Welcome to the vault. I’m Timothy Long and I’ve been working as a curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the past 35 years. It’s usually pretty quiet down here, but that doesn’t mean it’s silent. The vault is where I come to listen to artworks. There are 5,000 works in our collection and each one has a story. Sometimes I’ve heard that story from the artist who made the work. Sometimes from the collector who donated it. I’ve even heard a tale or two while giving a vault tour. But sometimes, when it’s particularly quiet, the artworks themselves have whispered in my ear. This is an exhibition about those stories, a collection of whispers from the vault.

As an art student at the University of Regina, back in the 1980s, I learned two things pretty quickly. First, I was not an artist. And second, I really like to think and talk about art.

At the entrance to the show, you’ll see portraits of three of my professors, all by artist Joe Fafard. Most people don’t know this, but when Joe was first hired by the university, he was what’s called a kinetic artist. One of the pieces he made was a kind of palm tree formed of long strips of foam rubber. When he hooked the tree to a motor, it would spin and flop around. Kind of like a “flying French fry,” as some people called it. But he wasn’t happy doing that kind of work. It was only when he started making portraits that he began having fun again. The busts of Jack Sures and Ted Godwin that you see here were part of a series he did in the fall of 1969. I remember Joe telling me the story. He worked on them in secret all semester creating a plaster portrait of each professor in the art department. And then one morning, when the faculty arrived, there they were, installed all along the hallway of the Visual Art Department. A “Rogues Gallery” they called it. The evil green stripe down Ted Godwin’s bulbous nose gives a pretty good idea about Joe’s feelings for Ted. Ted was not amused.

You’ll notice that Ted is wearing a red and green checked shirt. That’s because his paintings at that time were large abstracts made of an interweave of colours, kind of resembling a tartan. They earned Ted the nickname, the “Tartan Kid.” I remember hearing a story about one of his big Tartan paintings that hung in the art department hallway for many years. An Art 100 class had been given an assignment to make rubbings from whatever interesting objects they could find outside the classroom. One student thought Ted’s painting looked pretty interesting and started making a rubbing from it. Unluckily for him, Ted happened to see this. He ran out into the hallway and began to yell, “don’t you know this is a priceless artwork that you’re destroying.” Well, the kid froze and said he didn’t know it was an artwork, he thought it was a piece of wallpaper! Well, that didn’t help! Fortunately, the student’s professor arrived before Ted could do any real harm to the poor guy. Ted did have a kinder side, though. When I was failing my third-year painting class, he took me aside and showed me, step by step, how to make a big, abstract painting, just like his.

I only took one class from Jack Sures, an advanced drawing course. I was too scared, I think, to take any of his ceramics classes. Jack had a reputation for demanding a lot of hard work. When I finally did take a ceramics class, I got the worst mark of my academic career. I’ve spent much of my time since then championing the incredible clay artists of this province, including working on Joe and Jack’s retrospectives. I guess it’s my penance for being such a poor ceramics student!

Down at the end of the entrance is Maija Bismanis, my art history professor. In Homer’s Odyssey, whenever Odysseus is in need of direction, the goddess Athena appears out of the mist and shows him the way. Maija is my Athena. She pointed me to art history when making art proved a dead end. When the time came for Grad School, she said “go there” and sent me off to New York to Stony Brook University. And when I returned, she said, there’s a job at the MacKenzie, you should apply. And so, here I am, thirty-five years later. Thanks, Maija!

Small works often have big voices. This is something I learned from a painting by Quebec artist Jean McEwen. It’s titled La folie conduisant l’amour no. 8 (Love Led by Folly Number 8). It’s a small canvas, less than 2 feet square, with two vertical stripes of blue on either side of a stripe of red. For years I paid little attention to the painting, until one day, I was giving a vault tour, and said, half-jokingly, “here’s our mini Voice of Fire.” For those of you who don’t know, Voice of Fire is an 18-foot-high painting by the American abstract expressionist Barnett Newman. Like the McEwen painting, it features a vertical stripe of red flanked by two stripes blue. Unlike the McEwen painting, Newman’s canvas is famous, or rather infamous. The National Gallery of Canada purchased it in 1990 for $1.8 million, setting off howls of protest across the nation. How could the gallery spend that much money on what is essentially three simple stripes. The controversy erupted not long after I was hired at the MacKenzie and I remember hearing people say, “Hey, my kid could do that.”

