I signed up for it. There they were. I clicked on one, my heart's pounding, clicked on the one and it said something along the

lines of, I'm so excited. I get to have a show or an exhibition. I get to show my work in Toronto, but they've been lost. Right away it was, okay, I now know these are hers. I love them, but they don't belong to me and I need to get these back to her. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. She was there that moment when they landed on top of the pile because apparently crazy bins trashes things. They layer them, they dump them. If they haven't sold they go down in price again and down in price again. So she was there at that moment. At that moment, her hesitations

were important because it allowed her to move on to another bin. Her emotional needs drew her to the color and the forms of these pieces that made no sense there. Somebody else would have just brushed them off and thought, oh, I'm not interested in that. I'm looking for something that was remainder from Amazon or something. She's incredible. We've now developed a friendship and I have such admiration for the person she is on so many levels. But she is tenacious and she's smart and she loves art and she loves music. When she took them home, initially she just was so smitten with them, she wanted to hang them on her own wall and have them near her, but it gnawed at her that they were so out of place at Crazy Bins. And being the person she is, and she's a voracious sleuth, not only that she had to find me, but she had to return these pieces to me and kind of close that loop that had been left

open by Canada Post. It's remarkable. Okay, so I have this friend, Peter, who does a lot of work on my property for me and is a dear friend and he knows how much effort and heart I put into my artwork. And so behind the scenes, he was trying to figure out, once Sonia was identified, how to get these works back to me. And he used to be a trucker. So we knew people in the trucking world that might be crossing the country or out on runs or something. There might be somebody somewhere

that could stop in Hamilton and get these pieces. But he was kind of thinking of all this behind the scenes and I didn't realize to what extent. Wow. I'm Peter. And end up fixing her porch. So now we are friends. It was even painful listening to her because you can tell in the voice and everything how bad she felt. I was in transportation business for all my life and I said, I'm going to do whatever I can possibly do. I'm going to call all my friends.

If anybody of them is coming here with transport trucks, they can maybe pick it up. And then the opportunity happens that friend from Minersville was going to trip for Christmas to visit his family in Chicago. Right away I said like I'm going to have to torment him and torture him, whatever is needed in order to get it. And he agreed. He was actually laughing when I was calling him at least two, three times a day just to make sure that it's going to happen. And, and he was laughing. He was like, Peter, like, don't worry about it. Tell me once it's going to be done. Outside.

Is there somewhere where we could do it inside? I'm not allowed. Robert Mites. Uh, Peter called me. He know we're going to Chicago. And he's like, can you guys pick up something for me? He told us the whole story. We didn't know what it is.

It was nicely packed. And I don't know how fragile that thing is. So we were really careful with that stuff. My wife told me to make sure it's art, not something illegal, because she's a very suspicious person. So yeah, that was art. My son was like, what's that? I'm like, art.

But because he's 15, he's like, Oh, that was his response. Oh, and that's it. To his final destination, it was about 2400 kilometers. So he definitely have to stop for the night, just to rest. And he said, like, I'm afraid that maybe somebody going to break into the vehicle and steal it. So he actually ended up renting more expensive hotel instead of just the motel. And he showed me pictures when they are sitting right on the little corner sofa. He showed me the picture. He goes, no, no. He goes, like, I pay more attention to that than I did to myself during the transportation. So even when I saw him pulling it out of the vehicle, it was like he almost looked like

he was handling something so extremely fragile. When he was passing it over to me, he was actually watching my hands if I'm actually having a good grip on it. I used to do work that could be very dark, personally dark, because it came from a very depressed place in me. And at one point I made a decision if I continued to do artwork it was only going to be about something uplifting taking me upward into the realm of kind of a glorious place of affirmation and goodness and light and movement. I didn't care if other people got it because I knew I was only going to do the best I could to do my small part to shift universal energy toward goodness and toward trying to correct whatever is going on in this world right now, which

is really complex and dark. And if people got it, they got it. And if they didn't, they didn't. The magic in this is that people do get it. And when I got Sonia's email and then started communicating with her. And again, we've communicated quite a bit. My feeling was, oh my God, it worked. The energy that I was putting into this through color and flow, it worked. It drew her in and she got it. It's one of those stories where it's kind of the end, but... and then there's more. I think that's our friendship. The connection that we have is, I think, pretty special.

Maybe I'll be inspired to get back and to do more of my own creative things. More creative or less worried or more sure of myself. Less socially anxious, more out there, more engaged with people. In the recent years you keep hearing that people don't care about each other anymore. People don't do this, people don't do that, everybody's kind of locked in their own little box. It proves the point that it's not.

Two thousand, three thousand kilometers away from here there is still somebody who cares and that little thing you can see that people are not locked in the little boxes that when it comes To helping each other they coming out they helping they doing whatever it possibly can be done. And yeah, it changed It changed the idea of what you actually hear on Internet about people saying all kinds of different stuff and then what happened in real life is completely opposite. I think it's a story about goodness. I think that's the essence of it. The Canada Post part still needs answers.

Sonya and all her amazing goodness and all the effort they went to to make sure that the work was safe, that it was protected as well as could be to get it back to me. It's a beautiful story of generosity, integrity, honesty. It's about how much people can reach out to each other, be there for each other, and we've all grown from this a lot. I think everybody involved has. Sydney Blum is an artist in Tata Magoosh, Nova Scotia, and that story brought to us by CBC producer

Mary Catherine McIntosh. Canada Post says the company does not know how the sculptures ended up at an Ontario store called Crazy Bins. The Canada Post website says the company does not know how the sculptures ended up at an Ontario store called Crazy Bins. The Canada Post website says the company will sell items considered undeliverable, but a spokesperson says it has no business relationship, either direct or indirect, with the Crazy Bins chain. As I mentioned, you can and you should have a look at Sydney's art on our website. Go to cbc.ca slash the current. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.gov.