Regina-based Jeannie Mah combines her film/image-making interests with her sculpture/object-making interests to present an installation titled familiar…but foreign.  Mah uses a familiar domestic object, the cup, as a ground for her personal imagery.

Eleven exquisite, wafer thin porcelain cups sit clustered in a straight row on a narrow shelf, with a cup on each end, that sit on separate shelves, and act as bookends or quotation marks to the ordered grouping between.  Thirteen cups all told.  Images of old family photos and holiday snapshots appear on the front and back of each cup that then form a narrative of sorts.  The centre cup shows an image of Luxembourg Gardens, which demonstrates perspective, and ways of seeing in Mah's thesis.  This cup acts as a central image and the other cups unfold chronologically from the centre and inaccurately "mirror" each with falsely symmetrical images: on the left are photos taken in Canada, on the right are photos from China.  Mah has carefully rationalized the order of the cups (like pages in a book) and her choices of colour that ultimately refers to the largely ignored rich history of ceramics.

Jeannie Mah continues a movement of contemporary artists, such as the American artist Charles Kraft, Canadian artists Léopold L. Foulem, Richard Milette, and the British artist Paul Scott who all bring direct references to bear from that profound history.  It intellectually feeds the work and stimulates the makers, and ultimately rewards the viewers with a level of complexity and depth that make these objects compelling.