So, after making that comment about McEwen’s painting, I started to wonder, was there a connection between our small canvas and Newman’s? I looked at the date. Our painting was made in 1967, the year that Newman’s Voice of Fire was featured in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Everyone remembers Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, but what is less commonly known is that Newman’s painting was the first thing you saw when you entered the pavilion. And then it struck me, McEwen, who was living in Montreal at the time, must have seen that painting.

So I looked at McEwen’s painting more closely and noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Along the edges of the central stripe, where red meets blue, the artist had painted a very thin line of light cyan blue. Now why would he do that? The answer, I think, lies in Newman’s painting. When you stand in front of Voice of Fire and stare at it for any length of time, a strange thing happens. The red stripe comes alive. It starts to pulsate, rising like a column of fire. And all along the edges of the column, where red meets dark blue, a thin line of electric light blue appears. It’s actually an afterimage on your retina, cyan blue being the complementary colour of red. But when you’re standing in front of the painting, that blue line has the effect of an electric shock.

Going back to McEwen, I think the line of cyan blue in his painting is his attempt to record the effect of seeing Voice of Fire – a kind of visual note taking. I see that, as well, in the way he’s painted the stripes of blue in his work. They’re actually a deep purple with a blue-black paint scumbled over the surface – an attempt, I think, to record the intensity and depth of the blue in Newman’s painting. McEwen’s series La Folie conduisant l’amour actually predates Expo 67, so it was not so much a question of influence, but rather a dialogue that McEwen was having with Newman, an artist with similar painterly concerns.

I also think he’s engaged in a dialogue that touches on the politics of the day. It’s well known that Newman was profoundly concerned about current events, such as the threat of nuclear war, and the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The title, Voice of Fire, has biblical echoes—think of Moses in the desert hearing the voice of God in a burning bush—but the painting is not religious per se, but rather a modernist call to freedom. It says what is unsayable in a world which always wants to tell us what to think.

Was McEwen interested in that message? I don’t know exactly, but in researching his painting for a show that I did back in 2017, I came across McEwen’s design for a new Canadian flag. In 1963, the magazine Canadian Art invited artists from across the country to submit their proposals for a new flag in hopes that one of the designs might be used by the government to replace the old Red Ensign. Most of the entries used some combination of red and blue to symbolize English and French Canada. The winning design, for example, was a white flag with a central disc that was half blue and half red. McEwen’s entry played with this. It had a central vertical stripe of red with ten short horizontal bars of blue, five along the right edge, and five along the left; but unlike the other flags, these elements were on a field of orange – a buffer zone perhaps, between French and English Canada? That might be a stretch, but as McEwen was translating Newman’s painting into his small, compact frame, I wonder if he was thinking about his design for the Canadian flag, about an electric point of contact between red and blue, between English and French? If he was, our mini Voice of Fire is bilingual!

Where’s Louis Riel? Now that’s a question I’ve been asked many times on vault tours. Where is the memorial for Louis Riel by Saskatchewan artist John Nugent, a public sculpture that was removed from Regina’s Wascana Park under a cloud of controversy. It’s a story I’ve told repeatedly over the years. I learned it firsthand from the artist. But it’s also been shaped by tales whispered in my ears during vault tours. When it comes to Louis Riel, the story is never over, so it seems.

As an art student at the University of Regina, I took my second-year sculpture course with John Nugent. A section of the course was devoted to bronze casting. It was during those lessons that John gathered us around in a circle, sat us down on five-gallon pails turned upside down, and told us the sad tale of his memorial for Louis Riel.

The story begins in 1967 with Canada’s Centennial, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board’s commission for a memorial to Louis Riel. Riel, of course, was the leader of the Métis Nation. He brought Manitoba into Confederation, asserted Métis rights, and led the North-West Resistance, resulting in his public trial and execution in Regina in 1885. After a public competition was held, John’s design for the memorial was selected. We have the maquette here in the collection. It’s a three-foot-high scale model for a 20-foot-high abstract sculpture to be made of welded steel. It features a central spike flanked by two gently curving plates that almost but not quite touch at the top – a design meant to symbolize the aspirations of the Métis leader that were almost, but not quite realized. In the wind, the plates of steel would gently strike the central spike, creating a sound like a bell, a haunting reminder of Riel’s dreams for his people. It was an impressive idea.

