ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Thank you for visiting the Art Gallery of Regina to experience the exhibition An Accidental Forever by Theo Pelmus and Kristin Snowbird, which runs from August 15 to October 18, 2025. Before entering the gallery, please use the coat rack in our welcome area or place large bags on the floor inside the gallery doors.

Please take care not to damage artworks and the technology we’ve provided allows you to experience their artwork, which primarily takes the form of performance art. What you see in this exhibition is documentation, including photographs, films, and video recordings, of the artists performing and the costumes they wear in their performances.

Photos are permitted. If you post pictures from our exhibition, tag the Art Gallery of Regina and the artists.

Please visit our welcome table inside the gallery doors for helpful items and gallery information, including self-guided tour pamphlets written in plain English.

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Please help yourself to sensory tools for use in the gallery from the baskets located under the white table. There are earmuffs for those sensitive to sound, dark glasses for people with light sensitivity, and fidget toys for those who wish to keep their hands busy. Please return these items upon completion of your visit.

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We have divided our gallery space with three movable walls on wheels. Please don't lean against gallery walls: they are easily marked, and we want to protect artworks from damage by being brushed against. We have soft upholstered benches in the gallery where visitors can rest.

Please ask the gallery staff if you would like assistance navigating our gallery, which changes with each exhibition.

Start outside the gallery doors:

I'm Sandee Moore, Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of Regina. I'm delighted to guide you through this exhibition of artworks made together or singly by married artists Theo Pelmus and Kristin Snowbird.

Directly in front of of the entrance doors, you'll see the exhibition's didactic panel inside the gallery. Didactic means intended to teach; an exhibition didactic panel includes information that helps visitors understand and learn about an exhibition. This didactic panel consists of the artists' names, the exhibition dates and title, An Accidental Forever, and a short introduction I wrote for this show.

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Titles of artworks and exhibitions are intended to direct viewers' thoughts and help them understand the message of an artist or curator. The artists chose to call their exhibition "An Accidental Forever" because it reflects their story.

They never imagined that they would be married, a promise to stay together forever, when Theo moved to Canada from Romania with his first wife. An Accidental Forever goes beyond describing Theo and Kristin’s chance coming together and commitment to each other and their shared art practice; it also references the lasting impact and importance of other meaningful relationships to their lives and art practice: family, traditions, and the land.

“We are like people from two different planets,” Theo observes. “Without the invention of airplanes, a Romanian and an Ojibwe/Cree person would not have come together.”

 

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Let’s begin this tour by looking at the mannequins on either side of the didactic panel.

The one on the left is titled Jingle Dress. A jingle dress is a type of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) women's dance regalia is adorned with rows of metal cones that create a rhythmic jingling sound. The jingle dress in An Accidental Forever doesn’t look like a traditional jingle dress. The flattened jingles overlap to cover the dancer’s body more completely, like scales or armour. This mannequin also wears a mask, adorned with dried flowers and a golden bird plus various items of jewelry and a medicine bag that has sweet grass and sage, which would be presents for the jingle dancer. The jingle dance is a healing dance and is often performed for people who can’t dance themselves; the dancer would then receive these medicines as gifts in thanks for their dancing. By bringing all these elements together, Kristin acknowledges that if you are a dancer who dances to heal others, it’s essential to protect yourself, too.  

The one on the right is titled Ribbon Skirt. This ribbon skirt contrasts with a traditional version because it is crafted from reflective, safety fabric. The top, made entirely of ribbon scraps, demonstrates how overlooked materials can be transformed into something beautiful. The figure also wears a dust mask or PPE adorned with numerous pins, a mask that may be recognizable from the artist's other performances, visible on video projections around the gallery.

To the left of the door stands a male mannequin dressed in what Theo calls a Pagan Romanian Dance Costume. This beast-like figure wears a mask crafted from crocheted lace, featuring horns, shaggy eyebrows, and a long proboscis. A white wedding veil crowns its head, fastened at the shoulders by a white cotton preparator’s glove punctured with sharp sewing pins. The costume consists of shredded fabric strips that move and float as the figure dances. A slingshot mischievously slung around its neck.

