JAEDEN BLEWETT AND GERMAINE KOH
ASTERISMS: TERROIR
8 AUGUST 2026 - 31 OCTOBER 2026
OFF-SITE | PARK PATH CROSSROADS NEAR 210 INDIAN BATTLE RD S

EXHIBITION BOOKLET (COMING SOON)

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 paths in Lethbridge’s Oldman River Valley. Attached to the poles are flags woven from the grasses and plants of the river valley, entwined with yarns pulled from locally 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 of their immediate 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.

Typically, flags planted on the landscape symbolize the presence of a supposedly enduring nation or entity on those lands. In contrast, the flags of Terroir exist in an ongoing conversation of change, impermanence, and receptivity to their location. The particularities of Sikoohkotoki and Lethbridge are interwoven into the standards, proposing that each community is in continual flux between its combinations of natural phenomena, landscape, people, and material culture. 

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.

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.