Larissa Kurz
Regina Leader-Post
In the heart of a new art exhibition on display at the Saskatchewan legislature is a pair of small, carved Inuit statues that are scuffed with burn marks.
Jan Modler and Greg East aren’t sure when they collected them. They do know that both were sitting on an antique oak sideboard in the kitchen of their home at Birch Lake, near Denare Beach, when the Wolf fire swept through late last spring and burned it down.
Their daughter Jenny found the statues weeks later while digging through the wreckage. From the depths of a hazardous mess of ashes, nails and melted glass, she emerged with one in each hand and held them in the air — a little slice of victory following so much loss.
Now, on the one-year anniversary, both items sit inside a cabinet at Cumberland Gallery in Regina as part of an art show which Modler and East put together to showcase the true aftermath of a blazing wildfire.
It’s called Transformed by Fire.
The exhibit features a collection of what was recovered from the remains of the couple’s home — sculptures, yard decorations, personal mementoes, and melted geode-like twists of glass, metal and plastic that survived the inferno, but not without being changed.
Just inside the gallery’s door, the first piece on display is a heart-shaped paving stone, cracked down the middle.
“A broken heart,” says Modler, an artist who works in acrylic painting and clay sculpture.
Other pieces in the exhibit wear the trauma of the fire’s intense heat through scorch marks and warping, or in a whole new colour like ceramics re-fired in a kiln.
The entire show is something of a metaphor, Modler says. Its themes of loss and transformation apply to each piece of art, but also to the tri-community of Denare Beach, Creighton and Flin Flon.
“For me, it’s about resilience. How you can get through tough things,” Modler explains. “It’s not easy, but you can do it. It was the transformation of our lives. We didn’t choose this but now we have to move on.”
A full year after wildfires forced the evacuation of all three towns and caused so much destruction, Modler says the area remains forever changed.
Donna Champagne points at a painting in Cumberland Gallery during the opening of “Transformed by Fire.”
“People have left the community, chosen to move or chosen to build or buy at a different lake,” she says. “It is different now.”
Modler and East spent over 50 years in their picturesque cottage, which they built themselves. Located about seven kilometres east of Denare Beach, it was full of memories and art collected over the years, surrounded by a lush yard and garden.
“It was nestled in this little cocoon of trees, the lake and the smells of the bush,” recalls Modler. “Now, it’s black dirt and black trees.”
They left on May 29 after watching a column of smoke creep closer from the north and east. Eventually, the blaze hopped across Amisk Lake to Missi Island and, on June 2, it consumed half of Denare Beach along with the couple’s cottage.
All things considered, Modler and East feel lucky. They left early, avoided the panic of a last-minute evacuation on May 31, and saved some personal items from the ash.
Even as rebuilding continues, many still have no plans to return to the area — Modler and East included. They’ve cleaned up their property, but aren’t planning to start fresh on another cottage so late in life.
Donna Champagne too lost her home at Birch Lake along with everything in it, including family heirlooms and her wedding ring. She’d taken it off to water her plants before fleeing the fires, hoping it might help them survive what was coming.
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Interspersed throughout Modler’s show are paintings by Champagne, who moved to Moose Jaw and returned to art school in Regina after the fires.
For her, the emotion — sorrow, grief, even guilt for feeling so upset — comes and goes.
“Sometimes I still really struggle,” Champagne laments, a feeling she says many still share.
The exhibition debuted last fall at NorVA Centre in Flin Flon. It resonated with people as the community still wrestled with loss and frustration over the province’s wildfire response.
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Criticism persists that the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) wasn’t prepared to handle the Wolf fire or protect Denare Beach. Calls continue for the provincial government to release the results from a promised independent review of the SPSA’s response, now three months overdue.
For that reason, “there is something of a political statement here too,” Modler says.
Displaying the tangible consequences of Denare Beach’s tragedy inside the government’s own house carries a certain weight, Modler and East agree.
“I hope it makes it real for people down here who haven’t experienced that, for them to really see the damage and the incredible destruction,” says Modler.
She hopes that visitors and government officials take a simple message from the show: “We really need to be prepared, because this is not the last of the fires.
“It’s just going to go on; it’s climate change. Our government needs to be prepared. We need to have the resources there, because it shouldn’t happen. We feel like it really shouldn’t happen again.”
Transformed by Fire is open to the public until July 2.
