PAST EXHIBITIONS

This exhibition features a diverse selection of newly acquired works into the MJM&AG permanent collection over the last five years, including fibre arts, paintings, printmaking, sculpture, bookworks, photography, ceramics and drawing. These new acquisitions include collection purchases but primarily they are donations to the permanent collection, through the generosity of artists and private donors located throughout Canada.

This exhibition features paintings by Indigenous artist, Dave Pelletier, of môso-tâpiskan (Moose Jaw), created within a Woodland School style that present the artist’s own imagined, “legendary” stories through graphic and colourful, stylized compositions of animals and figures of Turtle Island.

Dave Pelletier was born in Balcarres, raised in Lebret and later moved to Moose Jaw in 1968, which has been home ever since. His parents were William Pelletier of Lebret, and Corinne McArthur from the White Bear First Nation in Saskatchewan. Dave joined the military after high school, and returned back to Moose Jaw in 1977. In 1978, he trained at the Saskatchewan Technical Institute in Radio/TV Electronic Servicing and worked in that field for a couple of years. It was during that time that Dave became involved in Friendship Centres to eventually become Executive Director of the Friendship Centre in Moose Jaw. It was this connection that inspired his interest in his own Indigenous background and led him to seek out the legends and stories of his culture. From there, he took the initiative to start his own business in 2003 - Moosgaw Arts & Gifts in Moose Jaw and began to pursue his own ideas and interpretations of the Indigenous world in his paintings. His work has been exhibited in Saskatchewan and is in numerous private collections throughout Canada.

Curated by Lakota historian, Dr. Claire Thomson, Wakšúpi will feature historic beaded works in the MJM&AG permanent collection, focusing on Lakota history in Moose Jaw and Wood Mountain and traditional beading patterns and practices.

In recognition and celebration of Pride Month in June, the MJM&AG is featuring works from our permanent collection by 2SLBGTQIA+ artists.

This exhibition examines the symbiotic relationships and connections between folk art and Funk art in Saskatchewan, with each genre featuring work that speaks to a Prairie vernacular, in regards to its realities, memories, cultural myths and visions.

Artists: Frank Cicansky, Victor Cicansky, Eva Dennis, Wesley Dennis, Joe Fafard, David Gilhooly, Richard Gorenko, Ann Harbuz, Jerry Kaiser, Molly Lenhardt, Jahan Maka, William McCargar, Harvey McInnes, Fred Moulding, Lawrence Pederson, Allen Sapp, Dmytro Stryjek, John Sutherland, David Thauberger, Harold Treherne, Jan Wyers, Russell Yuristy

The work of Hunkpapa Lakota artist, Dana Claxton, is critically acclaimed, being based in film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice is known for its investigation of indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work often alludes to the destructive legacy of colonialism, while it also celebrates the resurgence of First Nations’ presence and contemporary identity, resulting in powerful works of great conviction and beauty. Featuring the video installation, Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux, and a newly acquired work, photographic triptych, Cabri Lake 1, 2, 3, Claxton’s works in the MJM&AG Permanent Collection speak to a spiritual connection with place and with the history of the Lakota people in Moose Jaw and Wood Mountain.

Sponsorship is provided by Temple Gardens Hotel and Spa and Sparrow Hawk Developments

Opening Reception & Artist Talk: February 2nd at 7:30 pm; Doors open at 7:00 pm

The exhibition Jude Griebel: Illuminated Collapse presents a series of seven detailed dioramas merging figure and ground to highlight human connection to the surrounding world. In these sculptures, unsettling scenes unfold on the surface of circular bases. Anatomies/landscapes are engaged in dramatic acts of self-consumption and destruction, projecting a metaphorical “End of Times” narrative. Mirroring our own world through their miniature elements, the works reflect on contemporary consumption, industrial development, and inherent environmental degradation. Griebel’s artworks combine scientific reality with fantasy and diverse cultural references, using personal symbolism and metaphor to register the concept of planetary collapse.

