ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Thank you for taking the time to visit Ten Years Dreaming at the Art Gallery of Regina from June 5 to August 2, 2025. As director curator at the AGR, it is rewarding for me to support regional artists - visual and performance artist Cindy Baker and sound artist Scott Smallwood - whose artworks speak to our collective concerns and experiences.

 

In this audio tour, artist Cindy Baker will guide your observations of the artwork. The tour will circle counterclockwise through the gallery, then reverse for a conversation between Cindy and AGR Director/Curator Sandee Moore.

 

Before entering the gallery, please use the coat rack in our welcome area or place large bags on the floor inside the gallery doors. As you move through the gallery, please do not touch Cindy's artwork. Although they may look like items he might normally interact with, we ask you to recognize that these are one-of-a-kind items the artist carefully crafted for this exhibition. Although tempting, they are not meant to be sat on, ridden, worn, or walked on.

 

Photos are permitted. If you post photos from our exhibition, tag the Art Gallery of Regina and the artist, Cindy Baker. Visit the welcome area inside the gallery for helpful items and gallery information, including self-guided tour pamphlets written in plain English or help yourself to sensory tools for use in the gallery from the basket under the white table. There are ear muffs for those who are sensitive to sound, dark glasses for people with light sensitivity and fidget toys for those who wish to keep their hands busy. Please return all items at the end of your visit. And, feel free to visit during our low-sensory night: Tuesday evenings from 5 to 7.

 

We have arranged our gallery space with movable walls on wheels. Please don't lean against the gallery walls as they mark easily, and we want to protect artworks from damage by being brushed against. Two soft upholstered benches are placed around the gallery for visitors to contemplate and rest on. We display artworks on walls and pedestals. Please ask gallery staff if you would like assistance navigating our gallery, which changes with each exhibition.

 

I'm Sandee Moore, Director and Curator of the Art Gallery of Regina, and I'm delighted to have Cindy Baker guide you through this exhibition of her artwork, which reflects on dreams, memories, and trauma. If you look at the wall inside the entrance doors, you'll see the exhibition didactic panel. Didactic means intended to teach. An exhibition didactic panel includes information that helps visitors understand and learn about an exhibition and its artwork. This didactic panel consists of the artist's name, Cindy Baker, and her collaborator Scottwood, the exhibition dates and title - Ten Years Dreaming - and a short introduction I wrote for this show. Without further ado, I'd like to invite Cindy to show you around her exhibition in this audio tour.

 

[Cindy] My name is Cindy Baker, and I am the lead artist of Ten Years Dreaming, now at the Art Gallery of Regina. When you first enter the space the first thing you'll probably notice is the audio there's a cacophony of voices to be heard in the gallery, which I will get to in a few minutes, but I want to start with the first thing that you might see when you enter the space which is a motorcycle helmet with a floral pattern on it and bunny ears coming out the top. It looks very much like a mass-produced object, and yet it's a little bit absurd because it's maybe not that safe, and maybe not something that would be commercially successful, because it's so cute and a little bit ridiculous. I find a lot of my work tends in that direction, either it looks homemade but you wonder why someone would bother making that, or it looks mass-produced but ridiculous because there would be no purpose for producing such a bizarre thing. As you move to the right in the gallery past the bunny ears helmet, you'll encounter a text panel, which describes the dream that this bunny helmet was inspired by. So I'm going to read that text: "I dreamed that I met with V and assorted other friends in a mostly abandoned airport somewhere in Europe, and I walked by a dilapidated animatronic show in the basement food court where everything was missing, except the tin man and the head of the scarecrow. They were singing their parts, but the music and other characters were missing, so it was mostly silence punctuated by occasional creepy, mechanical bleating. The only people around were a group of really big men who were sketching as if it were a life drawing class. Megan warned me not to talk to them in case they hit me, but I did anyway because I wanted to know what they were doing. Megan bought a helmet shaped like a bunny that had a dainty chintz pattern, and then we boarded our flight to wherever, and I woke up."

