ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Some of Saskatchewan's best-known artists - Agnes Martin, Art McKay, and Bob Boyer - have been abstract artists. Although popularly assumed to be purely formal and free of content, abstract artworks, historically and today, are a new language to convey what is beyond words. The process of creating an artwork is a ritual that brings artists into contact with metaphysical truths. Nikki Middlemiss and Peter Tucker continue the sensitive work of their artistic fore-bearers,

Middlemiss' large-scale drawings from the Elevate series are collaborations with her materials, the fortuitous magic of vellum and liquid media authoring the work as much as the artist. The thin membranes of translucent paper buckle, pucker, dimple, wrinkle in response to the application of diluted ink and oily pigments while folding or sanding crisscross the surface with pale scars.

Drawing for Middlemiss, however, is not about depicting but about process. The delicate textures of her weightless drawings trace a sensitive record of their creation (and deterioration), leading viewers to ultimately reflect upon the fragility, resilience, and unpredictability of our lives.

Tucker's single, monumental sculpture Holon is not a hulking monolith but a gentle spiral comprised of dozens of oblongs of different varieties of wood. Holon, the artist notes, means a group, such as a school of fish, that moves as a single entity. Tucker united scraps of wood, both precious and ordinary, in his sculpture that optimistically imagines a diverse group moving as one. Tuckers' care is apparent in each hand-smoothed piece of wood, the size and shape of the hollow that forms between cupped hands. His craftsmanship is evident in the feat of balancing and suspending this 9-foot tall structure so that it soars rather than menaces.

Abstraction is often perceived as encoded with the worst elements of toxic masculinity emerging in the mid-twentieth century: disconnected, unfeeling, chilly intellectualism. Middlemiss and Tucker give form to the deeply felt and inexpressible in the spare essentials of abstraction: line, mass, and material.