Unsilenced
Richard Boulet, Ruth Cuthand, Derek Pho, Amy Snider, Peter Tucker
February 6 - May 3, 2026
Artist Statements
Richard Boulet -
Where to begin? I would like to situate my hand work among the desires of the many people who know the simple and heartfelt rewards of working with their bodies. We can all celebrate life via the heart and yes, my hand crafted approach to art can include the use of the occasional machine for making.
> My parents encouraged me to work with my hands as I was growing up. Apparently I liked to draw and colour as a child. Paint by numbers to latch hook rug kits were provided.
> My BFA painting professor for 3 years was Don Reichert. He was a father figure to me. As a young man I did not have the words to truly talk about what I was up to but Don taught me to trust the deep connections between my hands, my arms, my body, all in motion to my heart. Don first grounded me, then taught me I could thrive in my own way.
> We all have barriers in our lives that test our resilience. One cannot compare apples to oranges but we need help to create a vital life. Sometimes living and coping is served best by just a simple awareness of the rhythms of the everyday. That understanding of the moment at hand and its place and its passage can be crucial in being able to survive substantial hardship.
> I am remembering when I first read Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric"
> and when I first read aloud segments of John Cage's "Empty Words". I was living in liberty.
> I admire Anna Torma's stitching and Kenneth Patchen's painted poems. I also love when community comes together with shared purpose. lluminated manuscripts before the printing press or Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Basilica come to mind. I also admire the slow-stitch philosophy of Claire Wellesley Smith and her desire for sustainable living.
> So much about life is to have a congruent understanding of oneself. This is usually viewed as taking time and much quiet reflection but I also realize young children can access their own cosmology complete for their needs on a moment’s notice. They just need a few certainties in place but who doesn't?
> To close, saying “Thank-you” to the cosmos now and then, and a “Thank-you” for being alive as a human never really hurt anyone. A simple gestalt counts.
Richard Boulet lives and works in Edmonton. He holds a Bachelor of Environmental Studies in Architecture (1983) and a BFA (1987) both from the University of Manitoba School of Art, Winnipeg, MB, Canada, as well as an MFA (2006) from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. Boulet’s solo shows include A Retrospective, curated by Lycia Trouton and Kenzie Housego at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, and RAGE HOPE, curated by Dick Averns at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary and has another retrospective touring Canada currently, curated by Wayne Baerwaldt.
Ruth Cuthand -
I was born in 1954 in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, of Plains Cree, Scottish and Irish ancestry. I grew up in Cardston Alberta near the Blood Reserve, where at the age of eight I met artist Gerald Tailfeathers and decided that I, too, wanted to be an artist. As a child, my first art materials included the orange paper that was discarded in the processing of the Polaroid chest x-rays that we were subjected to annually as students in routine tuberculosis screenings; they collected the peculiar-smelling 18-inch squares of paper and gave them to my Anglican minister father for use in Sunday school. Early fascination with disease, First Nations living conditions, and settler/Native relationships informed by childhood experiences have become key elements in my creative practice, which has encompassed printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, and beadwork.
The 1876 Indian Act was passed into law as a means to protect, civilize and assimilate the Indian population. Today it remains a barrier to improvement in First Nations standards of living and a paternalistic system of governance devoid of transparency. My personal experiences with this system are reflected in work that throughout my career has included subjects such as “white liberal” attitudes towards Aboriginal women, the Canadian response to the 1990 Oka crisis, Mormon-Native relations in Cardston, Alberta (my childhood home), the diseases that ravished First Nations upon European contact, and the deplorable living conditions in Indigenous communities that exemplify the social issues that have affected Canadian First Nations people.
In my early work, I adopted a consistently anti-aesthetic stance, refusing to be stereotyped by forcefully rejecting the authority of both Western high art and traditional Aboriginal art and design. In true anarchic style, however, I borrow freely from both when it suits my purposes. This approach has allowed me to challenge mainstream perspectives on colonialism and the relationships between “settlers” and Natives, addressing the frictions between cultures, the failures of representation, and the political uses of anger in Canada, employing stylistic crudeness to counter the stereotype of Canada as the great polite nation. In my work, I challenge the status quo by exposing the inequities that have plagued for centuries Canada’s relationship with its First Peoples, while proudly claiming a complex and self-determined Aboriginal identity.
Adopting the traditional craft of beading in my recent work was a way to continue to centre the Aboriginal woman in my art while addressing other issues of concern. Maintaining the anti-aesthetic principles on which my practice was founded, I have traded crudeness of style for materials and techniques that have long been denied status as serious art. This shift has allowed for a more sophisticated end-product that capitalizes on my fascination with the attractive and repellant subject; the simultaneously beautiful and abhorrent. This dichotomous relationship between appearance and content, or between style and subject creates a cognitive schism; it is that gap that creates a space for contemplation about the work and what it means. Though humour softens the blow of a critical message, I have found that making work which confronts the most difficult truths about Canadian society and the impacts of colonization on Aboriginal people are made remarkably palatable when delivered in a strikingly seductive package.