 

From this point, continue and turn left to enter the main gallery space, where on your right, you see another text panel. I'm going to read it now. "I dreamt that Jamie and Andrew and Liv and Skyler and I were in Las Vegas touring the amusement park rides in each of the hotels. We got separated at the giant inflatable rubber ducky ride, and the ducky I got was far too small, so I basically just wrapped my arms around it and held on for dear life. Jamie got a giant sofa ducky, and I tried to catch up with her to get on the duck, but the current was too fast."

 

From this point, to your left, there's a giant rubber ducky inflatable with a sofa carved into it sitting in an enormous 16-foot inflatable kiddie pool. This is a pretty faithful replica of the ducky that I saw in my dream. It's about 8 feet tall and about 12 feet long. It's bright yellow. It looks like a rubber duck, except for the fact that it has a chair carved into its chest where you might sit down on this inflatable ducky river ride.

 

The pool is not filled with water. It's completely empty, and it's a bright blue, looking very much like a children's wading pool, except for the enormous size. Standing in front of the ducky to your left is a carved elk with antlers that are so large that they circle its entire body. It's carved fairly roughly out of wood, but it's detailed enough to give you a sense that it was made with care. On the wall to your left of the elk is another panel, which I will read now.

 

"I dreamed that I was sitting on the carpeted stairs in a big empty commercial gallery/gift shop holding a tacky carved wooden elk with massive winding antlers that encircled its whole body. A woman who clearly worked there asked as she passed me on the stairs if I needed a bag for that. I told her politely that I did not. She reached the top of the stairs. I heard her tell another woman, 'That was Cindy Baker. It could hardly not be Cindy Baker no matter what she tells you.'"

 

Turning back around to the rubber ducky, you'll see on the left of the duck an adult-sized Big Wheel tricycle. It looks for all the world like a fairly faithful replica of a Big Wheel tricycle you might remember from childhood, but it's large enough for an adult to ride. And it's in fact quite professionally made. It has a flag on the back that says "Things I've Forgotten." It has tassels from the handlebars and is very much a very joyful, childlike object written large. It also has a loudspeaker attached to the back, which suggests that it might broadcast something, which, in fact, it does. On Saturday, after the opening of the exhibition, there is a performance by me riding the big wheel tricycle around while it broadcasts my dreams.

 

At the back, looking straight up from the tricycle, there is an LED ticker sign that scrolls endlessly with about 500 of my dreams playing on an endless loop for you to watch. If you happen to try to read them, it'll take you about three hours to get through them. But it's kind of a nice analogue to the audio tracks that are playing in the speakers surrounding you in the gallery. The speakers lining all of the walls of the gallery are playing variously between one and 20 voices at a time, building a massive cloud of sounds in the gallery.

 

Facing the one ticker sign, if you turn around from the exit of the gallery to where you came in, there's another LED sign with the same dreams playing on a ticker endlessly, so that you are completely surrounded by dreams no matter where you are in the gallery.

 

[Sandee] Thank you so much. I loved you guiding us through the artwork. I appreciate you letting me ask some questions that dig a little bit deeper into the meaning of these artworks, and how folks can understand that beyond, simply representing something even something that comes from a dream that they're all kinds of other messages embedded in things like materials or scale even colour that communicate with folks.

 

Maybe we can start with the text ticker and the sound. You wanted people to be surrounded by dreams, and yet it's kind of a different experience than we would think of in a dream, where we think that is kind of a peaceful experience. How do you want people to experience the sound that kind of swells to a cacophony of voices and then lapses into a single voice? What kind of emotion or state of being do you hope it will elicit?

 

(Cindy) I love the idea of people being a little bit overwhelmed, but not in an anxiety-provoking way, more in sort of a wonder way, where they might be able to pick out a few voices. It becomes a little bit frustrating, and yet kind of amazing and wonderful. The sound takes on a life of its own and is sort of what I might describe as a murmuration of birds, flying overhead. Sort of this cloud that has its own life outside of individual words or individual strings of words.

 

(Sandee) I see. It's not necessarily that people should be able to access each dream that you've recorded over 10 years, but in fact, it exists almost as a physical thing in itself. This kind of elastic sound cloud envelops folks and kind of moves and occupies the space on its own.