The artists continually draw on each of their traditional cultures to find points of connection and enact reconciliation. Both Romanian and Saulteaux people dance and wear specialized clothing to celebrate their cultures, connect to nature and each other and to keep ancient knowledge alive.

The material for these artworks—these garments on the mannequins—is “performance ephemera.” This means that these items were not intended to be artworks in and of themselves. Instead, they serve as mementos or provide a fragmented archive of the performance. Along with film, video, or photographic documentation, they capture the experiences of the performances.

If we continue to go to the left through the gallery, we will see on the walls some large-scale light boxes, measuring 35 “x 45”. They are titled Chimera, The Kiss of Adam and Eve Saulteaux, and Bird. These are photographs either documenting live performances or are of the artists performing for the camera. These photographs are printed on synthetic silk. They are backlit to glow compellingly and surrounded by a matte made of woven ribbons. The ribbons are similar to those used on a ribbon skirt or ribbon shirt, but they also relate to the weaving traditions of Theo‘s Romanian background. Theo spent many long hours hand-weaving a matte for each of these photographs, and he notes that this type of weaving has practical applications and is found in almost every culture.

Chimeras are mythical animal that is really an amalgam of many other animals, a kind of impossible being. In classical Greek mythology, a chimera is described as having a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a snake’s tail. We see Theo here dressed in shredded strips of fabric much like the pagan Romanian dance costume on the mannequin to the left he’s digging through a pile of dried grasses at the edge of the lake, where there is a small heap of clothes also resting on this pile of dried vegetation. It’s as if we’ve caught him unaware, making an offering performing a right perhaps a funeral right?

The chimera also appears in Romanian folklore as a half-human, half-spirit apparition tied to nature. Without nature, we could not exist. Nature serves as both camouflage and a place of allure. Like a siren, it tempts wanderers—embodying the romantic danger of the unknown. It represents nature’s amorality; it may not seek to kill you, but it could kill you.

The chimera is between spirit and human, between the pleasures and rewards of nature and its dangers.

The chimera appears and disappears just like this Romanian costume, with many colors and clashing patterns, so that the body becomes indistinguishable among these strips of fabric. It’s a kind of camouflage.

Theo says, “Seven years ago, I was in Romania and wanted to perform in a pre-Christian pagan costume, which is typically worn during winter celebrations in that region. Men wear it to go from house to house. They sing, they make noise in exchange for whatever people can offer them: money, alcohol, cakes, bread, and so on.  I was talking with my friend Vasily, who is a peasant who works the land. He advised me on making this costume and let me know that it’s not a static form. You can add onto it. I like this approach because it’s not a masterpiece. So, I kept adding more and more. I added a mask and plastic bags.”

This photograph was actually taken at Pine Creek and conveys the notion that nature is universal and can accommodate any kind of body. It can accept Theo as a person from Romania. The costume is from Theo’s  Romanian culture, but it’s in a place that belongs to his partner, Kristin.

This performance and its imagery are not fixed in time or geography. Every person in the world needs a place to rest, free from borders and names.

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The next photographic light box, The Kiss of Adam and Eve Saulteaux, features two stills from the artists’ performance videos, separated by a ribbon pierced with Saulteaux words. The upper still, from The Kiss, shows Kristin and Theo bringing their faces together as if to kiss, but with their mouths covered by spiked masks—a prop Theo made even before the COVID-19 pandemic. The lower still, from Adam and Eve Saulteaux, references a performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay. Here, Kristin and Theo face each other over a frozen white landscape, their hair braided together to symbolize intercultural connection, commitment, and mutual respect.

Both images evoke the isolation and longing for connection experienced most keenly during the pandemic, when city life paused and only the landscape and sky remained.

The ribbon that joins and divides these images is pierced with a Saulteaux phrase added by Kristin, who is reclaiming the language she spoke as a child. Although her mother, Lisa Snowbird, is fluent, Saulteaux—like many Indigenous languages in Canada—has been endangered by colonial policies and forced assimilation. The phrase translates loosely as “we live together until death,” echoing the marriage vow but extending its meaning to encompass all people living in harmony with each other, the land, and all beings.

