ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Thank you for visiting the Art Gallery of Regina to experience the unique exhibition Care from October 31, 2024 to January 11, 2025.

Before entering the gallery, please use the coat rack in our welcome area or set large bags on the floor inside the gallery doors.

 

Some artists in this exhibition created artwork meant to be touched and handled. The curious can feel one of Karishma Joshi's hair sculptures in the Northeast corner of the gallery. Labels and this audio tour will guide you to artworks you can touch. Ashley Johnson and Karlie King encourage gallery visitors to remove clay hearts from the wall, warming them in their hands and touching them to their bodies. Please only touch the artworks designated as touchable and with the care that recognizes that these artworks are one-of-a-kind creations by artists.

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

 

Before you experience the exhibition, please visit our welcome table for helpful items and gallery information, including self-guided tour pamphlets written in plain English and a booklet with QR codes so that you can listen to artist Ashley Johnson read the text prompts she created to animate her installation with Karlie King.

 

When you enter the gallery, you may notice soft sounds filling the space.

 

SENSORY TOOLS

Please help yourself to sensory tools for use in the gallery from the baskets under the white table outside the gallery doors. 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 at the end of your visit.

 

GENERAL GALLERY LAYOUT

We have divided our gallery space with three movable walls on wheels. Please don't lean against gallery walls, as they mark easily, and we want to protect artworks from damage by being brushed against. We have two soft upholstered benches in the gallery where visitors can rest. We display artwork on walls and pedestals. Please ask the gallery staff if you would like assistance navigating our gallery, which changes with each exhibition.

 

INTRODUCTION

I'm Sandee Moore, curator of the exhibition Care. I'm delighted to guide you through this profound exhibition of artworks by Tea Gerbeza, George Glenn, Karishma Joshi, Ashley Johnson, and Karlie King. These artists use their bodies, medical tests, memories, and nightmares to challenge audiences to rethink how society perceives sick bodies, to consider how illness reshapes lives, and to experience the complex interplay between our physical and metaphorical inner worlds.As an artist, curator, gallery director and art critic, I often wonder why we should care about art. Through their artworks, artists reveal the unknown, the ignored and the unseen. Artists in Care, through their work, help us and themselves consider their subject positions as multifaceted and redefine terms such as "sick" to recognize that one's identity cannot be reduced to a single term.

 

If you look at the wall to the left 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, Care, and a short introduction I wrote for this show.

 

TITLE

Titles of artworks and exhibitions are intended to direct viewers' thoughts to understand an artist's or curator's message. The word "care" is ambiguous, constantly mutating. It can be something that causes worry, an assertion of fondness or an act of maintenance. Power shifts radically for subjects in relationship to care: "I care" versus "I care for her" versus "he goes into care."Importantly, the exhibition Care asks that we care about experiences of sickness and contact with the medical system.

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ARTWORKS BY GEORGE GLENN

If we begin by going to the left through the front gallery doors, we come to a slice of the gallery where we will see framed drawings and a sculpture by George Glenn.

 

Many of the drawings are modest in size, like pages from a sketchbook. The first two drawings, stacked one on the other, are titled Body Memory: Starting the Furnace and Body Memory: Viral Path.

 

Both drawings, made using silvery, dark grey graphite or pencil, show the exterior and interior of a house. In fact, both drawings depict the same house: the artist's childhood home as he remembers it.

 

The top drawing is a diagrammatic sketch of how to start the coal-powered boiler in the basement that delivers heat to other rooms in the house. A little thermometer on the left of the page reads minus thirty-two Fahrenheit. We can see the ducts that deliver hot air from the furnace to rooms in the house where we see people huddled under blankets in bed. A tall, brick chimney with a spiral of black smoke coming out the top runs up the middle of the house.

 

Below Starting the Furnace is a drawing called Viral Path. Gray lines describe the sharply angled roof; thick lines made with the side instead of the pencil's point give dimension to the front steps. A red and orange line zigzags a path from the door through rooms and stairwells, suggesting something small that flies through the air quickly. The title tells us that this trail is the path of an airborne virus. In contrast to the mellow, deep gray of the graphite pencil, the unnaturally bright chemical pigments of the red pen and fluorescent orange marker raise the alarm at this stealthy home intruder.

