Filtering by: group exhibitions
BLACK PRAIRIES
Feb
1
to May 14
2025, group exhibitions

BLACK PRAIRIES

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Central Library, (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Image: Rosa and Mary, Amber Valley, Alberta c. 1940, black and white photograph, 5 x 6 cm. Frank B. Jamerson fonds, courtesy City of Edmonton Archives.

Curated by Alyssa Fearon

BLACK PRAIRIES honours more than one hundred years of Black/African-Canadian cultural production in the Prairies, spanning the 1920s to the present, with a focus on lens-based media. The exhibition includes newly commissioned contemporary artwork, original glass plate negatives by early 1900s Black Manitoban photographer William “Billy” Beal, and archival photographs from the City of Edmonton’s Frank B. Jamerson fonds.

Beal’s glass plate negatives, taken between 1915 and 1925, document homesteading life in western Manitoba from the perspective of a lone Black man living in an all-white rural township during the early 1900s. Meanwhile, the photographs in the Frank B. Jamerson fonds, created by unnamed photographers, depict everyday Black life in and around Amber Valley, Alberta—a historic community formed during the Great Black Migration of 1910. This migration saw African-Americans fleeing racial violence in the United States to seek refuge in the Canadian Prairies. The selected photographs in this exhibition capture the first thirty years after the migration, reflecting the experiences of the first generation of Black migrants in the region. The contemporary artists in this exhibition foster important dialogues about personal histories, a changing climate, and collective experiences in the region.

Additionally, the exhibition includes the newly created short film For Caesar by filmmaker Cheryl Foggo. The film features Leander Lane, the great-grandson of Julius Caesar Lane, a founding member of the Shiloh People, the historic African-Canadian community in Saskatchewan.

BLACK PRAIRIES provides space for communal grounding and reflection on the ongoing and ever-expanding continuum of Black life and Black cultural production in the Prairies.

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Photos by Don Hall

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Of a Place
Feb
8
to Jun 4
group exhibitions, 2025

Of a Place

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Sherwood Village Branch (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Audi Atcheynum, Providing for the People (detail), acrylic on canvas, 2024

Featuring Featuring Audi Atcheynum, Catherine Blackburn, Daphne Boyer, Carole Epp, Patrick Fernandez, Torrie Ironstar, Dani LaValley, Kevin McKenzie, Bailey Randell-Monsebroten, and DJ Tapaquon.

The works in this exhibition are recent acquisitions to the Regina Public Library Permanent Collection and the SK Arts Permanent Collection, and are made by artists who have a connection to the Prairies. Evident in all the work, are the artists’ deep and profound relationships to family, culture, land, home, and community, which is achieved through various methods, materials, and strategies. Through playful, wry, serious, introspective, hopeful, joyous and critical approaches, the artists examine how they are situated within and what they envision for their communities. Most importantly, the works feature the powerful contribution that individual personal identities bring to the richness of a particular place.

Special thanks for the loan of artworks from SK Arts Permanent Collection.

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Audi Atcheynum

Inspired by ledger art, which is a method of documenting history or telling a story using drawing or painting, Audi Atcheynum tells a historical story of a chief providing for his community. The chief is identified through the style and representation of his rich regalia, as is his decorated horse. The chief is leading the hunt for bison, a critical source for the life of Indigenous people.  Like the powerful clap of thunder, bison run through the scene adorned with lightning bolts, arrow patterns, and white dots to represent rain, hail or snow. Several tipis in the background are adorned with circles to represent community and to signify the tipis as safe and sacred spaces.

 Audi Atcheynum was born and raised in Sweetgrass First Nation in Treaty 6 territory Saskatchewan. Growing up in an artistic family, he was exposed to many different forms. The importance of his culture was instilled upon him at a young age, giving him the inspiration and ability to portray it through his paintings and powwow artistry. He is a self-taught artist, developing his talent with the encouragement of both his parents as well as observing and learning through his father’s own love of creating great works of art. Audi says of his work, "Each painting has a different meaning for me, they depict the stories and legends I remember hearing growing up, passed down from our Elders. I love the idea that art can be fun, reinforce cultural ties and traditions, express personal thoughts and feelings, and communicate with others."

Catherine Blackburn

The two works Armour, Mother of Mobilization, late 21st century and Mother of Mobilization were a part of Catherine Blackburn’s touring exhibition, New Age Warriors that toured throughout Canada for over four years. Merging fashion, beading, photography, and sculpture, Blackburn explores Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and representation through the medium of beadwork and photography. While these themes continue to flow through this exhibition, Blackburn’s New Age Warriors expands conversations around love and perseverance. Combining regalia designed from plastic beads with photographs of Indigenous women wearing her creations, Blackburn considers Indigenous futures, storytelling and kinship, drawing from traditions of the past and the culture of the present to celebrate the strength of Indigenous women.

Catherine Blackburn was born in Patuanak Saskatchewan and is a member of the English River First Nation (Denesųłiné). She is a multidisciplinary artist and jeweller, whose common themes address Canada's colonial past that are often prompted by personal narratives. Her work grounds itself in the Indigenous feminine and is bound through the ancestral love that stitching suggests. Through stitchwork, she explores Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization and representation. Her work has exhibited in notable national and international exhibitions including Radical Stitch, Àbadakone, Santa Fe Haute Couture Fashion Show and Toronto Indigenous Fashion Week. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Sobey Art Award longlist (2019/2023), a Forge Residency Fellowship (2022), and an Eiteljorg Fellowship (2021).

