Mending: Quilt Project 2025 - 2026

The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba presents a solo exhibition by Mélanie Rocan, Mending: Quilt Project 2025 - 2026.


“[T]he patchwork comes together in one blanket, it leaves us with a final question: As we are all living in this world, how do we continue with respect for our surroundings in balance and harmony with nature?” - Mélanie Rocan

Through the metaphor of the quilt, Mending reflects the sheer effort of enjoying life. Emotional tensions, like the tension between the twinned experiences of hardship and ease, are a motif throughout Mélanie Rocan’s painterly work, here manifest in the ultra-material, apparently documentary mediums of textile, video, and photography. Constructed of second-hand material, the 11-metre-long quilt is adorned with text from the King James translation of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8. This passage, which begins, “To every thing there is a season,” lives in the collective consciousness as a contradiction itself, an instruction to find comfort in one’s own powerlessness; discover one’s agency in the relinquishing of control.


MÉLANIE ROCAN (b. 1980, La Broquerie, MB) is a Franco-Manitoban artist. She has a BFA from the University of Manitoba (2003) and an MFA from the University of Concordia in Montreal (2008).

Rocan is a three-time semi-finalist in the RBC Painting Competition. In 2012 – 2013 her work was the subject of a survey exhibition, Souvenir involuntaire, organized by the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus. This exhibition toured to the Kenderdine Art Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, SK) and Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg, MB). The bilingual catalogue includes an essay by Josée Drouin-Brisebois.

Rocan is the recipient of awards and grants from the Canada Council, Manitoba and Winnipeg Arts Council. Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Crossing Natures, with Janet Morton, Christiane Pflug and Joyce Wieland, at the Tom Thomson Gallery in Owen Sound in 2016, My Winnipeg, at La Maison Rouge, in Paris and the Carte Blanche painting survey at MOCCA Toronto in 2008.

Collections include the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON), Winnipeg Art Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto), TD Bank (Toronto), RBC (Toronto) and the Manitoba Arts Council, and many private collections in Canada. Rocan has taught at the University of Manitoba.