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Visual Arts by Monique Westra The Search for Home Face Forward: Six Canadians Confront the Millennium Glenbow Museum runs until May 22 In her talk last week at Glenbow Museum, Carol Shields, one of Canada's most celebrated authors, admitted that she was "thrilled and bewildered" when the museum invited her to be one of the six guest curators of the Face Forward exhibition. It proved to be a rewarding and wonderful experience, unlike any other in her professional life. In the course of her research, she loved getting into the secret corners of the museum, which was, she said, "just like going to the best carnival in the world." In a style that seems effortlessly fluid, her carefully composed and beautiful novels reveal the thoughts and feelings of her characters, who are often ordinary people embarked on life’s journey. For her theme in the museum exhibit, she reflected on what art and literature are really about, and she came to the realization that "art is about an individual finding his or her true home" and that it is the search for home that constitutes the life journey. The yearning for home is universal and timeless, elemental and profound. Home means more that just shelter and security, it is a place – real or metaphorical – where one can be oneself. For Shields, home is the site of creativity. In the past, one of the few ways in which a Western woman could be creative was through quilting, a quiet art form associated with domesticity and tradition. Displayed in an open chest is a beautiful log cabin-patterned quilt circa 1900, made up of silk ties belonging to family members and friends. A delicately stitched 19th century sampler conveys the idea of women’s handiwork and family bonds. For many women at home, writing in their diaries was a personal expression of self. In the Glenbow archives, Shields was delighted to find the diary of a young woman named Sophie Puckette, whose gentle features we see in a photograph of her as a girl in 1903. Shields points out that diaries like this are invaluable because they tell stories from a woman's perspective, "...a range of social history that would otherwise be lost to us." The freedom to be creative is the cornerstone of Shields’s concept of home, so it is altogether fitting that she expresses this idea through the creativity of others. Her exhibit is unique in the Face Forward exhibition in that it is defined and shaped by works of art. The art works featured in the other exhibits serve primarily as adjuncts to the central thesis. In the Shields exhibit, art is its living core – conveying in many different ways, and in various media, concepts of home that seamlessly weave across cultural, spatial and temporal lines. The Shields exhibit is designed as a home, complete with a comfy velvet crimson armchair the grateful visitor can relax in, thereby becoming a part of the exhibit. Next to the real armchair is a much smaller ceramic one by Regina artist Vic Cicansky entitled Carrot Patch. Its backrest, arms and back are entirely covered with blue sky and clouds, bringing, as it were, the outside in. On the seat of the chair are rows of young carrots erupting from the soil. Heaven and earth are brought together in a modest, domestic vegetable garden under a prairie sky: the universe at our doorstep, travelled from an armchair. Directly opposite the ceramic garden are several painted ones – carefully tended backyard vegetable gardens, behind houses set in a sunny mountain valley in a work by Margaret Shelton called Dogtown in July, Rosedale, Alberta. Beside this painting is a glass-fronted cabinet filled with fascinating artifacts, including a miniature tableau set in a wooden box by Wayne Friesen, called Busy Signal (Spiritual Inquiry). The armchair in this room is unoccupied. Shields is struck by the emptiness and sterility of this tiny, sparsely furnished living room. "Is this our idea of a living room?" she asks. The cigarette butt still burning in the ashtray and the telephone receiver dangling off its cradle in the empty room have ominous overtones, as if someone’s life had been abruptly interrupted forever. For many people, home is synonymous with the nuclear family: father, mother and child. This familiar and reassuring triad is represented by Maxwell Bates in a 1956 painting simply called Family. Other works of art selected by Shields also deal with the theme of family, directly or indirectly: a Peruvian sculpture of a birthing scene; a hilarious 1970s suburban couple lounging beside their swimming pool in a ceramic and mixed-media work by Saskatchewan artist David Thauberger called The Long Hot Summer (Part 2); and a whimsical construction, topped by a bird made by Jane Zednik. In addition to the Friesen miniature, there is one other work that introduces a discordant note into the generally positive warmth of Shields’s harmonious exhibit. Annemarie Schmid-Esler’s 1980 Kitchen Cupboard Birds is made up of a dilapidated and decaying wooden cupboard with disproportionately large teacups and saucers, their delicate floral motifs on porcelain obscured by crude over-painting. Perched on top of the yellow cupboard are two identical nuzzling birds. Love birds? I don’ t think so. One is black and the other is white, signifying a duality, perhaps good and evil. And, both are crows, traditional harbingers of death. Shields’s commentary suggests that her interpretation of this piece was far more benign than mine. But surely the idea of home today is also fraught with anxiety in light of domestic violence and the sad reality that, for many women, home is where the self is denied, cowed and hidden, a site of fear and danger. Unforgettable too is the terrible plight of the homeless. Although Shields never seems to allude to this darker picture in The Search for Home, it is precisely the poignancy of her cherished images of home that led me to consider the magnitude of its loss.

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