The Flower may not Look like the Roots

Sat, May 1, 2021 to Sun, May 23, 2021 @ Sherven-Smith Art Gallery

Community: Melfort Arts Council

Education Packages: FlowerEdGuide.pdf

Everything I needed to know about Regional Identity, I learned from Artists

Curated by Jera MacPherson and toured thorough OSAC’s Arts on the Move program. Featuring Sarah Fougere, Bonnie Gilmour, Barbara Meneley, Vera Saltzman, Carol Schmold, Crystal Thorburn, and Sarah Timewell.

With attitudes ranging from the microscopic to the cartographic, the seven artists of The Flower may not Look like the Roots1 cultivate contemporary relationships to landscape, ecology2, and regional identity that respond to local communities past, present and future. The work plants its roots deep and long ago but to ends that are contemporary and evolving. These renegotiations of a well worn-in genre materialize themselves in clay, paint, video, drawing, and textile. Each of the various artistic mediums employed by the artists supply generous insight into the ways in which geography and sense of place figure into the personal landscapes of their own minds. Yet collected together, the suggestion of a regional voice begins to assemble. One that is rooted in history and place, but whose flowers are open and receptive to the conceptual intricacies of region-building.

"The flower may not look like the roots, but from them it derives its life. Similarly regional visions derive their life from the landscape. This is the meaning of regionalism. The regional voice is the landscape. Without it there is no art." Arthur Adamson, "Notes from the Dark Cellar: Ruminations on the Nature of Regionalism and Metaphor in Mid-Western Canadian Poetry, in RePlacing, ed. Dennis Cooley (Downsview: ECW Press, 1980), 224.
2 "The really existing, true state of interdependency manifested in the relation of all living things." Artist-made definition. Daniel Tuck, Immersive Life Practices (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014).