Yvonne Mullock’s art loves to misbehave. Whether she’s transforming underwear into ceramic sculptures, collaborating on a printmaking project with a horse, or orchestrating an oversized game of Pick Up Sticks with a loose assembly of dogs, Mullock approaches art with mischief, intent, and an eye for the absurd. “I do have a sense of humour,” Mullock said – an understatement that barely captures the wit and irreverence running through her work.
Mullock’s upcoming exhibition, Why Don’t You…, offers an opportunity to reflect not only on her current work but on a career shaped by playful provocation and a resistance to the polite social boundaries. Borrowing its title from a ‘30s fashion column by Diana Vreeland, the exhibition reframes suggestion as an audacious invitation. Rather than instructing viewers on what to think, Mullock cajoles them into reexamining familiar tropes with surprise and uncertainty.
Her unique ethos comes into focus in Proofread, a project also featured in the exhibition. Composed of a relief-printed alphabet made from used clothing gathered through Mullock’s friendships, the installation invites viewers to rearrange letters into their own words and statements. The result is an ever-changing communal text; part message board, part wordplay, and shaped by touch, chance, and collective authorship. As garments carry personal histories, so too do the phrases that emerge, accumulating meaning through revision and exchange.
Spanning works made over the past decade, the exhibition brings together printmaking, video, ceramics, sculpture, quilting, costume, and installation. Oversized gloves, hooked rugs, and crushed hats are featured alongside video and sculptural works that push familiar forms just far enough to be playful yet unsettling.
Raised in the UK, Mullock brings a distinctly British sensibility to her work, one that embraces awkwardness, crassness, and social discomfort rather than refinement. She has long been interested in dismantling the invisible hierarchies that separate “high” and “low” culture, questioning who decides what is tasteful, offensive, or worthy of serious attention. Craft-based processes such as quilting, ceramics, collage, and rug hooking recur throughout her practice; not just as nostalgic gestures, but as tools for disrupting entrenched value systems around labour, gender, class, and consumption. A hooked rug reading I MADE IT, shown at an art fair, becomes a pointed comment on authorship, markets, and artistic labour.
While humour is often the entry point, it’s not the destination. Her work aims to catch viewers off guard, to gently unsettle, and to shift their perspectives. Questions around feminism, capitalism, social norms, and craft history are embedded in the work rather than spelled out, allowing meaning to emerge through encounter and participation. For example, in works like Harmonia, which uses mushrooms as both material and metaphor for human connection, personal loss, and collective systems, these elements quietly intersect.
Why Don’t You… invites viewers to engage in uncertainty, play, and contradiction. Mullock’s practice challenges traditional modes of making, favouring art that is social, tactile, and disobedient. The exhibition reminds us that creating and experiencing art can be collaborative, messy, and mischievous.
Why Don’t You… can be experienced at the Nickle Galleries from February 6 to April 30. More information at nickle.ucalgary.ca.
What’s In The Galleries
CONTEMPORARY CALGARY
Trees communicate with each other at 220 hertz
Nelly-Eve Rajotte
Until April 19, 2026
Nelly-Eve Rajotte’s immersive installation combines moving image, generative sound, and live interaction with a tree to evoke the spectral presence of the boreal forest. Inviting intimate engagement, it explores ecological fragility, climate change, and non-human memory, fostering reflection, empathy, and a profound sense of connection between humans, nature, and technology.
ESKER FOUNDATION
Until April 26, 2026
This winter, four distinct exhibitions — featuring Anthony Cudahy, Justin de Verteuil, Magalie Guérin, and Alexandre Pépin — highlight the enduring power of painting. Each show explores fleeting moments of connection, tenderness, and desire, embracing ambiguity and complexity. Together, they offer a counterpoint to the speed and spectacle of contemporary life, inviting slow looking, reflection, and material engagement.
[NOTE: The print version of this story lists March 26 as the end date for these exhibitions. The digital article has been edited with the correct end date.]
NEWZONES GALLERY
PRISM ROOMS 2026
Until April 25, 2026
Megan Dyck’s figurative paintings explore disembodied faces in states of euphoria and limerence, merging direct gaze and polyphonic colour. Evoking dance subcultures, synth sounds, and chromesthesia, her layered, mosaic-like process creates sensuous, atmospheric images that blend intimacy and psychedelia, transforming photomontage references into cinematic fields of floating, luminous visages.
HERRING KISS GALLERY
Light, Trace, Time
Until February 28, 2026
The gallery is presenting Light, Trace, Time as part of the Exposure Photography Festival, a month-long celebration of photography across Alberta. The exhibition features David Burdeny, Dan Hudson, Brian Flynn, Laurel Johannesson, and Mitch Kern. Through their distinct practices, each artist explores the camera’s potential to connect past and present, memory and reality, revealing new possibilities within the medium.
