Art Gallery of Swift Current, Swift Current; Little Gallery, Prince Albert; Rosemont Art Gallery, Regina; Estevan Art Gallery and Museum, Estevan; Allie Griffin Art Gallery, Weyburn; Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery, Moose Jaw; Prairie Art Gallery, Grande Prairie; Gordon Snelgrove Gallery, Saskatoon, 2002 – 2003
With Honor Kever
Artist’s statement:
In 1999 I began a series of paintings whose intention was to examine the construction of identity. I began with images from my father’s life, altered and invented on to suggest a larger meaning. The choice of images came from the experience which suggested the project. My father died from a tumour located in the left front brain. During his last months he no longer knew who he was, at least not in the ways we usually think of. Still, it seemed in some sense that he knew who I was. It seemed that when I was with him he knew how to react, knew that I would know how to react to him. It almost seemed that I became his context. My father had been forced by circumstance to leave every aspect of the life he had known. Had he been surrounded by the objects that defined him, would he have needed me to re-create himself? Those things all around us, what do they truly say?
Private collection
Private collection
Private collection
Private collection
Private collection
Collection of the artist
Private collection
Private collection
From the exhibition statement:
The exhibition Bequest came about because Honor Kever and Laureen Marchand realized we had both been producing paintings based on our respective parents’ lives and that our individual approaches would make a compelling visual statement. The paintings by Honor Kever, although realistically rendered, are oddly dream-like, with a sense that not everything is as it seems. The images are pared down to quiet moments, sometimes punctuated by small movements, and charged with moods that range from foreboding to transcendent. Laureen Marchand’s paintings originated in questions: What is the role of family in the construction of personal one’s identity? Does identity change as family changes? What constitutes one’s definition of the self? Does others’ response to self help one to know who one is? Because the illness which ended Marchand’s father’s life raised these questions, the images are taken from scenes in that life. However, they are not literal depictions of experience, but are altered and invented to suggest something more ephemeral.