 

Contact tracing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic attempted to track the movement of that virus. Glenn describes that these drawings began in response to a drawing exercise that prompted him to remember and draw the floor plan of his childhood home. Glenn's drawings address his experience of a virus just as rampant and feared as COVID-19 in earlier decades: the Poliovirus. Just as the dormant Poliovirus sometimes re-emerges in the artist's body, so the artist's drawing exercises reawakened long-forgotten memories of infantile paralysis, surgeries, and hospitalizations mixed with nightmares he had while hospitalized with the infection as a child.

 

Glenn's largest drawing on paper, Viral Schematic, is bookended between his small-scale drawings. A construction of thick, pulpy paper with a deckled edge rests on a sheet of chloroplast, itself centred on a large Birchwood cradleboard; these thin stacked rectangles conjure up associations of a figure on a bed in a room or a specimen on a microscope slide.

 

A partially unfolded geometric ball of thick, buff-coloured card looks to be supported by a jagged stem of glossy, reflective, blue and turquoise. An electrifying squiggle of orange running down its center calls back to the red and orange viral path of the drawing to the left of this piece.

 

Viral Schematic, while beautiful, does not depict a flower, a cloud, or something from the artist's fancy, but a virus. We can tell by reading the title on the exhibition label to the left.Titles are a way that artist give us hints about what their artwork means and, in this case, what the subject is. The human eye, unaided, is incapable of perceiving viruses.

 

Although science has quantified and visualized these pathogens, they remain mysterious. Scientists can describe what they look like or create representations and illustrations. Artists, particularly artists who create abstract artwork, show us what we cannot see - sometimes, this is a feeling or something that does not exist. In this case, Glenn shows us not just what the Poliovirus looks like but also his ambivalent relationship with the Poliovirus.

 

The artist credits this illness with turning him into an artist, even as it destroyed his motor neurons; he writes, "The Poliovirus changed the course of my life from a physical interaction with the world to the more cerebral space of the art studio. It is here that I reconcile my interior memory with my dream of the world and my daily life."Thus, an artist whose cells have been invaded and forever changed by the Poliovirus (now part of his body) shows us the virus in an unnamable hybrid medium between drawing and sculpture. Rendered in shimmering colour and complex geometry, it is wonderous if not exactly beautiful.

 

If we continue further along this wall, there are two more small, unframed drawings. They seem chilly, institutional or space station-like. Thread-thin pencil lines describe tubes, hubs, and pods, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a vast expanse of whiteness, sanitized and devoid of human life. These two drawings are titled Body Memory: Space Pod and Body Memory: Dead Nurse.

 

We can see a tiny figure inside one of the spherical rooms where tubular hallways meet. A few lines of red pencil hint at something gory behind the crescent-shaped desk with a figure slumped over it. The drawing below shows the same figure in detail. In this drawing, the nurse, identifiable by her mid-twentieth century uniform of white knee-length dress and starched cap perched on her head, has a blue face; there is a small slash of red on her neck and a smear of red on her fingers.

 

These drawings, with their space-age setting and horror movie scenarios, depict his dreams while in the hospital. The hospital can be a scary place, and a pandemic can seem much like a horror movie, being stalked by an invisible and indiscriminate killer.Between this wall of drawings and the opposite wall of drawings, there's a sculpture by Glenn titled Window, Wall, Door. We can learn a lot by reading the exhibition label. Glenn's materials for this artwork are notable: a metal hospital screen on wheels, etched plexiglass, and gold leaf. These materials have associations and evoke feelings even before an artist transforms them. The hospital screen is clearly a piece of institutional furniture.

 

The almond-white enamel paint is chipped and abraded, especially along the legs where the screen would've collided with other similar screens. Clear plexiglass panels replace the original fabric curtains that would've been stretched between these bars - I imagine they would have been pale, green or blue - providing some privacy for people in hospital beds pushed close together.

 

This antiquated piece of medical furniture may provoke an initial response of revulsion. Hospitals are not places we like to think of because we associate them with sickness, pain or accidents. Glenn's alternation of the screen is subtle; he's left all the marks of the item's use and substituted sheets of clear plexiglass for the insubstantial fabric barriers, meaning that this screen no longer delivers even the small measure of privacy it once did. He decorated each pane of glass with gold leaf lettering; gold is a material often associated with wealth and the things we treasure.