Expressions of love, though sometimes dismissed as trivial, become deeply honest and disarming in this context—reminding us of the power of care and connection, especially in challenging times.

 

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The last light box on this wall is titled Bird. It is a still from Kristin‘s video SWEAT, staged to illustrate her first sweat experience when she began to engage with her community’s cultural traditions. Like the light box, Kristin herself is backlit. Streamers of red, blue, and white hang from her arms, conveying the magic of her first sweat and give form to a vision she experienced

It was a vision that was felt not seen—she sensed a bird’s wings flapping, an apparition, a vision of an eagle. Bird and Chimera act as conceptual bookends: the chimera, a mythical creature from Romanian tradition, and the eagle, a spiritual figure for Plains peoples.

These presences are grounded in reality; they may be real or not, but they represent what lies beyond our understanding.

The matte woven from colourful ribbons around each of these photographs references the labour of framing something, understanding that acting in a space creates an image and frames a place. The matte is performative. It tells you about how Kristin and Theo approach art making as threading something together to create links. Their artwork bridges their cultures and explores other connections between them.

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If you turn toward the movable wall and away from the outer gallery walls, you see and hear Theo’s video Shame-ing Pieta.

Pieta is a famous marble sculpture by Michelangelo. "Pieta" translates to "pity" or "compassion" and depicts the Virgin Mary solemnly contemplating the lifeless body of her son, Jesus, cradled on her lap. Pieta is a symbol of mortality, a mother losing her son, having a child who dies; it’s unnatural.

This pain and mourning are reflected and juxtaposed with the suffering caused by religion. What Catholicism has done to many people in many places. It’s a work that’s conflicted. Theo doesn’t want to make a direct, single-minded criticism, but rather to be more nuanced. “It’s more like a conversation,” he explains, “you don’t know where you’ll end up.”

The harms perpetrated in the name of religion and the punishments for defiance of authority are referenced in this video. The kaleidoscopic image breaks Theo’s figure into an unnatural creature, a kind of chimera with two torsos and two heads. There are somewhat confusing things taking place: Theo and a miniature reproduction of the Pieta sculpture are showered in feathered down and drenched in sticky, greasy fluid, like tarring and feathering, often a kind of vigilante punishment for perceived wrongs of a religious or nationalistic character. Theo describes these flows as glamorous sexuality leaking. Dreamy and grotesque

Theo claims that Shame-ing Pieta is not one thing. “Like all my work, it shifts like a pendulum from the grotesque to the beautiful, and refuses to stay in one place.” Like the chimera, it’s many things at once; it refuses to be pinned down.

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You might be surprised to see a figure sitting on a chair in this corner of the gallery behind you. This is another mannequin in one of the costumes that Theo and Kristin wear for their performances.

The brown, furry head, adorned with a double row of oversized pearls on one side and a cascade of braids and torn cloth ribbons on the other, resembles a head somewhere between bear and human. Ribbons seem to stream from the eyes, like tears. The body is almost entirely obscured by layers of ripped cloth of all colours and patterns. This is the chimera costume that the artists wear in photographs and live performance documentation throughout the exhibition. Although it is made from old clothes, you can see the magic of this costume - the strips of cloth dance and dazzle, so that the person wearing it disappears and becomes something more than human.

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Next, we come to several small, framed photographs that respond to your presence by illuminating when you draw close.

Each of these is a group of three, comprised of two photographs: Light that Guides Us and Tree Between Heaven and Earth, My Family Trees and Dandelion Puffs, and Dancer Skin I and Dancer Skin II, along with the microprocessors that create the interaction. Each group of three is connected by an electrical wire, elegantly adorned with ribbons that celebrate both function and beauty. Theo invites us to appreciate the aesthetic side of technology by revealing what lies beneath the microprocessor: the wires, the inner workings, the very guts of the device. Here, the hidden viscera of electronics are brought into view, transforming technical components into objects of fascination.

The grouped photographs show Theo’s homeland, Kristin’s homeland, and something that they haven’t in common: performance.

