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45th Annual Winter Festival Art Show & Sale
curated by Heather Benning
February 12 - March 27, 2021
View the virtual exhibition here
Carol Wylie: They Didn't Know We Were Seeds
Main Gallery, April 16 — May 29, 2021
The Mann Art Gallery presents They Didn't Know We Were Seeds by Saskatoon-based artist Carol Wylie. This exhibition consists of eighteen portraits of Jewish holocaust and residential school survivors. In Jewish tradition, eighteen represents the word 'chai' which means life. Themes including trauma, ongoing recovery, shared pain, and the indomitable human spirit, are central in Wylie's work. With numbers of holocaust survivors dwindling, and the same eventual loss of residential school survivors, these portraits remain and continue to reflect the strength and courage of these individuals.
View the remote exchange with Robbie Waisman and Eugene Arcand here.
Download the exhibition program with Wylie's statement here.
10th Annual High School Juried Art Show
Project Space and Education Studio, April 9 — May 29, 2021
View the virtual exhibition here
Virtual Reception and Awards: April 23 @ 7PM live-streamed on the Mann Facebook Page
For the past nine years, the Mann Art Gallery has presented art by local high school students in the Project and Education Studio Galleries of our beautiful space. This year, during the typical High School Juried Art Show period (April-May 2021), we are determined to showcase and celebrate the artistic achievements and creative vision of talented students in a new, hybrid format—both an in-person and virtual exhibition! We are excited to host your work not only in the gallery for visitors to appreciate, but also online, where artwork has the potential to reach viewers around the world. Students have the option of only submitting a digital image of a work, or the physical work itself; all artworks will be viewed online.
Ultimate Gray and Illuminating
Project Space
June 23 — August 21, 2021
The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to present a special salon of artworks from its Permanent Collection. Ultimate Gray and Illuminating [yellow] are the colours the Pantone Color Institute designated “Color of the Year 2021.” All the pieces in this exhibition make extensive use of one or both these colours. As we punched the colours into our database, automatically generating the catalogue raisonné (reasoned catalogue) for this exhibition, we came to realize the artists who created these artworks were visionaries for the colour choices they made so many years ago (les palettes) – how did they know what colours would be trending in 2021?
Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ
A Path or Gap Among the Trees
Jason Baerg
Main Gallery
July 10 — August 21, 2021
Closing Reception: August 19 at 6:30PM
The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to welcome Jason Baerg back home to host his mid-career retrospective. Tawâskweyâw ᑕᐋᐧᐢᑫᐧᔮᐤ / A Path or Gap Among the Trees charts 25 years of the artist’s work comprising installation, immersive projection and painting. He writes, “I was born to be a Métis Artist. Raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, I was inspired by media and everything that was creative on-air!” While much of his recent work is conceived on the computer and produced by laser cutters, he thinks like a painter – it’s where he started as an artist. His ongoing allegiance to painting reverberates powerfully when he states: “Painting is a sacred bundle that echoes through ancestral time, carry it responsibly and make a meaningful contribution to it.” Baerg’s work consistently evokes and challenges themes of community, ritual, Cree cosmology, Indigenous futurisms, and survivance – a term first employed by Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, to suggest the dynamic and creative endurance of Indigenous people, without the colonialist allusions to mere subsistence and victimhood that survival may connote.
Leah Marie Dorion: Generations of Love
curated by Assistant Educator, Jessalyn LeBlanc
Education Studio
June 11 — August 21, 2021
The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by local Métis artist Leah Marie Dorion. Leah is an award-winning visual artist, educator, storyteller, filmmaker, and author who has illustrated and written numerous early readers books. These paintings were part of her generous donation to the Mann Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection in 2015. The paintings chosen from the illustrative series Giving Thanks, Ways to Carry a Métis Baby, and A Métis New Year express the love passed down through generations of family, including a mother’s adoration for her baby and a grandparent’s deep affection for their grandchild. The energetic colours and lively shapes depicted by the artist grab the viewer's attention and invite us to examine the themes of family, home, and love. This selection expresses warmth and comfort—most evident in the family’s connection through physical touch. May Dorion’s paintings take you on a journey of gratitude for the love in your own family. Follow along as the families greet the rising sun, set out in their travels, and finally reach their destination of home.
