The latest exhibit at the Portage and District Arts Centre held its official opening last night.

The exhibit features 12 paintings by artist Edie Marshall, from Saskatchewan. She explains the exhibit.

"The exhibit is called Picturing Grandmother and it's based on old photos of my grandmother's family at the time when they were first settling in the prairie west. The paintings are about sort of trying to understand a bit more of what life was like in the prairies at that time, and it also speaks to my identity, I think, as a 21st-century prairie woman."


Marshall says there's a certain similarity in all of the paintings.

"There is a way that all of the paintings work. The images are kind of fuzzy, and ghostly or ephemeral, and some pictures seem to come forward, some of them you can hardly see the images in, or you lose the picture a bit. I think that's how our memory works as well; we remember our ancestors, but until we actually see the photos, we never really have a clear vision of them. That's what I was doing when I created these, I was thinking about the stories and bringing that to the forefront."

The Picturing Grandmother exhibit is the first of Marshall's to be showcased in Manitoba, and will be at the PDAC until August 6th.