Change is the only constant | Holly Aubichon: Urban Legends
Summer 2025 at Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina
Gao Yujie, Flowing to Unsettle, installation view, 2023
Change is the only constant
May 31 – September 7, 2025
Dunlop Art Gallery (Central Library)
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Curated by Wendy Peart
Artists Gao Yujie and duo Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse (aka Instant Places) transform the gallery into a site for the complex interplay between technology, flow of time, sensory haptics, and human experience. Using visual and sound-based electronic media and traditional art methods, Kavanaugh and Birse explore the reflexive interflow between the body and the machine. Similarly, Gao Yujie questions the perception of time as it is interpreted and manipulated by both humans and the machine. Together the work situates our experience along an expansive continuum defined by the flux of time. Simultaneously dense and light, still and dynamic, refined and complex, the works embody the running concept that change is the only constant.
* This exhibition changes from time to time.
As part of the exhibition, MFA candidate Kadence Meredith will participate in an artist residency under the guidance of Gao Yujie. Kadence Meredith will facilitate art-making workshops related to technology and electronic media. Visit the Creation Cube at the George Bothwell Branch during the second week of July to take part in the activities.
Under the name Instant Places, Laura Kavanaugh and Ian Birse have created intermedia performances and generative artworks across Japan, Australia, Argentina/Uruguay, the UK, Europe, New York/Chicago, and Canada. Recent highlights include an audio commission and livestreamed performance in Vienna for Kunstradio ORF, hybrid performances with Company Blu in Italy, a graphic score composition for Ensemble SuperMusique in Montreal, and Bell Curve, a midi-controlled carillon and audio installation at Edmonton City Hall for the Works Festival 2024.
Gao Yujie is a media artist, performer, and researcher who explores time as an artistic material through site-specific performances, interactive installations, and data visualizations. Her generative, participatory work examines the materiality of duration and the elasticity of space and time in rule-based environments. Gao’s work has been showcased internationally in Canada, China, and Italy, earning an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica 2022 and a longlisting for the 2017 Lumen Prize. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia in Digital Arts and Humanities and teaches Creative and Media Studies.
Holly Aubichon, Modern Medicine, Oil painting on stretched canvas, 2021
Holly Aubichon: Urban Legends
June 14 – October 12, 2025
Dunlop Art Gallery (Sherwood Village Branch)
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Guest curated by Tomas Jonsson
Urban Legends honours Holly Aubichon’s relatives, growing up in Canada’s violent, forceful attempt to assimilate Indigenous people. In these works, Holly pieces together stories of relatives, symbolically recovering and restoring them to her circle. Due to their weight, these stories come in glimpses; short conversations or a passing memory shared on the road. Holly has collected these fragments and reimagined them through her paintings, removing colonial filters and restoring the stories in a way to build a better understanding and connection.
Art is healing, a way to document and preserve her paternal lineage while placing herself as the leading matriarch within these painted narratives. Her paintings depict intimate urban interiors, where individuals do their best to continue traditional ways while adapting to contemporary urban realities. Holly’s family had to be tough, living in both worlds of figuring out how to cope in the city, and with the effects of residential schools: homelessness, prostitution and addiction. Her paintings reimagine their stories of suffering and loss to envision what stories they might have shared with memories of joy, accomplishment, and moments in ceremony.
Join us for upcoming programs related to Urban Legends, all located at Dunlop Art Gallery (Sherwood Village Branch), unless otherwise indicated:
Drop-in Art Tours of Urban Legends
June 14, 1 – 4pm
Artist Talk with Holly Aubichon
July 26, 1 – 4pm
Art-Making Workshop: Painting with Stories
August 13, 6 – 8pm
Sherwood Village Branch
Closing Reception: Urban Legends
September 20, 1 – 4pm
Holly Aubichon investigates topics of urban Indigeneity and how ancestral knowledge is carried through to urban spaces using memory recollection, the land, and body through forms of painting, writing, tattooing and curation. Born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan, her Indigenous relations come from Green Lake region, SK and Lestock, SK. Aubichon’s practice is laboriously reliant on retracing familial memories and connections. She uses painting as a way to foster personal healing. As an extension of her practice, she has begun a traditional Indigenous tattoo mentorship to acknowledge the memories that bodies hold, support the healing, grieving and the revival of traditional tattoo practices. She graduated from the University of Regina in the Spring of 2021 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, minoring in Indigenous Art History. Aubichon is the 2021 BMO 1st Art! Regional winner for Saskatchewan.
About Dunlop Art Gallery at Regina Public Library
Central Library location
2311 – 12th Avenue
Regina, SK S4P 3Z5
Gallery Hours (CST), Central Library
Mon – Thurs, 9:30am – 9pm
Fri, 9:30am – 6pm
Sat, 9:30am – 5pm
Sun, 12 – 5pm
Sherwood Village Branch location
6121 Rochdale Boulevard
Regina, SK S4X 2R1
Gallery Hours (CST), Sherwood Village Branch
Mon, Thurs, Fri, 9:30am – 6pm
Tues, Wed, 9:30am – 9pm
Sat, 9:30am – 5pm
Sun, 12 – 5pm
Admission is FREE to all exhibitions.
Galleries are wheelchair accessible.
306-777-6040
dunlop@reginalibrary.ca
reginalibrary.ca/dunlopartgallery
We acknowledge the support of SK Arts, and funding partners SaskCulture and Saskatchewan Lotteries, whose contributions help the arts thrive in this province.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
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