Do you own or manage a business in Calgary, Alberta? Search our tourism
directory to ensure your company
information is up to date and accurate.
If you don’t find a listing, we invite you
to add a FREE business listing.
If you want to increase your exposure
to the millions of people who come to
WorldWeb.com each month to plan their
business trips and vacations, please refer
to our advertising information.
Calgary Art Book Reviews
• A WorldWeb.com Travel Guide to Art Book Reviews in Calgary, Alberta.
BETWEEN THE COVERS OF RECENT VISUAL ARTS PUBLICATIONS~BY PAULA GUSTAFSON
1920 - 2005, Gail Crawford, 310 pages, 370 photos (170 in colour),
bibliography, index, Goose Lane Editions with the Gardiner Museum of
Ceramic Art, 2005, $45.00; www.gooselane.com
Cultural historian Gail Crawford successfully wraps the diverse
histories, personalities, and geographies of Canadian studio ceramic
practice into a comprehensive and sumptuously illustrated narrative
that, among other things, explains why Canadian clay art — recognized
internationally for its excellence and innovation — does not have a
single homogenous style or sensibility but many authentic voices. The
result of more than a decade of primary research, Studio Ceramics in
Canada is the definitive record of ceramic art development in Canada.
Janson’s History of Art has been a cornerstone of western art history
studies for more than four decades. This seventh edition, edited by
Penelope Davies (Ancient art), David L. Simon (Medieval art), Walter B.
Denny (Islamic art), Ann Roberts (Renaissance art), Frima Fox
Hofrichter (Baroque and Rococo art), and Joseph Jacobs (Modern art),
combines up-to-date art historical research in a remarkably
easy-to-read text with a massive number of excellent colour photos.
By Tina Oldknow, 248 pages, 200 colour images, index, The Corning
Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 2005, $29.95 US; www.cmog.org
Since 1976 the annual edition of New Glass Review has featured the work
of thousands of famous and soon-to-be-famous glass artists around the
world, documenting the relatively recent development of contemporary
glass art and the versatility of glass as a creative material. 25 Years
of New Glass Review is necessarily a Who’s Who of artists who
have made
significant contributions in the fields of blown and flat glass. But as
Corning Glass Museum founding director Thomas S. Buechner outlines in
his introduction, this selection of works by 200 artists is based on
“the excellence of the idea or function, as well as the high quality of
the aesthetic or technique.” Only Laura Donefer, Irene Frolic, Julie
Gibb, François Houdé, Kevin Lockau and seven other
Canadian glass artists are showcased on the book‘s pages. The
explanation, it seems, is that most of our homegrown talent has been
focused on producing innovative, prize-winning glass art instead of
getting their names into print.
Rudolf and Elizabeth Kurz, The
Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 2006; 64 pages, $19.95; pql@sentex.net
On the literary scale, An
Illustrated Alphabet for the Illiterate balances somewhere
between the dirges of Eeyore and the inane rationality of Arthur Dent.
Part word whimsy, part twee etchings, the 26 episodes in this alphabet
purport to be musings on the seven deadly sins — or possibly the seven
pillars of wisdom. J for Jealousy, for example, appears in the guise of
the last living dinosaur bemoaning that he must wait a billion years
“to be unearthed by a woman in khaki shorts.” In L for Loyalty, a
performing seal encourages her ball to try again when it falls.
Ontario artist Rudolf Kurz’s first book, Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon
— a compilation of 36 etchings and musings about erotic circus
performers and tree trunks that morph into elephants — was a 2005
Alcuin Award honourable mention. This second illustrated book is a
collaboration with his daughter. In R for Reach, Kurz has sketched a
hoop-jumping lizard. With world-weary ’tude, 18-year-old Elizabeth
writes, “No matter how high you fly, some clown in a top hat will
always be close at hand to take the bow and accept the applause.”
Some books you want to hug to your heart. An Illustrated Alphabet for
the Illiterate is one to share with friend and other book lovers.
