Following the Fault Line

Honey, mineral salt, bitumen, and fire transform the text, shifting it from an object of historical and colonial authority into a site of material change.

The exhibition emerges from a personal inheritance marked by contradiction. The artist is from a line of water witches on their maternal side, while their paternal grandfather served as a Baptist minister. These traditions reflect paradoxical ways of understanding the world: one grounded in institutionalized religion, and the other in embodied, often taboo practices of sensing.

Alana Bartol (Assistant Professor, Painting) is a white, queer settler with Danish, German, English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. Their father’s family arrived in Massachusetts in the early 1600s, near Salem, where the witch trials took place. Their mother’s family arrived in Nova Scotia in the late 1700s. Born in unceded Mi’kmaq territory, they have lived since 2015 in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), on the ancestral lands of the Blackfoot people. The exhibition pairs religious, familial, and colonial inheritances with relationships to land, responsibility, and time.

In the exhibition, the Bible is subjected to a series of transformations. One was burned in a moon ritual, reflecting renewal and regeneration. Another was drilled and filled with bitumen, a material tied to the petrochemical landscapes that dominate Alberta identity and industry. A third was slathered in honey, reflecting the complex relationships between extractivism and agriculture. The fourth was encrusted in salt that both preserves and erodes. The mineralized salt licks are used for livestock nutrient supplementation and sit alongside pieces that were sculpted by the tongues of deer and cattle. These materials move between geological, ecological, and biological registers.

The title, Following the Fault Line, refers both to geological fractures and subtle ruptures that run through faith and our place in it. By tending to these transformations, the work opens contentious spaces for reflection, refusal, and metamorphosis.

Opening Reception on Saturday, April 18 from 1 to 4 p.m., with artist remarks at 2 p.m.