You are invited to experience art during Culture Days 2022
Check out the fun that the AGR and members of our community had during Culture Days 2022, Our free activities, gathered under the banner of We Are All Electric Beings included:
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Monday, September 26, 9:00 - 9:00 PM - Music for Plants Online Listening Party
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Thursday, September 29, 6:00 - 8:00 PM - Online Discussion: How Artists and Biologists See Plants Differently
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Thursday, October 13, 7:30 - 8:30 PM - Live Performance: Plant Spa by Alyssa Ellis
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Friday, October 14, 4:00 - 500 PM - Participatory Artwork: Plant Adoption by Alyssa Ellis
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Saturday, October 15, 2:00 - 4:00 PM - Stitching and Sharing Circle with Heather Shillinglaw (in partnership with Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective)
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Sunday, October 16, 2:00-4:00 PM - Daisy Chains to Polynucleotide Chains: Collage Activity for children
The Art Gallery of Regina's free and accessible Culture Days events for all ages related to the exhibition We Are All Electric Beings explore the many relationships between humans and plants — caretaking, nourishing, studying, evolutionary, familial — as interconnected players in ecosystems.
October 14: Plant Adoption (participatory artwork by Alyssa Ellis) photo by AGR staff
October 14: Plant Adoption (participatory artwork by Alyssa Ellis)
October 16: Daisy Chains to Polynucleotide Chains: Collage Activity [Background: Climate Anxiety by Rachel Broussard]
October 14: Plant Adoption (participatory artwork by Alyssa Ellis) photo by AGR staff
EVENTS
Music for Plants Listening Party
Monday, Sep 26, 2022
8:00-9:00
Virtual (Zoom, Facebook Live & YouTube)
Veg out with plant sounds on a Monday night.
Hosted by holophon audio arts' Ernie Dulanowsky, this listening session invites you to rediscover lost, outlandish and ultimately inspiring notions by artists creating sound not for an audience of fellow humans but for plants.
This live, online event builds upon holophon’s series of online listening sessions focusing on soundworks of note. Dunlanowsky facilitates the listening and provides historical context for the albums and composers, including impact on emerging genres of sound and music, critical reception, influence and the album's interaction with research disciplines and social thought of the time.
This listening session allows the public to rediscover lost, outlandish and ultimately inspiring notions by artists creating sound not for an audience of fellow humans but for plants.
Mort Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia (1976) and Plant Material (2017) by Toronto artist Jess Forrest, AKA Castle If, have been selected for the listening session. This audio journey takes listeners from the flakey edge of science (Garson was inspired by the book The Secret Life of Plants, written by occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird) to dreamy and genuinely adoring odes by a contemporary musical artist to her beloved houseplants.
Listening with houseplants is recommended.
Online Discussion: How Artists and Biologists See Plants Differently
Thursday, Sep 29, 2022
6:00 - 8:00 PM
watch online, on-demand (https://youtu.be/Khkwo2PYLSk)
This online discussion forum compares how artists represent plants and compares them with specimens from the George F. Ledingham Herbarium's collection.
Four artists (Heather Shillinglaw, Laurel Terlesky, Rachel Broussard, Alyssa Ellis) for whom the complex biology of plants is a subject will show and discuss examples of their work. Artists will discuss why they value the plants they depict in their artworks, how their method of representation reveals unseen or unknown qualities of their botanical subjects and their perspectives on the role of the artist.
A biologist will show a complimentary image of a dried plant specimen from the George F. Ledingham Herbarium's collection. The biologist will briefly outline the goals of biologists in representing plants and how their approach differs from that of artists. For example, all specimens must be uniform in presentation while novelty and invention are valued in the work of artists.
The discussion will also encompass connections between biologists' and artists' understanding of plants will also be discussed. For instance, artist Laurel Terlesky's botanical drawings illuminate when touched making visible the fact that all living beings carry an electrical charge on the surface of their cells.
Evolution, cultivation, extinction and domestication of plants are additional topics addressed by artists and biologists. Artist Heather Shillinglaw stitches a record in thread of traditional knowledge passed onto her from a family member and elder in her large-scale embroideries of medicine plants foraged by her ancestors.
Artist and horticulturalist Alyssa Ellis delves into the codependent relationship of care between humans and houseplants. Rachel Broussard uses plant and animal bodies cut from the pages of scientific textbooks to spell messages of environmental doom, recognizing the interconnectedness and vulnerability of all species in an ecosystem.