Daphne Boyer

The design in this digital photo is modelled after traditional Métis beadwork. Instead of using tiny beads, the artist Daphne Boyer meticulously arranges and photographs berries. Boyer prints her photographs in a large format to show the individual berries and seeds as life size. She describes her technique as “Berries to Beads” or digital beading. For her artwork, Boyer draws inspiration from her training as a plant scientist and the relationships we share with plants and animals, as well as her Métis history and family stories. This image is part of a series that Dunlop Art Gallery exhibited in 2021, entitled “Daphne Boyer: Otipemisiwak (People who live by their own rules)” in which Boyer celebrated her matrilineal ancestors and teachers. As part of her research, Boyer worked with Dr. Maureen Matthews, Curator of Ethnology at the Manitoba Museum. The design in this image, “Full Flower” is based on a historical work, a Moss Bag beaded in the 1890s (artifact H4-2-13, Manitoba Museum). A mossbag is an Indigenous baby carrier, used to swaddle very young infants and keep them snugly wrapped. The pattern in this image depicts a wild rose, which is often featured in Métis work as a symbol of resilience. The rose thrives in the harsh weather of the prairies, and the thorny stems reflect resistance.

 Daphne Boyer is a Canadian visual artist and plant scientist. Her iterative practice combines plant material, high-resolution digital tools and women’s traditional handwork to create art that celebrates her family’s Métis heritage and honours plants as the basis of life on earth.

Carole Epp

This work by Carole Epp addresses the privilege of growing up on the Prairies being of French and English descent. As Epp writes:

“My whiteness and my roots wove a safety net that held me.

When our idealism of the world is shattered,

we start to see all the web of lies from which that net was composed.”

 

“Pennies from heaven.

Platitudes from those in power.

Accountability unattainable.

We must all push back on the oppressive system

and acknowledge our complicity in it.”

 

Carole Epp is a Canadian ceramic artist living and working in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She received her master’s degree in Ceramics from the Australian National University in 2005 and has maintained a full-time studio practice since. Her artwork and writing have been published in magazines, websites, and books, most notable in Ceramics Monthly when she was named the Ceramic Artist of the Year in 2017.

Patrick Fernandez

Seed for a New Beginning // Punla sa bagong simula depicts a great sea voyage of figures in search of a new beginning in a new land. Four standing figures carry elements that will help them in along their journey and at their final destination as they stand in support of the large, severed head, who appears to be someone or something of importance, perhaps a leader or figure head that can be transplanted on the new land. Along on the journey are animals bringing them good fortune: a fish to bring sustenance, a gopher to bring mastery above and below ground, and a crab to bring the drive to succeed. They sail along, anointed with the chartreuse glow, pulling them towards a greener place to call home.

 Patrick Fernandez is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Regina, Saskatchewan. A native of Pangasinan, Philippines, his colourful paintings use symbolism and reimagined folklore imagery as a means of storytelling. His works are based on personal experiences that deal with displacement and adaptation using circumstances as turning points for growth.

 

Torrie Ironstar           

Torrie Ironstar created Joy of Togetherness to represent the round dance, pow wow, and other Indigenous cultural ceremonies where people come together to celebrate and reinforce cultural practises. The pattern of the circular design represents a bird’s eye view of a tipi, which is the symbol of home. The colourful round form laden with complex geometric shapes represents togetherness and the enjoyment of being with community, on the land, and preserving cultural ways of being. In this essence, the act of gathering and being grounded on the land becomes not only home, but also a stabilizing force that nurtures and supports the next generation. 

Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Torrie is a proud member of Treaty 4 and Carry The Kettle. He was raised in the Nakota clan along with strong cultural knowledge. Torrie was born profoundly deaf and learned sign language at public school. He discovered his artistic talent in Grade 11 when he enrolled in an International Baccalaureate art course and started to focus on Indigenous arts. Torrie is a self-taught artist, with a focus on mixed media. He has created a diverse range of works in a variety of media including plexiglass art, screen-printing, painting on drums, collage, and oil paint. Ironstar is currently working with Making Treaty 7 production for an upcoming theatre project as a set designer and visual artist, as well as collaborating with artists on a Truth and Reconciliation commission and MMIW including Two-Spirit arts. Torrie is proud to be Nakota, Two-Spirit, deaf, and an artist.

 Filling the Four Directions

For Torrie Ironstar, Filling the Four Directions is a work that reclaims his Indigenous identity and finding the roles and duties within that identity. He depicts the four direction crosses as integral guiding principles in Indigenous knowledge systems to help guide personal lives, work, relationships and friendships. Ironstar used a powerful colour red to celebrate true Indigeneity, associated with kinship and ancestral bloodlines. Green is used as a connection to the land as well as to signify learning the cultural ways needed to carry on traditions into modern society. The circle in the centre of the painting represents finding and reclaiming true purpose and inner peace.

 Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, Torrie Ironstar is a proud member of Treaty 4 and Carry The Kettle. He was raised in the Nakota clan along with strong cultural knowledge. Torrie was born profoundly deaf and learned sign language at public school. He discovered his artistic talent in Grade 11 when he enrolled in an International Baccalaureate art course and started to focus on Indigenous arts. Torrie is a self-taught artist, with a focus on mixed media. He has created a diverse range of works in a variety of media including plexiglass art, screen-printing, painting on drums, collage, and oil paint. Ironstar is currently working with Making Treaty 7 production for an upcoming theatre project as a set designer and visual artist, as well as collaborating with artists on a Truth and Reconciliation commission and MMIW including Two-Spirit arts. Torrie is proud to be Nakota, Two-Spirit, deaf, and an artist.