Ruth Cuthand is a Saskatoon-based artist who has a national reputation for her politically engaged work, through which she explores themes of racism, colonialism, tradition, identity, and disease. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1983) and Master of Fine Arts (1992) from the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, SK). She has exhibited extensively in North America and currently has a touring retrospective exhibition, Beads in the Blood touring Canada. In 2013, she was awarded the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Art Award and in 2020, she received a Governor General’s Award in Media and Visual Arts.
Derek Pho -
I've worked on these paintings during two periods of my life, first in 1998-2000 and later between 2021-2025. Much has changed with me between these two periods of my life and with the gradual improvement in my mental health, I've added numerous therapeutic elements through the addition of endless lines. Creating the mazes covering these surfaces have improved my focus and mindfulness but they cannot cover up the story beneath.
Derek Pho is a visual artist who lives and works in Regina, Saskatchewan. When he is not creating or teaching as an art instructor, he loves being at home with his family in the company of their multiple cats and a reptile.
Instagram @apodpho
Husband and Dad, Visual Artist and Radio Host, Animal Lover and IPA Enthusiast, Instructor of Art and Student of Life.
Amy Snider -
Crushed is an art installation about climate change anxiety. The gallery floor is covered with over 800 eggshell thin ceramic bowls made from clay I dug up in Regina. To read the text on the walls, you need to become a participant: will you step carefully between the bowls, perhaps tiptoeing or raising your pant cuffs? Or will you stomp ahead, satisfied by the sound of shattering ceramic beneath your feet? What will you leave behind for others?
Climate change is destroying the places I love, from the melting Rocky Mountain glaciers I hike to with my family, to the dried-out wetlands where we used to bird watch. This affects me deeply, not only because it robs me of my enjoyment of these places, but also for the fear and sadness I have about the unprecedented planetary changes we are causing. Where are the birds who built their nests in these wetlands for generations? What will happen to our water supply when the South Saskatchewan River runs dry? What will the world be like when my son reaches my age? Questions like these are always on my mind.
As a potter, I now make cups, plates, and bowls the represent the effects of climate change on the world and on me as they dissolve, crumble, and blow away. To me, these pottery forms symbolize our humanness as they are a few of the first objects we created, and we use them daily in our homes to feed ourselves. The bowls in Crushed convey our precarity at this time, as the ecosystems that keep us alive are being crushed by the weight of our footprint on the planet.
Climate anxiety and grief are on the rise. This is not good. If anything hopeful is possible, we need people who care to demand action. Caring can be hard, I know. Even talking about this issue can be difficult. Crushed creates a safe space for community, solace, and support. For those who feel distress while experiencing this show, I offer opportunities to connect with like-minded people and to participate in work being done towards solutions. Finding community and taking action are the two best ways to overcome despair.
My name is Amy Snider. I am a recent MFA graduate of the University or Regina, Canada. I use a variety of media, predominantly clay and ceramic sculpture and autotheoretical writing, to represent the effects of the climate crisis. My work includes a series of ephemeral cups, bowls, and plates that represent melting glaciers, drought, and eco-anxiety as they dissolve, crumble, and blow away.
Peter Tucker -
Exploring the tension of identity, Peter Tucker’s work plays with the movement between fragmentation and connection, disruption and continuity that creates (and recreates) the wholeness of a human life. His work is the search for home and self, a negotiation of presence in the restless in-between spaces of landscape and people.
Peter discovered art as a child, and at age seventeen attended the Ontario College of Art. He studied at Mount Allison University for a year then moved to British Columbia where he apprenticed in woodworking, spending four years developing his skills as a craftsman. In 1996 Peter returned to painting, and began exhibiting in 1998. He has continued to show his work since then, in Vancouver, Montreal, and Saskatchewan.
He was eighteen when he spent his first summer as a tree planter in the “wilds of the Canadian north,” a place which captivated him. Peter returned to British Columbia a few years later and from 1990 to 2001 he divided his time between the rural forests of the west coast and the studio spaces of downtown Vancouver. In 2001 he relocated to Montreal, where his work as a furniture-maker and designer was featured in publications like Décormag and Plaisirs De Vivre / Living With Style. In Montreal Peter was commissioned for both paintings and furniture, but eventually his woodworking skills began to transform into a renewed interest in sculpture. In 2012 he moved to Saskatchewan, returning to the prairie space where, as a boy, he first discovered his interest in drawing and building.
Peter is currently exploring realistic landscape painting and experimenting with a variety of media. His landscapes play the infinity of land and sky against the fragmentation of human activity working across its surface, while his sculpture, created from reclaimed wood, is also concerned with the process of fitting together fragments and layers. Since moving to Saskatchewan, Peter has been following a new creative course dealing primarily with identity, both cultural and personal.