ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Audio Tour Transcript

 

Thank you for visiting the Art Gallery of Regina to experience the exhibition The Thread of the Wish, curated by Sandee Moore. This exhibition includes artworks by four artists: Adrian Golban, who lives in Saskatoon; David Garneau, who lives in Regina; Lara Felsing, who lives in Edson, Alberta; and Négar Deinve-Tajgardan, who lives in Saskatoon. The Thread of the Wish is free to view and remains open until March 28, 2026.

 

We recommend using the coat rack in our welcome area or placing large bags on the floor inside the gallery doors to avoid damaging artworks. We know that it may be tempting to touch artworks, so we have provided samples of the materials and processes used by the artists in this exhibition for you to examine through touch and close looking at the gallery entrance. Please limit touching to the touchable station at the gallery’s entrance.

 

The AGR’s welcome table, located between the touchable stations inside the gallery doors, offers helpful items and gallery information, including self-guided tour pamphlets written in plain English.

 

SENSORY TOOLS

 

Please help yourself to sensory tools for the gallery from the baskets 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. And, feel free to visit during our low-sensory hours: Tuesday evenings from 5 to 7.

 

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

 

GENERAL GALLERY LAYOUT

 

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.

 

 

I'm Sandee Moore, Director/Curator of the Art Gallery of Regina and curator of the exhibition The Thread of the Wish.

 

Directly in front of the entrance doors, you'll see the exhibition's didactic panel inside the gallery. Didactic means intended to teach; a 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, The Thread of the Wish, and a short introduction I wrote for this show.

 

TITLE

 

The title “The Thread of the Wish” comes from Sigmund Freud's essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming, which examines how fantasy is useful to artists. This essay, originally a lecture, was published in 1908, so I will note that, following the convention of the time, the words “he” or “his” describe people of all gender identities.

 

Freud writes, "On the contrary, they fit themselves into the subject's shifting impressions of life, change with every change in his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what might be called a 'datemark'. Past, present and future are strung together on the thread of the wish that runs through them."

 

This exhibition considers the thread of desire that connects past and future, including the desire for a better world, while encouraging viewers to consider how loose threads and tangled knots of memory, history, and hope are woven into our lives.

 

In practices spanning textiles, photography, painting, and sculpture, the artists in this exhibition, Négar Deinve-Tajgardan, David Garneau, Lara Felsing, and Adrian Golban, reveal weaving as both a method of creation and a metaphor for storytelling.

 

Just as threads are interlaced to create textiles, this exhibition weaves together the stories, memories and histories of the artists, demonstrating how all of our lives and identities are intertwined.

 

Textiles are deeply personal. They enclose our bodies in vulnerable moments, provide shelter and warmth, contact our skin and signal identity. The stories that Négar, Lara, Adrian and David share are likewise intimate. (I’ll refer to the artists by their first names from now on.)

 

Let’s begin this tour by going to the left. The first artwork you will see is Listen to the Rugs by Négar.

 

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NÉGAR

 

Listen to the Rugs

 

This sound-based artwork by Négar is presented with a pair of headphones for listening connected to a small player. Even when the player's screen is dark, the audio plays on a loop, though there are moments of silence between the sound of light tapping.

 

If you look at the label, you will see that “listen to the rugs” is in brackets as a translation of the title up above, which is .– … … … –.–. and so on. Titles are clues to how we should understand an artwork; Listen to the Rugs is a sound piece that takes the form of Morse code represented visually by dots and dashes. If you listen to the headphones, you will hear the tapping of Morse code, as may have been used by people imprisoned by the Iranian regime after the 1979 Revolution, tapping on the walls of their cells. Négar, however, is not using Morse code to represent words, but to represent the patterns of the many rugs she has woven, incorporating the memory of her uncle Mahmood.

 

You can use the headphones to experience this audio artwork. I will play a little bit for you here. [sound of intermittent taps.]

 

Uncle Mahmood

 

Négar transforms a photograph of her murdered uncle, which was long kept hidden behind another photograph in a family album. She slices the image into strips or separates it into threads; she then weaves these wisps into fabrics inspired by her family's daily life in Iran.

 

She describes her message like this: “I intend to point out the everyday aspect of it as a metaphor for deserving to have a normal life, a normal life that was taken away from lots of us. I have turned the photo into very small pattern lines, working as a weft of rugs; the warp of the rugs would be yarn and strings. In this way, the piece consists of thousands of my uncle’s photos as thousands of others who have been executed just like him.”

