“Emma Lake lived and worked in Northern Saskatchewan in the middle decades of the 20th century. Her home and studio was always open to the eager and curious and because of the vigour and abundance of her output, became a Mecca for young upstarts . Lake’s attitude, focus, imagination and intuition lead to many quantum breakthroughs in form and composition. Perhaps due to her geological location or state of sexual politics at the time, she never attained the glory or attention of the artists that gleaned a signature style from those works she most generously shared.”
Gronsdahl leads with comical and pleasing design so that the work’s accessibility becomes a trojan horse for critical thinking about contemporary social and political issues. The artist’s light-hearted mythologies highlight a strange symptom of the Anthropocene, where memes hold more power than journalism. In contrast to the sinister edges of our social feeds, Gronsdahl’s manipulation of reality contains a distinct sense of innocence. His tall tales exhibit a tenderness in considering the Saskatchewan landscape and the histories and mythologies that intertwine within specific locales. Imagination becomes the ultimate adventure. In this work, notions of what might have been ignite the possibility of a reimagined world – or at the very least, a desire for the storytelling never to end.
– Terri Fidelak Director AGSC