 

The artist also carved lines into the panes of plexiglass. Parallel scratches in the one pane form a tall, oblong rectangle, taking up almost its entire height and width. The central panel is etched with a floral pattern that repeats from top nearly to bottom. On each of these plexiglass sheets is a word printed in gold: "window," "wall," and "door." This could be a humorous comparison of the privacy screen to a room with walls to keep other people and sounds out, a door to leave and enter, and a window to look out upon a reward-rewarding view. Although the screen may function to separate one from others in a crowded ward, it fails to provide all that a room does.

 

These words could also refer to metaphorical states of body and health. The window could represent the feeling of being locked in and eagerly looking out. The wall may represent real, internalized or perceived barriers that prevent us from going further. The door suggests freedom, an exit from defeating states of mind.

 

Moving from the screen to the other drawings, we come to a larger, 30 x 22-inch sheet of paper with a brightly coloured drawing. A person lying flat on a thin rectangular mattress, head cushioned by a pillow or arm, floats in a deep blue sky, high above the tiny buildings and a vivid sunset. This drawing collects elements you may recognize from Glenn's other drawings. A red-orange line stands out against the drab brown of the broad street, making a sharp bend towards a house. From its architectural features - the short flight of steep stairs and high peaked roof above the entrance door - we can recognize this house from the drawing Viral Path.

 

Houses line one side of the street, facing an imposing rectangular school. A branching shape occupies one of the upper corners, like an insignia. Transparent and floating, it is the multi-tunneled space pod of Glenn's childhood nightmares.

 

You can find the now familiar purposefully angular viral path and tiny house in the next drawing, Body Memory: Space Pod over Regina. The quaint home is depicted as a foreboding shadow. The scene has a landmark, a photograph fragment affixed to the left side of the drawing showing the dome of Regina's legislative building. This scrap of a black and white snapshot shares more than location; a smiling child beside an old-fashioned automobile is likely the artist. The land, occupying only a sliver of the paper, appears frozen and white. Streaks of orange dissolve into a yellow, green and deep midnight blue sky, dominated by a transparent space pod's glassy tubes and hemispheres. A red dot—a beacon dictating the course of the deadly virus—crowns the space pod.

 

The last of George Glenn's drawings of the trio on this movable wall is comparatively large and made on softly textured rag paper. It looks as soft as a flannel sheet. The artist's symbolic vocabulary is on display here as well:

•The monolithic rectangle of the school, with its rigid rows of windows and cross-shaped antenna topping its roof.

•The wide street narrowed like a pointing arrow to the dome of the legislative building.

•The orderly row of houses is shrouded in shadow.

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I wonder if Glenn titled this drawing Body Memory: Russian Sky over McCallum because of another looming threat from the artist's childhood - that of nuclear war with Russia. Indistinct shapes created by the artist spreading pigment with fingertips or carving out white space with an eraser hint at much. Like a shadow in reverse, a white shape looks like a person standing with arms outstretched - a ghostly presence. The textured sky is smudged like smoke and ash.

 

The artist is letting us into his process by titling so many of his drawings Body Memory. He didn't set out to draw the subjects. The only thing he attempted to draw was his childhood home, and these composite visions of memory, nightmare, and sensations, buried deep within his tissues, emerged from that.

 

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ARTWORKS BY ASHLEY JOHNSON & KARLIE KING

The area of the gallery on the other side of this movable wall is filled with many small objects. Ceramic hearts cover the walls and sit on velvet cushions on pedestals. Sound fills the space, and there are words, which the artist calls "prompts," on the walls.

 

This is The Moving Heart by Karlie King and Ashley Johnson. King, who has been making ceramic hearts for many years, created this installation in collaboration with Johnson, a dance artist with congenital heart disease. Johnson's attitude toward the heart condition she inherited from her father may surprise you. She considers the metaphorical value of her medical condition and is grateful to have a piece of her father, who died from a heart episode when Johnson was young, forever in her heart. King and Johnson worked together to create artwork you can experience through many senses. The audio you hear was made for their installation by Clinton Ackerman using sounds Johnson recorded during one of her regular echocardiograms. You can hear Johnson's heart rushing and swishing mixed with other noises - chattering and beeping - from a busy medical institution. Ackerman has mixed this audio with his own field recordings of different ecozones throughout Saskatchewan, matching the peaceful rhythms of the natural world with the bustling pace of a hospital and the faltering rhythm of the artist's heart.

 

King's clay hearts sculpted from earthen clay are deliberately imperfect. They are over-developed, and their walls and chambers are distended and stiffened. Yet, they are neither grotesque nor fragile but invitingly tactile:

•Some are sandy and slightly rough.