 Dani LaValley

In this series of beaded pins called Kinship, Dani LaValley reflects on their valued community members emphasizing those who are often undervalued or overlooked. Each pin is purposefully and meticulously designed to honour the people who identify with each of the named communities. For example, the BIPOC pin is dedicated to those of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour and features a wolf willow shrub and its soft, but pointy seed. This reflects the core strength and resilience of the BIPOC community and draws a connection between humans and the land. Each pin reflects the qualities that make each identity distinct and beautiful, LaValley asserts that all of us are valued and belong here.

 Dani LaValley is a two-spirit Michif/Cree/settler artist and educator from Treaty 6 territory. LaValley’s family comes from Crooked Lake, Cowessess First Nation, Prince Albert, and Regina. They are a self-taught beadwork artist since 2016, under the name Deadly. Beads.. LaValley’s art is influenced by their cultures and relationship with the land. They share their beading skills and knowledge with youth and adults in their community through beading classes, clubs, and circles and trades or sells their work at local markets. Dani currently lives and works on Treaty 4 territory in oskana kâ-asastêki.

 Kevin McKenzie

This work was created for Kevin McKenzie’s exhibition “Edge of Seventeen”, which was exhibited at Dunlop Art Gallery in 2023. The exhibition served to collect and preserve McKenzie’s memories of his past, including his father’s teachings and passion for hockey into a contemporary Indigenous experience. Through this work, McKenzie linked repressed childhood memories of his father to his current state of Indigenous regeneration and resistance to colonial assimilation.

McKenzie created “Hot-Rod Moccasins” from his mom’s old black leather jacket. He lined the work with crushed red velvet and beading on the vamp. The vamps feature beaded hot rod flames. McKenzie’s work is typically imbued with this playful reverence for the pop culture he grew up around as a young Indigenous man, reflecting a personal transformation, through a process of reconstructing Indigenous identity and masculinity.

 Kevin McKenzie is Cree/Métis, Saskatchewan artist, based in Brandon, Manitoba. He is a member of the Cowessess First Nation of Saskatchewan, Treaty 4. He holds a BFA and an MFA from the University of Regina. McKenzie has exhibited nationally and internationally at notable galleries such as Museum of Arts and Design, New York, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Pataka Art Gallery Museum, New Zealand. McKenzie's artwork is represented in numerous public and corporate collections and has a permanent public sculpture in Whistler B.C. commissioned by VANOC Cultural Olympiad 2010. In 2022 he was commissioned by the President’s Office at Brandon University to produce a public sculpture dedicated to Truth and Reconciliation. Currently, McKenzie is an assistant professor and faculty member in the IWGI Department of Visual Art at Brandon University. 

 

DJ Tapaquon

DL Tapaquon’s rich colourful paintings explore his Indigenous heritage. He uses expressive brushwork, bold colour, in his large works to depict people and places that are deeply important to him. In this work, Mother Looks One (Her Good Old Stories) Tapaquon not only considers the iconic presence of mothers within his family group, but also pays dear homage to all mothers as those who lead with intelligence, strength, and love.

 D.J. Tapaquon (Darnell) was born in 1977 in Regina, Saskatchewan, a member of the George Gordon First Nation. He started painting at age sixteen and gallery representation soon followed. From that time Tapaquon splits his time between Regina, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

 Bailey Randell-Monsebroten

Carrot Bourassa was created in response to the occurrence of non-Indigenous people claiming to be Indigenous. A carrot, with its orange hue, represents the look of tanning products that darken the skin used to look more Indigenous. Slyly, Randell-Monsebroten included the original pale colour of a parsnip that can be seen behind the slipping Métis sash as well as the original colour of its green stalk, which has been dyed black. Not only does this work acknowledges that these attempts to look Indigenous are based on stereotypes that do not represent the range of physical attributes within Indigenous communities, but also reacts to the harmful impact of those who pretend to be Indigenous have on Indigenous People.

 Bailey Randell-Monsebroten is a Métis Art Historian, citizen of the Métis Nation Saskatchewan, beader, and auntie. My Métis ties are in the Red River settlement, where many of my grandmother's, Florence Hodgson-Randell, family took scrip. The names in my family tree include Hodgson, Cook, McLennan, and Inkster. I am also currently a graduate student at the University of Regina in the Media, Arts, and Performance department working toward a Master of Media Studies degree in Indigenous Studies/Art History and have a Bachelor of Arts degree from the First Nation’s University of Canada in Indigenous Studies.

 

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Photos by Don Hall

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Love the Skin
Nov
2
to Jan 29
2024, group exhibitions

Love the Skin

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Sherwood Village Branch (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Mel Lefebvre, Healing Through Ancestral Skin Marking series, 2024

Featuring Meagan Anishinabie, Darla Campbell, Mel Lefebvre, and Amy Malbeuf.

This exhibition features four Indigenous artists who work intimately with skin. It explores the act of working with skin as connection to life: people, animals, the earth, and oneself. Skin is a barrier and a form of protection, but it is also permeable and changeable. Traditionally, animal skins have been transformed into rawhide and leather for use as homes, clothes, footwear, and musical instruments since pre-history. Animal skins become a second means of protection, but also a means of self-expression and decoration. Similarly, tattoos can become clothing, protection, self-expression and decoration as a tradition in many cultures around the globe. Not only are the end products protective and beautiful but so is the creation process through the artists’ self-extension through touch, sight, and even breath as acts of deep love and care for the world around them.

