The Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery is preparing for three new installations to be featured this October, each one exploring a different perspective of life on the prairies.
Museum curator Jennifer McRorie is looking forward to all three of the incoming shows, two of which are collections put together by local artists Russell Mang and Edie Marshall.
Both artists are featuring a collection of landscape paintings, although each with a different perspective.
“We always want to support local artists,” said McRorie. “And I thought those works together would be interesting, both looking at landscapes in different ways.”
Mang’s show — titled Time, Presence, Place — features familiar scenes from in and around the Wakamow Valley and Moose Jaw. Mang’s work blends the lines between drawing and painting, creating elegant and present frames of Mang’s experience of the land around him.
“He's interested in really trying to be present and respond to place as he's working, and really connect with the environment that he's in,” said McRorie.
Each piece is even marked with the longitude and latitude of its location, creating a connection for both artists and audiences to experience the same place.
Marshall’s collection, titled Terrain, also focuses on depicting the experience of a landscape as well, although her oil paintings are each a recreation of digital images taken on a road trip through the Great Plains of North America.
There are around 1,000 pieces in Marshall’s installation, depicting the experience of being in the passenger seat of a moving car with only the scenery to appreciate.
“It’s sort of looking at how digital imagery is influencing how we see the world. It's about moments in time, as well,” said McRorie. “Russel is sort of about time and place, and [Marshall’s] work has that element as well.”
Alongside these two collections of paintings, a photography exhibit curated by Wayne Baerwaldt will also be debuting at the gallery.
Field Portraits of Contemporary Western Culture will feature five artists from Canada and the U.S. who have found subjects from rural lifestyles — “cowboy culture,” as McRorie describes it.
“It's portraiture that gives a sense of and builds up the myth of the West,” said McRorie. “It is images from the Canadian West seen through the eyes of different artists.”
While each photographer calls a different place home, all of them traveled to Alberta and Saskatchewan for their work, attending rodeos and connecting with ranchers to capture their human subjects in their element.
McRorie hopes that by pairing all three of these shows, people will appreciate the differing perspectives of the prairies.
“Landscape painting is very prominent in this province,” said McRorie. “And with the photography show, I think it will work really well together, in giving the different sense of the prairies.”
All three shows will be open on Oct. 10, with a joined grand opening for Russel Mang’s Time, Presence, Place and Edie Marshall’s Terrain that evening at 7 p.m.
The grand opening for Field Portraits of Contemporary Western Culture will take place on Oct. 18 at 7:30 p.m., with a panel discussion by the artists.
The shows will be available at the MJMAG until Jan. 5. More information can be found on the MJMAG’s website.