•Some drenched in glassily smooth glaze.

•Some are impressed with a network of veins from plant leaves.

 

The hearts, although not anatomical models, enable us to understand anatomy through the medium of the sculpture. Johnson guides gallery visitors through personal, reflective and embodied experiences of The Moving Heart and their anatomy with her poetic instructions. She sought to describe the heart and its functions poetically and with anatomical exactitude.

 

Johnson invites gallery visitors to observe all the hearts and select one to remove from the wall and warm in their hands. If you selected a heart from the wall on the left, you should know that these nails have slightly bigger heads, and it may be more challenging to remove and replace the heart on these nails. If you don't feel comfortable placing the heart you selected on the two nails projecting from the wall, we have provided velvet cushions to set the hearts on. Ackerman's soundscape merges anatomical, institutional, and natural environment sounds and enfolds viewers as they cradle the ceramic hearts.

 

I've included recordings of Johnson reading her prompts from the installation here:

[Johnson’s voice:]

1. Your heart is located at the centre of your chest. Scan the heart sculptures, choose one, remove it from the wall. Press it against your chest, line up the aortic arch with the centre of your throat.

2. Your heart connects the external world with the universe inside. Your heart exchanges oxygen with your lungs, creating a vital and interdependent relationship.

3. Breathe deeply and notice the rhythmic connection between your beating heart and expanding lungs. Your heart is a full cycle, pumping blood out and drawing it back in. The right side of your heart pumps blood to the lungs, the left supplies the rest of your body. Imagine your arteries pushing blood to the edges of you and veins drawing it back to the centre. Feel the clay heart begin to warm in your hands.

4. Your heart is a vessel for transformation. Transforming deoxygenated blood into oxygen rich blood, your heart is a centre for exchange. Move the clay heart against your chest, rotating it side to side. Imagine the conversion within it.

5. Your heartbeat is as unique as your fingerprint. Use the stethoscope to find the beat of your heart. Notice two sounds. Your heart is made up of valves and chambers. Imagine the filling of chambers and closing of valves.

 

[Johnson speaking ends; Moore speaking resumes]

 

Just as anatomical models also fail to represent the lyrical and inexplicable terrain of our bodies' interiors, medical models are abstracted and averaged, and, in the end, they represent no one.

 

Each of King's ceramic hearts is a unique individual. Some are stained brown, black, or blue, while others are coloured with uneven, scratchy strokes. The size, shape and surface treatment of these hearts suggest disease. We know that diseased hearts are often enlarged, as the muscle has to work harder to circulate blood, oxygen and nutrients throughout your body into your lungs. Johnson and King noticed that people are mysteriously attracted to model hearts that mirror the defects in their own hearts, even those they are unaware of.

 

Experiential anatomy takes us away from sanitized medical models and helps us explore the unknowable terrain of our bodies. The ceramic hearts act as a conduit to the experiential anatomy process of observing, sensing and visualizing. The multisensory experience includes holding the clay heart to one's chest and listening to air passing through its chambers.

 

Now would be a perfect time to follow the artists' directions: hold one of the ceramic hearts to your chest, lining the aortic arch (meaning the arch coming up and over the top of the central mass of the heart) crowned with little stubs of blood vessels. You may feel your heart beating against the cool ceramic surface. You may hear your clothing or your hands rubbing against the clay. Many of us don't truly imagine our hearts to be in the centre of our bodies; just as we cannot see viruses with our naked eyes, although we know what the heart looks like and how it functions, we have no way of seeing our own heart pumping blood to the lungs on the right side and the left side blood to the rest of our body.In addition to using the clay heart to envision what is happening inside your chest cavity, you can also listen to your heartbeat amplified through a stethoscope. The artists have provided two stethoscopes for gallery visitors to use.

 

Although many of us have had the experience of having a doctor use a stethoscope to listen to our hearts, very few of us have used a stethoscope ourselves. Besides the stethoscopes on the low pedestal, there are instructions, sanitizing wipes and a QR code on the instructions so that you can watch a video of Ashley Johnson showing and telling you how to listen to your heart through the stethoscope. I'll run the instructions for you here:

1.Using an alcohol wipe, sanitize the stethoscope earpieces.