 

Uncle Mahmood is a patchwork of tiny rug-like textiles woven by Négar from paper and thread. Altogether, these pieces combined are about 15 feet long. You’ll notice in some of them that what appears to be an orange-and-white-striped material is actually strips of paper with a photograph printed very small and repeated over and over. This is Negar‘s uncle Mahmood, for whom she titled this installation. You can see a larger reproduction of this photograph at the touchable station near the door. Négar has also provided a sheet of paper printed all over with tiny versions of this photograph at the touchables station; it’s paper like this that she cuts into strips and weaves into her rugs.

 

In the photograph, Negar’s uncle is holding a baby, one of his nieces. He died before she was born, so Négar never met him.

 

You might wonder why this photograph of her uncle was hidden in her family’s album. It was both important for them to keep and to remember him, but also never seen, partly because the memory of someone lost so young is painful and partly because they may always be subject to suspicion by the regime. Mahmood was only 23 years old when executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, after three years of imprisonment for protesting and speaking out against the government.

 

By spending time handling this photograph of her deceased uncle and weaving it into textiles, some patterned after rugs and other cloth items she remembers her family using for everyday tasks in Iran, Négar has crafted a new closeness to the uncle she never knew and reclaimed for herself the material culture of her heritage.

 

If we continue around the corner, turning towards the gallery's exit door and the west wall, you’ll see some fragile textiles nailed directly to the wall. The first is called Sedigheh, Mahmood, and Najmeh. On the wall perpendicular, are two more similar artworks by Négar called Nahid, Mahmood and Narges and Mahmood.

 

Instead of weaving a photograph of her uncle, as she did in the large artwork Uncle Mahmood, here she is unweaving cloth. Négar printed family photographs of her deceased uncle onto canvas and removed all the weft threads running in one direction. The result is a curtain of loose threads that hang like hair. Amazingly, the photograph can still be clearly seen in these threads, but it is faded and ghostly. She also wove new pieces of cloth from the threads she removed.  This process of weaving together the removed warp threads results in images that look smeared like an amorphous miasma, a spectral swirl of colour.

 

Dance To the Twisted Stalk to the Tune of Dawn

 

Before we move around the end of the movable wall, I’ll call your attention to the movable wall diagonally across the gallery. A long, beige, knitted scarf is draped from a hanger and stretched across the wall. This is also an artwork made by Négar, and, like her other artworks, it tells us about her uncle Mahmood.

 

This artwork is called Dance to the twisted stalk to the tune of dawn; Négar has translated this title from a Persian song she says can precede prayer or an execution. The twisted stalk of a blossom, bowing the flower’s stem and swaying in the breeze, is like the twisted and limp bodies of those executed by hanging, jerking in their death throes.

 

If you look at the label, you will notice that the size is simply “scarf-sized,” which creates an association with the warming, comforting item of clothing, and that the material is listed as “15m 3-ply cotton rope.” This is no ordinary rope, however; Négar sourced the same kind of rope as would be used to execute a person by hanging. She deconstructed the rope, untwisting it, then, using the most innocuous-seeming creation method, knitted it into a scarf.

 

Négar’s Uncle Mahmood, was imprisoned for three years before suddenly being executed, along with many other political prisoners across the country. He was hanged. Hanging, you may be shocked to learn, is the primary method of execution used by the Islamic Republic of Iran, with such punishments becoming commonplace following the 1979 revolution.

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From here, I’d like to lead you around the movable wall to consider a series of three related paintings on the West wall of the gallery by David.

 

DAVID

 

David depicts the woven-arrow sash, a key symbol of Métis identity, in bold slashes of paint, distilling its rich symbolism and flattening it into a text. In his allegorical paintings, he transforms the sash and juxtaposes it with other objects, expanding the story woven into the interlaced wool threads.

 

I am tempted to interpret David’s painting of the sash as flattening it, like a text to be read; however, the sash is already a text, the stories of Métis lives and histories woven into each colour of wool. Each colour is symbolic: Red represents the blood of the Métis shed while fighting for rights and is a key traditional colour; Blue signifies the depth of spirit, the sky, water, and the Métis Nation flag; Yellow stands for the sun, the potential for prosperity, and the East; White symbolizes the connection to earth and Creator, and the infinity symbol on the flag; Black marks the dark periods of repression, colonization, and the loss of land and language. Notably, David intentionally chose to paint the “Dark Times” sash, distinguished by its black borders.

