MOHADESE MOVAHED: The Burden of Street
The 
Burden of Street brings together paintings that depict contradictory compositions to provide distinct visual experiences while exploring the complexities of our surrounding built environment. The element of the wall plays a significant role in this body of work as public sites for dwellers to engage with the political and social fabric of society. These paintings aim to explore the dichotomy of walls as both tools of control and platforms for resistance. They delve into how authorities use these walls to impose their ideologies and values upon the people, while also emphasizing the agency of dissidents who transform these spaces into channels of protest and expression. A diverse range of artistic techniques and mediums, including collage, painting, drawing, and graffiti, are used to create satirical and ironic situations that reference the deep dualities, disparities, and hypocrisies inherent in ruling systems.
Iranian born visual artist, Mohadese Movahed focuses on painting in her studio practice. She graduated with a Bachelor of painting degree from the University of Science and Culture (USC) in Tehran and an MFA from the University of Regina, SK, Canada in 2020. Currently based in Vancouver, Movahed has exhibited her work nationally, internationally and is a recipient of Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
Mohadese Movahed, Burden of Street, oil on canvas, 9x12 inches, 2021
PATRICK FERNANDEZ: Mga Piraso mula sa Paraiso (Pieces from Paradise)
These series of works are excerpt from my previous exhibition “TADHANA”. These works explore the views as newcomer’s common concept that "fate brought us here" and the most common Filipino outlook of "bahala na" / "come what may" attitude which is prevalent to anyone. However, this attitude is not only a visible trait for newcomer alone, but these are also actually a day-to-day outlook of everyone just varying on expression and terms. The exhibition aims to finds parallels within culture to create better understanding of each and everyone’s' disposition in life.
These bodies of work centres on the ideas of “fate” while relating it to the quest for hierarchy of the modern society. As we live in a time that is always hungry for accomplishment, results and evidence of success, I want to elaborate the significance of fate thru commentaries using characters of reimagined folklore of my culture, patterns and juxtaposed imagery in order to give new meaning on how fate will lead us to one’s self discovery and freedom.
Patrick Fernandez is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in Regina, Saskatchewan. A native of Pangasinan, Philippines, his colourful paintings use symbolism and reimagined folklore imagery as a means of storytelling. His works are based on personal experiences that deal with displacement and adaptation, using circumstances as turning points for growth.
Patrick Fernandez, Bahay Kubo (Nipa Hut), acrylic on canvas, 24” x 30”
VANESSA HYGGEN: ôma askiy âpacihcikâtîw (this land is in use)
This body of work highlights the diversity, beauty, importance and plight of northern Saskatchewan muskegs, land that is being threatened with strip mining. Presently, there is a peat mining project being proposed in different areas in northern Saskatchewan with the potential for the company to be granted 80–100-year leases. Peat mining involves draining the water out of the muskeg then mulch the cover vegetation (sundews, pitcher plants, Labrador tea, black spruce, birch, willows, alders, cranberries, bunchberries, cloudberries, bog laurel, leatherleaf, and dozens of species of mosses). Muskegs/peatlands are very old landscapes, it takes 10 years for one centimeter of peat to form. I believe it is important to my culture, and to the survival of traditions and knowledge to keep wild areas intact and undisturbed by resource extraction. I’ve spent a lot of time in the muskeg, taking photos and painting and beading from those photos. Each piece is an homage to the species that live in the muskeg, if the areas are mined, they become a record of what once was. Many people are unfamiliar with these areas, and this is my way of bringing the muskeg to the public.
Vanessa is a Canadian artist of Woodlands Cree and Norwegian ancestry. She is a member of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band and her community is nemepith sipihk (Sucker River). She holds her Bachelor of Arts with distinction from the University of Saskatchewan. Vanessa is interested in utilizing memory, tradition and themes of nature in her work. Land conservation and land sovereignty are at the heart of her work, with her painting and beadwork focusing on the richness of the land, and in turn, the threats to the land.
Vanessa has work in the Indigenous Art Collection in the Government of Canada, the University of Saskatchewan, the University of Manitoba, and at the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Research Fashion Collection, and designed a MMIWG2S tribute and awareness bus shelter for Saskatoon Transit.
Top: Vanessa Hyggen, Marsh cinquefoil, miyuki beads on pellon, 8" x 8" 2022, Bottom: Vanessa Hyggen, Creeping snowberry, acrylic on canvas, 20" x 20" 2022
CATHERINE BLACKBURN, LORI BLONDEAU, XIAO HAN, MARIAM MAGSI, MERYL MCMASTER, LAURA ST.PIERRE: Storied Telling: Performativity & Narrative in Photography
Organized by Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery;
Touring Saskatchewan through the Organization of Saskatchewan Arts Councils;
Curated by Jennifer McRorie & Brianna LaPlante
The exhibition, Storied Telling, features photographic works by Canadian artists, whose images present as lens-based performance. The photographs reflect a performative nature, taken as video stills or documentation of performance art or presented as elaborate figurative compositions within settings that border on the fantastical or are imagined recreations of historic scenarios. In their adornment and positioning within their environments, the subjects of the photographs become powerfully iconographic.
The resulting images are rife with story, reflecting diverse narratives that are poetic, political, surreal, spiritual, or perhaps even mythic; stories that inform and speak to cultural and diaspora identities that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew through transformation and difference.
Meryl McMaster, What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth I, digital C-print, 45 x 30”, 2019