Queer Art on the Prairies

A uniquely regional and homespun vision of queerness reflected in sweeping survey exhibition.

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On the Prairies, living and creating in the shadows of a mythologized past and modern-day dismissal, are artists whose practices reflect a uniquely regional and homespun vision of queerness. 

Curated for Regina's Dunlop Art Gallery by Blair Fornwald and Gary Varro, Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies is a sweeping survey that spans both of the gallery's locations. 

Altogether, it includes 14 artists from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta under the umbrella of “queer,” a word reclaimed in what philosopher Michel Foucault calls a “reverse discourse.”

While some of the artists, including Kablusiak, Zachari Logan, Daniel Barrow, Adrian Stimson and Cindy Baker, are known nationally, others, like Nik Forrest, Daniel Cardinal McCartney and Lasha Mowchun, are more firmly ensconced in regional terrain.

Lethbridge-based Megan Morman's rainbow-hued replicas of bandana squares reveal the surprising queerness of prairie archetypes. Sometime in the mid-20th century, the hankie migrated from the cowboy's neck to the back pockets of gay cruisers. These humble squares of paisley cotton became covert semaphores for prohibited sexual desires. 

Morman’s conversion of soft cloth to brittle plastic relegates the handkerchiefs to the realm of ornament in a present where drones have replaced cowboys and hook-up apps have rendered the colourful hankie code obsolete. 

Another of Morman’s works, a doubled self-portrait fashioned from fused plastic beads, encapsulates the show’s key themes of the body and kitchen-table craft aesthetics. 

Separated by years and hormone treatments, Megan past and Megan present face away from each other like Janus, the two-headed Roman god of transitions. Under close examination, these perfect renderings of the artist's male and female identities become a jumble of colours, a metaphor for gender binaries that dissolve with scrutiny.

The body is a crucial site for artists from sexual and gender minorities that are not heterosexual or cisgender. Tapping into Prairie Gothic strategies of perverse surreality, they take the body beyond gender. 

For instance, the biological kingdoms of Animalia and Plantae mingle in Métis artist Sheri Nault's sculptures. Tree limbs drip with dark strands of hair. Trickles of wax form grasping hands that invite us to embrace a radical openness to others. 

Meanwhile, the Phomohobes collage collective, composed of Regina’s Jason Cawood and Winnipeg’s Colby Richardson, combines body parts, consumer goods and landscape in a cut-and-paste orgy of consumer images that effectively erase distinctions between decor, fashion, pornography and tourism.

Otherness, in the Dunlop’s satellite gallery in the Sherwood Village branch of the Regina Public Library, is rendered non-threateningly crafty and domestic. Here, melannie monoceros, a black non-binary poet and artist based in Winnipeg, evokes the groovy home decor of the 1970s in macramé wall hangings. 

This soothingly repetitive craft is tied to its fabled North African origins with portraits of visionary black writers, visual artists and activists who serve as role models and cultural touchstones. The dense coils of wool, embedded with talismanic objects, are an analogue for the politically potent signifier of natural hair.

Among the show’s pointed and playful representations of queerness are digital photographs by Winnipeg-born artist Rosalie Favell. Her 1999 self-portrait, I Dreamed of Being a Warrior, illustrates most effectively how queer artists, especially those with intersectional identities, rely on nostalgia and camp to render themselves quaintly harmless. 

Clad in the gladiatorial leather of lesbian pop-culture icon Xena: Warrior Princess, Favell clutches a dream-catcher like a weapon against a cheesy starry-sky backdrop. She demonstrates how her identity as a lesbian and an Indigenous person, is merely comprised of a symbolic vocabulary and, in this construction, is likeably safe. ■

Off-Centre: Queer Contemporary Art in the Prairies is on view at the Dunlop Art Gallery from July 12 to Sept. 15 and at the Sherwood Gallery from June 22 to Sept. 8, 2019.

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Dunlop Art Gallery

2311 12 Ave (PO Box 2311), Regina, Saskatchewan S4P 3Z5

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