Guest curator, Stacey Fayant is a Métis, Nehiyaw, Saulteaux and French visual artist from Regina, SK. Her art practice focuses on concepts surrounding identity and trauma in relation to colonialism and racism, but also in relation to healing, family, and community. She works in many mediums and is an Indigenous Cultural Tattoo Artist involved in the revitalization of Indigenous Tattooing here on Turtle Island.

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Love the Skin 

By Stacey Fayant  
 
In my 20 plus years as an artist, I have always gravitated to art that is work, as an act that does something positive in the world - not simply just a creation or representation of beauty. The labour involved in revitalizing cultural tattooing and traditional hide tanning is vast; it is intellectual labour, physical labour, and emotional labour. All of these being so strenuous as to only be attempted if you are truly in love with these practices. 

In January of this year, Dunlop Art Gallery invited me to be to take part in the Indigenous Curator Mentorship program. I had never really done much curating, but thought this would be a new challenge and something that could expand my personal art practice and engagement with art. I was encouraged to focus on my own interests in terms of what the exhibition would be about and since much of my art centres around the revitalization of Indigenous cultural tattooing, I started with that. We secured Sherry Farrell Racette to mentor me as someone whom I respect in the community as a passionate researcher, professor, advocate, curator and artist in her own right.  

The challenge for me would be to find the hook for the show I was to curate. I slept on it and it came to me…SKIN. I wanted to bring a show together that focused and drew connections between artists who work with skin such as tattoo and leatherwork (hide tanning, sewing and beadwork).  

Skin acts as barrier and protector, as communicator with the world around us, as an invitation and a boundary. It is what divides us from the world and people around us, distinguishes us as separate from each other, but also offers connection, care and understanding.  

In the past few years cultural tattooing and home tanning hides into leather are both practices that are being revitalized across what we currently call Canada. These practices were a very important part of Indigenous communities prior to colonization. As with many of our cultural and community practices and our languages, they were put to sleep for generations. Skin marking and hide making were not abandoned because they no longer served a purpose or because better ways of doing them emerged. We were disengaged from them as a means of disconnecting us from each other (working together, being together, learning from each other), our identities, personal pride and self-governance, and from the land we inhabited. 

My tattoo teacher Dion Kaszas has said: 

The interesting thing about the revival of Indigenous tattooing is the question of,  

‘why are we actually reviving something?’ It was just lost - it was purposefully 

destroyed, purposefully taken away from us. 

A few weeks prior to the opening of this exhibition, my family and I were able to go to a 10-day hide tanning camp at Ministikwan Lake put on by kâniyâsihk Culture Camps. I had been at this annual fall camp once before for a few days, but this time we were going as a family for the full camp and taking a deer hide to tan that my uncle had given me. I was asked to bring my tattoo kit with me, in order to give a couple people markings. This camp was a deep immersion into both the practice of hide tanning and the practice of cultural tattooing. The demand for tattoos was high and I was approached as soon as I got out of the car by many camp participants hoping to do a trade for a marking. The pressure to tattoo everyone was high, but I also knew I must work on the hide I brought and be engaged enough to actually learn the difficult processes and steps of hide tanning. I doubted I could do both. But I plugged away each day, doing the steps that needed doing for my hide and in between giving markings to folks. I managed to give 12 tattoos that week and complete my hide with my family and the help of many at the camp, fleshing, scraping, braining, softening and smoking that deer hide successfully. The experience really was exactly my vision of what the work in this exhibition are about. It was exactly what the work in this exhibition does. I was welcomed into a community and generously offered teachings and stories, friendships and food and I was trusted to give what I could in a good way.  

The colonization that has and does occur in what is widely recognized as Canada is a purposeful ripping apart of families and communities in an attempt to divide and conquer the Indigenous peoples of these lands and allow for the proliferation of once European culture and beliefs systems and now Canadian culture and belief systems, but also to allow for the profits and power of these lands to be in complete control of what was once Europeans and what is now Canadians.  

All cultural practices that benefitted Indigenous people by uniting them in their families, communities and nations were purposefully stripped from us. Being united in one’s family, community, and nation is love. It is a connection that is power, it conveys identity and self-respect, self-love really. When a person is valued in and by their community, they value themselves, and that value is reflected back to them as they reflect their community’s value outwardly as well. When our traditions, our knowledge, our means of connecting and being together were taken from us, all our self-value was taken as well and we were left as islands, uncared for and not having anyone to care for. Practices of skin marking, leather making, clothes making, self-decoration through tattoo and beadwork, are all practices of love, love for one’s self, one’s family and community members. In these practices we revitalize how to love again. 

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Photos by Don Hall

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tīná gúyáńí: guwasidodi (old agency)
Jan
20
to Apr 9
group exhibitions, 2024

tīná gúyáńí: guwasidodi (old agency)

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Central Branch (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

tīná gúyáńí, ina, elk parfleche, traditional paint pigments, wood dowel, pendleton blanket, 2019.

AGENCY
*an act of power
*to make decisions in another's best interest
*when Indian agents & government officials (federal, municipal, provincial) decide
*when Indian Act chief & councils make decisions for you and your family

-----LOSS-----
loss of agency when using the Indian Act to decide
loss of agency will leave you silent and powerless
loss of agency will make you invisible
loss of agency will erase you

NEW AGENCY
*power redefined
*no longer colonial
*no longer patriarchal
*to make decisions for you by you
*to make decisions without the Indian act
*you are no longer invisible
*you are powerful

tīná gúyáńí (deer road) is an artist collective from guts’ists’i / mohkinstsis (Calgary) consisting of parent/child duo Glenna Cardinal (Tsuut’ina/Saddle Lake Cree) and seth cardinal dodginghorse (Tsuut’ina/Amskapi Piikani/Saddle Lake Cree). In 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes and ancestral land on the Tsuut’ina Nation, for construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. Their multidisciplinary practice honors their connection to land and explores the effects of environmental /psychological damage. tīná gúyáńí’s work is deeply based in culture, language, oral history, family photographs, and museum/archival research. Their art is an act of cultural preservation and a protest against ongoing settler colonialism.

