SAAG opens first new exhibits of the year

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on January 25, 2025.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The Southern Alberta Art Gallery is opening their first exhibitions of the year today with a talk and tour by the exhibiting artists at 2 p.m. followed by an opening reception at 6 p.m.
The opening reception is part of the “5 Stop Gallery Hop” along with exhibition openings at the Trianon Gallery, L.A. Gallery 2.0, the Gallery at Casa and Legend Gallery.
Exhibitions include “Do weeds still grow in heaven?” a solo exhibition by Lan Florence Yee, “In spite of my own desire to see you disappear,” by French artist Paul Maheke, co-commissioned with Mercer Union, Toronto and “Tandem inadequacies,” by Lethbridge-based artist Katie Marie Bruce.
The Gallery also welcomes Shop at SAAG Feature Artist Melanie Barnett and her fungus, moss, and algae-inspired ceramics.
For the “Do weeds still grow in heaven?” Yee says they usually organize the series they make through rhetorical questions.
“They’re meant to be somewhat fantastical and somewhat abstract as a way to give me multiple meanings and multiple directions that I can go in,” says Yee.
They say the question came out of the idea that in a place like someone’s imagination of heaven, would something as unexpected and usually undesirable as weed still naturally grow or does heaven have manicured lawns. It was a metaphor for an abusive relationship they had.  
“I think in queer circles there’s a lot of emphasis on this imagery of utopia, of heaven, and it’s often associated with this emphasis on love, that is maybe too narrow, in that it doesn’t acknowledge the messiness of real people,” says Yee.
They add that when there is a desire to be celebratory of queerness, because it’s not quite acceptable enough to be imperfect, that people shun topics like domestic abuse or intimate partner violence.
“There is a statistic that bisexual women are most likely to encounter domestic abuse in their life,” says Yee.  
They add that the work is an exploration of losing and finding personhood across an abusive relationship.  
“My relationship was during 2019 to 2022, so it was very much in the pandemic isolation, and it definitely made it worse to not be connected to any of my family as I live in a different city than them. And having to isolate from most my friends as well, that it became more dangerous of a scenario,” says Yee.
They say because of that, some of the only things they say during that period was glass bricks, while attending doctor or dentist offices and community centres to get vaccinated.
“And those are some of the places where glass brick is used, nowadays mostly to give a sense of privacy to the person coming in, but at the same time it’s porous enough to let light in, but not enough to know what’s happening on the other side,” says Yee.
They explain that in that way the glass bricks become a double-edged sword in terms of that metaphor of connection.
The exhibit also involves walls that have been built specifically for it and Yee says they are meant to look like the frames of walls being built.
“They’re meant to look like the framing in construction or maybe in a demolition home. So it’s it’s kind of unclear whether something is being built or destroyed,” says Yee.
For the “In spite of my own desire to see you disappear,” Maheke says the title is based on a line from a journal he wrote between 2020 and 2021.
“This journal is exploring the aftermath of a situation of sexual abuse in a relationship. It was never meant to be published anywhere. It was just a tool for me to navigate that,” says Maheke.  
He adds that in 2021 he decided to use it as a source of material for some exhibitions he was working on and this exhibition is the last chapter of that.  
“I handed over the journal to a collaborator, a musician called Ndobo-Emma. She’s a musician based in the South of France where I live and we collaborated on this soundtrack that is central to the installation I’m presenting here,” says Maheke.
This exhibition includes wall drawings and wall paintings that were made around the same time as the journal. And Maheke says he decided to expand and scale it up to the to the size of the space within SAAG where his exhibit is being shown.
 “And there’s also an architecture that has been built inside the exhibition. Is kind of emulating some sort of an apartment, definitely a domestic space,” says Maheke.
 He explains that it has a bed and some partially built walls representing the in-betweenness in terms of when entering the space, people may have a hard time distinguishing if something is being built or being dismantled.
 “There is this sound is kind of guiding you through different meditations and different parts of the journal that are both in French and in English, as well as some music,” adds Maheke.

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