2.To correctly orient the earpieces (eartips) in your ears, ensure that when the stethoscope arms (stems) come together, the eartips form an angle like an arrow pointing up and away from your body instead of down and toward your body.

3.Insert the eartips in your ears.

4.Carefully touch the large side of the disc to check that the stethoscope is on. The stethoscope will powerfully amplify the sound if it is on. If you don't hear the sound of touching the disc through the eartips, rotate the disc 180 degrees so that the small disc is facing where the large disc is.

5.To find your heartbeat, first use your fingers to find your collarbone, then walk your fingers down to the hollow, the first rib, the next hollow and the second rib. Place the large disc of the stethoscope on the hollow below your second rib, close to the sternum. When the stethoscope disc is placed under the second rib, you can hear your heartbeat on either side, but there will be more places you can hear your heart just left of the midline of your chest.

 

The Moving Heart is a bridge between the tangible and the intangible, say Johnson and King, "the heart [...] determines our mortality and encases our deep longings. To move from our inner landscapes is to express our inheritance, memories and experiences."

 

Please talk to gallery staff if there is a ceramic heart that you wish to purchase and take home with you to hold close for longer. We also invite you to speak with gallery staff to register for a free experiential anatomy workshop led by Johnson on November 30th or December 7th.

 

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ARTWORKS BY KARISHMA JOSHI

If we continue clockwise through the gallery, we see several artworks by Karishma Joshi.

 

You will notice a short, nine-second video and a still photograph played on a loop on the wall-mounted television monitor. These images provide context for the multitude of sculptures on the many pedestals by Joshi you'll notice in this area of the gallery.

 

The video shows a table set for one in a field of stubble. If you look closer, you'll notice that dark wads of hair are piled on the plate and stuffed into the wine and water glasses. A wide assortment of vitamins, medicines, tonics, medical test devices and hair care products fill the rest of the table. The analogy to the mown field that was once lush and long prairie grasses and hair loss is apparent. The bumper crop of costly and likely ineffectual cures speaks to the artist's desperate attempt to restore her hair, one that will resonate with many other people experiencing hair loss due to disease or medical intervention.

 

Joshi's sculptures, displayed on seven pedestals throughout the gallery, are made of hair. Joshi chose not to cover or contain these dark, cloudlike under a vitrine or plexiglass pedestal top, deepening the sense of vulnerability. The sculptures seem poised to blow away or transfer to a viewer's clothing.

 

Joshi's Lines of Sorrow represents one year. They have stacked mats of hair between sheets of plastic. Like calendar pages, each transparent sheet enfolds a wad of hair the artist lost in a month. If you were to flip the page, you would reveal another month's hair loss.

 

The width of a human hair, measuring just 100 microns, symbolizes the alarming insignificance often assigned to women's health issues, highlighting how these critical concerns are frequently overlooked and trivialized. Joshi gathers individual hairs whose accumulated bulk testifies to the cumulative trauma of her medical condition, polycystic ovary syndrome. "PCOS," says Joshi, "is poorly studied, "and there is no cure."PCOS affects people with ovaries, people likely to identify and be identified as women. However, symptoms of PCOS – infertility, balding, weight gain, and increase in facial hair – contribute to the loss of female-coded characteristics and can contribute to marginalization and social depreciation. As a South Asian woman, Joshi is aware of the value her cultural background places on long, luxurious locks as signifiers of a woman's femininity, desirability and fitness.

 

Joshi, who was first diagnosed with PCOS at age thirteen, describes their hair as her shield. The sculptures made from her fallen and carefully collected tresses reveal the unrelenting nature of their illness. To be denuded of hair is to feel exposed and vulnerable. However, she also notes that her experience with PCOS has presented unexpected opportunities to reconsider and shift her identity. (You'll notice that I switch between the gendered pronoun "she" and the neutral pronoun "they," both of which Joshi uses.) Joshi has seized this opportunity to create new ways to consider pronouns and create an identity disencumbered by oppressive social norms.

 

There are several other untitled sculptures by Joshi on the smaller pedestals in the gallery. These devastatingly austere assemblages represent the places and items that resonate with hair loss for Joshi. A hair elastic pinches a dark, pillow-like mass, swirls of hair encircle a plastic drain cover, bobby pins skewer and are embedded in an oversized snarl of hair, and hair unfurls like a cloud of smoke from the teeth of a wooden comb. There are two small paper bags, each open to receive an airy bundle of hair. These provide insight into the artist's creative process; as she loses her hair, she carefully collects in whatever bag she has.