The first suite of photographs, made just six months ago, depicts Theo’s family home in Romania and celebrates his mother, who recently passed away from Alzheimer’s disease.

The artists chose Polaroid photographs for several reasons. These instant suggest the past, a particular historical era of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Polaroid’s small size encourages viewers to look closely, creating an intimacy and evokes personal family snapshots. Its physical presence—formed from layered chemicals—is almost tactile experience.

Theo wanted to heighten this intimacy and asked a friend for a technical solution that would invite close contemplation. The light behind each photograph responds to your movement: the closer you come, the steadier the illumination grows, flickering like a candle as it fades but never disappearing completely. The flickering conveys a sense of mourning or reverence like a candle-lit altar.

If you look closely at The Light That Guides Us, the first photograph, you’ll notice two radiant flares of light above Kristin’s head. These images were taken during a visit to Romania, as Theo’s mother was nearing the end of her life. The luminous orbs hovering in the frame evoke the possibility of a supernatural presence—perhaps a final visit from his mother’s spirit outside the family home.

Mourning is deeply human. Theo repeatedly returns to mourning in his artwork; in Tree Between Heaven and Earth, he mourns his mother, while in Shame-ing Pieta, he connects to the powerful mourning of Mary cradling the body of her dead son, Jesus. The backlit photographs are like a little altar, drawing one closer to contemplate and remember to venerate in their golden light.

In the last two photographs, the chimera costume appears collapsed and flattened onto the landscape, blurring the boundary between body and environment. It becomes difficult to discern whether anyone is inside the costume, emphasizing how identity can dissolve into place. These images evoke the idea of labor and presence—how wearing certain garments allows one to inhabit and connect with the land, spirit, and tradition. Through transformative clothing, the self merges with the landscape.

You may notice the mattes for these photographs appear organically mottled and stained—a result of their unique origin. The cloth used for the mattes came from Theo’s family home in Romania, where his family makes wine. During a visit, Theo discovered these heavy cloths, deeply stained red and dark from years of use, among his father’s things. When he asked about them, his father explained, “These are what we used to filter the tannins from the wine.” Wine holds a powerful symbolism—representing the blood of Christ in religion—but it is also a living substance, born from the earth.

Connecting to the land, including cultivated food crops, is important to Theo and Kristin. Theo notes that as vineyards age, older grapevines eventually stop producing fruit, yet remain alive, exuding clear sap like tears when cut. This image of the grapevine, still striving and weeping with age, echoes the resilience and poignancy found in both the matte and the photographs it frames.

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If we continue past the responsive photographs, we’ll come to a video projection of Kristin’s Super8 film, For What They Did to Us. I encourage you to use the headphones hung on the wall to listen to the soundtrack for Kristin’s film. Instead of using existing recordings of drumming and singing, Kristin asked the drummers to perform as if they were angry, creating a pounding sound so loud that it caused audio clipping.

Kristin is a former competitive jingle dress and fancy shawl dancer. She performed for the camera by first drawing a Canadian flag in the sand at the beach. The flag, a potent national symbol, becomes the stage for Kristin’s act of reclamation: as she dances on the image of the flag, her footsteps gradually erase the maple leaf, symbolically undoing a legacy of oppressive nationalism that once threatened to erase First Nations cultural forms such as dance.

Kristin wears a costume or regalia you have seen elsewhere in the exhibition: an armor-like garment made from flattened, scale-like jingle cones, referencing the jingle dance’s traditional role as a healing act and evoking both vulnerability and strength.

The film is projected on a quilt that shows the marks of use and love. This quilt is made from recycled fabric, all of which was made from clothing from her family members. The quilt underscores the importance of family in Kristin’s life. On the reverse side of the quilt, Theo presented a video of a sunset over the lake at Pine Creek First Nation. Showing these works together invites viewers to consider how different perspectives—personal, cultural, and artistic—can coexist, interact, and support one another.

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If we continue around the next corner of the gallery, you’ll see three additional large-scale photographic light boxes. These photographs address Theo and Kristin’s collaborative relationship. When you work with someone, the idea of authorship and individuality has to be set aside.