Jude Griebel (Canadian) is a New York-based figurative sculptor, recently the Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, USA. Griebel has completed numerous residences including The Studies of MASS MoCA, North Adams and HALLE 14, Leipzig. His major sculptural commission Tired Water was installed in Telus Spark, Calgary. Recent exhibitions include the Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan, Art Gallery of Alberta, Esker Foundation, Calgary, the Beaty Museum of Biodiversity, Vancouver, Galerie Sturm, Nuremberg and the Spinnerei Archiv Massiv, Leipzig. Griebel is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Emerging Figurative Artists and his work is in collections including Arsenal Contemporary Art, Montreal, the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Art Gallery of Swift Current. Griebel holds an MFA in Sculpture and Ceramics, Concordia University, Canada. Completed an MFA International Exchange, University of Lapland, Finland, and holds a BFA, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada.

For more information visit: https://www.judegriebel.com/

This series of poignant drawings in their simplistic elegance presents visual meditations by local, Moose Jaw artist, Ross Melanson. Reflective of his signature approach of working with a continuous line, Melanson offers poetic compositions of isolated and overlapping biological forms as a means of processing and facing his cancer illness and its treatment, while becoming present in the moment to embrace life in all its wonder and constant change.

How the Sky Carries the Sun is a universe that extends beyond the artist's complex and seemingly dichotomous identity (Métis and white Settler). This exhibition explores Boyer's internalized dualities, expressed as the relationship between the sun and the sky. Boyer uses the exhibition title as an invisible through-line for structural support to explore the edges of a Queer, Métis phenomenology, that helps the artist ask "Am I the sky or am I the sun?", an important question about disorganized experiences and self-consciousness. Placing hard and soft components in complementary and mutually supportive relationships that lay the ground for this internal, yet critical, dialogue, How the Sky Carries the Sun presents installation-based work that allows Boyer to rotate between process and materials: traditional beading suspended on free-standing, wooden structures, cyanotypes depicting garden plants, lightboxes that use quilting but act as trusses, and knots that close obsessive cycles of labour. 

Jeannie Mah and Heidi McKenzie are two established Canadian ceramic artists of colour whose paternal ancestors are each directly intertwined with migration and immigration across multiple continents. This exhibition is a portrait of two migrant/immigrant narratives through ceramic works that incorporate archival image and document the artists’ families with particular attention to each artist’s relationship with their father.

Heidi McKenzie’s works document her father’s journey, growing up in Colonial Trinidad and his struggle to find his place as an immigrant of colour in Canada, while also being informed by her own everyday lived experience of her mixed Indo-Caribbean and Irish heritage. Jeannie Mah’s work seeks to mark the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which, in 1923, closed the door to all Chinese immigration until 1947, while also exploring her own Chinese-Canadian identity through her impossibly, delicate porcelain vessels that allude to the global meandering pedigree of Chinese blue and white porcelain.

This intimate survey of ceramic installations by Regina-based artist, Jeannie Mah, alludes to the historic influences of Chinese white and blue porcelain on Persian and European design and architecture through centuries of trade and commerce.

Through her compositions of porcelain vessels imprinted with images and pattern, Mah imagines the voyages of Chinese porcelain around the globe, seeking out glimpses of its influence lurking in Turkish and Portuguese arabesque and floral patterns and architectural details.

Brick by Brick: Absence VS Presence, by Toronto-based artist Heidi McKenzie, is a multifaceted installation, featuring historical and contemporary photographs, ceramic sculpture, augmented reality, video and sound projection. The catalyst for the installation was a 2019 residency at the Medalta International Artist in Residence ceramic program in Medicine Hat. The daughter of Indo-Trinidadian and Irish American parents, McKenzie toured the historic I-XL brick factory in Medicine Hat during her residency, which brought to the surface memories of her own father’s experience working the brick furnaces at Stelco in Hamilton, ON, in the 1950s as a new immigrant. These personal memories ignited inquiries into whether local Indigenous people or immigrant persons of colour worked at the brick and clay factories in Medicine Hat, and if so, what was documented in regard to those experiences? The findings of this research became the conceptual foundation of McKenzie’s installation. In its thoughtful combination of historical and contemporary content, Brick By Brick gives presence to the undocumented stories of people of colour within this industrial history in Canada and connects to our own local history of the Claybank Brick Factory in the hills south of Moose Jaw.