 

While a single hair is nearly invisible, collected masses highlight the magnitude of PCOS. This project may only conclude with the discovery of an effective cure. Joshi sees her work as a way of re-gathering shed pieces of herself.

 

Like Glenn's use of the hospital screen, human hair is yet another example of an incredibly articulate material. It communicates deeply with each of us, representing a part of the body and something separate from it. We conceive of hair as an object once it is no longer attached to her body. Theorist Julia Kristeva explains that we often feel revulsion toward anything detached from our bodies. Such detachment can evoke unsettling reminders of death, disease, and deformity. To maintain our sense of self, we often reject these detached parts as "not me." Our experiences with hair and hair loss can trigger strong emotions, sometimes ones we may not even be aware of.

 

I want to draw your attention to one of Joshi's sculptures on a pedestal angled away from the wall in the northeast corner of the gallery. Many visitors to the gallery have expressed an ambivalent attraction to this tangle of hair and the invitation to touch it. We rarely touch another person's hair, which can be disturbing when we encounter it in other contexts, such as pulling it from the shower drain or sweeping it from the floor. Some people have confided that they want to touch this hair but feel unable to do so; they plan to return because they believe they can learn something or make a meaningful shift in internalized attitudes by overcoming this taboo.

 

Hair loss is an unspeakable topic, most especially for those who identify as women. Other people who experience hair loss report feeling seen and understood by this work, which invites us to focus our senses on something ordinarily masked, hidden, ignored, and denied.

 

A documentary video created by Joshi is on the table inside the entrance door to the gallery. While this video, entitled A Quiet Love Letter, is not one of the artworks in the exhibition, it provides background to Joshi's artwork. In the video, several South Asian women, including Joshi, share their stories, experiences, and perspectives on hair loss, both their own and those of others. Each woman experiences hair loss for different reasons. One woman, reflecting on her situation, poignantly states, "Meena is no one," highlighting the demeaning and dehumanizing treatment she endures within her family and cultural context. Another person in the video shaves her head, questioning why bald men are celebrated and admired, but bald women are shunned. A Quiet Love Letter presents possibilities to engage critically with gender and culturally informed gender norms. She sees the disruption of traditionally defined female traits as an opportunity to free oneself from the constraints of gender rules.

 

Hybridity is a recurrent theme in this exhibition, be it narrowly conceived, binary gender norms, artistic disciplines or biological systems of taxonomy. Glenn's Viral Schematic occupies a space that blends drawing and sculpture. King's heart sculptures are made of clay, which comes from the earth, imprinted with veiny plant leaves that grow in the earth but represent a critical muscle in the bodies of all animals. In contrast, for Tea Gerbeza, plant imagery is a strategy for resilience and hope. She describes this approach as fostering a connection with the body, self, and pain. Hybridity is a tool for embracing multiple ways of being and promoting radical inclusion without prioritizing one perspective or way of being over another.

 

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ARTWORKS BY TEA GERBEZA

 

Beyond the pedestals that support Karishma's puffs of human hair are three framed digital collages by poet Tea Gerbeza on the gallery's East wall.These three images go together as a triptych, a set of three artworks intended to be appreciated together. This trio of digitally printed collages are titled Bedscapes: Diagnosis Bed Triptych from Gerbeza's Bedscapes series. As a triptych, they are narrative; the series is read from right to left.

 

You may initially interpret this composition of white and beige rectangles on a black background as merely a geometric design. Look closer, and you will see that this spare geometry describes the emblematic form of a bed - twin oblongs representing pillows punctuate the large rectangle of a white-sheeted mattress with bedspread pulled down. Gerbeza assembles the downy shapes that cradle and comfort us from the rigid lengths of gold-impregnated plastic of her used diabetic test strips.

 

Reading the label, especially the materials listed, provides essential information about what the artist intends to say about this work through her decision to use medical testing apparatus that, once used, should be discarded. Not uniformly, blandly beige, the diabetic test strips have a dark line at one end and a notch in the other; these thin pieces of plastic coated with metal can read body processes and nutrients carried by a drop of blood. They seem entirely unlike a bed, yet like sleeping in her bed, they are now an essential daily ritual through which the artist maintains her health.