The first and last photographs in this series, Home I and Home II, initially appear identical—like duplicates—but in fact, one artist is replaced by the other. Theo explains the concept behind these images: “I proposed that we be similarly dressed and be in this landscape, because the landscape is bigger than the person. The landscape is generous; it can welcome and encompass anyone. We are just a moment in the life of the landscape.”

Theo and Kristin both wear a simple, white jacket—the kind commonly worn when working in the Romanian countryside. The choice of white is deliberate: pure white doesn’t truly exist in nature, so the identical jackets subtly suggest the illusion that the person inside is the same. This blurring of identity amplifies the idea that the individual is secondary to the enduring landscape.

This particular jacket comes from Theo’s family vineyard and has been worn by his father, uncle, and brother. Rather than being purchased for the photograph, it is deeply connected to place and family. Using objects with a lived history is central to Theo’s process, distinguishing his practice from theatrical costuming. For Theo, integrating materials that are tied to family or land creates a more organic, responsive, and authentic relationship with the setting. “You can feel it,” he says, “you can feel it when an object has been used.” The garment carries the stories of its previous wearers, enriching the artwork with layers of memory and meaning.

It's striking that the people appear at the bottom edge of the photograph’s frame, emphasizing the landscape as the true subject. This composition adopts a non-human-centric perspective, positioning humans as small, embedded within the vastness of the land rather than dominating it.

Theo describes the natural beauty and expanse of the hills near his childhood home in Romania, where it was easy to become lost. For him and his brother, the tree pictured in the photograph was a vital landmark—standing out in the rolling terrain and guiding them home. For Theo, this tree is the very symbol of home.

Everything in this landscape—the trees, the vineyards, the house—shares a deep history. It’s a landscape shaped by generations of human care, where life is intimately entwined with the land. The longevity of the trees and vines extends far beyond a single lifetime, connecting Theo to his family’s enduring relationship with this place.

For Theo and his family, working with the land is a form of storytelling. During winter, when the land rests, so do its caretakers: they gather, share stories, and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

The central photograph in this group, Memento Mori, highlights the significance of performance art to Theo, Kristin, and this exhibition.

Memento mori, Latin for “remember you must die,” is a potent reminder of mortality and the fleeting nature of life. This theme is powerfully embodied in their Live Biennial performance in Vancouver, where the Virgin Mary is represented as an Indigenous woman—an act that confronts the historical atrocities inflicted by religion, particularly Catholicism, upon Indigenous peoples.

At the performance’s conclusion, Kristin invited audience members to brush her hair, echoing an intimate gesture her grandmother performed for her as a child. This tender act of care and devotion also references the practice of touching religious statues as a sign of reverence. Theo and Kristin reinterpret ritual, replacing harmful, rigid traditions with inclusive and healing ones—shifting the focus from critique and pain to beauty and connection. Their collaboration brings together distinct cultural perspectives, creating new, shared forms of meaning.

In the Memento Mori performance, Theo—covered in red—blows a flurry of gold flakes onto Kristin, who is draped in a blue shawl signifying the Virgin Mary. The materials used—lipstick, gold leaf—are ones Theo often explores in his practice. Lipstick, made from natural substances like lard and pigment, opens a conversation about gender. Gold leaf is both precious and enduring, yet tied to histories of exploitation and empire. The work explores the duality of gold: its beauty and purity, its value, and its role in colonial extraction and religious power. Together, these elements evoke the complexity of ritual, history, and healing in the artists’ collaborative practice.

The gold leaf becomes like snow, weightless, ephemeral rather than heavy and eternal, carried on breath like an apology from one partner’s lips to the other.

Theo emphasizes the importance of ambiguity in both his solo work and his collaborations with Kristin. He believes that welcoming multiple, even conflicting, viewpoints is rooted in his Romanian heritage—a culture shaped by both Catholic and nature-based rituals, and by the experience of having those beliefs suppressed during the Communist era. This layered background encourages openness to interpretation, allowing each viewer to find their own meaning.