Regina Clay: Worlds in the Making,
edited by Timothy Long with essays by Sandra Alfoldy, Timothy Long,
Julie Krueger and David Howard, 128 pages, approximately 100 photos (38
colour plates), bibliography, artist biographies, index, MacKenzie Art
Gallery, Regina, 2005, $32.95
Kenneth Lochhead: Garden of Light,
Ted Fraser, 95 pages, approximately 100 photos (40 colour images),
MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, 2005; mackenzie@uregina.ca
These two exhibition catalogues, read in tandem, offer compelling
insights into the personalities and politics that, for a few brief
years, gave star billing to Regina art. Kenneth Lochhead was a member
of the Regina Five, the group of abstract painters who rose to fame in
the mid-1960s through the influence of New York art guru Clement
Greenberg. The 14 ceramic artists featured in Regina Clay, many of whom
were teachers and students during the waning years of Lochhead’s tenure
at the University of Regina, totally rejected Greenbergian orthodoxy
and never formed a cohesive group. Nevertheless, the ironic, playful
approach to ceramic sculpture by Vic Cicansky, Joe Fafard, David
Gilhooly, Marilyn Levine, Jack Sures, and David Thauberger, to name
just few, attracted widespread international attention and launched
enduring reputations.
by Alyce Mahon, Oxford University Press,
2005, 304 pp., 100 illustrations, 65 in colour, $30; www.oup.com
Sex sells. In the case of Eroticism and Art, sex plus a good Irish
storyteller results in an engaging romp through modern art history.
From Impressionist Paris to contemporary carnality, artists have
inflamed opinion and provoked controversy by portraying the naked body
as the site of transgressive ideas. Discussed with intellectual
enthusiasm by University of Cambridge art historian Alyce Mahon, the
subversive role of eroticism provides a highly readable educational
tour through most of the important 20th-century art movements.
edited by Robin Lenman, Oxford
University Press, 2005; 445 pages, 49 colour and 239 B&W
photographs, indexed, $88.00; www.oup.com/ca
This massive compendium — it weighs in at about four kilos — provides
answers to almost any question that might be put about the techniques
of photography, its social consequences, and the personalities that
have expanded photographic practice from its beginnings in the mid-18th
century. Historically, the Canadian biographical notes include Humphrey
Lloyd Hime, the official photographer to the 1858 Assiniboine and
Saskatchewan expedition; Hannah Maynard, who opened a professional
photographic studio in Victoria, BC, in 1862; William Notman, whose
photographic studios by 1874 were producing 14,000 photographs
annually; photographer Geraldine Moodie, who spent 32 years (1885-1917)
following her RCMP husband to posts across Western Canada and into the
Arctic; and Sidney Carter, who organized Canada’s first major
exhibition of pictorial photography in 1907. The contemporary list is
equally eclectic: Roloff Beny, Janieta Eyre, Yousuf Karsh, Freeman
Patterson, Peter Pitseolak, and Jeff Wall. Amply illustrated with
full-page colour and black-and-white photographs, the 16,000 entries in
The Oxford Companion to the Photograph are fully cross-referenced,
making it easy to locate information.
by Virginia G. Berry, Winnipeg Art
Gallery and Bayeux Arts Inc., 2005, 190 pp., indexed, $29.95; www.wag.mb.ca
No wagon trains or gunslingers between this book’s covers. Taming the
Frontier is an unassuming chronicle of the ladies who introduced fine arts to Winnipeg.
Every art practice has its minor genres and, within each sub-category,
its minor talents. Edward Frederick
Hagell’s contribution to the genre of cowboy art falls into the latter
group. Despite former Galt Museum
director/curator Wilma Wood’s willingness to ennoble the life and work
of this peripatetic Southern Alberta artist, she concludes that “the
sad truth about Hagell . . . is that the treasure [of success] was
never realized.” A touring exhibition of some of the Galt Museum’s
extensive collection of Hagell’s drawings and paintings is scheduled
for 2007.
