Imaginary Exhibition

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What has social isolation in the age of COVID-19 revealed to us? Perhaps that the intangible, immaterial and imperfectly recalled has the power to show us the potential of art to transform our world.

From these thoughts emerges a strange point of inspiration: an un-memory of an audacious curatorial project by Andrew Hunter in my hometown art gallery in the 1990s that I never saw.

The mental image I have pieced together from half-remembered and fractured reportage of Hunter’s show provides a suitably ungraspable starting point for an exhibition of objects displayed in the AGR's closed gallery.

Like the exhibition that inspired it, this Imaginary Exhibition (as I have termed it) will never be whole or concrete, only incompletely glimpsed as bits (and bytes) on social media.

Hunter's exhibition has taken on mythical proportions in my memory, but the details are scant; thus, the entire picture is unformed and lacks definition. What I think I know is that Hunter painted the entire gallery, walls and pedestals, a rich cobalt blue to contrast with his selection of all-white sculpture. The gaps in my knowledge are considerable: I don't know the name of the exhibition or the artist or artists involved. Maybe, these blanks and unknowns are there to be filled with potential.

Perhaps, it is now my idea to distort at-will.

I'm eager to put a regional spin on this half-remembered exhibition re-imagined for socially-distant viewing. I have invited members of the Art Gallery of Regina's Board of Directors to submit an object for display on a pedestal in our sealed gallery. I'm not about to paint the walls and pedestals I just finished repairing. Instead, I'm flipping Hunter's concept – all the objects on display in our all-white gallery are the green and gold of the Saskatchewan flag.

Imaginary curated by Sandee Moore