Every art gallery has its own personality, its own “feel,” which gallery goers construct inside their own heads through their reaction to the gallery’s physical spaces, the exhibits and how they are arranged, the text that accompanies those exhibits, and the gallery’s various programs.
To me, the gallery with the most interesting personality in Regina is the Dunlop Art Gallery. Invariably, I find the exhibits there interesting, provocative, and sometimes breathtaking.
The Dunlop Art Gallery is actually a department of the Regina Public Library, and has two locations: Central Library, where the staff, office, research centre and storage spaces are located; and the Sherwood Village Branch. Just as the library provides access to books and other information sources to the people of Regina, so the Dunlop’s purpose is to provide access to the visual arts.
The gallery’s connection to the library is central to its curatorial process; its exhibits and programs are based on an examination of ideas in contemporary culture both locally and globally. “Contemporary culture” is interpreted broadly, to include not only the traditional fine arts such as painting and sculpture, but such things as architecture, advertising, film and video, performance, fashion and digital media.
The gallery also maintains a research center that contains information about art (especially Saskatchewan artists), and is constantly involved in collecting, researching, cataloging and preserving significant works by Saskatchewan artists; the permanent collection currently contains 251 artworks.
Uniquely, and reflecting its connection with the library again, the Dunlop allows anyone with a Regina Public Library card to rent art for a modest fee on a monthly basis. (Before we filled up our walls with art we’d purchased, my wife and I often rented from the Dunlop.) There are currently 240 works available for rental.
A glance through the latest edition of the regularly published booklet At the Dunlop gives some idea of the innovative kinds of exhibits the Dunlop has regularly mounted over the past few years.
Currently on display, for instance, is Notes from the 20th, an exhibit by Montreal artist Freda Guttman, which uses art to make us think about the effect of the tumultuous 20th century on the individual. One exhibit features replicas of early phonographs whose “records” are imprinted with 20th century images–Hitler, for instance–anamorphically distorted so that they can only be seen clearly in a mirrored cylinder at the centre of the machine. The “records” rotate counter-clockwise, as though moving backward in time.
Coming up from March 23 to May 5 is an exhibit of ceramic vessels by Calgary artist Greg Payce that uses the negative space between pottery forms to create images. In one exhibit, for instance, the space between large ceramic urns forms the shape of nude men. The images aren’t really there, but the mind creates them anyway. It’s a fascinating study of how we see–and how we interpret what we see.
Shows are normally up for eight weeks. Occasionally something that might work really well in both locations will be shown in both, but there’s not usually much overlap. The percentage of exhibits that are organized by the Dunlop, as opposed to being brought in from elsewhere, is very high; of the six shows at the Central location in 2002, five are being organized by the Dunlop; at the Sherwood, the figure is five of seven.
Until recently, all the exhibits at the Dunlop have been curated by Anthony Kiendl. Kiendl will soon be leaving to go to the Banff Centre for the Arts as director of visual arts in the Walter Phillips Gallery. At the moment, he’s acting director of the Dunlop, replacing Helen Marzolf, the Dunlop’s first curator and director for the past decade; she’s accepted a curatorial position at the University of Saskatchewan’ Kenderdine Gallery in Saskatoon and will be pursuing her own art. The Dunlop is currently searching for a new director; once a new director is in place, the search will continue for a new curator.
For now, the temporary curator is Andrew Oko, who explained how the varied and endlessly fascinating exhibits of the Dunlop come about. “They (Kiendl and Marzolf) keep themselves informed and up to date,” he said. “There are several ways to approach that. One of the most important ways is visiting artists, and both Anthony and Helen were constantly in touch with artists. That way you have a really good sense of what the artists are doing, locally, regionally and nationally.
“The other thing is to keep current on publications. There are the periodicals, there are the catalogues that are exchanged between galleries on the exhibitions, there are also library books. Part of the process of keeping up to date is constantly bouncing your own ideas off of what is generally happening in the arts.”
Oko agrees that the program at the Dunlop has been consistently interesting. “There has really been a good balanced overview of visual culture,” he said. “Not only in the category of visual arts or fine arts, but through a more general view that might look at visual objects as cultural signifiers. That has been very, very important here.”
It’s all part of the personality of the Dunlop gallery–quirky, intriguing, intelligent. It’s a personality that will surely remain intact, no matter who the new director and curator may be.
