Age of Anxieties

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Audrey Dreaver, "Dark Without Black," 2006

acrylic on canvas, 60" x 60"

Indigenous artist Audrey Dreaver’s painting, Dark Without Black, based on an archival photograph from the Holy Angels residential school in Fort Chipewyan, Alta., shows native children kneeling before a wooden packing crate. Dreaver’s work is part of Anxieties, a group show that runs to Feb. 2 at the Art Gallery of Regina. She and other artists – including Kevin McKenzie, Sylvia Ziemann, Lionel Peyachew and Sarah Ferguson – look at issues of fear, considering everything from Prairie Gothic and flatlander fright to the bogeyman and colonialism. 

Sarah Ferguson, “Suckerfish,” 2016

Kevin McKenzie, “Dead Apostle,” 2016

In her essay, guest curator Carmen Robertson, an art historian at the University of Regina, writes: “Through the gothic imagination, the unconscious is free to seep out into the world. Prairie Gothic tropes took hold artistically in Saskatchewan during the 20th century, mostly confined to realizing settler experience in relation to a gruelling and stark landscape. More recently, new layers of aesthetic experience make contemporary Prairie Gothic aesthetics a ready platform to explore a wider range of individualized trauma, carnal desires, and complex psychological states often manifested through concepts of the uncanny.”

Robertson notes that Sigmund Freud coined the term “uncanny effect” as a blurring between the known and unknown, as for instance, when something imaginary appears in reality or when a symbol takes over for what it symbolizes. Later French philosopher Jacques Derrida suggested the uncanny is something both familiar and unfamiliar. Robertson notes Dreaver’s painting works by conflating the unseen religious icon with the visible crate, blurring the imaginary and the real.