 

Allegorical paintings like David’s use figures, objects, and scenes to evoke deeper meanings, symbolizing complex ideas or philosophies beyond the artwork’s literal subject matter.

 

 

 

Afterburn I

 

The first of these three paintings, on the other side of the movable wall, is Afterburn I. Afterburn I is a painting of a charred length of wood swaddled, as a baby would be bundled, in a Métis sash woven in the arrow design. Yet this blackened piece of wood, inspired by the devastating forest fires that forced many in northern Alberta to evacuate, remains beyond human comfort.

 

The painting also serves as a visual pun: it literally illustrates the French term “bois brulé” (“burnt wood”), a phrase once used pejoratively to describe the dark complexions of Métis people. This painting is a layered and complex depiction of Métis identity, using the sash—a symbol of Métis identity, history and ingenuity—to encircle and reclaim a word historically used against the community.

 

 

 

Métis Quipu

 

David’s next painting, Métis Quipu, seems to glow on a deep, blue background. David used a special painting technique to enhance the “trompe d’oiel” or “trick the eye” effect of his painting, in which the tasselled or fringed ends seem to jump off the canvas and each knot is rendered in exquisite and painstaking detail. David recalled that he took care and even some pleasure in painting the occasional error or dropped stitch by the original sash weaver.

 

The Métis sash is far more than a decorative belt; it fulfills many practical and symbolic functions, and even the loose threads serve a purpose. The loose threads at its ends are traditionally used for practical purposes—like mending, tying, or keeping track of small items. In David’s painting, tassels on the sash are knotted in an intentionally irregular pattern reminiscent of Morse code or abacus beads, hinting at systems of communication and calculation.  David intended the knots to reference the ancient Andean recordkeeping system known as quipu—a series of knotted threads used to convey information. However, the knots in his sash don’t calculate goods but represent significant events and people in his life.

 

Looking further, David notes that the sash, as a whole, represents the Métis nation, while the loose threads at the end symbolize individual Métis people, celebrating both community and individuality.

 

Today, many Métis sashes are woven from alpaca wool by Andean artisans. By combining the sash with the quipu, David speculates on this pan-Indigenous connection, weaving together histories, materials, and knowledge across continents and generations.

 

 

Our Noose

 

Next, we move to David’s third painting called Our Noose.

 

In Our Noose, the arrow-woven sash is looped and tied to form a hangman’s noose. This stark contrast between the sash’s traditional role and its depicted use powerfully evokes a pivotal moment in Canadian and Métis history: the execution of Louis Riel, who was convicted of high treason after the North-West Resistance and hanged in Regina, North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan), in 1885.

 

When I curate a group exhibition, I hope to foster conversations between artworks—like the powerful exchange between David’s Our Noose and Négar’s Dance the Twisted Stalk to the Tune of Dawn, a scarf knitted from the same rope used in executions. One artwork transforms an item of clothing into an instrument of death; the other reclaims a tool of execution, turning it back into something warm and life-affirming. These parallel stories reveal how easily people's rights can be trampled by the state, and how speaking out for justice can be criminalized by the state: a warning still relevant here and now.

 

Did you notice that I lit David’s paintings with spotlights, a treatment that differs from all the other artworks in the exhibition? Each composition David paints isolates the sash in a featureless space. This isolation emphasizes the sash as an idea rather than a mere object. Illuminated by a spotlight, its separation from the everyday world is heightened - it is simultaneously objectified and transcends mere objecthood.

 

In all his paintings, David draws attention to historical wrongs—such as the criminalization and othering of Métis people—that are perpetuated by government actions and inherited perspectives today, or are too often dismissed as issues of the past.

 

If we turn to the gallery’s back wall, you will see several large-scale textile works (or perhaps real-scale) quilts, by Lara Felsing.

 

LARA

 

Lara’s practice is deeply rooted in the land of Northern Alberta and in Métis traditions passed down through generations.

 

Blanket Ceremony for the Forest unfolds as a visual narrative, with each patchwork panel reflecting the stories embedded in its repurposed and foraged materials. The sequence progresses from left to right, much like the panels of a comic book. Blanket Ceremony for the Forest partially documents Lara’s experience of a dangerous forest fire near her home in Northern Alberta.

