Beast Friends Forever

When we say, “best friends forever,” it's a phrase that lingers between passionate longing and the understanding that it is a promise destined to be broken.

Featuring Bruce Anderson, Joanne Bristol, Mackenzie Kelly-Frere (Associate Professor, Fibre and BFA '98, Textiles), Jeff Meldrum, Adrian Stimson (Chair of Board of Governors and BFA ‘03, Painting) 

Relationships are fragile. Beast Friends Forever reveals how our connections—shaped by culture, consumption, mythology, and daily life—are both deeply meaningful and mutable. Do the distinctions we make between "human" and "animal" merely mask the impermanence, interdependence, and complexity at the core of all relationships?

Do we feel closer to animals when we consume their flesh, which then becomes our flesh? In essence, becoming one shared body? Painting a bison becomes, for Siksika artist Adrian Stimson, an act of remembrance and a tribute to the enduring bond between his people and the bison. Bruce Anderson’s heroic, large-scale equine paintings evoke the supernatural power of the mythological centaur. The soldier riding a horse becomes a symbol of unbridled power, enabling exploration, conquest, and ultimately colonization.

At times of necessity, we cloak ourselves in animal skins and mimic not just creatures, but the land itself—blending with stone, vanishing among grasses—to shield ourselves from biting winds and cold dew. Mackenzie Kelly-Frère revives these traditions, weaving a grey, shaggy-pile cloak inspired by a thousand-year-old textile fragment from a Viking-Age grave in Ketilsstaðir, Iceland.

Do we attend, as Joanne Bristol does, to the community of nature woven into our human-built environment? The artist’s sparse line drawings of nearby McTavish Street, projected onto the gallery wall facing this location, reflect the bleakness of early spring as urban critters emerge to animate a shadow city of non-humans.

Building on these ideas, artist Jeff Meldrum reimagines art’s purpose in his Art for Animals projects, making works intended not for humans but to attract and reward wildlife, prompting us to consider a more-than-human aesthetic.

Beast Friends Forever explores the fluid and often ambiguous boundaries that shape our interactions with other animals and the wistful desire to transcend human-centred perspectives. To be more than friends, to be Beast Friends…Forever.