samskāra
Diana Chabros
Main Gallery
September 7 — October 21, 2021
Closing Reception: October 21 at 6:30PM
The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to welcome Diana Chabros: samskāra. This exhibition of paintings explores forms of energy, cycles of life and death, and authentic relationships through story as a means to understand Chabros's interdependence with the land. Known to artists, biologists, photographers, tourism operators, ranchers and other locals as grasslands, to the Lakôta as maka tatanka, and to the nehiyaw/Cree as buffalo land or paskwâw mostos askiy, Saskatchewan’s southwest and it’s natural inhabitants are celebrated for their beauty and resiliency to survive under extremely harsh weather conditions. Through accelerated human intervention, the lives of these inhabitants are compromised to the point that even the soil has become a species at risk.
Gaia Symphony
Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson
Project Space
September 7 — October 23, 2021
Closing Reception: October 21 at 6:30PM
The Mann Art Gallery is pleased to welcome Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson: Gaia Symphony. The works in this exhibition use antique kimonos that are carefully taken apart and reconstructed. Rigorously produced in serial formats, they are substantially allied to the minimalist tradition; the artist writes about her great admiration for the Saskatchewan-born artist, Agnes Martin. These beautiful, meticulously crafted works draw on the artist’s deep respect for and knowledge of Japan’s iconic garment. As a young woman, she attended kimono classes and recalls how beautifully her mother’s hands moved when folding and caring for her own kimonos.
La Ronge Drawings
Gregory Hardy RCA
Main Gallery
November 12 — January 15, 2022
Reception with Catalogue Launch and Artist/Curator Talk: Friday, November 26 (doors open 6:30PM)
Gregory Hardy is much admired across the country and beyond for his vigorous and direct landscapes of the prairies and boreal lakes and forests of northern Saskatchewan. This exhibition features work produced around his island cabin on Lac La Ronge. He draws quickly and aggressively, en plein air from his kayak, with subsequent refinements completed in the studio. A remarkable feature of his landscapes is the weighty prominence given to the sky and its clouds. Curator Grant McConnell writes: “The clouds in a Hardy painting are as physical, as tangible as a mountain in a work by the Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris.” Hardy has exhibited extensively since 1975 and his work can be found in collections around the world.
Carbon Capture
Ken Van Rees
Project Space
November 12 — January 15, 2022
Reception with Artist Talk: Friday, November 26 (doors open at 6:30PM)
Ken Van Rees is a landscape painter, and a member of the well-known collective Men Who Paint. However, it was as a soil scientist that he first expressed his life-long love of forests. In 2015, a forest fire burnt his research plots in northern Saskatchewan, and while inspecting the damage to his equipment, he became engrossed with the patterns inscribed on his clothes from the charcoal of the burnt trees. This planted the seeds for an entirely new series of abstract works on canvas that take the form of rubbings and controlled imprints – produced by leaving canvases in the charred forest for extended periods. In Carbon Capture, Van Rees doesn’t work “strictly as a researcher studying the ecological functions of the forest, but as an artist/researcher designing and experimenting with burnt remnants to create new landscapes.” (KVR)
The Secret is the Paper
curated by Exhibitions/Collections Assistant Breanne Bandur
Education Studio
November 12 — January 15, 2022
The Secret Is the Paper (exhibition title from John Berger’s essay, “To Take Paper, to Draw”) features selected works on paper from the permanent collection. From quick notations on torn pages and in sketchbooks, to elaborate prints on carefully handled rag, this exhibition surveys diverse approaches to the treatment of paper, as well as the range of relationships artists share with their substrates. The Secret Is the Paper shares some of the material histories held in the permanent collection.