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tīná gúyáńí: guwasidodi (old agency)

By Christina Reynolds

Backstory: How art collective tīná gúyáńí’s guwasidodi (old agency) exhibit came to be – and the one piece that didn’t make it to the gallery.

The interior of the little art house smelled of green tea and fresh wood varnish. On a cold and crisp day in May 2022, Glenna Cardinal, the artist who conceived the house and recently had it built, along with her son and fellow artist seth cardinal dodginghorse, welcomed three visitors inside to talk. Rez House, as Cardinal named it, was a bittersweet endeavour for both mother and son who often collaborate as art collective tīná gúyáńí (deer road), which was a finalist for the 2022 Sobey Art Award.

Cardinal worked with a local builder (and through local arts grants) to build Rez House as a close replica of her isuu (grandmother) Elsie Jacobs’s home — which still stands on Tsuut’ina Nation. The original home is around 100 years old and it faces the Rocky Mountains to its west, and overlooks guts’ists’i/mohkinstsis (the City of Calgary) to its east. The home’s fading red-painted wood shell now also perches above the south west portion of the new 101-kilometre Calgary Ring Road; the old home’s foundation is now just a few feet from the road’s vast corridor and eight lanes of traffic.

 But Cardinal and her immediate family are now physically separated from this ancestral home and land which used to be gently sloping forest and vegetable gardens, where their family lived since before the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877. In September 2014, they were forcibly removed from their homes on Tsuut’ina Nation to make way for the construction of the ring road. Since that day (and really, for their lifetimes — plans for the ring road loomed for 70+ years) Cardinal and her two sons, along with other family members, have been grappling with and mourning the loss of home — and what this means for their deep connection to land, language, ceremony, culture, community, family and identity.

This is the family story Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse have been telling for years through their multidisciplinary art: a modern war painting, Super-8 movies, a Minecraft version of home, postcards, home furnishings trimmed with reflective tape used for road-construction vests, family photographs printed on library cards and silkscreened on to Pendletons and parfleche, coats and shawls emblazoned with pennies crossed out by sinew-thread Xs, evolving live performances – and now a new art house!

 Anticipation was high as we stepped inside Rez House on that chilly May day. Cardinal opened a brand-new plexiglass window for fresh air, and the five of us arranged our folding chairs into a socially distanced circle, all bundled up with our mugs of steamy tea, ready to talk.

 “I’m so excited!” Cardinal exclaimed, as she fiddled with a temporary space heater — a planned cast-iron stove, like the one her isuu had, was not yet in place. The conversation started full of possibilities: Rez House as a travelling exhibit (it fits on a flatbed trailer, so it’s moveable like a “tiny house”), or as a gallery space, or an art therapy classroom, or maybe, one day, as part of an artists’ retreat, or a movie house for showing family Super-8 films — as another way to keep telling her family’s story through art. And should she still paint the whole exterior red? That was still up for debate.

 Tomas Jonsson, a curator at Dunlop Art Gallery, was one of the three visitors that day. He came to Tsuut’ina Nation to see these Rez House possibilities first-hand, and to talk about possibly exhibiting it in Regina. The other guests were a fellow artist, and me, a journalist who lives nearby in Calgary, who has been closely following the family’s story for years. Over the next few hours, Cardinal and cardinal dodginghorse often finished each other’s sentences as they recounted their family’s story through the story of their art.

 It later turned out that logistics prevented Rez House from traveling to Regina. And while all of this might seem like a lot of backstory for an art piece that did not make it to the Dunlop’s new exhibit, guwasidodi (old agency), January 20 to April 9, 2024, Rez House was a key catalyst for the show – and is just a tiny bit of context for the eight carefully selected pieces that did travel to Regina. These artworks tell the stories shared in and held by Rez House.

 One of the first pieces you’ll see when you enter the show is i am here (2019), a postcard stand filled with a series of 40 numbered cards. Pick one up (visitors are encouraged to do so). On the front of card 14/40 is a sepia-toned image of barren trees flanked by survey markers and tangles of barbed-wire fencing. Flip to the back, where cardinal dodginghorse writes: “I am here, at the South West Calgary Ring Road, walking through a small bit of my family’s forest that barely exists...” Pick up another. The story unravels in stark images and vivid prose poetry.

 Throughout the exhibit, three semi-transparent elk parfleche are suspended in mid-air: ina (mother) (2019); nadisha-hi at’a (i am going home) (2023); and kuniya (come in) (2023). These modern-day war paintings and portraits feature silkscreened images of Elsie Jacobs and her mother Winnie Bull. For ina, cardinal dodginghorse used traditional paint pigments to depict the day his mother, Glenna Cardinal, first saw their trees chopped down and consumed by yellow construction vehicles for the ring road. The pictographs also recount Cardinal’s empathic encounter with a buck stranded in the tree shards who stared back at her with eyes as lost and scared as her own. On the floor below this parfleche – literally cut out from it – are a silkscreen image of Winnie Bull and her baby Elsie, showing how, through the continuing impact of the Indian Act and modern-day colonialism, women and their descendants are still being disenfranchised.