 

Moving from right to left, the bed becomes elongated, stretched out, jagged, disrupted, split, and doubled. The artist created these prints by laying the first bed collage on top of a scanner platen, another type of bed. The artist can muss this inflexible bed collage by dragging the image across the scanner. Significantly, she hasn't destroyed the bed; she has merely created an altered representation. This process illustrates her dependence on and appreciation for her bed while revealing her frustration with it—where hours and days are often spent unwillingly. Isolated and enclosed within multiple rectangular borders, it's a space where sheets, muscles, and thoughts become twisted and knotted, reflecting a desire to break free from enforced rest and constant self-testing.

 

Gerbeza writes, "There were mountains of emotions and information to process, so I used my scanner bed as instrument to explore the emotional heft of a new life-altering diagnosis, and to connect with my body in its newness (something I've had to do in the past when I underwent spinal fusion surgery). In creating Diagnosis Bed Triptych, I've formed a self-portrait of what this diagnosis means for me, and how this disease effects and relates to my other disabilities. [...] Framing the triptych is purposeful because I want the frames to suggest a sense of enclosure, an inability to move beyond the parameters of the frame (or the body and its new illness, its new pain). The frames [...] also suggest that a body is being examined; that what is inside is on display for all to see through this frame-window."Yet, Gerbeza also recognizes the value of the disposable test strips, both for their ability to help her treat and heal herself and for the valuable metals in which they are plated.

 

If we read the bed triptych from left to right, ending with number 1 in the series, we end with a pristinely made bed. The presence of a body does not mark this bed; instead, it stands ready - like a blank page awaiting a body to write stories of rest, recovery, dreaming, and love on it.

 

For Gerbeza and many others, the bed is a "place and an identity. For a queer, disabled, and chronically ill artist," Gerbeza writes of herself, "whose bed [...] is a place of rest, recovery, pleasure, creation, discovery, selfhood, but also sickness, pain, isolation, and unself." Her work encompasses a multitude of seemingly contradictory feelings, associations and uses of the bed.

 

If we continue to move through the gallery clockwise, we will see two more artworks in Gerbeza's Bedscapes series on the side of the movable wall facing the gallery's interior. They are Bedscape Series: Letting the Light In and Bedscape Series: Tending.

 

The pieces contrast the artist's monochrome and rigid Diagnosis Bed Triptych in several ways. Unlike the triptych, Tea crafted these artworks from intricate, three-dimensional, feather-like paper coils in appealingly cool, healing greens, deep reds, and soft pinks. The compositions are round rather than rectangular. Gerbeza particularly notes the importance of the round format of these artworks: "The circle is a consistent motif in my work, but not because most paper quilling shapes start as circles. Instead, the individual circles hold for me one of pain's shapes—no beginning or end, a cycle, episodic, structural, tightly woven into my body. The circle also embodies my bed as witness to the reality of my chronic pain: sometimes as hard as the edges of the small puncture in the middle of the circle. Other times, thunderous, unravelling, letting the light in."Both Letting the Light In and Tending are nearly symmetrical but disrupt the easy comfort of composition mirrored on the left and right, inviting us to recognize the unique beauty of the twisted, bent, lopsided in the folded paper gardens Gerbeza has made and in the human body and a comforting transhumanism.

 

A closer look at the abundant twining florals of Tending reveals that some stems have been severed and petals dropped, and the border for pale pink blooms, like a flower crown, fails to link up. This piece includes A cascade of pale green leaves flow like a stream, bisected with a dark green squiggle of paper foliage, from an uneven shape glued flat to the birch support in Letting the Light In. A meadow of small coils appears like a carpet of moss or clover. But there is also something in the dark cleft and dense paper curls that hints at the body.

 

The raw, torn edges and folds, so intricate that the shadowed gaps between folded slips of paper appear like a dark line of stitches, attract us to the visual tactility of these artworks. Paper quilling, also called paper filigree, is a papercraft that has been popular since the 15th century. This technique involves using strips of paper that are rolled, looped, curled, twisted, and otherwise manipulated to form shapes, which are then glued together or to a support. I'm interested in how Gerbeza, a published poet, uses paper to create visual artwork. She is familiar with this material as a carrier for her words. Here, she shreds and contorts the paper into a visceral language of pain—bending, folding and coiling it tightly, like the pain that constricts and immobilizes her body. Gerbeza explains that one of the reasons she chooses to work with paper quilling is that she can do it from her bed. There are times when she must endure long hours of pain that grips and twists her body, just as she folds and coils the delicate strips of paper.