Organized in partnership with MJ Pride, this exhibition features works by artists from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community in support of Pride Week.

Image: Alexis Valgardsson, METAMORPHOSIS, linocut relief print letterpress installation, 2022/23

Organized by the Art Gallery of Swift Current in partnership with the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery; curated by Mr. Kim Houghtaling

Jonathan Forrest's work has been recognized for its contributions to contemporary painting and its connections to the history of modernist abstraction in Saskatchewan and Canada. This survey exhibition follows the trajectory of Jonathan Forrest’s painting practice from 1985 to the present with a variety of works on paper and canvas, including works from the MJM&AG Permanent Collection. Presenting large-scale paintings dating from 1989 to the present, the exhibition also features a “wall of small” – a collection of small scale artworks spanning a thirty-five year period to offer a visual timeline of the artist’s development.

Image: Blue Print, acrylic on canvas, 132.3 x 143.5 cm, 2002, Collection of the MJM&AG

Carol Wylie’s exhibition of exquisitely painted portraits of Holocaust and Residential School survivors serves as a testimonial of these individuals’ lived experiences and these historical atrocities, presenting her subjects as the strong survivors they are. MORE INFORMATION

Image: Installation view of the exhibition at the Mann Art Gallery, Prince Albert, SK

This exhibition will present a focused survey of the work of SK Métis artist, Edward Poitras. Poitras envisions this project not as a touring survey exhibition but as a series of “Treaty Four Art Actions”, played out in four different locations within Treaty Four territory, including project partners, Art Gallery of Swift Current, the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery (Yorkton, SK) and the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre (Medicine Hat, AB). These “art actions” will involve Poitras revisiting and re-contextualizing past works, choreographing the works to dialogue with new pieces and, essentially, creating new meanings or narratives that play out within the gallery space to address colonial history, its impacts on Indigenous nations and the significance of Treaty Four.

In recognition and celebration of Pride Week in Moose Jaw, the MJM&AG is featuring works from our permanent collection by LGBTQ2SIA+ artists. The exhibition PRIDE features a variety of artistic media, including ceramics, sculpture, printmaking and photography, and includes works by Saskatchewan, Canadian and international artists.

Join us for a reception event in partnership with Moose Jaw Pride on May 25th at 12:00 pm. Come partake in the exhibition and petites bouchées and refreshments over the lunch hour!

Sylvia Ziemann has long explored the tension between dystopia and utopia in her art, and with this exhibition, in its presentation of paintings, drawings, video, sculptural dioramas and installation, she creates the unexpected moments of utopia that emerge when folks come together across difference in the wake of a disaster or pandemic to build community.

Todd Gronsdahl’s interdisciplinary practice challenges truth, fiction and the construction of historical narratives. The exhibition is an immersive installation of fictional museum exhibits, employing irony to highlight the randomness of museum and archive logic. By playing, tampering and reconfiguring archival documentation, Gronsdahl intentionally legitimizes mythologies, loosely retracing residual marks of past events.

In its presentation of installation, bookworks, embroidered objects and video, Confluence is the result of Saskatchewan artist, Susan Shantz’, artistic and scientific exploration into the water sources that sustain our province: from the glaciers in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta water flows across the prairies in the South and North Saskatchewan Rivers, joining to create an enormous delta near the Manitoba border. Shantz states, “While I experience the river near my home as a natural phenomenon and place of beauty, after learning more about the river from scientific and environmental perspectives, I have come to realize it is a highly-managed water source. It sustains us, but with a cost for those downstream. Drawing on field trips to sites along the river, I use a variety media (from textiles to videography) to consider the currents that connect us in this prairie water basin.” Shantz’ work encourages viewers to consider the interconnectedness and fragility of our water sources, the environmental impacts of human progress on our water systems and how these impacts will ultimately affect us all.

New Territories (2011) features a series of colour photographs by Gabriela García-Luna in the MJM&AG Permanent Collection. The series presents fragmented layers of patterned and shredded wallpaper in the process of being removed from various wall surfaces of an old home here in Moose Jaw. Through digital manipulation of her photographic images, Garcia-Luna creates layered, digitally-collaged works that become meditations on time. Images of these damaged, decorative surfaces have an uncanny visual quality that transports the observer to a more complicated, visionary topography.