All was well until the Premier of the day, Ross Thatcher, got wind of this plan. He called a cabinet meeting and summoned John, the head of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and representatives from the university, to justify why an abstract sculpture had been selected for the memorial. John gave his reasons for the proposal, and, as he told us, he had everyone around the table persuaded except the one person who counted, the Premier. Under no circumstances was an abstract sculpture of Louis Riel going to be erected on his watch! It had to be figurative, end of story.

Because John had won the competition fair and square, he was given the option of accepting the commission on these new terms. I remember him telling us, he should have said no, but, hey, he was broke. So he created a figurative version of the sculpture in bronze, translating the soaring spike of his original design into Riel’s raised right arm. And, in the grand tradition of civic sculpture going back to Michelangelo’s David, his figure was nude. As you might guess, more controversy ensued with word coming back from the Premier that under no circumstances would a nude sculpture of Louis Riel be erected on his watch.

At this point, John was fed up. He described taking an old piece of burlap, fashioning it into a rough tunic, dipping it in wax, and draping it around the figure’s torso. There. Happy? The tunic, when it was cast in bronze, covered almost, but not quite all, of Louis’ anatomy.

On October 2, 1968, the day arrived for the grand unveiling of the sculpture. Dignitaries from across the country gathered in Wascana Park, including recently elected Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who was to perform the dedication. Nugent was not invited. On one of my tours, a woman took me aside and told me she had been there at the unveiling. What’s more, she said, it was the politicians who were the first to peek under Riel’s robe.

And thus began the sad mistreatment of the sculpture. It was the butt of jokes and was repeatedly vandalized. If you look at it today, you can still see traces of spray paint on the statue. In the end it was a relief to see it removed from the park in response to requests from the Métis community. That was 1991 and it has been in the MacKenzie’s vault ever since.

At the time of the removal of the statue, I asked John what he thought. His reaction, they should leave it out on Wascana Lake in the winter and let it sink to the bottom when the ice melts. I could just see it, Louis’ finger poking out of the lake.

That was the story I told on vault tours for many years – a story that laments the treatment of an artist by a government with no appreciation for art, modern or otherwise. That was until one day, I gave a tour to an individual with a different story to tell. That individual was Dr. Richard Thatcher, nephew of Premier Ross Thatcher. He told me that had heard a rumour that Jim Sinclair, then head of the Métis Society of Saskatchewan, was not pleased with the original abstract design for the memorial, and that it was likely his opinion that had influenced the Premier. Unfortunately, by this point both the Premier and Sinclair had passed away, so it was impossible to fact check the story. But what an intriguing possibility! If true, it means that Thatcher’s reactions were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to be responsive to the Métis community, and that he was ahead of rather than behind the times. Whatever the case may be, what I do know is that when I give a vault tour, the stories I hear are often as important as the ones I tell.

“Holy hell, it’s incredible! You and I’ve been to all the same places!” That was the reaction of one long-haul driver after seeing Wanda Koop’s landscapes at an opening. Passing by Wanda’s canvases in the vault, you can maybe understand the trucker’s response. Koop’s paintings contain everything you might see on the freeway—coastal shorelines, city skylines. But her paintings are not actual places that you can drive to and visit. They are reconstructions made out of the “tissues of memory and longing,” as Wanda says. Why, then, do they feel so familiar? And why do we want to look at them? And when we look at them, where are we standing?

Desire is a funny thing. It’s so personal. This is what “I” want, and yet so often our desire is borrowed from someone else. I want what they want. And often it’s not even that I need that particular thing—that BMW, that iPhone, that Picasso—I just want it because somebody else has it. I remember asking a friend what he liked best about his new iPhone. “The way I look when I’m holding it.” Well, at least he was honest!

