Making memories

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This article was published 11/03/2025 (196 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The title of the Urban Art Group’s debut exhibition at Assiniboine Park’s Pavilion Galleries has taken on special significance in the past few months.

Memories: Artwork by the Urban Art Group brings together a wide range of artistic styles, from oil portraits, wildlife watercolours and landscape paintings to caribou tufting and photography. The exhibition features works by artists Elizabeth Sellors, Kristina Ryan and Daniel Roscoe, who formed the creative partnership in 2022.

But the occasion of their first collective show is tinged with sadness, as Roscoe, who founded the group with Sellors, died a month before the opening date.

The trio were in the thick of preparations in December when Roscoe began to show signs of illness. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January.

“His sickness was out of the blue; he had no idea. He went downhill very fast. We had been having meetings, he was working on things preparing for the show. His death came as a huge shock,” Sellors says.

Roscoe had been methodical when it came to organizing the show. He had plotted out the exhibition, making charts of the gallery’s available spaces and dimensions of the walls so the group could visualize the display setup. But he wasn’t as ordered when it came to his own work.

His sudden demise left Sellors and Ryan in a predicament — the duo had already prepared their pieces, but Roscoe’s work had yet to be organized. Roscoe was in the middle of creating new art for the show when he became ill and there were unfinished drafts everywhere.

“Unfortunately, Daniel didn’t leave a list of what he wanted,” says Dawn Campbell, Roscoe’s wife of 43 years. “He kept thinking he was going to be able to go home and finish the work for the exhibit.

“He worked on his own on the second floor of the house and I very often did not know where he put things. Paintings got randomly scattered around, there were a lot of works in progress and old stuff got tucked away in a corner somewhere,”

It fell on Sellors, who met Roscoe at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art in 2018, to locate art for the show.

The pair — two mature students in the university course — had swiftly become friends, attending numerous gallery openings and art exhibitions together.

“He had been working on various things and had not got his stuff ready for the show so there were bits and pieces of things all over the place. Dawn said, ‘Go through anything,’ so I went through his studio, I went through his basement, I did a lot of digging. There was absolutely no order to where things were placed. It was all over the house,” Sellors recalls.

As the exhibition opening date grew closer, Sellors and Campbell searched together, successfully locating a number of finished works, including Roscoe’s latest oil painting, Day’s End at Baker Homestead, which he completed in late 2024.

Another of his works forms the group’s poster for the exhibit. Using his extensive collection of old photographs, Roscoe had edited and colourized a picture and presented it to the group.

Both Sellors and Ryan have 19 pieces each in the show. Interspersed between their art are 16 of Roscoe’s works, ranging from pencil sketches and paintings to photographs of plants and fungi.

Sellors specializes in portraits, and on the walls, alongside her still life and Prairie landscapes, are her paintings of Ryan and Roscoe.

“My main interest is portraiture and it’s absolute realism for the most part. I did a portrait of Danny, which is bang-on him, hanging by a window in the gallery,” she says.

Ryan works in the exhibition feature watercolour paintings of wildlife and nature, and include six caribou tuftings, a northern Canadian craft that involves sewing pieces of caribou hair onto suede, velvet or velveteen.

“I have been making these pieces since 1982.My tuftings are a variation of the original style but the basic technique is the same,” she says.

Both artists say the thought of cancelling never entered their minds; they were determined the show had to go on.

“When Danny died, I had to make a number of decisions. After going through all of Danny’s works, I felt we had sufficient numbers of his artworks to continue to be a three-person show — which was what we so desperately wanted. Danny was part of the group, and our friend, so we wanted to keep it as the three of us,” Sellors says.

“We weren’t sure if Danny’s wife would be ready to share his art,” Ryan says. “Thankfully, Dawn was very receptive to allowing us to include Danny’s art in our show and we are very fortunate and honoured to be able to so,”

Memories will run until May 25 in the Community Gallery on the second floor of Pavilion Galleries at Assiniboine Park.

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca