AGSM exhibit focuses on artist’s family tragedy

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This article was published 17/04/2012 (5173 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Retelling the story of a traumatic family tragedy, an exhibition of close to 100 works by more than 50 Manitoba artists opens this week at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba.

“With Alec in Mind” is curated by Winnipeg writer, curator and artist J.J. Kegan McFadden.

Using selected works from the Manitoba Arts Council Art Bank Collection, McFadden revisits the 1995 murder of his great-uncle, Alexander Tabolotney, by his grandson, on his homestead in rural Manitoba.

This methodology of “curator as storyteller” positions the works from the collection as parts in a narrative constructed through the exhibition, while a series of audio pieces act as nodes through which the narrative unfolds.

By offering his personal stories as a sound guide to the exhibition, McFadden invites viewers to share in his private remembering and opens a dialogue about family history and its role within the public sphere.

The exhibition also includes traces of Alec’s life, such as clothing, furniture, rusted cans and old tools found on his property. These mundane objects, as they connect to the artworks through McFadden’s personal storytelling, suggest a meditation on the poetics of the everyday: things that we all inhabit but often take for granted.

As parts of his narrative, McFadden imbues unrelated pieces from the collection with new meaning, thus suggesting the possibility of encountering the artwork as an intensely personal moment.

Aganetha Dyck’s Prairie Held (1988), a collection of jars filled with beeswax, buttons, cigarette ashes and other found materials, signifies the rows of food preserves lining Alec’s hallway as a young man, while their abject contents point to the dark moment of Alec’s death years later in the same hallway.

In turn, Janet Carroll’s series of marbled paper titled Lichens (1991) become blood splatter.

A row of landscapes, their horizon lines aligning along an entire wall, expand around a massive painting by Shirley Brown, Norman’s House (1991), in which the house from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “Psycho,” looms over a prairie drive-in theatre.

In these transformations, the boundary between the agency of the curator and the artist is blurred, removing the artists’ original intentionality in the images and replacing it with personal storytelling.

Through this exhibition, McFadden suggests that the process of imaginative reconstruction carries the potential for healing, or at least coming to terms with, his family tragedy.

Opening with a reception and an artist-led tour on Thursday at 7:30 p.m., “With Alec in Mind” will continue until June 9, and will be accompanied by an artist book.

The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba can be accessed either from The Town Centre parkade, or from the first floor of The Town Centre through the elevators near the library.

» Brandon Sun