At the MacKenzie The Magazine of the MacKenzie Art Gallery | May to August 2011 Kaleidoscope Summer Art Program for Kids Learn more and register today at mackenzieartgallery.ca Ages 5 to 6 Years Ages 7 - 9 Years Ages 10 - 12 Years July 4 - 8 July 11 - 15 or July 18 - 22 1 - 4 pm July 25 - 29 9 am - 4 pm Members: $115 9 am - 4 pm Members: $230 Non-Members: $125 Members: $230 Non-Members: $250 Non-Members: $250 August 2 - 5 1 - 4 pm Members: $90 Non-Members: $100 At the MacKenzie is published tri-annually by the MacKenzie Art Gallery AT THE MACKENZIE ISSN 0712-9238 Editor The Magazine of the MacKenzie Art Gallery Leah Brodie [email protected] May to August 2011 Layout & Design Leah Brodie Vol. 41 No. 1 2010 - 2011 Board of Trustees Executive Committee Mark Stefan, President On the Cover Andrea Wagner, Vice President Natalka Husar Robert Poultney, Treasurer Dave Pettigrew, Past President Looking at Art (detail), 2009 Members oil on rag board, 81 x 102 cm Norman Bercovich Collection of the artist Rani Bilkhu Louis Browne John Dawes Terry Downie Features Glenn Gordon Pam Klein Marty Klyne 02 Executive Director’s Message Josh MacFadden Sheila Petty Carmen Robertson 05 Natalka Husar: Burden of Innocence Mark Vajcner Stuart Reid, ex-officio 06 Ballet by Szuper Gallery The MacKenzie Art Gallery is a non-profit organization supported by its members, volunteers, individual donors and corporate sponsors. The MacKenzie is generously funded 08 engram* by the University of Regina, Government of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Lotteries Trust Fund for Sport, Culture & Recreation, City of Regina, Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Museums Assistance Program of the Department of 09 The Regina Five: 50 Years Later Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Regina Arts Advisory Committee, and Regina’s Public and Catholic School Boards. 10 Dimensions 12 Upcoming Programs + Events 14 MacKenzie Gallery Volunteers 16 Photo Gallery 19 Members 20 Donors 01 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE individuals who have made the Gallery an essential part of life in Saskatchewan. Every year, the Gallery’s Annual Appeal solicits financial donations from our community to support the MacKenzie’s exhibitions and programs. This year, you were very generous – 68 families supported the appeal generating nearly $25,000 with total donations from the community last year totalling over $102,000. On May 31st, the MacKenzie will host “A Celebration of Giving” to honour our generous donors and all the businesses in Regina that have been sponsors, donors or Champions. When our Provincial Outreach van pulls into La Ronge, or a young person from Piapot Nation gets a guided tour of Demanding a Response, or a senior citizen gets a visit from our “Art at Your Door” program – all these transforming experiences are made possible by your gifts. We have a lot to be thankful for at the MacKenzie. See you at the Gallery, It is so important to say “thank you.” In the coming months, the MacKenzie has several events scheduled that offer an opportunity to honour individuals and businesses for their Stuart Reid enormous contributions to the MacKenzie and to the arts Executive Director community in Regina. Stay connected to your MacKenzie! April 10th through 16th was National Volunteer Week in Canada. For more than 60 years, the MacKenzie has been Bring a smile to your inbox. Sign up today for our free e-vites at supported by community volunteers. Whether sitting on mackenzieartgallery.ca our Board of Trustees, selling raffle tickets at BAZAART, or working a shift in the Gallery Shop, every aspect of our “Like” the MacKenzie Art Gallery on Facebook business at the MacKenzie benefits from the generosity of volunteers. On April 19th, the MacKenzie hosted a reception to celebrate the enormous contributions made last year by Follow MacKenzieArtSK on Twitter our treasured MacKenzie Gallery Volunteers (MGV). This was our chance to say a heartfelt thanks to those dedicated Check out our latest event photos on Flickr. Were you there? Photo: Don Hall 02 The Gallery Shop where shopping is an art... Spring Members’ Sale Receive a 20% discount on all regular priced items! May 6 to 18 Featured Artist Reception with Megan Hazel Saturday, May 7, 2 - 4 pm Featured Artist Reception with Miles Anderson Saturday, June 25, 2 - 4 pm Featured Artist Reception Sponsors Gallery Shop Hours Monday to Thursday 10 am - 5:30 pm Friday 10 am - 9 pm Weekends and Holidays 12 pm - 5:30 pm Image: Robert Held Art Glass 04 NATALKA HUSAR: BURDEN OF INNOCENCE April 30 to September 5, 2011 Opening Reception & Artist Discussion Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm, Free Pandora’s Parcel: A Discussion on Contemporary Ukraine Saturday, April 30, 2 pm, Free In this exhibition, Canadian artist Natalka Husar takes her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, into new territory