Milne’s significance as an early twentieth century Canadian modernist artist rests on his focused and deeply personal artmaking strategies informed by an innovative aesthetic and stylistic approach. His vision differed markedly from the artistic intentions and ideological positioning of the landscape art of the Group of Seven whose works were perceived to be in alignment with a nation-building narrative which gained prominence in Canada following the First World War. The selection of Milne’s works featured in this exhibition reveals the range of David Milne’s inspiration in exploring media which supported his painting while also fostering new considerations in his approach to his art-making.

L'importance de Milne en tant qu'artiste moderniste canadien du début du XXe siècle repose sur ses stratégies de création artistique ciblées et profondément personnelles, éclairées par une approche esthétique et stylistique novatrice. Sa vision différait nettement des intentions artistiques et du positionnement idéologique de l'art du paysage du Group of Seven, dont les œuvres étaient perçues comme s'alignant sur un récit d'édification de la nation qui a pris de l'importance au Canada après la Première Guerre mondiale. La sélection des œuvres de Milne présentées dans cette exposition révèle la gamme d'inspiration de David Milne dans l'exploration des médias qui ont soutenu sa peinture tout en favorisant de nouvelles considérations dans son approche de sa création artistique.

Text Panel 1 English | Français

Text Panel 2 English | Français

Text Panel 3 English | Français

Text Panel 4 English | Français

Over the last ten years, animals have had a strong presence in Belinda Harrow’s artistic practice. She is particularly interested in that precarious area where human and animal habitats overlap. As our human populations grow and spread, animal species are forced to adapt and change, creating disruptions in migratory patterns, feeding habits and even mating behaviours. Featuring drawing, painting and sculpture, the exhibition Unsettled focuses specifically on the animals that live in and around Regina, situating them within some of the city’s most recognizable landscapes. The positioning of these resourceful, native animal species within these urban environments provide us an opportunity to examine the current post-colonial world that we share, reflect on the impacts of colonialism and consider what the future might bring for us all.

February 12 – May 2, 2021

March 8, 2021 - In Conversation Artist Panel: Director/Curator Jennifer McRorie leads a panel discussion with Heather Benning, Jeannie Mah, and Leesa Streifler about their work in the 2021 MJM&AG exhibition, Fire in the Belly: Saskatchewan Women Artists from the MJM&AG Permanent Collection. LIVE STREAM CLICK HERE

Featuring a diverse selection of works from the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery Permanent Collection, including painting, ceramics, beaded works, photography, video and installation art, this exhibition will highlight the strength and compelling nature of the work of women artists in Saskatchewan.

Heather Benning, Catherine Blackburn, Dana Claxton, Heather Cline, Reta Cowley, Ruth Cuthand, Eva Dennis, Cara Gay Driscoll, Gabriela Garcia-Luna, Vaughan Grayson, Ann Harbuz, Belinda Harrow, Beth Hone, Marsha Kennedy, Dorothy Knowles, Marie Lannoo, Diane Lara, Sandra Ledingham, Molly Lenhardt, Marilyn Levine, Jeannie Mah, Laura Margita, Judy McNaughton, Anne Meggitt, Angelique Merasty, Wynona Mulcaster, Wendy Parsons, Thelma Pepper, Catherine Perehudoff, Joan Rankin, Anita Rocamora, Vera Saltzman, Christy Schweiger, Leesa Streifler, Judy Tryon, Jane Turnbull Evans, Doris Wall Larson, Jane Zednik. CLICK for Virtual tour of exhibition.

Rob Froese: Measured Composition [2020]

February 7 - August 30, 2020

Opening: Friday, February 7, 2020 @ 7:30 pm

In Conversation Artist Talk: Saturday, February 8, 2020 @ 1pm

Measured Composition [2020] showcases elements of pottery production, wood platforms, paint, and gaffer's tape to demonstrate essential connections between pottery and sculpture, utility and ritual, and spatial and musical composition. Work featured will include installation works that were developed as part of Froese’s MFA program at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2018, as well as new works created through a residency at Medalta in Medicine Hat., AB.

