VISUAL ART

Mixing Stars and Sand: The Art and Legacy of Sarain Stump

March 3 - June 24

MacKenzie Art Gallery, 3475 Albert St. A multi-faceted project that makes a major contribution to the art history of the Canadian prairies. It focuses on the art and legacy of Sarain Stump (1945 – 1974), Italian-born Plains Cree autodidact and polymath artist, writer, musician, actor and educator. The exhibition will feature a new, commissioned video installation by Edward Poitras; over two hundred works by Stump in a variety of media, documentation, and ephemera, including the un-edited manuscript for a new book of image-poems never before seen in public.

Laura St.Pierre: Museum of Future History

March 24 - June 2

Dunlop Art Gallery – Sherwood Village Branch, 6121 Rochdale Blvd.

Laura St.Pierre’s Museum of Future History documents the flora of Saskatchewan’s boreal forests. Recycled glass jars containing pale, ghostlike plant specimens are arranged in vitrines and documented with luminous large-format photographs. In the makeshift museum, we catch the increasingly familiar scent of the summer forest fires that both sustain and threaten the forest’s delicate ecosystem. Surreal and elegiac, St.Pierre’s installation casts us into a speculative future both predictable and unthinkable.

Diyan Achjadi and Brendan Tang: Surface Handling

April 5 - May 31

Dunlop Central Mediatheque, 2311 12th Ave. Brendan Lee Satish Tang and Diyan Achjadi combine elements of historic Asian decorative craft and contemporary material culture to examine how historical mythologies and familial lore are visually transmitted and culturally translated through time.

Revolutionaries and Ghosts: Memory, Witness and Justice in a Global Canadian Context

May 26 - September 29

Mackenzie Art Gallery, 3475 Albert St. Canadian author Madeleine Thien uses the figure of a book within a book to gently assert the power of stories to preserve memories even as changing political tides threaten to sweep them away. By hiding the true names of lost loved ones amid the fictional Book of Records, her protagonists keep alive the dream of art, beauty, and freedom amidst China’s repressive political regimes. Thien’s novel demonstrates the important role that Canadian authors have played in recent years in attesting to violence on the world stage while exploring its impacts at home.

Plain Red Art Gallery

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

First Nations University

Represents indigenous visual art practices, culture and history found in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada and globally.