 The title of this exhibit guwasidodi (old agency) connects with this continuing fight, along with another piece in the show titled new agency (2023). In this text piece printed on a wall, the artists reclaim and redefine “agency”, “loss” – and most importantly, “new agency”: 

 “*power redefined


*no longer colonial


*no longer patriarchal


*to make decisions for you by you


*to make decisions without the Indian act


*you are no longer invisible


*you are powerful”

 The story continues along the elk parfleche spine of kuniya, which is silkscreened with 10 images of their primary family home, this one constructed in 1951, which was moved from their land for the ring road almost a decade ago now.

 tīná gúyáńí’s most recent piece, her name (2023), is a 33-minute Super-8 film of family memory vignettes paired with a powerful and ethereal musical score by cardinal dodginghorse. It’s the first time the collective has created work that connects their family life growing up on Tsuut’ina also with family connections to Saddle Lake Cree Nation, north-east of Amiskwaciy-wâskahikan (Edmonton), where Cardinal’s father grew up and attended Blue Quills residential school. Cardinal’s dad had an older sister who also attended, but did not come home.

 What tīná gúyáńí said recently about this film also sums up much of their approach to all the art they create: “This is not an educational film. It’s not a history of the school,” cardinal dodginghorse explains. “It’s a personal story – it’s not just big trauma dumping. As we get to the end of it, there are heavier things, but we are respectful to people in the family that are living through this. And we made this movie in a way that people in our family can watch it.” Says Cardinal: “Making this film is a way of giving to our family – we’re documenting it because no one else is. It’s art that facilitates healing.” Both cardinal dodginghorse and Cardinal credit making art with helping them to recognize and develop their own voices, and their ability to speak up and speak out. “Art gave me a voice,” Cardinal says, “especially at times when I couldn’t say the words out loud.”

 

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Photos by Don Hall

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her name is a film commissioned by Gallery TPW by tīná gúyáńí (deer road), the parent/child artist-duo consisting of Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse. The film explores a family story as it unfolds during Glenna’s studies at Blue Quills University near Edmonton, Alberta. In 1970, the Blue Quills Native Education Council took over operations of a former residential school and initiated the first Indigenous-owned and governed educational centre in Canada. Encountering a father and daughter’s experiences of Blue Quills at different periods of its history, her name presents “life as it is lived'' for a family navigating intergenerational colonial trauma through an Indigenous framework of healing

Content warning: This film contains content on Indian Residential Schools

The Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24 hour Crisis Line available for individuals in need of support: 1-866-925-4419

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my language has no word for 'artist'
Sep
23
to Jan 10
group exhibitions, 2023

my language has no word for 'artist'

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Central Branch (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS
David Garneau, Displacement, Indigenous Scholarship, acrylic on canvas, 2019.

David Garneau, Displacement, Indigenous Scholarship, acrylic on canvas, 2019. PC2021.4. Collection of Regina Public Library

The Indigenous curatorial mentorship program is a partnership between Sâkêwêwak First Nations Artists' Collective Inc and Dunlop Art Gallery. Recognizing the need for more Indigenous curators living and working on Treaty 4, the program aims to create a unique mentorship opportunity for an emerging Indigenous curator and provide a generative space for study, discussion, and critique.

Brianna LaPlante is this year’s mentee curator, was mentored and guided by Alyssa Fearon and Holly Aubichon. The mentee selected artwork from Dunlop’s permanent collection for an exhibition this Fall at Dunlop Art Gallery.

Brianna LaPlante is a Fine Artist from Fishing Lake First Nation. LaPlante’s larger scale commissions have been sought out to elevate Treaty 4 spaces as an artist from the land. Artwork is an act of lifelong learning and resilience for her as an Anishinaabe/nehiyaw/ Michif creator. Her work is rooted within the elevation of Indigenous knowledge systems informed by the intersections of her life experiences. Underlying tones of her road to reclamation of both language and culture are present within all that she puts out into the world. This narrative is further explored through the multifaceted artworks dialing in on the evolution of culture and the dualities of existing in the two worlds of ceremony and urban life. Her artworks engage mind, body, and spirit.

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Photos by Don Hall

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Meera Sethi: ritual intimacies
Feb
18
to Apr 26
2023, Noor Bhangu, group exhibitions, Sherwood Village

Meera Sethi: ritual intimacies

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Sherwood Village Branch. (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Bodies are complex entities, both built and viewed from many scientific, social, and personal networks. In My Skin brings together artists who dare to self-determine what is means to live in their own bodies. Through diverse feminist perspectives, they resist dominant definitions of how one’s body "should" look, feel, move, and act. Consequently, they embrace the intricacies of what our bodies are and can be. These are acts of resistance and self-reclamation that are actionable calls to respect more fully, love more completely, and care more intentionally for the bodies we inhabit and, by extension, those of others.

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the excess is ritual
Jan
21
to Apr 4
group exhibitions, 2023, Noor Bhangu, Central

the excess is ritual

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Central Branch (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Anna Binta Diallo, The Snake Charmer from The Wanderings series, digital collage, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.

the excess is ritual returns to histories of excess from a pluralistic range of positions and experiences, to generate new readings and relations within queer contemporary art. It features artists and thinkers who draw on the repertoire of rituals, which have become marginalized and silenced through colonial and homocolonial history. Using the metaphor of excess, this exhibition hopes to visualize all that has been lost and all that can be recovered.

Artist projects centre aesthetics of queer life, queer history, and cross-cultural relation, as they are brought together to confront Western fantasies of progress and order. Under the curatorial umbrella of queer and relational, works will comment on the afterlife of racism in diaspora, the imagined intimacies of ancestors, and the survivance of non-binary identities through the histories of settler colonialism. Moving across specific contexts and questions, we consider what it means to centre queer and relational practices, pleasures, and desires in art.

