Are You My Mother?

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Heather Benning, “Sarcophagi: Rosalie and Larry,” 2015

acrylic, resin, fiberglass, enamel paint, cotton, foam and wood (photo courtesy of the artist)

Three years ago, I touched my dad’s hand. It was as cold, hard and pale as the plaster Saskatchewan artist Heather Benning has used to model the likenesses of her parents, reclined stiffly on cloth-draped plinths. Titled Sarcophagi: Rosalie and Larry, Benning's sculptures are slightly larger than life. The body of a dead parent is already monumental.

By invoking the stone coffins of antiquity, Benning signals that she is not creating a monument but a shell large enough to enclose the bodies of her loved ones, shielding them from the ravages of time and decay: Eternal devotion.

Benning’s work is part of Are You My Mother?, a show by six artists at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina that taps into the human desire for affection, nurturance and finding one’s place in the world.

Director and curator Jennifer Matotek, after seeing several exhibitions recently about the concept of care, felt the Dunlop, located in Regina’s downtown library, was well positioned to engage its diverse audience with such a personal and emotional theme.

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Michèle Pearson Clarke, “Parade of Champions (Esther’s daughter, Simone),” 2015

digital video still (photo courtesy of the artist)

The exhibition, which continues until March 24, borrows the title of a children’s book in which a hatchling poses the question “Are you my mother?” to each creature it encounters in its increasingly frantic search.

Absence connects the most powerful works in this exhibition: Indigenous artist Tanya Lukin Linklater excludes speech from her video, The Treaty is in the Body, while Michèle Pearson Clarke, a Trinidad-born artist based in Toronto, disconnects accounts of grief from speakers’ bodies in her multi-channel video, Parade of Champions.

Montreal-based artist Chun Hua Catherine Dong travelled to China, seeking out her mother’s female relatives and friends. She staged a version of the same photo with each woman, dressing in their clothes and reflecting each woman like a daughter or, perhaps, a mirror.

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Chun Hua Catherine Dong, “Mother,”2017

14 inkjet photographs and video, detail of installation (photo courtesy of the artist)

Each detailed mise-en-scène is a riot of colour, pattern and sensible slacks, a portrait created via each woman’s possessions. Despite titling the series Mother, Dong isn’t seeking a replacement for her own mother. Rather, she aims to inhabit each woman's life in order to see her mother through their eyes.

It seems fitting that a film screening is referred to in French as a séance. In (R0G255B0), a two-channel video by Montreal-based Emilie Serri, words, spoken softly and incompletely translated in small white letters at the bottom of the screen, conjure scenes. Pure green (its code is used as the work’s title) replaces images. Serri consciously creates an association with a colour used for special effects, making the green screen a blank field for the projection of longing.

A sense of care may be in the zeitgeist, but the ghosts of unfulfilled relationships and half-recalled memories haunt Are You My Mother? ■

Are You My Mother? is on view at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina from Jan. 18 to March 24, 2019.