 

(Cindy) That ambiguity is why it's kind of nice. Because if you're committed to actually being able to understand or literally read all the dreams themselves, then you can spend time with the ticker. You can spend time with the book, for example, if you have access to it, or if you happen to be at the performance, that's one voice recording all of the dreams in a row, so you can understand them more literally that way. But I think the sound piece is about more of a dream state where you can pick out some words at the beginning and at the end, but in the middle, it becomes its own thing and takes on a new life.

 

The performance, and of course, the audio, is part of the performance as well, so this is an endurance performance. I believe it will take two hours. I mean, it could take longer. Generally, it takes 2 to 3 hours to get through all of the dreams and to exhaust myself, but it's about trying to make it to the end, then trying to see if I can remember it. If I can be changed through the process of doing this sort of exhaustive performance.

 

(Sandee) Does the performance of Things I've Forgotten have a different emotional tone from the other work in Ten Years Dreaming? It's actually rooted in the memory of a childhood trauma.

 

(Cindy) I would say that the base of this work is a lot more serious than most of the work in the show, but you wouldn't necessarily see that in the performance because I'm dressed quite joyfully. The Big Wheel itself is beautiful and colourful and whimsical and so there's nothing that specifically points to that trauma in the performance, but I think there's a bit of gravity that comes with the - not exactly frantic, but sort of endless - drive to try and exhaust myself and get through this whole catalogue of dreams. That might point to that trauma.

 

(Sandee) For sure. When I was writing about the exhibition, I talked about this kind of endless peddling that's sort of a little bit like trying to run in a nightmare. But also the difficulty that we have moving past a trauma - this endless cycling.

 

(Cindy) Absolutely.

 

(Sandee) Speaking of the tricycle, you described it as a joyful. It has bright primary colours. It has this little flag on it, and of course, the yellow speaker. I guess, how do you want both visitors to the exhibition to kind of experience the tricycle, maybe in relation to their own bodies?

I think it's a very deliberate choice to kind of make yourself into a child for the purpose of the performance.

 

(Cindy) Absolutely. In the performance, I really want to, as much as I can, embody the person that I was when the trauma happened, which was a three-year-old wearing "big girl jeans" for the first time and really thinking of myself as more grown-up than I had been before. So I get on the Big Wheel trike and I think, "I'm gonna go farther and faster than I ever have before because I'm a big girl now. Something about that quest for adulthood, for maturity, the quest for independence that I think arises all through life in many different ways. It's not just about a moment in time.

 

I really think that the Big Wheel, which is something we all remember from our childhood, and toys in a lot of my work is basically me looking at things for my childhood and saying, "I deserve to have that as an adult," and making it bigger and making it more adult, making it more mature, making it more complex and complicated. It's not just about childhood, not just toys, but many other things it represents for me.

 

(Sandee) I love how you speak about riding your Big Wheel as an opportunity to kind of exercise your agency and this idea of mobility, which is, I think, for many children, you know, to learn to ride a bicycle or a tricycle, is a very powerful feeling. And I think that folks will both identify with it if they have memories of Big Wheel tricycles. I never had one myself, but they're a familiar icon for my childhood. But, yeah, it's not so much nostalgia or one time, you make it, as you said, a much more complex experience.

 

If we could move along to the duck sculpture.

This is surprising to me, and I love watching people encounter this when they come around the corner of the wall. Everyone's really surprised, and in fact, I was surprised. I knew it was large, but I didn't think it would be quite so large. Similar to the adult-sized tricycle, the scale is very powerful, and I wonder if you wanted folks to feel small and childlike when encountering the duck?

 

(Cindy) That wasn't necessarily one of my major intentions, but I think it's an important result anyway. I wanted it to be big in terms of overwhelming the senses, and I wanted it to dwarf people. I think any link to childhood in any of my work is kind of a bonus, and maybe that's something that's a little bit subconscious for me. It's those linkages back to childhood that bring the work back to that trauma moment. The duck, I think, is both comforting because it's toy-like, and a little bit scary because it's giant and toy-like. The same with the pool. It's a little bit uncanny because it's not filled with water, but it looks like it should be, so everything about it is a little bit uneasy, but not in a way I think that is scary. Not in a way that I think is daunting. In a way that I think draws people to it and brings a sense of wonder. But not a playful Disneyland kind of wonder. Definitely kind of standoffish, 'I need to stand back while I figure this out' kind of wonder.