In another corner, the couple’s three-minute performance video The Kiss is projected floor-to-ceiling on a small wall, inviting viewers into a chilly, snow-laden landscape.

The video follows Kristin and Theo as they embrace in wintry, snow-covered settings near bodies of water such as a lake and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights on the shores of Winnipeg’s Red River. A soundscape by Brett Parenteau heightens the sense of cold, empty alienation.

Both artists wear face masks bristling with spikes—Theo’s crafted from metal nails, while Kristin’s are adorned with porcupine quills, referencing pre-contact materials used by her ancestors to adorn clothing prior to the introduction of glass trade beads. Although the masks suggest danger and the need to keep a distance, their embrace is a powerful metaphor for the longing to connect despite fear, risk, and adversity.

Created before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Kiss draws on the sense of isolation and the apocalyptic atmosphere of a city stilled by winter and lockdown. The harsh landscape and the spiked masks emphasize the challenges of intimacy in difficult times, yet Kristin and Theo’s determination to reach for each other expresses resilience, vulnerability, and hope. The Kiss illustrates how, even when circumstances make closeness hard, the need for connection and love persists.

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Continuing to the fourth outer wall of the gallery, you’ll encounter three horizontal scrolls of unframed, long-exposure photographs taken in the dark. These images are not meant to capture the fine details of Kristin and her regalia; instead, they evoke the sensation of dancing with her shawl—the swirling movement, the vivid ribbons, the glimmer of beads in motion. By embracing blur and fluidity, these photographs convey the energy and emotion of the dance, in contrast to high-speed photography, which would freeze the experience into a static, sharp image.

The title Dancing in the Dark references both Lars Von Trier’s film about a woman losing her eyesight and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancin’ in the Dark,” a song about the pressures and hopes of artistic creation. Both evoke the idea of moving through darkness—whether literal or emotional—and finding joy or transformation within it.

Transformation through dance is a central theme for Kristin and Theo. Again and again, their work explores how the body, in motion and in ritual, becomes reshaped and renewed.

 

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Moving toward the center of the gallery, you’ll find additional video works: three displayed on monitors and a film by Theo projected on the reverse side of the blanket.

On the opposite side of the wall from The Kiss, a monitor features Kristin and Theo’s performance video, Adam and Eve Saulteaux. This work introduced me to the artists and their practice, which weaves together the history of performance art, their relationships, and their connection to the land, language, and tradition as a living force.

In Adam and Eve Saulteaux, Theo and Kristin restage Marina Abramović and Ulay’s iconic 1977 performance Relation in Time, in which the artists sat back-to-back for 16 hours with their hair tied together—a test of endurance and connection that became a symbol of love and partnership.

By contrast, when they restaged this performance, Theo and Kristin faced each other, braiding their hair together to highlight both the intertwining of their cultural backgrounds and the deep respect that guides their collaboration as artists and life partners. Their performance unfolds before a landscape consumed by snow and flanked by two ice obelisks, visually emphasizing themes of transformation and unity.

The video is narrated in Saulteaux by Kirstin’s mother. Please use the headphones to hear her beautiful, soft voice speak about nature and change, further grounding the work in tradition and the transmission of cultural knowledge and reminding us that language shapes cultural perspectives and worldviews.

 

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Turning from Adam and Eve Saulteaux toward the projection on the blanket, you’ll encounter Theo’s Super8 film, inspired by the myth of Icarus.

The ancient story tells of Daedalus, who fashioned wings from wax and feathers so he and his son, Icarus, could escape their imprisonment. These wings—crafted from delicate, natural materials rather than heavy metal—speak to humanity’s desire to transcend boundaries, to reach for the impossible, and the bittersweet beauty of striving and falling short.

For Theo, Icarus is less a tragic hero than a dreamer—a youthful figure yearning for adventure, heedless of warnings. Despite his father’s cautions, Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, and he plummets to his death. What resonates most for Theo, however, is the complex relationship between father and son: the longing for guidance, the inheritance of hope and limitation, the mixture of love and conflict that shapes every family.

The Icarus film is accompanied by a soundtrack featuring Theo’s poem, including the plaintive line: “father, father, why did you build me wings just to let me fall?”