and presents three interwoven, though unresolved narratives, in the form of a history play in three acts. Act 1 is a narrative on the nature and fate of painting itself. In Nurse and Stew, Husar paints her own image, masked and costumed, to address the surrogate dependency between painter and subject, the cannibalistic relationship between the artist and her muse, and the anachronistic limbo in which painting currently lies. Act 2’s Trial is a social narrative conceived in terms of art’s power to bring things to light if not to justice. Though it deals with fictitious characters, it is a form of contemporary history painting. Old Soviet-style and new-capitalist corruption collide in the collective of fictive portraits, the wheeler-dealer thugs who are put on trial not as an accusation but as a record of the cultural and psychological damage they have sustained. Act 3 presents a banquet in a time warp: Husar merges 1960s North America with a depiction of contemporary Ukraine. The protagonists from the first and second acts reunite in the cumulative canvas Looking at Art. Husar, cast as her dual personae, plays the waiter in her examination of the artist’s role and art’s responsibility vis-à-vis the social narrative. Supported by Left: Natalka Husar, Baby Face, 2007, oil on rag board, 38 x 38 cm. Collection of the artist. Co-produced by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (Guelph), McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton), and the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina). Presented at the MacKenzie Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the City of Regina Arts Advisory Committee and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Saskatchewan Provincial Council. 05 06 Ballet by Szuper Gallery April 30 to August 28, 2011 Opening Reception Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm, Free Performance of Ballet Friday, May 6, at 8 pm and Saturday, May 7, at 2 pm, Tickets available at the Gallery Shop: $20 ($15 for Members)* Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Keresty) are back in Regina with a follow-up to their highly successful project The Extras (2008). Ballet brings into focus current anxieties around food production through an exhibition, video installation and performance that was inspired by Cold War instructional films for farmers. Originally developed for the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England with the participation of Michele Sereda (Curtain Razors), the MacKenzie exhibition will mark the Canadian premiere for this unconventional response to agricultural realities. Anxieties about the state of our food supply have resulted in a growing social phenomenon: urban twenty- somethings, with no ties to the land, who are obsessed with threats to the integrity of our food supply (GMOs, pesticides, etc.). It is against this backdrop that the drama of Ballet unfolds. Here, the threat of nuclear war stands in as the symbol for all other contaminations, a catastrophe lived out by Szuper Gallery in post-Chernobyl Ukraine. Through a blended choreography of farm labour and dance movement, the separation of rural and urban is registered in the young actors’ soft urban bodies, in their awkward imitation of everyday agricultural chores, and in the eruption of dance movements culled from music halls and the avant-garde. However, as the mushroom cloud at the end of the video reminds us, catastrophes, nuclear or otherwise, threaten to disrupt our neat separation of rural and urban—the “ballet” on which the world food system depends. The genius of Ballet is to make manifest through an apocalyptic “dance of the dead” the underlying threat to a fundamental aspect of our global social organization. Szuper Gallery’s live performance of Ballet is a rock opera performance that flirts with a posthuman conception of action, focusing on the border between human bodies and their outside. Set in a world askew with remnants of civilization, it questions how the world of vibrant and edible matter might affect the way we live. The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. Pulling apart the “ballet” of the food system in musical scenes and absurd stories, a hysterical cabaret unfolds. Based on the principle of a crash choreography, the performance features a local and international performance art ensemble complete with a three-piece band. * The performance of Ballet includes mature content and nudity. Video still from Ballet, 2009. Courtesy of Szuper Gallery. Produced by Szuper Gallery / Curtain Razors and presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Curtain Razors with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the City of Regina Arts Advisory Committee, the British Council, and Reading University. 07 engram* April 30 to September 5, 2011 For the past three months a group of nine student curators, under the direction of art historian Dr.