 

Paper is a material that brings many associations to Gerbeza's paper-quilled Bedscapes. For example, I also think of how pharmacists once used twisted slips of paper to dispense individual doses of powdered medicines.

 

The vegetal theme of Letting the Light In and Tending is not accidental. Nor is it a shorthand for beauty or recognition of flowers as a typical gift for the sick bed. The soft, paper-quilled leaves and tendrils in Gerbeza's pieces offer a hopeful counterpoint to the fragmented angles of the Diagnosis Bed Triptych; it is a visual strategy for resilience, what she describes as building a kinship with body, self and pain. Gerbeza writes, "I use leaf and plant motifs in my rendering of my pain, body, and selfhood; the reason for this is plant life as Will Dwyer in their article, "Plants and Queerness," notes, "takes root underground, in the darkness, and spreads its limbs toward the light." This description of plant life feels true to my pain and selfhood and this ongoing building of kinship with my body and its pain. Dwyer's conception of queerness is also one I found useful in my own rendering of my queerness, which is a part of my identity inextricably linked to my disabled identity."

 

In her artist's statement, Gerbeza again quotes Dwyer's essay "Plants and Queerness" from the American Society of Plant Biologists Plantae Blog published in 2022: "Plants, like queerness, suggest new ways of being, living and loving. They are bisexual, they are trans, asexual, polyamorous, hermaphrodite and gender fluid. They are other; they are in between, alive like animals but seemingly still as minerals. Plants are everywhere, proud and strong and often hidden in plain sight. Like us, they make their presence known by their gifts to the world: shelter, nourishment, a breath of fresh air. Queerness can be all those things, too: a home, a family, a source of sustenance. What I once thought of as a burden has, for me, become as essential as oxygen."

 

It may be surprising that Gerbeza also describes these floral artworks as beds. Not flower beds, but an inversion that transforms the notion that the bed has become her whole world to make the entire world her bed. Conceiving the bed as a soft and beautiful space allows the artist to pay homage to all the people who have provided her with care as she adapted to "a new diagnosis, a new daily routine, a new way my body had to become to survive." In her writing, she notes how the colours of these beds recognize that "Even in my pained self, there is also a cared-for self, a web of people, a softness that keeps me alive."

 

This inclusivity and boundary dissolving relates to care webs, a concept that Gerbeza acknowledges in her writing. "Coined by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 'care webs' refer to the ways disabled, sick, and mad people create collective access and care for one another. It is about "attempting to dream ways to access care deeply, in a way we are in control, joyful, building community, loved, giving, and receiving, that doesn't burn anyone out or abuse or underpay anyone in the process."

 

Gerbeza's approaches reveal how bed and health are entangled with a sense of self. She writes, "There have been various instances in my life so far that I've had to rebuild myself and reclaim my selfhood from ableism's grasp. This rebuilding has repeatedly happened in bed, as I often create art in bed, whether weaving paper strips on a comb or writing poetry. Living with chronic pain from scoliosis-related disability and spinal fusion, as well as being a new diabetic, one way I exist is in pain's root systems. Therefore, it's all interwoven—the pain, the creation, the kinship."Like other artists in the exhibition, Gerbeza invites us to experience life as narrowed to the scope of the bed but to reimagine the bed as an ambivalent landscape that accommodates contradictions.

 

CONCLUSION

Health and healthcare system haunt our daily lives. Spectres of disease emerge in dreams and are resurrected in the body's cells. Loss of self and dehumanization are daily horrors for those who live with illnesses. The artists in Care acknowledge how these troubling experiences can be perceived in positive ways and are part but not the totality of their identities.

 

THANK YOU

Thank you for taking the time to visit Care. As Director/Curator at the AGR, it is rewarding for me to support local artists and strengthen our connections to the community through exhibitions that speak to our collective concerns and experiences. Thank you to the City of Regina's Accessibility grants program enabling us to provide inclusive ways to process the concepts in our exhibitions. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of SK-Arts through their Artists-in-Communities grant program for funding the development and presentation of free, accessible experiential anatomy workshops led by Ashley Johnson, plus the exhibition’s closing forum on Sunday, January 12.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.I would like to thank our core funders, SK-Arts and the City of Regina, through their Community Partner Grant program.And I am delighted to recognize SaskTel for making this audio tour possible with their sponsorship, which connects people to experiences of art 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 Care.