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A collection of forty paintings capturing a family farm outside of Inglis, Manitoba is on display at Altona’s Gallery in the Park for the next several weeks. For the artist, those paintings - collected in an exhibit called Return to the Farm - hold lots more than just the buildings and machinery: it holds the stories of five generations of her family and her own life.
“I’d spend every summer there with my cousins,” says artist Hollande Bezan. “It also was before cell phones and the internet, so it was really awesome because you just immersed yourself in the farm. You go outside all day... just wandering around, looking at cows, playing fairies in the trees, anything.”
Although Bezan now calls Winnipeg home, she still visits the property often on the weekends. The activities she does there may have changed, but the feeling of peace and freedom from the demands of daily life remain, a feeling that Bezan does not take for granted.
“I feel really lucky that we can still do that in our family,” she says, “because there’s so many families that had farms, and as families as expand and grandparents die, the farms get sold off.”
The desire to capture the family property before any of these changes occurred was a driving force for Return to the Farm. Bezan began the project in 2020, just before her grandparents left the property and her cousin took it over. “I felt a lot of pressure,” admits Bezan, “because not only [do] my dad and his siblings have all these memories there, but [also] my grandpa and then my cousins.”
“In doing this series, it was fun to really spend time [going], ‘What is this building I’m looking at that’s dilapidated and falling apart?’” she continues. “That’s the bunk house. That’s where great grandparents stayed when they were building the house. That’s where their workers would stay after that if they’re farming out there. It’s interesting to look at that then to look at what it is now. If you were just to go in cold, it’s like, ‘There’s a building.’ It’s interesting to put it all together.”
While the experience of preserving the memories of the family’s property will resonate with many exhibit-goers, particularly in an agriculturally-driven community like Altona, Bezan was most excited to have her own family interact with her paintings. “So many of them actually came out for the opening,” she remarked, “and it was really funny because everyone was running around [going] ‘I know where that is! That’s so-and-so's farm! That’s this place!’”
“I feel like that accomplished one of my check marks of making sure that I captured it in their eyes as much as I could,” Bezan smiles. “It’s not just my memories. It’s quite a few people’s memories.”
Return to the Farm will be on display at the Gallery in the Park until September 21. For hours and more information, visitors are encouraged to visit the gallery’s website or follow them on social media.
