Amalie Atkins

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Amalie Atkins, “Requiem for Wind and Water,” 2018

film still (courtesy of the artist)

A map of strange landmarks – Disappearing Island, Witch’s Cave and Kryoor: Village of Abandoned Churches – introduces visitors to the latest work from the hallucinatory world of Saskatchewan artist Amalie Atkins. The boundaries of this world are charted as a cloud of hypnagogic smoke billowing from an oven fed with diamonds by a hunchbacked grandmother.

Atkins identifies her Russian and Ukrainian Mennonite heritage, rich in stories, the symbolism of faith and ancestral trauma, as the source of the vivid visions in The Diamond Eye Assembly, a trilogy of filmic fairy tales on view at Saskatoon’s Remai Modern until June 9.

Panels of thick, red wool draped from ceiling to floor divide the gallery into three muffled chambers. Inside each, a projector clicks through a loop of 16mm film like a monster noisily devouring fantastical images.

Anachronistic rather than nostalgic, the films embrace the cockeyed logic of the folk tale. Illogical and unpredictable threats to tenuous peasant existence require an equally illogical tongue, that of poetry and its metaphors, similes and homophones.

Two 25-minute films, The Diamond Eye Assembly and Requiem for Wind and Water, echo Atkins’ previous fantastical films. The central chamber provides respite from their giddy action with Transvection, previously shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It features three sets of twins soaring and falling, their matching red pinafores flaring, through a vertical band of clouds.

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Amalie Atkins, “The Diamond Eye Assembly,” 2018

film still (courtesy of the artist)

Scenes and images in the first film, The Diamond Eye Assembly, flow like a child’s logic, bubbling up with everything seen and touched, tasted and felt. The braided hair is light, a talisman of power. The bread is light, a talisman of flour.

A woman rides a bicycle through the woods to pick berries. She feels a whispering touch – one of her golden braids is severed. She flees. Then: dancing and disaster. Small girls, joined like the blades of scissors, stir and knead dough that an old woman forms into a pair of shoes. The bread shoes are part of a mysterious funeral rite for the golden-haired woman. Her body lies on the kitchen table, her head hidden from view by the window frame.

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Amalie Atkins, “The Diamond Eye Assembly,” 2018

film still (courtesy of the artist)

In the third film, Requiem for Wind and Water, the braids are dark, a talisman of power. The bread is dark, a talisman of flour.

In a tent made from bowed saplings and aprons, brunette twins sift dirt and pebbles into cake pans, concocting a feast of bread and sweets. This delectable trap lures the witch, a canny reversal of authority to favour children. This final film meanders and rushes with the logic of a river, or the depths of the subconscious, toward the triumph of the doubled heroines, who harvest a bounty of dark plaits from their defeated foe.

Atkins’ vision speaks to persecution and the precarity of subsistence farming. In a world without justice or causal logic, superstition gives form to fears that are warded off with the everyday alchemy of embroidery and baking.  ■

The Diamond Eye Assembly is on view at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon from April 5 to June 9, 2019.