"To be capable of wonder is to be fully human."ⁱ

Alison Norlen is capable of wonder. Exploring sites of cultural spectacle and fantasy has been a constant source of inspiration within the Canadian artist’s esteemed artistic practice. Whether realized in large-scale or miniatures through drawings or sculptural installation, she has investigated the cultural artifice of roadside attractions, miniature golf courses, theme and amusement parks, fairgrounds, carnivals, parade floats, architectural follies, world expo pavilions and other monolithic architectural structures as “sites of fantasy, myth, industry and invention”.ⁱⁱ In their carnivalesque exoticism or absurdity as both reality and fantasy, these are “places of promise”, utopia, pleasure and play, allowing for escapism and time travel through “association, memory and imagination”.ⁱⁱⁱ Norlen explores these “participatory sites of theatre and performance where the conventions of everyday life are subverted” to investigate how we make cultural meaning.^iv

The exhibition Odyssey continues Norlen’s longstanding interest in spectacle in its presentation of her newest body of work of large-scale drawings, embroidered works and an installation of smaller paintings. Turning her gaze from public spectacle to that of a private home, she explores its domestic interiors and the wonderfully eclectic collections of objects housed within it that one comes to identify with through a lifetime of accumulating belongings and memorabilia. Originally initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown when the artist moved home to work, the resulting breathtaking works combine observation, memory and storytelling. As in her previous bodies of work, the detail and complexity of her depictions feel as fantastical as they do observational.

Norlen takes inspiration from curated spaces of fiction, such as the Dennis Severs House in London, UK, where Severs created the interior of a 17^th century Georgian house as a historical imagination of what life would have been like in former centuries. Norlen recalls artist David Hockney’s experience of this historical tourist attraction, quoting him saying, “everywhere you look is a walking still life and either you see it or you don’t”.^v Never meant to be a historically accurate renovation, each room of Severs' still life drama is performed like a cabinet of curiosities where each collected object represents storied memory and contributes to the overall theatre. Like the Dennis Severs House, Norlen’s recreation of this intimate and yet wonderfully, baroque, interior space is a theatrical evocation of a world, one embedded with personal narrative, metaphor and cultural meaning. Curator and writer Wayne Baerwaldt offers that Norlen’s practice engages “social spectacle that pays homage to the act of collecting, inspecting and analyzing our built environments, producing subtle critiques of a material culture”.^vi

Jennifer McRorie, Curator


i. Quote by Carlina Rinaldi, Italian academic and expert on childhood development.

ii. Shauna McCabe, Architecture as Art as Archive: The Analogous Spaces of Alison Norlen, GLIMMER (Saskatoon: Kenderdine Art Gallery, 2010), 10.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Ibid.

v. Alison Norlen, Art as Life, TEDxUniversity of Saskatchewan, YouTube video, accessed May 18, 2026.

vi. Wayne Baerwaldt, Float, Alison Norlen: Float (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 2002).