So, let me ask you, why are you listening to this podcast? Were you interested in Wanda Koop? Are you interested in her now? I think people look at an artwork because someone else wanted it first. And the first person who wanted it was the artist—isn’t that why we look at the label, to see who made the work, and what it’s called. I think that’s why works that are untitled are so unsatisfying—I mean it’s like having a child and refusing to give it a name. It suggests that this object is undesired and undesirable, so why should I look at it?

Because this is a gallery exhibition, the decisions of a curator are also involved. My desire, my interest, my insight. It’s why you’re listening to this vault tour, isn’t it?

Anyway, back to the paintings. Macrosomatognosia. That’s the term used to describe the hallucination of having an abnormally large body, like the tea party scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice grows and grows. Wanda told me that she enters this state whenever she paints one of her large canvases, imagining her hand as large in relationship to her canvas as it is to her sketchbook. It explains her ability to translate the spontaneity of a small sketch to an immense canvas. And it implies that we are giants when we’re looking at her paintings.

But that’s not all. We are giants with rifles and cameras in our hands. The paintings you see here are from her series Sightlines. Each painting contains a full or partial sightline—whether a camera focus ring or the crosshairs of a gunsight. That sightline sits between you and the landscape. You see a lot of sightlines when you watch coverage of a war, a phenomenon that caught Wanda’s attention during the first Gulf War. You see them just before the explosion when a smart bomb or drone reaches its target. But in Wanda’s paintings they are so large and abstract that they could equally be corporate logos. And perhaps that’s the point. Logos are like sightlines targeted at us, at our desires. The sightlines in these paintings seem to target a landscape, but really, they are targeting us. And in a world where everything is advertised, blogged about, posted on YouTube and TikTok, and packaged as part of a curated experience, like this podcast, those desires are now supersized and jumbo large.

“Holy hell, you and I’ve been to all the same places.” This is what corporations and governments would like us to believe. It’s so much easier to control people when they all want the same thing, the thing they’ve persuaded us we want. But Wanda shows us that the unity they promise is as elusive as the landscapes she creates.

Some works never get talked about on a vault tour. They’re either tucked away in a crate, or require a set up, like a video. Even paintings can pose a challenge if they’re hung too high or at the very back of a rack. For this tour, I’m going to talk about three such works. But first, I’m going to ask you to put on your swimsuit.

Putting on a swimsuit. That’s literally what I had to do when Ingrid Baxter and her granddaughter Hannah Dubois came to town. Ingrid and Hannah had been commissioned to create a video for the exhibition Re: Celebrating the Body, which I co-curated with Robin Poitras and Fabien Pinaroli in 2018. The video shows Ingrid in a pool attempting to perform a synchronized swimming move called The Crane. She tries three times, never quite perfecting it. Oh, by the way, did I tell you she was 80 years old at the time? As a young woman Ingrid had been a competitive synchronized swimmer and could perform the move flawlessly. Then, in 1972, she tried it again. By this time, she had left swimming to become co-president of N. E. Thing Company, a conceptual art enterprise which she had founded with her husband Iain. She had also had a child, and the results of her attempts to execute The Crane were less than satisfactory. Her analysis of her failed performance became the basis of a conceptual artwork which was included in Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking exhibition of women artists, c. 7,500. Forty-eight years separate that attempt to perform The Crane and her more recent attempts in the video, but both speak to the gap between athletic ideals of perfection and the less-than-ideal bodies that most of us inhabit. Back to the bathing suit. While Ingrid was in town she gave an artist’s talk. The location? A swimming pool at the University of Regina. She gave each of us a free nose plug and basic instructions about floating in water. It was a profound lesson in understanding art as something everyday, embodied, and immersive, literally.

