Prairie Portage Primer exhibit opens
A new art exhibit has opened up at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, featuring work by an Ontario artist’s perception of southwestern Saskatchewan. The exhibit is titled Prairie Portage Primer and dozens of people came out to the official opening held June 7, which featured food, refreshments, and live music provided by local musicians Megan Nash and Brodie Mohninger. In 2010 Copping was approached by museum curator Heather Smith to create a public exhibit that would be displayed in both the Swift Current and Moose Jaw galleries. Copping and his partner, former Moose Javian and fellow artist Susan Rankin, set out to travel the area. Copping strapped a canoe to his vehicle with the intent to travel the waterways, but found water was hard to come by in some areas. Copping, a renowned artist that works with materials such as glass and wood, has long had an interest in water and that theme is often explored in his work. He says that is partly because the area of Ontario where he lives is surrounded by water. But Copping says there is more to it than that. “It’s water, water everywhere. But working with glass... glass is a natural to try and talk about water and use it as a metaphor around water. It’s a fluid material, you can create motion with it,” said Copping. “It’s just something that seems to really work...It’s something that I’ve become obsessed with.” Although Copping had difficulty finding water at first, the inspiring landscape of the province soon led to a discovery. “It’s an inspiring landscape and aspects of it are completely overwhelming. A lot of that is the sky, it’s just that sheer volume of sky and how low it seems because of that endless horizon—it just brings everything down on top of you. So you have this immediate reaction to that,” said Copping. “You ask, ‘What are the things that you keep seeing?’ I was trying to focus on the water and where the water was and trying to connect to that, because that’s what I do. But in the process of doing that...something starts to resonate and that was hay bales. “I was like, look at all this hay. And then I realized that’s where all the water is—it’s all tied up in this stuff that’s growing. Then it became this thing where it felt like I was looking at bales of water.” That inspiration is certainly seen in one particular piece in the exhibit, known simply as “haylines.” The large piece contains pieces of glass bundled up to look like hay bales. The bales are then connected by further pieces of glass made to resemble powerlines, another enduring image of the landscape that caught Copping’s attention. He said that, being from Ontario where hydroelectricity is used, he found the powerlines to be a further connection to his water aesthetic. It’s an interesting exhibit that certainly warrants attention. The work will be on display until September 2. As for Copping, he certainly plans on exploring more of what the province has to offer. “It’s got to happen.” For more information on the exhibit and other programs being offered by the museum, visit www.mjmag.ca.