Beyond the Stone Angel

Artists reflect on the deaths of their parents in poignant show.

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Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in the preface to The Interpretation of Dreams, refers to his father’s death as “the most significant event, the deepest loss, in the life of a man.” This bereavement motivated Freud to publish his long-delayed work.

Grief continues to inspire creative acts today. Following the loss of his own parents, curator Timothy Long began to assemble the exhibition Beyond the Stone Angel: Artists Reflect on the Deaths of Their Parents. He chose works by 12 Canadian contemporary artists, some new and some from the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s permanent collection, in an exhibition where, as he says, “stone-like opacity and spiritual transcendence overlap creating poignant monuments to the life-givers who have left.”

In this exhibition, funerary signifiers – ash, flowers, grave markers and the night sky – are surrogates for loved ones, a focus for care and attention. But Winnipeg artist Bev Pike’s Ghost Series seizes upon a less ritualized but equally familiar mourning rite: dealing with the deceased’s belongings. Pike’s delicate monochromatic mixed-media works are installed in a narrow passage with black walls. The cramped space magnifies their impact. Crammed with belongings, whether carefully ordered or carelessly stacked, they are overlaid with faint images that hint at the life that still clings to these objects. Pike’s careful record belies her frustration at a world unchanged by this death as she folds, organizes and packages the material record of a life.

Beyond The Stone Angel moves from the abject to the profound, and from haunted objects to living memorials, exemplified by I Cried, a new sculpture by Regina artist and choreographer Robin Poitras. Her narrow slab of ashy marble evokes a headstone with an inexhaustible fount of tears. Twin bands of liquid dribble from copper pipes to collect in a basin, a reservoir of sadness. The leaking eyeholes transform the sculpture from object to living presence. It might be surprising that Poitras, primarily known as a dancer and performance artist, would create a marble sculpture; however, the work reveals that weeping can be a kind of performance that impresses our anguish on others.

Sometimes, the pain of a parent’s approaching demise can be lessened by performing ritualized acts. Photographs by Toronto-based Erika DeFreitas function both as a memento mori and as a self-invented practice to ward off her mother’s death – or, at least, to mark it with a joyful hybrid of birthday cake decorations and funerary florals. The faces of the artist and her mother are photographed as if laid out on a mortician’s slab and displayed in a grid of 48 inkjet prints. Each subsequent image sees the addition of roses made from swirls of buttercream icing that eventually bury their faces beneath a confectionary mound.

The undimmed brilliance of distant constellations offers solace in a world that grows darker each day. Montreal interdisciplinary performance artist Shauna Beharry officially named a star, You who are Older than us, in memory of her father, Amos, who died in isolation in a care facility in Moose Jaw last year. The installation at the MacKenzie includes a video of stars from Worldwide Telescope, an open source astronomical website, and a vitrine containing the traces of offerings – a folded square of cloth (dhotï), marigold petals and star maps – made by the artist to accompany the donation of You who are Older than us to the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Meaningfully, her project offers participatory rituals to recognize and process loss: the artist invited individuals around the world to light candles to mark pandemic losses and to metaphorically feast upon starlight in a celestial memorial. She has posthumously reunited her parents in the arts board collection by adding You who are Older than us to a jar containing traces of a previous performance marking the death of her mother, Hyacinth, in 1991.

At a time when many people are distanced from their support networks, Beyond the Stone Angel dispels alienation through a communal experience of loss. ■  

Beyond the Stone Angel: Artists Reflect on the Deaths of Their Parents at the MacKenzie Art Gallery from Oct. 14, 2021, to Feb. 13, 2022. Curated by Timothy Long with artists Gabriela Agüero, Laura Barrón, Shauna Beharry, Deborah Carruthers, Erika DeFreitas, Sherry Farrell Racette, Gabriela García-Luna, Spring Hurlbut, Zachari Logan, Bev Pike, Robin Poitras and Lyla Rye.

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