This forum will be recorded with ASL translation and can be viewed free, on-demand through the Art Gallery of Regina's website, YouTube account and Facebook videos.
Live Performance: Plant Spa
Thursday, Oct 13, 2022
7:30 - 8:30 PM
Art Gallery of Regina Main Gallery
Audiences can observe and participate as artist and horticulturalist Alyssa Ellis performs Plant Spa in her gallery installation comprised of pennants, plant tending tools, books on plant care, plants, and a specially-created audio score for 55 - 60 minutes. The score is distinguished by an intermittent, high-pitched ring, which was believed to stimulate growth and increase plant happiness in the urban environment.
Members of the community are invited treat their houseplants to a spa treatment performed in the gallery. (It is free to book a spa treatment for a companion plant; participation is limited to 14 plants allocated on a first-come, first served basis.)
Moving beyond self-focused self-care as a method of addressing societal trauma, tending to the needs of domestic plants presents new avenues of peace and healing for plant, practitioner, and plant owner.
Meditative in pace and action, Plant Spa immerses audiences in restful and informative experiences of plant grooming - leaf cleaning, replanting, and trimming - set to a score inspired by 1970s sonic research.
With her green hair and foliage-printed dresses, Ellis' presence is critical to the goals of her performance: to dissolve the distinction between human and the vegetal. In tending to the needs of plants and becoming plant-like herself, she models non-hierarchical ways for people to reimagine caring and mutually beneficial relationships with plants. Not as owner and object, but as equivalent beings who thrive in partnership.
Book a free spa treatment for your plant online: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/418216084567.
Live Performance: Plant Adoption
Friday, October 14, 2022
4:00 - 5:00 PM
Art Gallery of Regina Main Gallery
Artist and horticulturalist Alyssa Ellis invites the public to care for plants rescued and rehabilitated from dumpsters with her relational aesthetics artwork Plant Adoption.
The terms of the plant adoption contract vividly and viscerally underscore the burden of care and the long-term relationship that must evolve between plant and human; people must bring a vessel to house the plant to the gallery. A plant could be planted in a non-traditional container, such as a jacket pocket or a travel mug, but the plant parent must agree to maintain the plant in this container for its life.
Plants are available for adoption on a first-come, first-served basis.
Stitching and Sharing Circle(in partnership with Sâkêwêwak Artists’ Collective)
Saturday, Oct 15, 2022
2-4 PM
Art Gallery of Regina Main Gallery
Join Métis artist Heather Shillinglaw, who creates fibre art portraits of traditional medicinal plants, for a Stitching and Sharing Circle on Saturday, October 15 from 2-4 PM at the Art Gallery of Regina (2420 Elphinstone St).
Shillinglaw will open the stitching and sharing circle with a poetic spoken account of the relationships she has formed with land and tradition through her research. Shillinglaw and her mother, Elder Shirley Norris Shillinglaw, will share stories and their knowledge of medicinal plants from their family's traditional territory. Following the sharing circle model, everyone will have an opportunity to speak and share.
In lieu of recording or photographing this gathering, a record of the stitching and sharing circle will take the form of a communally-created stitched item. The act of stitching both creates cohesion and a sense of fellowship amongst the group while also serving to sooth anxieties that can accompany speaking in a public context.
Although all are welcome to attend, the purpose of this event is to create a space for speaking and sharing based on shared experiences and building a common understanding.
Stitching and sharing circle is presented in partnership with Sâkêwêwak Artists' Collective.
Daisy Chains to Polynucleotide Chains: Collage Activity
Sunday, Oct 16, 2022
2:00-4:00 PM
FREE (register online)
Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre's Weaving Studio, 2420 Elphinstone Street, Regina
Inspired by artist Rachel Broussard's lacy collages that speculatively reorganize the phylogenetic tree, children are invited to image new hybrids of plant and animal in this collage activity.
Cut vivid flowers, fish, birds and mammals from scientific textbooks and nature magazines, then paste them together to create festive chains, while speculating on the purpose of colouration, inherited traits, the ways plants and animals interact, and human uses of plants.
This art activity for children who can use scissors (independently or with the assistance of a parent or guardian) is guided by Art Gallery of Regina staff. Children can take home their multispecies chain to decorate their rooms.
This activity is offered in conjunction with the Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre. Follow this link to register and secure free spots in this workshop.
The Art Gallery of Regina requests that visitors to the building wear a mask, especially when events do not permit social distancing. Please do not visit if you have or suspect you have COVID-19.