Quiet Stories from Canadian Places by Heather M. Cline
Exhibition Information
Artist, Heather M. Cline of Regina presents a national touring exhibition of paintings and new media audio works, entitled Quiet Stories from Canadian Places. This project is in response to Canada’s 150th-anniversary celebrations. This exhibition explores shifting the traditional role that painting has played in documenting history from official portraiture and pivotal historical moments to documenting Canadian places that are significant to everyday people and simple moments.
Over the past 10 years, Heather Cline has been quietly gathering stories in communities across Canada, collecting personal and regional history. Through a series of artist residency projects and public engagements, she engaged individuals to share and record their personal memories of their home and community. The interviews inspired Cline to paint different geographical locations, connecting with the subject matter through other people’s reminiscences and experiences of place. The resulting exhibition features fifty paintings presented in salon-style groupings, which are interspersed with audio stories, creating a collage effect with images and soundscapes and offering a space for active viewing.
This project presents viewers with constructed social histories of Canadian communities through Cline’s “exploration of history as an organic process of telling and re-telling”, a means of weaving regional histories together out of personal, individual stories. Using the experiences of everyday people as her inspiration, Cline documents Canadian places through sight, sound and memory, creating a “multiplicity of experience”, and reveals the complexity of collective identities and social histories in terms of place.
At AGSC November 4 to December 30, 2017
Heather M. Cline is a painter and mixed media artist based in Regina, Saskatchewan. Since completing her MFA at the University of Saskatchewan in 2001, Cline has been exploring narratives around place and personal history. Over the past 10 years Cline has been involved in a series of residency programs and public engagement across Canada. Her activities have included setting up a ‘Story Collection’ office from an inner-city storefront in Oshawa, Ontario and riding along on combines in rural Manitoba. Cline is fascinated by how personal history intersects with human geography; currently, this involves merging collage soundscapes with lush intricate paintings of everyday places. – Jennifer McRorie, MJM&AG
Heather Cline has participated in multiple group exhibitions, with solo exhibitions at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa, ON), the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, and regional exhibition centres throughout Saskatchewan. Cline’s work can be found in many public and private collections, including the Colart Collection, the Mendel Art Gallery and the Saskatchewan Legislature Building. She is represented by Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina and The Gallery/Art Placement in Saskatoon.
https://www.facebook.com/ArtistHeatherCline/videos/vb.1162964593731178/1806716192689345/?type=2&theater
Art Gallery of Swift Current gratefully acknowledges the support from our funders including Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskCulture, Saskatchewan Lotteries and the City of Swift Current. Artist Heather M. Cline acknowledges project support from the Saskatchewan Arts Board Individual Artist Grant Program and David Stanchuk for collaborating on the audio devices. AGSC thanks the partner galleries Strathcona County Art Gallery @501, Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery, Slate Fine Art Gallery of Regina.
Organized by the artist and toured across Canada. Presented at AGSC with curator, Kim Houghtaling.
This is a Canada 150 project for AGSC.