Theo’s Super8 film unfolds as a real-time sunrise—a mythic scene of the day’s birth, echoing the moment when the sun melts Icarus’s wings, and he falls into the sea. As sunlight catches the wave tops, Icarus seems to vanish into the landscape, inviting viewers to lose themselves in this daily miracle.

Ultimately, Theo finds hope in the myth. Perhaps Icarus simply wanted to become one with nature, to merge with winged bees and birds and to belong to both sky and water. Even without sight, the warmth of the sun can be felt. Theo observes that, wherever we are in the world, people pause to watch the sunrise—a universal and enduring definition of beauty.

 

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Continuing counter-clockwise through the space, you’ll find a TV monitor showing Kristin’s film Sweat. I encourage you to use the provided headphones—there are two, so you can listen with a friend—and take a seat on the bench to experience the film. Sweat is not a documentary, but a poetic evocation of the sensations and transformative experience of Kristin’s first sweat lodge ceremony.

As an adult, Kristin sought to reconnect with her cultural traditions and healing practices, encouraging her daughter to do the same. To support her daughter’s journey, she attended her own first sweat lodge—a surprising and revelatory experience.

"A sweat lodge ceremony cannot be documented,” Kristin states. “In this film, I recreate my experience and what brought me to the sweat lodge with a metaphorical and poetic interpretation of this beautiful ceremony."

Sweat weaves first-person narration with evocative, visually rich imagery to poetically reimagine Kristin’s journey to the sweat lodge. The film captures both the unexpected vision she experienced during the ceremony and the profound personal and spiritual growth that followed.

On the third monitor, you'll find two videos documenting the artists’ live performances: Memento Mori from Live Biennale in Vancouver, from which they lifted the photographic still of the same name, and the endurance performance Niimin Dance Dans from Nuit Blanche in Winnipeg, where the artists danced for four hours. Watching these recordings—and listening with headphones—you can experience how their costumes, movement, and sound coalesce in performance.

You can also experience Niimin Dance Dans live at the Art Gallery of Regina on October 5. This performance by Kristin Snowbird and Theo Pelmus blends jingle dress dancing with pagan pre-Christian Romanian dance, merging their distinct cultural heritages. Set against projected footage of the artists dancing Niimin Dance Dans at sunrise, noon, and sunset in the Romanian hills where Pelmus's family lives, the work connects the roots of fancy shawl and jingle dress as healing practices to Kristin’s visionary revision of the jingle garment—flattening the bells into an armor-like structure. The amplified sound of her costume will echo through the gallery, as it once did through the hills. Kristin invites all to join her in dance as an act of prayer and healing—a gesture the world needs now more than ever.

Join us for this and other free events supporting the exhibition An Accidental Forever, addressing themes of intimacy, culture, communication, and identity on October 3, 4, and 5.

These free Culture Days activities are sponsored by SaskCulture funded by Saskatchewan Lotteries. You can register for free experiences by visiting our website www.artgalleryofregina.ca

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Thank you for visiting An Accidental Forever. As Director/Curator at the AGR, I’m proud to support artists who unite innovative digital practices with cherished cultural traditions, creating exhibitions that foster meaningful connections and speak to our shared concerns and experiences.

Thank you to the City of Regina's Accessibility grants program, which enables us to provide inclusive ways to process the concepts in our exhibitions. We are also grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts for funding our Accessible Gallery Tours project, offered and developed in consultation with Listen to Dis', a disability arts organization based in Regina.

Thank you to Casino Regina for supporting our efforts to meaningfully connect exhibitions with Indigenous experiences and knowledge.

I would like to thank our core funders, SK-Arts and the City of Regina, through their Community Partner Grant program.

I am delighted to recognize SaskTel for making this audio tour possible through their sponsorship, which connects people to art experiences through communications technology.

I especially thank YOU for taking the time to listen to this audio tour and attend this exhibition. You can support the Art Gallery of Regina by becoming a member, donating, or both. Visit our website, www.artgalleryofregina.ca, for details on becoming part of our gallery's community and more about An Accidental Forever.