Relationships central to Sask. artist’s work
Family, friends are central to Atkins’ artwork
Sisters, twins, aunts, friends. Connection among women is recurring in Amalie Atkins’ artwork.
Almost everyone in her photographs has a personal relationship to the artist — except for a pair of twins she found in a parenting group on Facebook.
“There’s all this energy that exists in the women in my life. And what I see with my aunt or my grandmother, my relationship with my sister, like, these are all important relationships. So that’s probably part of it,” said Atkins, a Saskatoon-based photographer, filmmaker and textile artist.
Atkins last week opened a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Regina. Where the hour floats does not entirely encompass new work, however. It contains “remnants from a larger project,” a film series a decade in the making, chapters of which have been previously displayed at the Mackenzie Art Gallery (we live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical, 2014), the Remai Art Gallery (The Diamond Eye Assembly, 2019) and the Mendel before that (They Made A Day Be A Day Here, 2013).
Atkins’ grandmother has inspired much of this work.
“I have all these letters from my grandfather to my grandmother,” said Atkins, but there are no replies.
“So I have this one side, like my grandfather’s side of the story, and then my grandmother’s absence. And so in the process of writing the film, I was reading those letters and wondering what was going on with her. And so that’s maybe where some of these invented histories, where this came from.”
Atkins’ grandparents migrated to the Canadian Prairies, Mennonites displaced from Ukraine.
Harking back, natural landscapes and folkloric textiles are also recurrent in Atkins’ work.
“I’m interested in the past,” said Atkins. “I’m not shooting in urban circumstances ever. I’m only shooting outside. I’m trying to create this image that can be from a different time period.”
Whether it’s 1960s-style orange A-line dresses worn by actors roller-skating down a rural road, or floral-print shawls worn by women group-hugging atop a hill — none of Atkins’ pictures are modern or obvious.
Her work carries elements of fantasy and imagination, and is “connected to my grandmother in these ways that are not straightforward.”
“In the broader film, there’s Evgenia (Mikhaylova) on the bicycle. She (plays) the main character. And she has daughters that are twins, and she’s connected to this community
of Ukrainian dancers,” said Atkins, referencing various photos framed on white walls in the gallery.
“There is a dark force at work, which you can’t actually see so much in (this exhibition).”
The dark force is the Kranken-schwester, a “character who’s up to no good.” From German, it literally translates to suffer-sister.
In one image, the now-orphaned twin daughters have prepared a “dirt feast” on fine china, to attract the antagonist.
The twins continue to seek her out; the apron hut at the centre of the gallery is part of that story.
“My work really overlaps from exhibition to exhibition. The exhibitions are almost like an arbitrary marker of a lot of narratives that are connected. They continue; they always continue,” said Atkins.
Except, this project is coming to an end. It began when Atkins’ first son, now nine, was born. She had a lot of time to think about art, but not much time to actually make it. So she drew out the film into snippets.
“I work in chapters, that’s how I manage the larger project, because otherwise it’s too much to handle. Because I’m making the costumes, I’m writing the film, I’m shooting the film,” said Atkins.
“So the way that I can manage that is to break things down into these sections.”
The film “was like a labyrinth,” the story leading her. For some aspects, she would return to a scene years later to pick up where she’d left off.
“I don’t know the end point; I don’t know the end of the story when I start the project. So it’s really a windy path towards the resolve, whatever that might be,” said Atkins.
Her three-part film — The Diamond Eye Assembly/transvection/requiem for Wind and Water — was screened at the Remai this spring.
Atkins has since begun work on her next film, which explores the matriarch of her family, aunt Agatha Bock.
Agatha’s portrait hangs in the current exhibition.
In the exhibition’s lone film, Agatha’s sister Emelie Berlanda dresses her in layers upon layers of aprons, which had belonged to their mother, Atkins’ grandmother, also named Amalie.
The chapter is called Aprons, and was filmed in her grandparents’ farmhouse near Marquette, Man.
“The whole project was about matriarchy,” said Atkins, who describes Agatha as the matriarch of her family. “The documentary is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. But because I was working on this massive project, there was never extra time to go and shoot with her.
“She lives at my grandparents’ farm. She’s 85 years old. And she lives there every summer, growing this enormous garden. And she’s got some eccentric habits and collections of things. And so I’m looking at just kind of her daily life in the next project, like what she’s collected over time,” said Atkins.
“It seems like there could be potentially enough to do a feature, but I can’t start with that in mind, because it will feel overwhelming. So I’ll start with, it’s gonna be five minutes. And we’ll see what happens. And the thing is that these projects always lead to more.”