ART GALLERY OF REGINA

Beast Friends Forever

Bruce Anderson, Joanne Bristol, Mackenzie Kelly-Frère, Jeff Meldrum, and Adrian Stimson

July 17 - September 17, 2026

Closing Reception: Saturday, September 12, 5:00 – 8:00 PM (preceded by the Art Gallery of Regina's Annual General Meeting)

When we say, “best friends forever,” it's a phrase that lingers between passionate longing and the understanding that it is a promise destined to be broken. Relationships are fragile. Beast Friends Forever reveals how our connections—shaped by culture, consumption, mythology, and daily life—are both deeply meaningful and mutable. Do the distinctions we make between "human" and "animal" merely mask the impermanence, interdependence, and complexity at the core of all relationships?

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Do we feel closer to animals when we consume their flesh, which then becomes our flesh? In essence, becoming one shared body? Painting a bison becomes—for Siksika artist Adrian Stimson—an act of remembrance for those lost and a tribute to their enduring significance.

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Bruce Anderson’s heroic, large-scale equine paintings evoke the supernatural power of the mythological centaur. The soldier riding a horse becomes a symbol of unbridled power, enabling exploration, conquest, and ultimately colonization only possible through interspecies collaboration.

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At times of necessity, we cloak ourselves in animal skins and mimic not just creatures, but the land itself—blending with stone, vanishing among grasses—to shield ourselves from biting winds and cold dew. Mackenzie Kelly-Frère revives these traditions, weaving a grey, shaggy-pile cloak inspired by a thousand-year-old textile fragment from a Viking-Age grave in Ketilsstaðir, Iceland.

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Only the attentive notice the community of nature woven into our human-built environment. Joanne Bristol’s sparse line drawings of nearby McTavish Street, projected onto the gallery wall facing this location, reflect the bleakness of early spring as urban critters emerge to animate a shadow city of non-human animals.

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Or should we, as artist Jeff Meldrum proposes in his Art for Animals projects, create artworks—not for wildlife to accidentally engage with—but to attract and reward them, to consider more-than-human aesthetic?

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Beast Friends Forever explores the fluid and often ambiguous boundaries that shape our interactions with other animals and the wistful desire to transcend human-centred perspectives. To be more than friends, to be Beast Friends…Forever.