"It's a delight," says artist Dean Bauche about showing his work in a space that used to fall under his purview as director of galleries for the City of North Battleford.
"I love this gallery. I love this space," he says. "It's just a wonderful opportunity."
The show is now on at the Chapel Gallery and will be on display until the end of the year.
"The 22 years that I was the director here, I didn't have that opportunity [to show] because it always would have been perceived as a conflict of interest."
Bauche, award-winning artist, curator, educator and adjudicator, retired as director of galleries in the summer of 2010 to pursue his art full time. He's been preparing for this show ever since. A reception was held Saturday night where patrons had a chance to greet the artist and take part in a unique musical exercise.
The exhibition is titled Visual Tension: The Recent Work of Dean Bauche.
The oldest piece dates back to 2001, which is relatively recent given that Bauche has been creating art most of his life.
The overpainted photograph, a portrait, also illustrates how an artist evolves, being a precursor to the direction Bauche's current work has taken.
"This was when I was working with resin, and that's why I moved over to wax, because I found the resin to be too glossy and a little bit too unpredictable."
Bauche, whose artistic mainstay is portraiture, has found new techniques to add to his palette and wider meaning to apply to his subjects.
Applying encaustic wax to his paintings, photographs and copper art in various ways is a common theme across the exhibition. It brings a new texture and interpretation to the process of creation.
The 2001 portrait also points to Bauche's growing affinity for asymmetry and organic texture. The frame, which is a part of the whole, is textured with handmade paper. Later works integrate acid-treated, encaustic-enhanced copper as the framework for paintings or as art pieces themselves.
"You're playing with beautiful organic texture and letting it do its own dance."
Seeing the copper pieces in a gallery setting has been exciting for Bauche.
"A lot of the copper has always been worked on in the studio context, always learning up against walls and that kind of thing, so to actually see it hung is also a wonderful kind of thing."
The exhibit features 42 pieces. A half dozen or so have actually been borrowed from their owners for the show.
One of those is a portrait, which was purchased by its subject, that points to Bauche's thoughts about where people come from and where they are going.
The works resultant of those thoughts he calls his boat series, inspired by the story of Tom Sukanen, a Finnish immigrant who died at Saskatchewan Hospital North Battleford, institutionalized from his home near Macrorie after trying to build a sea-going boat to return to his homeland via the Saskatchewan River.
The boat theme is integrated throughout the show, says Bauche, and the piece titled Frozen Harbour of the Great Plains is "directly focused on the idea of the boat series."
In that background of the portrait are two boats frozen in a harbour with their sails up.
"They want to go home even though they can't."
The subject is a man he met at Elbow, and during the course of having coffee together agreed to pose for Bauche.
"He's exactly the kind of character I wanted for the boat series," says Bauche. The fact that he was also a Newfoundlander who had lived on the prairies for 30 years further fascinated the artist with its appropriateness.
When Bauche finished the painting he showed it to his subject, who was so enamoured of it that he ended up buying it.
"When I explained the series and why I was doing it he stood in front of it and read this poem by Wordsworth," says Bauche, "and this poem explains the series better than I could ever explain it."
That inspired him to integrate the poem into the painting.
Bauche's thoughts have also turned toward the way we view the world, a theme he's explored on a painting of two ravens.
"I was down in Yellowstone with my grandson, and these two sat on the bench where we were eating," says Bauche. "They wouldn't go away, they just absolutely did their own thing."
When he painted them, he was in a time of experimentation for a mural he and fellow artist Darrell Baschuk were to create for Prince Edward Island's celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference. The mural followed Bauche's Tom Sukanen theme, with a man pulling a boat and a woman observing from a window, painting the sight.
The ravens are seen in the context of gazing through the suggestion of a window.
"Windows are just a metaphor, the suggestion of an idea that we are always looking at the world through windows," says Bauche. "We see the world through our house, our perspective, so they are not literal windows. They let in sometimes the whole thing and sometimes they completely obscure like the boat series, the boats are more than boats, they speak to something in our psyche."
Exploring new ways for art to speak to our psyche, Bauche was excited to incorporate a musical experience into Saturday's opening reception, a spin off from his connection with the community of Flin Flon, Man.
Last year and the year before, Bauche traveled back and forth to Flin Flon for a residency mentoring artists at the Northern Visual Arts Centre, or NorVA, an artists' collective, gallery and community arts space.
It was while working with the artists there that he began to build heavier design and more visual impact into the representational work he was doing. His portraits were moving away from being reliant on the representational element in the piece as the singular focus.
"I've always believed that shouldn't be the case, but my work with NorVA pushed me into developing a strong sense of design to allow the design element to carry as much weight as the portrait," says Bauche.
It was at NorVA that Bauche's new show debuted in September.
It was also at Flin Flon that Bauche came to know Mark Kolt, who holds bachelor degrees in both law and music and who is the City of Flin Flon's chief administrator. For many years he was a pianist with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
"He plays 60 different instruments," says Bauche with wonder.
For about the last four years, Kolt has been interpreting art with spontaneous sound impressions, usually with a keyboard, at art events.
Bauche explains people come into an exhibition, where they may be chosen to pick a painting to interpretation, then Mark, often working with a second musician, responds to it musically.
"It is really moving," says Bauche. "It's another level of experiencing art. Art is so visceral, that's why we like or dislike something. But when you hear how they respond to it at a visceral level, it's very emotional.
Local musician Keith Bartlett joined him for the event at the Chapel Gallery.
Bauche was pleased Kolt was willing to make the trip, 14 hours each way, for just an hour's performance.
Bauche has been a resident of the Battlefords since the 1970s. He and his wife Barb moved here when she was training as a psychiatric nurse at Saskatchewan Hospital.
Bauche, who studied institutional psychology in Australia, worked for 12 years at the Centennial Park Education Centre, during which time his interest in art saw him become involved in the local art scene.
He developed a relationship with Cree artist Allen Sapp and Sapp's benefactor Dr. Allan Gonor, which eventually resulted in Bauche becoming the founding curator of the Allen Sapp Gallery and the City of North Battleford's director of galleries.
In 2010, he retired to focus on his own art, and to engage with other artists.
The annual retreat he holds in the Cypress Hills is heavily committed to making young emerging artists, he says.
The retreat attracts about 30 artists from across western Canada, including playwrights, poets and visual artists, and about half of them are typically under 30 years old.
The retreat is held at the Bauches' summer home near Eastend, where Bauche grew up. He has a studio there and at their Battleford home as well.