 

The patchwork evokes an aerial map or sections of farmland seen from above. As the sequence progresses, the panels grow increasingly sombre, from the pastel florals in the first blanket to the almost entirely white panels in the third blanket. Lara wanted the final blanket to appear subdued, like an aerial view of a landscape blotted out by smoke and ash, representing the aftermath of the fire.

 

Heavy wool blankets—remnants of the Cold War, once meant to protect people in emergency situations including an attack using nuclear weapons—now support her patchwork of plant-dyed thrifted cotton. You may notice that these blankets are not square and even. In part, this is due to the ad hoc nature of the wool blankets upon which they are built. The civil defense blankets were cut off the roll without particular care to build the national defense emergency stockpile, so many of these blankets have slanted or curved edges.

 

Lara assembled each blanket from fabric scraps, adhering to a self-imposed rule to repurpose them without cutting any fabric. The first blanket in this series was made from bedding provided during the initial evacuation for the forest fires Lara and her family experienced.

 

You may notice small holes in the blankets. These tiny punctures hint at the artist’s process. In addition to making natural dyes from foraged leaves, fruits, and pinecones, Lara also transferred plant pigments directly onto the cloth by hammering natural materials into the fabric, embedding their colours and imprinting their forms.

 

Some dye patterns resemble sun dogs or tree rings, echoing the radiance and shadows found in nature. Like tree rings, which record cycles of weather and fire in their dark bands, the stained bedding becomes a record of evacuation and a testament to a connection with the natural world. Her intention is for all of these organic materials to eventually return to the land.

 

After returning home following evacuation from devastating wildfires, Lara wrapped these blankets around charred tree trunks in the forest. You may have noticed that the title of this artwork, Blanket Ceremony for the Forest, describes this unseen act of enfolding trees in these blankets. Giving a blanket as a gift is sacred in many Indigenous cultures. It can be given to someone who has done great things, to someone going through a change (like graduating or becoming a parent), or to show respect to an important person. “Usually,” Laura notes, “there is family when there is ceremony, but because of the fires and the smoke,” she explains, “ it was just us [meaning her and her husband].” Her husband took the photograph you can see on the Art Gallery of Regina’s website, which shows the blankets wrapped around tree trunks in the forest after the fire.

 

On the smaller, movable wall, you’ll find a cluster of three works by Lara called Forest Baskets.

 

To create these baskets, Lara wove together fallen needles and other materials collected from the forest floor, capturing the story of her immediate landscape. Vivid plastic flagging tape woven into the baskets speaks to the presence of the logging industry, while strands of bark reference the traditional uses of natural materials by Indigenous peoples.

 

Inside each basket, a photograph of a wildfire taken from one of the windows in the artist’s home acts as a portal, offering a rare, close-up glimpse of the fire as it surrounded her house. The baskets are grouped to evoke the chaos and unpredictability of the wildfire.

 

The photos nestled at the bottom of each basket appear grey and drained of colour, echoing the smoky, obscured world outside. Together, these images function as a visual calendar of the fire’s impact: the first, taken from her front door, captures thickly needled trees and a bird in flight; the second, from her back door, shows trees reduced to dark silhouettes, almost hidden by smoke; the final photograph, taken after her return, depicts a stark landscape of blackened, denuded tree trunks left in the fire’s wake.

 

Each basket and photo is backed by a recycled sleeve of one of many vinyl records left behind by the home’s previous owners. Records and music, like visual art and words, are forms of storytelling. The concentric grooves of a vinyl record echo the rings of a tree, reinforcing the connection between memory, time, and the natural world.

 

 

 

ADRIAN

 

If we turn almost 90 degrees from this wall, you’ll see Adrian’s sculpture The Mudbrick Relic. This sculpture harmonizes perfectly with the muted tones of Lara’s Blanket Ceremony for the Forest.

 

The sculpture’s cylindrical base is constructed from stacked scraps of wooden two-by-fours. The cylinder is open on one side. The inside is roughly textured and evenly whitewashed with calcium carbonate. The outside has been sanded smooth, so you can see the individual pieces of wood that make up this part of The Mudbrick Relic, as well as the wood grain and traces of grey, white, and rust-coloured pigment. From this base rises a support of woven lilac twigs, thickly daubed with a mixture of clay, straw and dung. This is a method of building house walls still in use in Romania. Shadows of woven twigs fall across the interior of the sculpture.

