Often solitary, the five petalled wild rose (rosa acicularis, or prickly rose) can be found in some of the harshest of climates. Versatile in its choice of habitat, it flourishes across rocky outcrops, hillsides and on the banks of streams.* Since 1930, it has been the floral emblem of Alberta, “brightening the countryside with flashes of pink.”** Different from its cultivated relatives, the wild rose is beloved for its adaptable characteristics which have come to accommodate disparate concepts of beauty, ideology, culture and property in addition to medicinal and spiritual applications. 

Working across, or in relation, to what is understood as Alberta, artists Miruna Dragan, Michelle Sound, Holly Ward and Peter von Tiesenhausen have been possessed by its landscape. Shaped, reconfigured, and pieced together, each of the works in Wild Roses question what it means to know, understand and live with a place through dispersed moments of encounter. 

Shortly after relocating to the Badlands, Miruna Dragan had a dream of herself as a spider and her log house as a loom. Waking, she set her partner a task of building one into their house and taught herself how to weave. The resulting kilims, Visitation VII - IX (2022 - 2024)—partially woven in white and overdyed off the loom—present a mixture of geometric and blurred phytomorphic shapes. Allowing material to dictate form, these geometric rugs become extensions of Dragan’s dreamworld and physical location, specifically rooted within her local context. 

Approaching land as collaborator, Peter von Tiesenhausen has made work on his rural property in Demmitt since the 1980s.  A transcript, settlement agreement, map, baseball cap and series of letters comprise the evidence of a durational land-based work. For What It’s Worth began in 1996, when von Tiesenhausen copyrighted the top six inches of soil on his property to prevent a pipeline being laid through the area. 

Sifting through family archives and Cree-language dictionaries, Michelle Sound’s sculptural photographic series Holding It Together (2022-2023) addresses histories of displacement and loss in relation to Treaty 8, her home territory. Torn apart, these images are stitched back together*** using porcupine quills and caribou tufts—material processes embedded in Indigenous land-based knowledge. Crossing spoken words and unutterable pain, these works address an intentional practice of reassembling fragments.

A temporary visitor to the province, Holly Ward’s cyanotypes, Realms of the Soil (2016-2018), depict six grass species cultivated for restoration at the Coutts Centre Heritage Farm (Nanton). Nearly eradicated during the introduction of wheat monoculture in the early 20th century, the removal of these grasses contributed to the dust-bowl ecological disaster. Depicted with roots intact, Ward emphasizes the integral role that these humble organisms play in holding soil in place.

Collectively resisting the picturesque, these works point to the fallacy of a singular idea of landscape. Much like the wild rose that adapts to untamed grasslands, visions of place emerge from individual looking where beauty is entangled with thorny stems.

*https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=roac

**https://www.alberta.ca/alberta-emblems

***From Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ode to Northern Alberta (excerpt) “here, no one is birthed only pieced together. i tire myself out pretending to have a body.” The Wound is a World (2017)

Miruna Drăgan (b.1975, Bucharest, ROM) is a visual artist settled in Alberta alongside the Rosebud River / Akokiniskway in Drumheller and teaches in Mohkinstsis / Calgary on Blackfoot territory. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis. Select exhibitions include: Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto),  Muséo de la Ciudad, Muséo Regional, and Muséo de Arte Contemporáneo (Querétaro, Mexico), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), u Gallery (Black Diamond), Living Art Museum (Reykjavík), Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto),; Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge) amongst numerous others.

Michelle Sound (b. 1977, Vancouver) is a Cree and Métis artist and mother. She is a member of Wapsewsipi Swan River First Nation in Treaty 8 Territory, Northern Alberta and she was born and raised on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, School for the Contemporary Arts, and a Master of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. Recent solo exhibitions include Neutral Ground ARC (Regina), Daphne Art Centre (Montréal), Alternator (Kelowna), Gallery 101 (Ottawa), Burrard Arts Foundation, and Seymour Art Gallery (Vancouver). Her works can be found in the collections of Forge Project Collection (New York) and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg).

Peter von Tiesenhausen (b. 1959, New Westminster) is a settler artist based in rural Treaty 8 territory, in the community of Demmitt, AB. von Tiesenhausen's long-standing multidisciplinary practice staunchly eludes categorization; land art, community-building, steel sculpture, environmental activism, bronze-casting, and wild blueberry propagation equally contribute to a complex synergy: a life lived as art. Select exhibitions include the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Esker Foundation (Calgary), Platform Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). In 2023 he was presented with Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Glenbow Museum (Calgary), the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection amongst other national and international private holdings.

Holly Ward (b. 1973, Saint John) is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, multi-media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Select solo-exhibitions include Artspeak (Vancouver), the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), the Kelowna Art Gallery, Or Gallery (Vancouver) and Volta 6 Basel.  She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, Chile, England, Mexico, the US, Norway and South Korea. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery and Fogo Island Arts.  Lost & Found, a collaborative exhibition with Kevin Schmidt, is currently on view at the Varley Art Gallery (Markham, ON).  Holly is an Assistant Professor in York University’s Visual Arts program (Toronto).