Faye Heavyshield,
essay by Paul Chaat Smith, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2005; 48 pp.,
illustrated; www.saag.ca
Published subsequent to the 2004 exhibition of blood, this stylish
catalogue features photographs of the installation at the Southern
Alberta Art Gallery, Faye Heavyshield’s preliminary sketches for the
project, eight of her poems relating to blood, and a six-part essay by
Museum of the American Indian associate curator Paul Chaat Smith. The
poems are spare, reflecting Heavyshield’s minimalist ethic. Obliquely
touching on Heavyshield’s oeuvre, Smith’s essay is mostly about Smith.
curated
by Gordon Snyder, The Works International Visual Arts Society, 2005;
126 pp., 100 B&W photographs; www.theworks.ab.ca
In 1962 Edmonton radiologist Orest Semchishen began documenting the
people and places of rural and ethnic Alberta, from First Nations and
Metis to his own Ukrainian heritage. “My job as a photographer is to
portray with honesty a segment of life which is not seen by most
people,” he wrote in his journal. Five exhibitions, each composed of 20
of his silver gelatin prints, began touring during Alberta’s centennial
year.
essays by Elena
Feder, PhD, and Christine Laffer, 2005: 24 pp., 14 colour illustrations
The two series of tapestries discussed in this exhibition book — Cover
Ups and Revelations — are the strongest and unquestionably the most
memorable anti-war, pro-humanity images woven by internationally
acclaimed Vancouver artist Barbara Heller. See them at the Alberta
Craft Council’s Discovery Gallery, July 15 - August 22.
by Jimmie Durham, Walter Phillips
Gallery Editions, 2005; 80 pp., illustrated; www.banffcentre.ca
The complete title of Cherokee artist and political activist Jimmie
Durham’s book is The Second Particle Wave Theory (as performed on the
banks of the River Wear, a stone’s throw from S’underland and the
Durham Cathedral). The performance it commemorates is the July 16,
2005, sinking of a red-painted rowboat with a very large pink granite
boulder. The boulder was also painted, somewhat in the manner of a Mr.
Potato Head, which it vaguely resembled. In his rambling, Python-esque
text, Durham discusses the resemblance between rocks and potatoes:
“Potatoes camouflage themselves to look like stones. The hope is that
any worm or grub passing by will think, ‘Oh, nothing to eat here, just
a field of boulders’.”
Mary-Beth Laviolette, Altitude Publishing, 2005; 544 pages and CD-ROM
with 197 colour images, index, $39.95
(and below)
A History of Art in Alberta 1905 - 1970, Nancy Townshend, Bayeux Arts,
Inc., 2005, 304 pages, 50 colour and 21 B&W images, index, $39.95;
www.bayeux.com
A History of Art in Alberta 1905 -
1970 and An Alberta Art
Chronicle:
Adventures in Recent and Contemporary Art together span
Alberta’s
century — from its inception as a Canadian province through to its
present-day status as a centre of visual art production. Conceived as a
joint venture when art historians Mary-Beth Laviolette and Nancy
Townshend began their research 10 years ago, each book is incomplete
without the other. Similarities, however, are mainly focused on the
hundreds of artists whose career trajectories overlap from book to
book, and the assertions by both authors that Alberta art is regionally
unique, highly innovative, and regrettably undervalued in the national
context. Laviolette and Townshend share a commitment to chasing down
every last shred of material and oral evidence documenting Alberta’s
art and artists. Their extensively footnoted texts attest to the depth
and breadth of their primary research and provide a strong foundation
on which future scholarship can be constructed. (continue...)
paintings by Karen Brownlee, text by
Kenneth Tingley, Red Deer Press, 144 pp., 128 watercolour images, $35
hard cover. www.reddeerpress.com
The prairie landscape is dramatically changing. Iconic landmarks are
fast disappearing and mega-agribusinesses are replacing family farms.
In Alberta Remembers: Recalling Our Rural Roots, Kenneth Tingley’s
historical text and the improbably vivid colour choices in Lethbridge
artist Karen Brownlee’s paintings of rural communities — exhibited
throughout Alberta during the 2005 centennial year — may be more than
even wet-eyed nostalgia buffs might want to know about the rise and
fall of grain elevators.
texts by
Carol Prokop, Peter Ohler, Matt Petley Jones, published by Petley Jones
Gallery, hard cover, 120 pp.,100 colour plates, $60 [limited
edition with colour etching $250]. www.petleyjones.com
In 1999, Don Li-Leger shifted his artistic focus from realistic
representations of flowers and birds to colour-infused semi-abstract
compositions. Carol Prokop’s insightful essay suggests the painter’s
world travels and his South Surrey, B.C., garden are twin sources of
inspiration for Li-Leger’s new imagery.
Landscape, photographs by Courteney
Milne, Red Deer Press, 144 pp., 225 colour photos, $35 hard cover.
www.reddeerpress.com
Award-winning Saskatoon photographer Courteney Milne has travelled
across all seven continents during his 30-year career, documenting
sacred sites and sharing his reverence for the land with audiences
everywhere. In Saskatchewan: The Luminous Landscape, Milne turns his
lens on the splendours of his home province, from microviews of
lichen-brocaded rocks to the thousand-kilometre-long stretch of sand
dunes bordering Lake Athabaska where, he writes, the “land makes no
distinctions, cuts no deals, regards you as neither friend nor foe.”
essays by Ian Thom, Roald Nasgaard,
Nancy Tousley, Jeffrey Spalding, Douglas & McIntyre, 172 pp.,
approx. 100 colour plates, $60 hard cover. www.douglas-mcintyre.com
In his biographical essay, Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Ian
Thom refutes the commonly held notion that Takao Tanabe’s wide-horizon
landscapes are informed by his Japanese heritage — a motivation the
artist dismisses outright. Instead, Thom characterizes Tanabe as a
quintessentially West Coast artist concerned with the ineffable
qualities of light and weather. Augmented by Nancy Tousley’s, Jeffrey
Spalding’s and Dr. Roald Nasgaard’s perceptive comments about other
aspects of Tanabe’s work, Takao Tanabe is the first definitive study of
this important Canadian artist. A major exhibition of Takao Tanabe’s
paintings and prints opened at the Art Gallery of Victoria in October
2005 and travels during 2006 to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art
Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in
Kleinburg, Ontario.
photographs by John Conway, texts by
Sharon Butala, David Carpenter, Helen Marzolf, The University of
Alberta Press, 156 pp., 61 colour plates, $30 soft cover.
www.uap.ualberta.ca
John Conway’s “uncommon views” of post-pastoral Saskatchewan are like
the long, unsmiling pause following the punch line of a bleak joke: a
telephone pole striped with discarded licence plates, a derelict
windmill, sterile rows of plastic-wrapped hay bales, each exquisitely
framed against an endless expanse of prairie and sky. “In
Saskatchewan,” David Carpenter writes, “optimism is a guarded hope.”
autobiography by John Koerner,
Ronsdale Press, 170 pp., 65 colour and 50 b&w images, $40 hard
cover. www.ronsdalepress.com
In a memory tour that ranges from recollections of Salvador Dali’s
first Paris exhibition through the cultural wasteland of Vancouver in
the 1950s to his still active art practice — a new series of paintings
was launched at Diane Farris Gallery last August — 92-year-old John
Koerner offers a gentle perspective on the development of West Coast
modernism.
Eva Diener: New Paintings Sylvie Tourangeau:
La résidence, le performatif: 15 minutes d’Humanité Grunt Manawa: Pacific
Heartbeat TransFormations:
Ceramics 2005 Source
Book 1955 - 2005(continue...)
Canada
