Diana Thorneycroft's 'Alternative Facts'

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U.S. President Donald Trump has no monopoly on “alternative facts.” Winnipeg artist Diana Thorneycroft also has “alternative facts” – hers present a bleak take on the 150 years since Confederation. And, unfortunately, they are true. Well, mainly true. Maybe Santa is not really a drunk.

Thorneycroft’s examination of the last 150 years is not a celebration of achievement but an indictment of the smothering of aboriginal culture, hockey coaches that molest young players, the exploitation of the Dionne Quintuplets, the mysterious death of painter Tom Thomson, Robert Picton’s murderous pig farm and other tragic events in Canadian history.

Two Alberta galleries, Banff’s Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and Sherwood Park’s Gallery@501, are simultaneously exhibiting Thorneycroft’s large-format photographs of table-top dioramas of dolls and toys depicting both real and allegorical events from Canada’s past. Some are horrific, laced with black humour. Some are just plain creepy: Who can forget the priest doll leering at the boy doll?

Both shows are called O Canada (I’m Sorry), although the Whyte exhibition is bigger, containing 30 photographs from four series, A People’s History, Group of Seven Awkward Moments, The Canadiana Martyrdom Series and Canadians and Americans: Best Friends (forever … it’s complicated). The smaller show of 13 works at Gallery@501 only has examples from the first two of those series. The Banff exhibition closes April 2 and the Sherwood Park one April 30.

Works from the series have been circulating around Canada and abroad for a decade or so and can be found in many important collections. Both the Banff and Sherwood Park galleries felt Thorneycroft’s photographs deserved to be shown anew in the context of the country’s 150th birthday, a year perfect for navel-gazing.

At Sherwood Park, especially, there’s an attempt to provide viewers with real history lessons. Thorneycroft’s works are essentially turned into diptychs, with text panels equal in size to each photograph. This is a valuable tool for those too young to know the story, for example, of the Avro Arrow, the supersonic, twin-engine jet that seemed destined for greatness until the government cancelled the project in 1959. As part of the Group of Seven Awkward Moments, a model of the aircraft is superimposed against a reproduction of Arthur Lismer’s landscape, Sombre Hill.

Thorneycroft may add to her series. She has been seeking just the right diorama to depict the horror of the death of Winnipeg teen Tina Fontaine and other murdered and missing indigenous women. And then there’s Trump. The mind boggles at what the Mephistophelean Thorneycroft would do with the president of “alternative facts.”