Opening Reception: Hockey Night in Canada

Join us for the reception of "Hockey Night in Canada," an exhibition by Julie Mills at the John V. Hicks Gallery (Prince Albert Arts Centre).

Julie Mills received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2016. In the same year, she received the Mary Blade award for excellence in painting. Mills currently lives between Vancouver BC and Prince Albert where she works alongside the beavers, moose, elk and deer. 

The paintings and multimedia works included in "Hockey Night in Canada" examine and critique the ways that illustrious Canadian identity is continually manufactured on a fractured plot of colonial patriarchy. The work, grounded in satire, focuses on how behavioural standards are supported through sports culture and perpetuated via fandom.

Humour is essential to this body work. The series of paintings and installations are as much concerned with the distillation of the colonial properties in national imagery as with the dislocation of pretension often associated with contemporary art. The layers of referential material in each piece (from a decorative canvas table cloth to the iconographic appropriation of Martha Rosler’s ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’), make space for cultural reflection and relation with the hope of initiating inclusive conversations, regardless of viewers' education.

This exhibition is proudly supported by the Prince Albert Council for the Arts and the Mann Art Gallery, with funding from the City of Prince Albert, SaskCulture, and Sask Lotteries.
In late 2015, the Mann Art Gallery entered into a partnership with the Prince Albert Council for the Arts to program exhibitions at the John V. Hicks Gallery (located at the Prince Albert Arts Centre; 1010 Central Avenue). The MAG and the Arts Council have shared a long and vibrant history in the Arts Centre, and both parties are committed to working together for the betterment of arts and culture in Prince Albert.