Regina artist Jeannie Mah joined us in the pool for that talk. She is both an avid swimmer, and one of the other artists in Re: Celebrating the Body. When I think of swimming in this city, I think of Jeannie doing laps in the old Wascana Pool, an outdoor facility that was sadly demolished to make room for a water park with a much smaller section for lane swimming. The piece you see here is about that pool. It’s titled Hommage à Wascana Pool (The Water Cups). It also has a rather long subtitle: je nage; donc, je suis… (cinema + art + travel + swimming = comment (sur)vivre à Régina). I like the wordplay: je nage; donc, je suis—I swim, therefore, I am. When Jeannie says it, I believe her. The work is composed of a wide blue shelf with 11 wafer-thin porcelain vases. Each has a rim that rises and falls like a wave. Photo decals turn each vase into a mini-wraparound cinema screen. There’s Jeannie—gliding through the pool in one, contemplating Monet’s Water Lilies in another, and walking by the French seaside in yet another. The central vase shows the happy citizens of Regina swimming in Wascana Lake in the 1920s, before fertilizers turned it into a green soup. You can see the backs of the vases in a wave-shaped mirror which completes the custom-built shelf made by Regina artist Brian Gladwell. There is a fluid quality to this work that allows personal memory, our collective histories, and the media by which we experience them, to slip beneath the surface and soak into our skins. In her artist’s statement Jeannie writes: “With this hommage, I remind the city of its responsibility. The social space of the public park activates the mind and body, enabling citizens to be healthy, industrious, and happy.” For Jeannie, utopia starts with a swimsuit!

For both Jeannie and Ingrid, swimming is a small “p” political act. In Huang Zhong Yang’s oil painting depicting Chairman Mao afloat in the Yangtze River, swimming is political with a capital “P.” I first met Yang when I was a young student at the University of Regina. He was a grad student, freshly arrived from China, and looking for opportunities to practice his English. We talked a lot about the body, about its different representations in Eastern and Western art. Yang could paint like a French Impressionist, and his beautiful female nudes were a bit of a strange sight in what was still a bastion of modernist abstraction. Years later, I visited Yang at his studio in Regina, and was shocked to find a series of paintings dealing with the legacy of Chairman Mao. Among them was a study titled Who Decides Who Rises and Falls? I included it in the solo exhibition titled The Shadow of Mao in 2011. The painting raises questions about the central figure of modern Chinese history, Chairman Mao Zedong, whose rule overturned the lives of an entire nation, including that of Yang and his family. I had no idea, for example, that he had participated in the Cultural Revolution, working alongside peasants in the peanut fields of Southern China. Or that he had painted murals of Chairman Mao with “nostrils the size of rice bowls,” as he says. Or that he had taught himself in secret to paint Impressionist-style landscapes using leftover paints from those murals.

For this painting, Yang provides the following background. In the classic poem “Thoughts of the Past at Red Cliff,” the eleventh-century poet Su Tung-po writes: “The mighty river flows east / Sweeping away countless heroes down the ages.” Here the Yangtze River serves as a metaphor for a national destiny, which even the greatest leader cannot resist. In 1936, Mao provided his response in the poem “Snow”: “To find men truly great and noble-hearted / We must look here in the present.” Mao implies that, as a man of today, he can rewrite history. The tendency to read this poem as a prophesy of Mao’s subsequent rise to power has contributed to the mythology surrounding the Chinese leader. However, in Yang’s painting, the river’s current is strong, and it is unclear whether Mao and his flag-clutching supporter are sinking or swimming, rising or falling. Who Decides Who Rises and Falls? China’s “mighty river” appears to have the upper hand.

I once asked Yang if he felt guilty for the part he played in China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution. His response surprised me. “How could I feel guilty; we all believed in it?” Guilt implies a singling out of an individual wrongdoing. This was collective, like the waters of a great river which makes its own decisions about the destiny of a nation. Looking at this painting, I’m still learning from Yang, still listening to whispers from the vault.

Our final stop in the vault takes us into the print and drawing cabinet. It’s a separate area of the vault with incandescent lights that can be dimmed and its own environmental controls. Specially built drawers hold acid-free boxes filled with over 1,000 works on paper. The works are hinged and matted, sealed in boxes, tagged, and tucked away in large sliding drawers. It’s a bit like a morgue in some ways.

It’s appropriate then that the two works on paper that I want to talk about both deal with the theme of death. They are prints by the great French artist Georges Rouault from his most important print portfolio, the Miserere. Only one print is on display at the moment. We’ll switch them over the course of the exhibition to limit their exposure to light.