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice is rooted in relational curatorial aesthetics and practices. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories of representation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.

She is a co-curator for Window Winnipeg (CA), a 24-hour art space for site-responsive presentations of contemporary art, with Mariana Muñoz Gomez and Jennifer Smith. Her independent curatorial projects have shown in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, and Norway.

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the excess is ritual

by Noor Bhangu

The language used to name the workings of this exhibition was first introduced by Joseph Massad in his 2007 text, Desiring Arabs, to analyze the emergent homophobia of post-Independence Egyptian literature. While our exhibitionary endeavour is more global and transcultural in its reach, the exhibition title retains from its conceptual ancestor an ethic of queer historiography, which can only be understood as the deep desire of queers to place themselves in the wound of history. Anchored around diverse representations of queer life, the excess is ritual cradles the excesses and rituals of history to initiate a present and future coming of all that is lost and all that remains to be recovered.

Consistent with exhibition’s troubling history and historiography, the excess is ritual beats an archival impulse, which is defined by Hal Foster, as the desire “to connect what cannot be connected.” In the work of Anna Binta Diallo and Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the highly subjective technology of collage is used to form new bodies of knowledge from colonial and, often, disparate sources. Anna Binta Diallo’s Ritual series includes three figures performing the rituals of celebration, menstruation, and hunting, their bodies filled in by scraps from old magazines, almanacs, and other printed matter. Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s two books, Coconut Milk and The Healer’s Wound, are compilations of the artist’s research into Samoan queer their stories, with specific attention paid to the recovery of Fa'afafine identities. The Wound, a new video work, expands on this research by collapsing visual and textual references to queer practices and identities recorded in colonial archives. The figures produced by Diallo present critical appropriation as part of a larger dialogue about decolonization of archives, while McMullin’s work travels across familiar colonial tropes to forge an eventual return to its source. 

Grounding the past and future archives is an installation by artist Sahar Jamili. Disturbed by the monstrous turn in the depiction of brown bodies in Scandinavia and the Euro-American world, Jamili appropriates the monster to build an alternative rhetoric of anti-racism. In their installation, Monster, me, more, strange creatures take up residence above a wrinkled bed in a child’s bedroom. Instead of disturbing the scene, the monsters borne of Jamili’s hands are casually domesticated to subvert their internal ideologies. The monstrous excess in the case of Jamili’s installation is ritualized to think through the social politics of contemporary time and the location of brown queers within.

By contrast, the work of Damien Ajavon, Darcie Bernhardt, and Carmel Farahbakhsh moves away from the density of archives and onto the imaginary plane of critical fabulation. In the work of Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation can become a way of working with scatted references to produce historical facts. Ajavon’s Dyptique de l'imaginaire visualizes a conversation between the artist and their ancestor, separated across borders as well as colonial and post-colonial time. The artwork memorializes in thread a feminist and queer genealogy, whose transference was broken in time, but one which can easily be recovered. Bernhardt and Farahbakhsh’s work similarly explores the fruitful conceit of relation. Nanuk and Bibi is a short video, which includes hand-drawn representations of the artists’ grandmothers, as they sip tea, gossip, and sit in the pleasure of birthing future queer generations. While Ajavon’s work stretched an intimate line between blood relations, Nanuk and Bibi fabulates relation across cultures. The imagined relation becomes a new memory for the artists, even though the ancestors did not encounter each other in their mortal lives or even understand the queerness of their future kin. The works of Ajavon, Bernhardt, and Farahbakhsh exists in excess of historical knowledge and has the potential to shift what we know as historical truth. 

But of course, the present representation and future inheritence of queer history too has its limits. As Walter Benjamin writes, “The true picture of the past flits by [and] the past can be seized only an as image which flashes up at an instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” In bringing together aesthetics of queer life, queer history, and cross-cultural relation, this exhibition lingers at the ritual passage of time, captured in asymmetrical visuality, to seize on encounters with an earlier, current, and future queer life.

While these moments of recognition are bound to disappear, as prophesized by Benjamin, it is my hope that our ritual desire to recover persists.

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Photos by Don Hall

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for those of us who live at the shoreline
Jul
9
to Sep 7
2022, group exhibitions

for those of us who live at the shoreline

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Central Branch. (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

With for those of us who live at the shoreline we are reminded of methods of self-soothing and affirmation that we return to as both salve and testimony. Here, kinship, self-imagining, and ancestral knowledge take precedent, and movements of both embrace and refusal are offered as an act of care. Relations here are multi-faceted: they are tactile, immaterial, and otherworldly; they reside on the same embodied plane as liberation, as rest, as joy; they privilege the immediacy of feeling and spirit. The works in this exhibition act as witness to both us and their makers, communally grounding us within the freedom of each of our expansiveness and with love for our specificities.

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each of us, beloved
Jul
2
to Sep 25
2022, group exhibitions

each of us, beloved

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Public Library, Sherwood Village Branch. (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Bodies are complex entities, both built and viewed from many scientific, social, and personal networks. In My Skin brings together artists who dare to self-determine what is means to live in their own bodies. Through diverse feminist perspectives, they resist dominant definitions of how one’s body "should" look, feel, move, and act. Consequently, they embrace the intricacies of what our bodies are and can be. These are acts of resistance and self-reclamation that are actionable calls to respect more fully, love more completely, and care more intentionally for the bodies we inhabit and, by extension, those of others.