 

(Sandee) Yeah, I really understand that. There's something about the duck's kind of guileless, cheerful face that lets us know that, despite its immense size, it's a friendly presence. Uncanny is a perfect word. It doesn't fit easily with our expectations. It's not something that exists at an amusement park that you could buy from Canadian Tire for your backyard to amuse yourself in the summer.

That is what's interesting about making your dreams real. That they're not just one thing. There are so many things that are kind of jumbled up together. There's delight and anxiety, and there are experiences of both agency and powerlessness. And especially if we think about the dream that inspired this sculpture, where you had a duck that was too small for you when you were kind of hanging on and trying to climb onto your friend's bigger duck that was a better size to accommodate both of you and going down some ride.

Dreams are fascinating things, mixing up all kinds of experiences that we're having, helping us practice to get through day-to-day life, as well as reflecting on some troubling experiences that we are thinking about even in sleep.

I guess that brings me over to the sculpture, underneath the glass vitrine top, of the elk with the antlers that curve all the way around its body. Having read some of your dream texts, they often refer to this uneasy preoccupation with the commodification of art. And so you talked about in your dream, having acquired this at a commercial gallery, the sculpture. Also, describing it as "tacky." Tacky might be a word used to brand craft in commercial objects that would be historically excluded from fine art galleries, and I wonder what it was like for you to ask a crafts person to make something tacky? I wonder if you have these types of ambivalent encounters in your waking life? To want to acquire something that may not be highbrow.

 

(Cindy) I have a great love for low-brow art, and for outsider art, and for art by children, and art by unschooled people, because I really feel like there is a rawness and a realness to that work that disappears when we sort of train it out of us. So I actually hired a master sculptor named Dan Gallagher to carve this for me. And it's true that I sent him the dream, and he knew that it was meant to be somewhat tacky. He understood the assignment, I think. And we talked at length about how finished it should be, how polished and how rough or well-made it should be. And in the end, I think it is rather tacky, but in the most beautiful way. It's definitely not unschooled-looking or unfinished-looking, nor does it look like it was made by someone who didn't know what they were doing. It's definitely very well made, but it's also what it is: an elk with giant antlers encircling its body that cannot stand on its own without rolling over and over.

 

(Sandee) It's fragile a little bit, impractical and, as you said, it's beautifully crafted. At some level, it's desirable. And I like what you said about through art education, things get educated out of our creative activity, including some of the joy, some of the magic. You can let me know if I'm right or wrong about this, but I think that dreams are also a way of connecting with this unfettered joy of creating something that doesn't have to be intellectually rigorous.

 

(Cindy) Oh absolutely. I also recognize that I have a certain level of skill in the kind of things that I can make and do, and sometimes I want the hand of the artist to be visible, and sometimes I don't want it to be. And so when I make a body of work like the 10 years streaming, it really gets to show off so many different levels of sophistication and accomplishment. Some of the things in this body of work are things that I've made with my own hands, and some are things that were made by other artists and artisans. Some of them were made by people in industry, following my direction, but basically factory-produced. So we get all of these levels of completion and finish and finesse that I think allude to that sam cacophony of voices that's in the audio piece that sort of all come together in a conversation that overlaps and really creates this very rich tapestry of voices.

 

(Sandee) I really love that each artwork, each dream has its voice and each maker, whether it's you, whether it's your collaborator on the audio, Scott Smallwood or whether it's somebody that you hire to create something for you, like the elk sculpture.

I wonder if we can circle around to the bunny helmet, what people first see when they come into the exhibition Ten Years Dreaming. I think you've addressed some of this, but I did want to go a little deeper. Certainly at this when you describe these big men and then to know that you kind of think of them as a bikers and to think about how the men that you saw in your dreams how they might feel about this floral, bunny-eared motorcycle helmet, and it really seems to engage with our expectations about what when a motorcycle helmet should be and who would wear it, who would want it and how that is part of the identity that they're signalling to the world.

 

(Cindy) When I had this dream, it was a person I was dreaming about, Megan, who is named in the dream text, transitioning, and so I think this helmet is kind of a representation of this femininity and masculinity coming together in a way that I hadn't consciously articulated, yet. So that's in a little bit, but it's just such a beautiful object that is a bit absurd and a bit playful and a bit seductive.

