Ritual & Lore

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Maia Stark, “How it Feels,” 2020

gouache on panel, 18” x 14” (courtesy the artist)

I left Ritual & Lore, an exhibition by seven artists at the Art Gallery of Regina, with an unusual memento in my pocket – a photocopied index card of a hand-written recipe for “Blair’s Grandma Leona’s Chocolate Molasses Cookies,” which I had picked up next to a wooden cutting board turned into a ouija board. 

Although Recipe Book of the Dead, by Blair Fornwald and Brette Gabel, is the only work in the show that invites you to remove an installation component, all the artists deal generously in both personal histories and rituals, imparting a sense of their worldview and the traditions from which they stem. 

Repetition – a feature of folklore, rituals and oral histories – figures centrally in the works on display: twinning in Saskatoon artist Maia Stark’s autobiographical yet inventively uncanny fairy tales, repeated motifs and symbols in Marigold Santos’ envisionings of Filipino folklore, and the Ukrainian folk dances rehearsed over and over during Ayla Dmyterko’s childhood.

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Ayla Dmyterko, “Solastalgic Soliloquy,” 2020, video (courtesy the artist)

Through acts of making, such as traditional skin-stitching and quillwork, Métis artist Audie Murray feels connected to her relatives. By spending hours with her family harvesting quills from roadkill porcupine, chatting with her grandma and boiling chestnuts and acorns to make the dyes used in Portal Rug, the relationships between the land, self and others reveal themselves as having been there all along. 

Nearby, a spell is cast over and over: “From 248 to 172. May this spell make it true. This weight leaves me in a healthy way. Calmly, easily, without obsession.” Regina artist Zoë Schneider’s eight concrete Moon Pools, filled with ritual objects from witchcraft and diet culture, re-enact the waxing and waning cycles of the moon.

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Audie Murray, “Portal Rug,” 2020

canvas, harvested acorn hat ink, acorn nut ink, horse chestnut ink, 53” x 78” (courtesy the artist)

The works in the show, curated by Jess Richter and on view until Oct. 31, are stories to be passed down, with lore borne from conversations with self and ancestors. Their beauty rests in what Dmyterko refers to as “generational slippage” – the spots where the dancing is clumsy, the memory hazy, the tale half-borrowed, the process imperfect, the recipe a dash here or a pinch there. 

These lapses between past customs and present-day re-imaginings reveal the contemporary telling of stories. The traditions that inform these works, be they cultural, familial or spiritual, exist within the context of daily life. The moments where they cannot be perfectly articulated are whispered encouragement for how far the artists have come and the strengths they have borrowed. ■ 

Ritual & Lore at the Art Gallery of Regina from Aug. 28 to Oct. 31, 2020.

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