Adam and Steve: Doug Melnyk.
October 24 - November 28, 2003
This gallery-based installation of hundreds of small drawings affixed directly to the walls and windows of the gallery space, grows out of the artist's current fascination with the evidence and study of a wide range of homosexual pairings, same-sex parenting and transgendered appearance and behaviour in nature. A response to the Christian Right's "Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and Steve," this show will succinctly present visual representation of the case against. Running concurrently in the Frost Free Gallery will be an exhibition featuring tiny polar bears by Carolyn Meili.

Cut-Paper Drawing Books - a workshop with Doug Melnyk at AKA Gallery Saturday, October 25 1 pm as a part of our year of book-related programming.

Guessed House: Ellen Moffat, Linda Duvall, Rachelle Viader-Knowles
September 11 - October 17, 2003
Local artists Linda Duvall and Ellen Moffat are matched with Regina-based Rachelle Viader Knowles in this exhibition based upon a project where the artists "invaded" a stranger's house and occupied it (sans owner) for an entire weekend. The project, supported by AKA, will center around relationships between people and places; about travel and transience; about lives that involve movement and multiple locations and the heightened sense of awareness that comes with being away from the familiar. The artists plan to fictionalize both the reading and interpretation of the space and lives lived within the guessed/guest house in the installation.

FIX: Laura Kinzel.
April 9 - 12, 2003
"I come from a long line of women who sew and crochet, women who embellish everything from people and furniture to toilet paper rolls -- caught somewhere between covering up, decorating, and marking territory." - Laura Kinzel

Kinzel seeks the reassurance of ritual as an answer to the body politic. In FIX, she continues to order, bind, and mend, while using the creative act to "fix" aspects of her life. Obsessiveness is a leitmotif in Kinzel's work. The exhibition space will be punctuated by hundreds of crocheted pill bottles and fragile vessels that serve as random meditations and speak to the desire to control and rely on habitual knowledge when facing the unknown. This act of repetitive artmaking is ritualistic, both exorcising demons and providing time for contemplation.

Landlocked.
January 10- February 14, 2003
Landlocked is a two person exhibition organised by AKA Gallery featuring artists Lynn Richardson, a Winnipeg artist currently residing in Texas, and Phil Irish, an artist in Ontario. Both artists in Landlocked are working with issues of tension, yearning, and the struggles of individuals and groups, though approach these subjects by very different means. Phil Irish is a painter whose subjects are sea-faring boats; living so far from the ocean, Irish's boats are homages to memory and symbolic emblems, tokens of thanks for safe voyages and calls to prayer for those in danger. Lynn Richardson's art, which comprises small, awkward wooden automatons, evokes a prairie landscape transformed by immense pressures into something productive as an auto factory. For Irish, the vantage point of the viewer is key in his work the viewer is called upon to aid those in distress; the paintings compell the viewer to act. More directly, Richardson's work implicates the viewer when they choose to manipulate the sculptural
objects.

Peak Performance 1
Open Call : Marlene Madison
September 19, 2003
Open Call explores the prospect
of becoming a celebrity and contemplates celebrity life. This work is a performance component Madison's Audition Tapes Series that uses the Hollywood celebrity model and the mainstream entertainment product to make art. The Audition Tapes Series and Open Call also examine pre-production systems as they apply to mainstream media production.

Marlene Madison is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her works have been performed and screened across Canada, in the USA, Mexico, and in Europe. She has been featured in various media including CBC, CTV, TV Azteca and ADBUSTERS magazine. For the past few years Madison's work has focused on the effects of advertising's intrusion upon cultural, public and private space.