 

(Sandee) There are so many really attractive things in this exhibition, but the bunny helmet is certainly one that you deliberately placed where people can see it from the front door of the gallery to draw people in. And so many people I've encountered already have been saying to me, "I want that helmet!" And of course, people can't put it on. I think it's very important, also, for an artist to work that is seductive, and that allows people to like it. That's the first step for folks to then begin to understand it, and think about how it relates to their life, their lived experiences and maybe their dreams as well.

 

(Cindy) Oh absolutely. I love the idea of making things that people wish they could put in their pockets and walk out with, or wish that they could wrap their arms around, or ride away on even if it's a little bit scary, or especially if it's a little bit scary, if their first instinct is to say that that's sort of a catch that brings them in. And I love that about the way this exhibition was arranged, so that there's one small thing, one small seductive thing right inside the door that really draws you in, but then you have to walk deeper, and when you come around the corner, that ducky really grabs you.

 

(Sandee) That's also been a great pleasure for me to watch people rounding the wall and just absolutely being stunned by the scale of the inflatable duck. There is something, a thread through your work, not just the work in 10 years streaming, but I think in your whole body of artistic practice, almost like too much of a good thing. So even the exhibition title, Ten Years Dreaming, if you're an overworked art administrator like me, you think, "I would love to spend 10 years dreaming," but in fact, if that's all you did for 10 years, it would be a frustrating situation to be in.

Also, your performance of Things I've Forgotten, where you're riding the tricycle around for 2 to 3 hours. We all love going for a bike ride, but such an extended ride to the point that you have to physically exhaust yourself. You're often taking things that maybe we idealize as pleasurable or restful and pursuing them to such an extent that they become overwhelming or unpleasant, even.

 

(Cindy) I think 'too much of a good thing' is a great way to describe my work and maybe even my life. I love too much of a good thing and hate it at the same time., obviously

 

(Sandee) We talked about the seductive appeal of so many of these works, and I think there's also this very sly humour, which is somewhat too much of a good thing approach. And there's also sometimes some disappointment, and I wonder if you can talk about some of the disappointment of basing your art production in dreams and then creating those things in real life.

 

(Cindy) Well, obviously, trying to make things that appear in your dreams come true is never going to be perfect. It's never going to be exactly as you saw. In part because in your dream things shift and change, and as much as they feel exact and concrete and purposeful. Iin a dream when you wake up, you realize like oh that language, I was speaking was just gobbledy gook. And that coin that I picked up in my dream, thinking back on it now, it was just a rock. Or that journey that I took in a European city in my dream, when I woke up, I realized it was just West Edmonton Mall. Things like that pose a really awkward problem when you're trying to physically make a plan for how these things are going to come to life. Because things in real life are concrete and exact and need to be made out of one material and not many materials slipping through your fingers, it's been a challenge. And I'm working on one set of works from this ongoing body right now that were meant to be a series of kind of crappy cast-off ceramic works, but I'm finding that to be very as purposeful and try to make them as exact and as beautiful as I can because I'm not a ceramicist. And my skill set just isn't there, so they are going to turn out kind of cruddy no matter what I do. So there's an ongoing push and pull of exact and exact and good and maybe not so good and real and not at all real at the same time.

 

(Sandee) Of course, any artist, when they're creating from an idea, there's a challenge to work with something intangible, but I think it's even more challenging when there is something like a dream that's intangible and yet you've seen and experienced. I think it's also really appropriate that you use a lot of intangible media like sound, like text, like air and like performance to represent the dream, the memory, the subconscious.

Begins and ends as something ungraspable

 

Thank you to the City of Regina's accessibility grant program, which enables us to provide inclusive ways to explore 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. I want to thank our core Funders, SK-Arts and the City of Regina, who support the art gallery Regina through their professional arts program and community partner grant programs. I am delighted to recognize SaskTel for making this audio tour possible through their sponsorship, which connects people to experiences of art through communication technology. On behalf of artist Cindy Baker, I also want to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for funding the creation of this work. And, 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 Ten Years Dreaming.