%20white%20b.png)
Remix: Seeing the Permanent Collection Differently
What happens when a gallery’s Permanent Collection is placed in the hands of artists from its community?
For Remix: A Permanent Collection Exhibition, the Mann Art Gallery invited four regional artists and artist collectives to do exactly that. Heather Benning, Ace Denzel, George Glenn, and Studio Q, Lisa Halsall and Alex Powalinsky, with contributions from other members of the collective were invited to explore the Gallery’s collection of more than 4,000 artworks and select pieces that intrigued them, challenged them, resonated with their experiences, or sparked their curiosity.
The result is an exhibition shaped not by a single curatorial voice, but by several distinct ways of looking.
Since the Mann Art Gallery acquired its first artwork in 1993, its Permanent Collection has grown through donations, bequests, and the generous support of Diane and Roger Mann. Today, the collection includes more than 4,000 historical and contemporary artworks connected to Saskatchewan and the region. It reflects changing perspectives, interests, histories, and artistic practices, and Remix offers an opportunity to see that collection through fresh eyes.
Rather than asking the co-curators to organize the collection according to a predetermined theme, Remix began with a simple invitation: look closely, choose what speaks to you, and see what connections emerge.
Heather Benning: Inside Artist Out
For Heather Benning, the process began with two works: John MacRae’s Artist’s Saturday Night Affair and Margreet van Walsem’s Inside Out. The latter inspired the title of her selection, Inside Artist Out.
Benning’s selection explores the relationship between an artist’s interior and exterior worlds. She considers imagination, memory, dreams, spirituality, inner dialogue, and the places and experiences that sustain creative practice.
Her selections move between what is felt and what is seen. Alex Mullie’s Why the Hell Should I Paint Like Patterson Ewen?, for example, speaks to internal dialogue and artistic self-determination, while Conrad Helfenstein’s Headrest creates a dreamlike space where reality and invention begin to blur. Other works, including Pamela Burrill’s Break-up and George Glenn’s Coffee Room #2, are grounded more directly in observation.
For Benning, the act of making art is itself an act of vulnerability. An artist takes something internal and brings it into the world, offering it to others to interpret, question, and connect with. Once an artwork enters a public collection, it moves beyond the studio and becomes part of an ongoing conversation with audiences.
Benning’s selection asks us to consider that movement: What happens when something from within an artist becomes something shared by a community?
Ace Denzel: Finding Energy in the Collection
Ace Denzel approached the collection through close looking. Rather than selecting works simply because he liked them, he became interested in the time, skill, patience, and dedication behind each artwork.
His selections bring together different media and artistic approaches, connected by a shared sense of energy, movement, texture, colour, and life.
Nature became one of the strongest threads in his selection. Pamela Burrill’s Jumping Fish, David Thauberger’s Pasture Print, Mina Forsyth’s Resting, Margreet Walsem’s Inside Out, Beth Hone’s Folded Vase, Anita Rocamora’s untitled pottery, Ken van Rees’s Wildfire, and Jason Baerg’s Relations all offer different ways of thinking about the natural world.
For Denzel, these connections aren't always literal. A woven textile can evoke a landscape; burnt wood can recall both destruction and renewal; a group of cows can become a meditation on agriculture and our relationship with animals; a brightly coloured abstract work can bring to mind a sunset or clouds.
Across these works, Denzel also sees evidence of practice and dedication. A brushstroke, print, woven surface, piece of clay, or piece of burnt wood represents a different set of skills and decisions.
His selection ultimately invites viewers to slow down and appreciate both the beauty of the works and the work that went into making them.
George Glenn: Art as a Conversation
For George Glenn, Remix offered an opportunity to activate the Permanent Collection through a different perspective.
Glenn approached the more than 4,000 works in the collection looking for pieces that told him something about the person who made them, their life experiences, their interests, and their process. From there, he looked for relationships between works, imagining them as part of a conversation with one another.
As he developed his selection, Glenn noticed that many of the artists he chose had been profoundly affected by the Second World War. For Glenn, this connection became an opportunity to consider how history is absorbed across generations and how art can carry those experiences forward.
Glenn suggests: when we forget our history, art can be an invitation to rethink who we have become.
His approach highlights one of the possibilities of a Permanent Collection: artworks made decades apart can begin speaking to one another in unexpected ways. A collection is not static. Each new arrangement can reveal relationships that may not have been visible before.
Studio Q: What Is Here and What Is Missing?
For Studio Q, represented in Remix by Lisa Halsall and Alex Powalinsky with contributions from other members of the collective, the process began with questions of representation.
As two Indigenous, queer artists, Halsall and Powalinsky approached the collection with an awareness of how identity, culture, institutions, and social structures shape the ways we see the world. They initially looked for themselves and their communities within the collection.
Then the question changed.
What is missing? Who is visible? Who is absent? What has been collected, preserved, and valued?
Rather than looking only for direct representation, Studio Q considered the deeper ways artworks engage with ideas of identity, belonging, gender, culture, institutions, and the things society often treats as fixed or inevitable.
For the collective, art can create space for ambiguity, contradiction, imagination, discomfort, and play. It can question the meanings and structures we inherit and open up possibilities for seeing them differently.
This approach gets to the heart of Remix: rearranging artworks can also rearrange the relationships and meanings we associate with them.
A Collection Is Never Finished
Although the four curatorial selections are distinct, they share a common starting point: looking closely.
Each co-curator entered the Permanent Collection with their own experiences, interests, knowledge, and questions. In doing so, they demonstrated that there is no single way to understand a collection—or an artwork.
A Permanent Collection preserves artistic heritage, but it is also an active and evolving resource. The meanings we find in artworks can shift depending on who is looking, what they bring with them, and what other works they encounter along the way. As the Gallery's collection continues to grow, so too do the possibilities for new conversations.
Remix makes those possibilities visible.
It asks us to look beyond individual artworks and pay attention to the relationships between them. It asks us to consider whose perspectives have shaped collections in the past, whose perspectives are represented today, and what new interpretations become possible when more people are invited into the process.
Most importantly, Remix invites us to spend time with the collection, not simply to look at what is there, but to ask questions, make connections, and discover something we might not have noticed before.
Because every time we look again, we might see something new.
Comments