The opening reception and artist’s talk for the latest exhibition at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery (MJMAG) is coming up on Friday, Sep. 22, featuring Métis art professor Katherine Boyer.
Boyer’s exhibition is called “How the Sky Carries the Sun.” It will be featured in the Norma Lang Art Gallery from Sep. 22 to Dec. 31, 2023, alongside historian Dr. Claire Thomson’s guest curation of Lakota beadwork and historical artifacts.
The opening reception for Thomson’s “Wakšúpi: Lakota Beadwork” is Thursday, Sep. 28 at 7 p.m. as part of the annual Every Child Matters powwow.
Boyer received her undergraduate Fine Arts degree from the University of Regina, and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba. She currently holds a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art.
Her exhibition “How the Sky Carries the Sun” is an examination of her own dual identities as a white Settler and as Métis. Boyer grew up in Regina and spent considerable time at her grandparent’s farm in Grenfell. Her Métis heritage comes from her father, but that part of her identity was learned later in life — something she has put much time and effort into discovering. She also integrates aspects of her identity as a Queer person, giving her yet another personal layer to interweave and explore in her art.
She expresses these relationships and their possible and realized dichotomies as a contrast between the sun and the sky.
Boyer created all new work for this exhibition, primarily woodwork and beadwork: traditional beading suspended on free-standing, wooden structures, cyanotypes depicting garden plants, lightboxes that use quilting but act as trusses, and knots that close obsessive cycles of labour.
Boyer uses the exhibition title as an invisible through-line for structural support to explore the edges of a Queer, Métis phenomenology, that helps the artist ask "Am I the sky or am I the sun?", an important question about disorganized experiences and self-consciousness. Placing hard and soft components in complementary and mutually supportive relationships that lay the ground for this internal, yet critical, dialogue, How the Sky Carries the Sun presents installation-based work that allows Boyer to rotate between process and materials.
Don’t miss Katherine Boyer at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Sept. 22 at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery. Local Moose Jaw artist Ross Melanson will join Boyer to open his exhibition Life Drawings, exploring the poetic, continuous-line drawing visual meditations he is known for.
Learn more online at www.mjmag.ca/upcoming.
