JAEDEN BLEWETT AND GERMAINE KOH
ASTERISMS: TERROIR
8 AUGUST 2026 - 31 OCTOBER 2026

OFF-SITE | PARK PATH CROSSROADS NEAR 210 INDIAN BATTLE RD S

Asterisms are easy to spot. They are familiar star patterns like Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper that are created, shared, and recognized by people all over the world. As opposed to officially recognized constellations, anyone can chart their own asterism. As they shift over the seasons and years, one way of relating to the unending field of stars is to create patterns and stories from them. 

In 50 years of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, countless stars in the form of artists, staff, volunteers, funders, and visitors have come together to create their own asterisms in the relationships that continue to shape the Gallery. In this way, a gallery is not a building. It is an ever-evolving series of relationships where many versions of the same gallery overlap and coexist.

Asterisms is a four-part exhibition series presented across the Gallery’s 50th year that sees past exhibiting artists working in a peer-mentorship model with early-career artists of Treaty 7 Territory. The exhibition series is a non-hierarchical learning opportunity for artists at different stages in their careers to develop an exhibition together.

In the second exhibition in the Asterisms series, artists Jaeden Blewett and Germaine Koh collaborate with the slow accumulation of natural forces as they intersect with local culture. For their exhibition Terroir, the artists installed three flagpoles at a crossroads of pathways in Lethbridge’s Oldman River Valley, placing them on either corner of the intersection, while an existing tree serves as a fourth marker that anchors the work within the surrounding landscape.

Attached to the poles are flags woven from the grasses and plants gathered in the river valley, entwined with yarns pulled from thrifted sweaters that colour and strengthen the flags. Combining local, natural fibres with repurposed yarn, the flags wave in the southern Alberta wind as hybrid symbols of the natural and human forces shaping their surroundings.

Terroir refers to an environment's unique combination of sunlight, wind, water, and soil that alters how life grows in an ecosystem. Southern Alberta’s exceptionally sunny days, Chinook winds, and semi-arid terrain, affect how plants used in the flags such as Yarrow, Blue Grama Grass, and Showy Milkweed have developed particular characteristics from growing in this environment. Once processed into weavings and displayed outdoors, these plants become an evolving record of the ecological forces present during the exhibition as they dry out, become bleached by the sun, and blow away. The same environmental characteristics of the Oldman River Valley that cultivated these plants will return them to the ground they grew from.

Studio assistance by Max Wu.

Curated by: Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Lead Preparator: Arianna Richardson

Thank you to the City of Lethbridge, Parks & Cemeteries for their assistance with the exhibition.

Jaeden Blewett is a visual artist who utilizes elements of performance, installation, and sculpture to explore materiality and the conditions of visibility as they relate to the body in dissonance with architecture. Her work investigates how movement can be choreographed within an installation to cultivate a heightened sense of embodied awareness. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, AB, and her MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC. 

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She was a 2023 winner of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20 and since 2024 is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.

The Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin acknowledges the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.