Peter Tucker: Predisposition

February 7 - August 30, 2020

Opening: Friday, February 7, 2020 @ 7:30 pm

Virtual In Conversation Artist Talk: Saturday, April 25, 2020 @ 1:00 pm

This is by invitation on our Facebook events page Virtual Artist Talk - In Conversation with Peter Tucker. Register by clicking “Going” and we will send a link to attend.

Peter Tucker’s work plays with the movement between fragmentation and connection, disruption and continuity, contingency and agency, which creates and recreates the wholeness of a human life. His work is the result of his personal search for home, belonging and self, a negotiation of presence in the restless in-between spaces of the natural world and society. Presenting large-scale, suspended and floor mounted sculptures and installation, the works in the exhibition Predisposition are the result of the artist’s exploration of his personal experience of being a mixed race adoptee of African-Canadian and European ethnicity, delving into what it means to create identity when there are no clear parameters.

Upcoming exhibition catalogue - Peter Tucker: Predisposition - available at a future date.

Please check out Audrey Dreaver's interview with Indigenous Circle on CTV https://www.facebook.com/creeson/videos/10154879862490071/

Lucien Durey and Katie Kozak: Baba's House

December 1, 2015 - April 3, 2016

Curated by Blair Fornwald and tour organized by Dunlop Art Gallery

In fall 2012, artists Lucien Durey and Katie Kozak moved to the northern Saskatchewan town of Creighton to take up a self-directed residency in the home of Kozak’s Ukrainian-Canadian grandmother, Sophie Ostrowski. During this time, they produced scanned compositions from materials found in Ostrowski’s home, producing works with surprising depth and formal restraint. Thoughtful, emotionally resonant, and quietly funny, the resulting collection of works form a loving portrait of this specific individual. Ostrowski’s story, however, evokes commonly shared Saskatchewan experiences of rural prairie life and homesteading, the hybridization of second-generation Canadian identities, family history, and intergenerational friendship and exchange.

Featuring Ukrainian-Canadian artifacts from the MJM&AG heritage collection in collaboration with the artworks, this exhibit will connect with Moose Jaw audiences and encourage inquiry into immigrant and pioneering experiences.

Lucien Durey is a visual artist and singer working in Saskatchewan and Vancouver. Drawing from personal and popular experience, his practice explores themes of authenticity and compensation through performance, assemblage/installation, and digital processes. Durey holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Vancouver's SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. He has exhibited in Saskatchewan, Vancouver, Portland and New York.

Katie Kozak is a Creighton, Saskatchewan artist of Métis and Ukrainian descent, whose work is a thoughtful blend of visual art and science. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Victoria and attended Emily Carr University of Art and Design from 2009 through 2012. She has exhibited artworks in the Prairies and Western Canada.

Heather Benning - A Prairie Gothic: Let Our Fields Be Broader, But Our Nights So Much Darker

September 25, 2015 to January 3, 2016

Saskatchewan artist Heather Benning has a growing international reputation for producing large-scale, site-specific installations within natural environments, presenting interventions in outdoor locations and abandoned and decaying architectural spaces. Another focus of her practice is creating gallery-based installations and, most recently, working in video. It is these latter practices that will be featured in the exhibition A Prairie Gothic: Let Our Fields Be Broader, But Our Nights So Much Darker, co-organized by the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Swift Current. Presenting four bodies of work and her new film, The Dollhouse, the exhibition offers viewers intricately woven narratives that address notions of place, loss, the perceived ‘otherness’ of rural life and the construction of gender and femininity. Each series contributes to an overarching narrative of the prairie gothic. Stories of innocence, haunting memories and romantic ideals of settler life on the prairies are intertwined with dark narratives and tragic loss. Benning presents viewers with iconic images and monuments of prairie rural life that not only acknowledge the passing of an era, the loss of a connection to our rural roots, idyllic dreams that are never realized and the inevitability of change, but also reflect a sensitivity and respect for the individual lives and stories, whether real or imagined, that collectively contribute towards a prairie sensibility or even mythology.

The exhibition will tour to the Art Gallery of Swift Current in fall 2016 and the Mann Art Gallery in Prince Albert in 2017.