I’ve been fascinated by Rouault ever since I encountered his work at the National Gallery of Canada years ago. On that day, I found myself in front of Christ on the Cross from 1939. The painting is oil on paper mounted on canvas, and it was painted just as the clouds of World War Two were gathering. At first it seemed like just another Crucifix in the iconic tradition of the Catholic church. But I found there was something strange about the painting. Like most of Rouault’s images from this time, it employs a heavy black outline, the same outline that you see in the prints. That heavy black outline is usually likened to the black leading of stained glass. Rouault was born in Paris in 1871, and as a boy, he worked as an apprentice to a stained glass restorer. Writers often refer to this experience as if it completely explained the work. But I felt there was something more to it. Look at the way that the black outline encases the body, defines its limits.

Then I noticed the Cross. There was something unusual here as well. Usually, Christ is on the Cross. But with Rouault, the body is not so much on the Cross as in it. It’s as if his body is defined by the Cross, boxed in, contained, and buried within. Then I noticed the frame around the image. In the course of its creation, the image of the Cross was painted on a piece of paper which was then glued to the canvas, leaving a blue border around it. The effect is to create an internal frame, like the mat around a photograph.

And so it occurred to me, that what you have here is not just one frame, but a series of frames. First the black line that frames and defines the body, then the cross which further confines the human form, then the internal frame around the image, and finally the physical frame of the painting. You can see a similar approach in the prints. The overall effect of the frames is to isolate the subject, make it seem distanced, pushed back, and removed.

I remember thinking, what a strange thing for a Catholic artist to do, to take the central image of the Christian faith and make it as distant as possible from the viewer. And then something happened. As I stood there, it was as if the frames all of a sudden dropped away, disappeared—and the body advanced, leaving me with the sensation that I was in the direct presence of Christ’s radiant, suffering flesh. An image which at first seemed to be a dark reflection of death, became, in an instant, a glowing expression of life—a life wounded, in pain, yet filled with a compassionate presence. It was an amazing experience and one which I did not expect.

I have thought about that experience often and have come to realize something of the deeper truth contained in Rouault’s Cross.

The Crucifixion is a scapegoating narrative, a point which was brought home to me by the French writer René Girard. At one point in the Gospels, we hear the High Priest of the Jewish people say, “It is better for one man to die so that the people may live.” This is the logic of the scapegoat. Our collective unity is ensured by the singling out individuals or group, blaming them for all our social ills, and killing or silencing them. Bullies and dictators everywhere know this and use it to maintain their power and control. But this process only works when we believe that the victim is guilty. In ancient societies, this was often the case. But the victim in this narrative is innocent, a point underlined in the Gospels. This story has had a profound effect on Western culture, to the point where we equate the word victim with innocence.

Rouault understands this and uses the frame of art to reveal the darkness of scapegoating. When we create a frame, we take a bit of this world, cut it out, and send it away. It’s a kind of mini-expulsion that mimics how scapegoating works. This is the point of the multiple frames in Rouault’s work—to bring the violence of scapegoating to the surface. But Rouault also knows that at a certain point, frames fall away, disappear, and bring us into contact with that which has been singled out. Each expulsion is followed by a return, as we experience the quasi-divine presence which we call the aesthetic. The genius of Rouault is to unite that moment of aesthetic presence with the experience of suffering flesh. In that moment, we as viewers, enter into a profound identification with the victim of violence—the very opposite of what scapegoating intends.

The prints of the Miserere, which is Latin for “Have mercy,” retell the narrative of the Cross in the context of the suffering of World War One, a conflict which deeply touched Rouault. The identification with the victim of violence opens the possibility of a new social order, one based in love. Aimez-vous les uns les autres is the title of Plate XXXI of the Miserere. “That you would love one another.” The other print is titled Les ruines elles-mêmes ont péris (The ruins themselves have perished), Plate XXXIV of the Miserere. In it we see a contrast between the radiant head of Christ, and the skull-like head of a Soldier. We are confronted with a choice between the logic of scapegoating that leads to war, and the logic of the Cross that leads to peace.

The vault is a kind of frame, a barrier to access that when penetrated creates a contact more vivid and intense than in the galleries above. That contact creates an identification that has the power to transform our understanding of our relationship to the artwork, to the gallery, and to each other. I’ve tried to share some of those stories in this podcast. And I hope they encourage you to continue the conversation with your own whispers from the vault.