 

If you look closely at the rust-coloured marks on the exterior of The Mudbrick Relic, you’ll notice that these are repeated patterns of starbursts and an abstracted vine and flower motif. Adrian applied these patterns to his sculpture using patterned rollers that his father used as a house painter in Romania. The embossed pattern and pigment have been pressed into the soft surface of the mud wall before it dries, drawing further connections to family and tradition. Adrian, a newcomer from Romania, draws on traditions to create a sense of home, comfort, and warmth that are still alive in his homeland.

 

His mudbrick wall is an incomplete enclosure, offering only minimal shelter. While The Mudbrick Relic appears to be a beautiful, minimalist sculpture, by using traditional housebuilding methods to build something that doesn’t provide shelter or a home, Adrian lets us in on his experience as a newcomer struggling to build a home in a new country, disconnected from culture, tradition, and family support.

 

If we round the other side of the movable wall, we’ll see Adrian’s sculpture Knotted Vestiges (Vestigii Inodate). From the centre of the gallery, you can see a part of this sculpture, a ceramic head  the artist modelled on his own, peeking around the wall.

 

As you round the wall, the full sculpture is revealed. This ceramic head and a few other ceramic objects repose on a carpet of wood shavings, as if leftover from the artist’s process of shaping salvaged branches into a replica Neolithic loom. The artist designed this loom from memories of his grandmother's loom, referencing the tradition of weaving rugs from strips of old clothing. Instead of using rocks to weight the warp threads, as in a traditional Neolithic loom, he crafted ceramic weights, blending personal memory with inventive adaptation.

 

Unexpectedly, the tapestry cascading from this loom is not soft and warm, like a traditional textile. Instead, it is composed of many hard, low-fired clay tiles, each bearing the impression of an object from the artist’s everyday life in Canada, weaving together a portrait of his new life with the one he left behind. The lengths of twine forming the warp threads connect these clay tiles to two fragmented clay self-portraits and a donut-shaped weight. The largest of these clay sculptures features tiles clustered around the artist’s head, as if the tapestry were flowing directly from his mind, turning ideas and memories into tangible form. The fragmented self-portraits allude to the challenges newcomers face in forging a coherent identity when cut off from their roots. As the artist notes, “we in our lives will be fragmented by daily life and trauma.”

 

While Adrian’s work reimagines techniques of Romanian domestic comfort beyond their utilitarian roots, he also embraces technical experimentation. He thoughtfully unites the wooden loom and the clay tapestry, both materially and conceptually, treating each with patinas more commonly used for bronze instead of traditional ceramic glazes or paints. The loom, clay tiles and ceramic sculptures are blanketed in bright cobalt blue, inky black, and the pale green of oxidized copper—colours that evoke the sense of traditions breaking down and crumbling like rusted metal. Although firing typically causes mineral glazes to vitrify and shift in colour, here, the patina has sometimes produced a clear, glossy finish on the ceramics.

 

THANK YOU

 

Thank you for visiting The Thread of the Wish, unravelling the meanings in these artists’ works, and seeing how their stories weave a portrait of contemporary Saskatchewan. As Director/Curator at the AGR, I’m pleased to be part of this organization that, for over 50 years, has fulfilled its mandate to foster appreciation for contemporary art and share artworks through thoughtfully curated exhibitions that provide new ways to understand issues in our society. Founded in 1974 in response to a lack of exhibition opportunities for local artists and other excluded artists and practices, the AGR continues to support community-engaged and participatory artworks, emerging art forms, and fresh takes on familiar practices and subjects. Accessibility, inclusivity, and community infuse all AGR activities.

 

I thank the City of Regina's Accessibility grants program for funding our Accessible Gallery Tours project, offered and developed in consultation with Listen to Dis', a disability arts organization based in Regina.

 

I also thank Casino Regina for supporting our efforts to meaningfully connect exhibitions with Indigenous experiences and knowledge. Our next event, featuring an activity developed and led by Sara McCreary, will be on Friday, March 6. 

 

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

 

This year marks 50 years since the AGR’s incorporation as a nonprofit society, so it is fitting that, for the first time since I have been at the gallery, I can include the words “We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts” in my thanks.

 

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, including low-barrier exhibition opportunities for members, and more about The Thread of the Wish.