Hansen-Ross Pottery: Pioneering Fine Craft on the Canadian Prairie

April 30 to September 6, 2015

Folmer Hansen and David Ross considered themselves to be artist craftsmen and took a consciously non-industrial stance, placing considerable emphasis on making beautifully designed, handmade ceramics out of Saskatchewan clay.  As always, many factors play a part in the successful realization of any artistic practice or endeavor. In this case, the Saskatchewan Arts Board’s focus on adult education and its vision of a professional crafts industry in Saskatchewan helped to develop a wide audience for crafts. In the end, there are two components to the lasting legacy of this studio pottery in small town Saskatchewan. Hansen and Ross produced work on a small scale, primarily as a team of two, but periodically incorporating others, and this had an embracing and encouraging effect on many potters who are still working today. Hansen-Ross Pottery is one of the reasons that ceramics is still such a strong part of Saskatchewan’s art history and material culture. The other legacy is their beautiful pottery. There are thousands of finely made pots still sitting on the shelves of numerous kitchen cupboards and adorning china cabinets in Fort Qu’Appelle and far beyond. Increasingly, they are being acquired by art gallery and museum collections, but in Saskatchewan to this day, it is not uncommon to be served a cup of tea or coffee in a Hansen-Ross mug. At times, Hansen-Ross pottery has been honoured with exhibitions, but it is not the recognition that made them a success. It is their beautiful shape, glorious glazes and adept designs that set Hansen-Ross pottery apart from the rest; it is about how they are used or feel in one’s hand that makes them Canadian treasures.

Work from 10 Years of Collecting: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection 2004-2014

April 30 to September 6, 2015

Robert Scott - Copper Slag

February 5 to April 12, 2015

Robert Austin Scott, RCA, was born in 1941 in Melfort, Saskatchewan and spent part of his childhood in the town of LaFleche, in south-western Saskatchewan. He studied art at the Alberta College of Art, Calgary, AB, receiving a diploma in Applied Arts in 1969, and an MFA from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, in 1976. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally, and has received numerous awards.

The paintings on exhibit here are made using black copper slag (an industrial waste material from a smelting process that is used as an abrasive in the blasting industry) with a bonding medium. The compositions are made by moving the material around dry on a flat canvas and then fixing it with rhoplex medium. Using an array of different implements (garden tools etc.) Scott makes profound compositions where chance is integral to the process.

He lives in Edmonton, AB and travels regularly to a renovated school studio, in Cadillac, Saskatchewan.

Carl Beam - The Columbus Suite

February 5 to April 12, 2015

This exhibition presents the work of well-known Canadian artist Carl Beam.  The Columbus Suite is a series of 12 prints that were completed in 1990 in response to the ‘celebration’ of the 500th anniversary of the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas.  Many people, including those whose ancestors were indigenous to North America, found the celebration ironic and troubling because it represented history as seen from only a European perspective.   In these images, Beam uses historic figures such as Christ, Riel, Sitting Bull, Einstein, Lincoln, Kennedy, Columbus, juxtaposed with numerous historical references and symbols, to make art work that represents a contrasting, yet balanced, assembly of heroes from different cultures.    As Beam writes, “My works are like little puzzles, interesting little games.  I play a game of dreaming ourselves as each other.  In this we find out that we’re all basically human.”  Carl Beam was from the M’Chigeeng First Nation and died in 2005.  

Gabriela García-Luna, Pensive Space

September 18, 2014 to January 4, 2015

Gabriela García-Luna is a photography-based artist who lives and works between Moose Jaw, SK, northern India and Mexico City, where she was born and raised. She was invited to participate in   residencies at the Banff Centre and at La Chambre Blanche in Quebec City. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibition most recently at SLATE Fine Art Gallery, Regina, at Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary, and in the widely toured exhibition MIND THE GAP!, organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery.  Wayne Baerwaldt writes in the catalogue essay that, “As an artist who carefully constructs her photographic pictures to elude definitive and prescriptive readings, Gabriela García-Luna aims to open doors to an aesthetic that questions commonly perceived realities.  She suggests we observe her pictures with fewer, different or no expectations of knowing anything with any certainty and that another, more elusive quality is more revealing.  In the process of compiling her observations of the commonplace (urban-rural landscapes, ancient buildings, wallpaper, etc.) from various parts of the world, she hints at revealing the unseen in her images. She accomplishes this, in part, by subtly manipulating the quality of light/colouration of her surfaces.” This exhibition consists of work from a number of different series that each consist of beautiful, enigmatic images that both mystify and satisfy the viewer. 