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In My Skin
Apr
1
to Jul 3
2022, group exhibitions

In My Skin

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery, Regina Public Library, (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Bodies are complex entities, both built and viewed from many scientific, social, and personal networks. In My Skin brings together artists who dare to self-determine what is means to live in their own bodies. Through diverse feminist perspectives, they resist dominant definitions of how one’s body "should" look, feel, move, and act. Consequently, they embrace the intricacies of what our bodies are and can be. These are acts of resistance and self-reclamation that are actionable calls to respect more fully, love more completely, and care more intentionally for the bodies we inhabit and, by extension, those of others.

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multiPLAY
Apr
1
to May 2
2021, group exhibitions

multiPLAY

  • Sherwood Village Branch, Sherwood Gallery (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Curated by Wendy Peart, Curator of Education and Community Outreach

Organized by Dr. Rebecca Caines, multiPLAY features artists from across Canada working in improvisation, sound, new media and performance. Included is radio artist Michael Waterman’s experimental audio collage group “Mannlicher Carcano”, a video installation of archival recordings. John Campbell’s Recognition, is an installation that uses Artificial Intelligence to read human emotion and playfully control real-world objects. multiPLAY artists also include Rebecca Caines, Holophon Audio Arts, James Harley, Helen Pridmore, and Michelle Stewart.

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States of Collapse
Jan
31
to Apr 4
2021, group exhibitions

States of Collapse

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Sherwood Branch, Regina Public Library (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Curated by, Amber Christensen (Sherwood Village Branch Manager), Stacey Fayant (Independent curator), Tomas Jonsson (Curator of Moving Image and Performance) and Wendy Peart, Curator of Education and Community Outreach

Featuring works by Naomi Bebo, Andrea Carlson, Ruth Cuthand, Nicole Dextras, Jude Griebel, Jill Ho-You, Rachelle Viader Knowles, David Opdyke, Geoffrey Pugen, Rolande Souliere, Jeff Wizniak, Pinar Yoldas, and Sylvia Ziemann.

The end of the world has been a human preoccupation since basically the beginning of the world. The exhibition Apocalypse features multiple artists who explore the unimaginable complexity of a cataclysmic crisis. Regardless of the cause, the work in Apocalypse challenges us to consider our own response to a radical change to the world as we know it.

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States of Collapse
Jan
30
to Apr 9
2021, group exhibitions

States of Collapse

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery, Regina Public Library, (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Curated by, Amber Christensen (Sherwood Village Branch Manager), Stacey Fayant (Independent curator), Tomas Jonsson (Curator of Moving Image and Performance) and Wendy Peart, Curator of Education and Community Outreach

Featuring works by Naomi Bebo, Andrea Carlson, Ruth Cuthand, Nicole Dextras, Jude Griebel, Jill Ho-You, Rachelle Viader Knowles, David Opdyke, Geoffrey Pugen, Rolande Souliere, Jeff Wizniak, Pinar Yoldas, and Sylvia Ziemann.

The end of the world has been a human preoccupation since basically the beginning of the world. The exhibition Apocalypse features multiple artists who explore the unimaginable complexity of a cataclysmic crisis. Regardless of the cause, the work in Apocalypse challenges us to consider our own response to a radical change to the world as we know it.

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The Art Happens Here
Mar
20
to Jul 31
group exhibitions, 2020

The Art Happens Here

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery , Regina Public Library (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Organized by Rhizome

Curated by Artistic Director Michael Connor with Assistant Curator Aria Dean.

In its decades-long history, net art has served as a testing ground for artists. Through net art, artists have interrogated politics, economies, and material cultures. The Art Happens Here offers a selection of works from Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. The exhibition restages historical works of net art from its fragments – a timely approach as many institutions now frame the internet as a historical subject, rather than a novelty.

Net art is made up primarily of practices, not objects. This poses problems around how net art is historicized and exhibited. The Art Happens Here explores the new modes of authorship, collaboration, and distribution that have evolved through net art.

Rhizome champions born-digital art and culture through commissions, exhibitions, digital preservation, and software development. Founded by artist Mark Tribe as a listserv that included some of the first artists to work online, Rhizome has played an integral role in the history of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet. Since 2003, Rhizome has been an affiliate in residence at the New Museum.

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Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies
Jun
22
to Sep 18
2019, group exhibitions

Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery and Sherwood Gallery, Regina Public Library (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Off-Centre is a survey of artworks by queer artists from the Canadian Prairies. The exhibition title describes how this central region is often thought to be in the cultural and political margins. It also speaks to the experience of being queer – particularly in smaller communities.

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The Experiment
May
17
to Jun 29
2019, group exhibitions

The Experiment

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery, Regina Public Library (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

This group exhibition brings togethers artists who work in collaboration with nature and rely on natural processes to make their work. The selected artists generate conditions where at various points during their artwork’s creation, the pieces begin to develop according to the laws of nature without artist intervention. The Experiment reminds viewers of the existence of entities that are larger and more powerful then human forces, encouraging closer consideration of the natural world.

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Are You My Mother?
Jan
18
to Mar 24
2019, group exhibitions

Are You My Mother?

  • Dunlop Art Gallery, Central Gallery, Regina Public Library (map)
  • Google Calendar ICS

Whether the relationships are close, strained, or absent, being parented (or disconnected from caregivers) is a universal experience. Are You My Mother? considers what is shared about the experience of being raised, while underscoring the less universal, more specific circumstances that shape how we feel about our caregivers – feelings of warmth and love, and in the case of grief, loss and gratitude.

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