Mindy Yan Miller, Feed

September 18, 2014 to December 28, 2014

In Mindy Yan Miller’s Saskatoon, Saskatchewan studio, the clothing of children, men and women is neatly laid out in a tender patterned order:  a child’s pair of brightly coloured, wear-softened canvas pants; a man’s acrylic sweater with a vibrant geometric design suggesting a little-used Christmas gift and a suit jacket, pressed and kept for best.  The clothes, emptied of the bodies that once burnished them, fill the width of translucent industrial netting, a material used by farmers to capture and shape the large round bales that mark the fields of contemporary farmlands in Saskatchewan.  Like clothing put away by a mourning relative or set aside for a now-grown child, they are taken “out of circulation,” frozen in time, as they are rolled into a bundle resembling both a hay bale and the clothing bundle of the vagabond or refugee, their ontologies fixed by an earlier incarnation.

Excerpt from Essay "Making Hay While the Sun Shines -or The Emperor's New Clothes."

Written by: Lisa Baldissera

Mindy Yan Miller’s artistic practice is rooted in fibre traditions and frequently uses masses of potent materials such as used clothing, human hair, or Coke cans. Her installations address themes of labour, identity, loss and commodification. She has exhibited in Canada, Europe and United States and currently lives in Saskatoon, SK. She holds an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and since 1990 she has taught art as a sessional instructor at Concordia University in Montreal.

Les Manning: Common/Opposites

April 24 to August 31, 2014

In a bold departure from the practice which the internationally renowned ceramist developed and refined over the last two decades, the 19 sculptures in Common/Opposites combine Les Manning’s expertise and skill as a ceramist with passion and playfulness. Manning’s new works show a rich emotional and metaphorical register while drawing deeply upon his personal experiences and knowledge of Canada’s lands. Juxtaposing forms, textures and colour, Manning evokes the monumental reach of modernism as an artistic endeavour. Playful references to the humble objects of everyday lighten his sophisticated and contemporary appreciation of the more base aspects of nature, to reveal the rich and contradictory poetry of our ordinary world.  

Les Manning was the Director of the Ceramic Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts for 20 years, and has contributed to ceramics world-wide as a teacher, lecturer, conference and symposium participant and organizer, as well as Vice President of the International Academy of Ceramics, founding member and Vice-President of the Alberta Craft Council and first President of Canadian Craft Council. His work has been shown around the world, and is held in private, corporate and public collections, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Les Manning is the Senior Artist in Residence at the Shaw International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, Medicine Hat Historic Clay District, Alberta, and received the Order of Canada in 2012.

~ Joanne Marion, Director/Curator of Art, Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre

Carl Beam: From the Collection

January 31 to April 17, 2014

Emerging from Ojibwa and European descent, Beam resisted conventional categorizations of Native Art. Using mixed media, Beam collaged images drawn from Native and non-Native sources. This mode of representation deconstructed cultural assumptions and formulated new interpretations of history. His legacy continues to provoke questions that re-examine traditional mainstream views of Native identity by both Native and non-Native communities.

Alice Macredie: Cherished Memories of a Father's Career

January 31 to April 17, 2014

This exhibition features watercolors by this Moose Jaw-based artist. It is touring nationally by Exporail - the Canadian Railway Museum and features her work painted in memory of her father JRC Macredie, an engineer who help construct bridges such as the Lethbridge Viaduct and the Connaught Tunnel in Rogers Pass.

Maureen Newton: This is for the Birds

January 31 to April 17, 2014

This exhibition highlights new oil paintings that characterize rich coloration, bold compositions, and gently humorous depictions of life's serious - and not so serious - situations. This exhibition was curated by Joanne Marion for the Esplanade Art Gallery in Medicine Hat.