Curated by Linda Jansma and Virginia Eichhorn, Ornamenta brings together two significant installations by Edmonton-based artist Lyndal Osborne. An ecology of biodiversity surfaces as a unifying theme between Garden (2005) and Archipelago (2008) — both underscore Osborne’s meticulously detailed craftsmanship with a multitude of treated organic materials.

Louise Bourgeois’ famous bronze sculpture The Arch of Hysteria is the psychic centerpiece of a clever show developed by National Gallery of Canada curator Josée Drouin-Brisebois called Hysteria and the Body.

It seems appropriate that Quebec-based artist Sylvain Tremblay had his first formal exhibition in 2000. The mixed-media painter launched a unique perspective onto the Canadian art world as it entered the new millennium, with his richly layered abstracts anchored by solitary human figures. Seven years and many shows later, Tremblay comes to Calgary for a much-anticipated first solo exhibition in the western city.

Calgary’s Weiss Gallery presents an exhibition of lush black and white photographs by Vancouver-based artist Michael Levin. Playing with the elusive tonal qualities of light and water, he gives built and natural worlds a smooth, otherworldly glow that makes them at once hyper-real and abstract. Weiss Gallery will feature his work February 5 to March 7 as part of the Exposure: Banff / Calgary Photography Festival.

On May 16, the Artym Gallery in Invermere, BC, will open a comprehensive exhibition of works by senior artist Armand Vallée to coincide with the launch of the artist’s eponymous biography and retrospective of work. Originally from Austria, he emigrated to Calgary in the 1950s, working and painting in Canada before moving to the United States. His portraits, cityscapes and landscapes, spanning more than 50 years of work, show a decisive evolution into a strong, singular style.

Growing up, Jude Griebel began drawing from the images he saw in children’s picture books. In art school, Griebel planned to turn this passion into a career as a children’s book illustrator. Then he had a change of heart. “I realized I was more interested in my own ideas rather than making images for others,” he says. But Griebel continued to use the visual language of narrative imagery, building up a large body of work that depicted young characters in allegorical or supernatural situations. He says the characters were metaphors for his ideas, but he found that people focused more on the characters themselves rather than the ideas they were supposed to represent. So about a year ago, Griebel began replacing the actual characters in his paintings with composed figures from makeshift materials and domestic objects, arranged to suggest character. In the painting titled Out on Your Own, matchsticks become the figures. In A Child as an Unwritten Book, we see a doll’s head on top of a book, with matchstick legs sticking out of the bottom, ending in two limp socks. “I’m still referencing folk mythology,” he says. “However, by erasing the people in my paintings it allows for a more universal reading of my work. The paintings also have a more supernatural quality.”

Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta will bring more than 3,000 Polaroid photographs used by Vancouver-based painter Attila Richard Lukacs as referents for his work over 20 years. Curated by Michael Morris into assemblies and collages, the photographs create their own narrative thread through Lukacs’ career. Attila Richard Lukacs / Polaroids / Michael Morris is on March 7 through May 16.

Painted in oil on aluminum, the detailed, whimsical, slightly menacing work of Keer Tanchak is featured through February at Vancouver’s Elissa Cristall Gallery. Tanchak’s worlds have the immediate veneer of illustrations for children’s stories, but a blurring of themes, time periods, and odd locations give them a deeper, more puzzling side. It’s as if we’re peering into hidden places, seeing tiny, cosmopolitan worlds.

Anyone with even a basic experience of art has viewed a landscape, as a painting, a photograph, or other two-dimensional medium. In his exhibition Remote Sensibility, Whitehorse-based artist Marten Berkman wants to bring viewers right into the picture. Using an advanced form of large-scale three-dimensional technology — high-definition stereoscopic video — Berkman will give viewers a sense of being immersed in some of the Canadian North’s most remote places. “We’re familiar with 3D technology being used in old movies, to create spectacle,” Berkman says. “I’m interested in using the technique to bring people to a place of stillness, where they can sit by a stream, watch the leaves sway, and just be present.” The Remote Sensibility project, made up of multiple components that the artist has been working on for three years, is mainly concerned with the place at which human culture and industry meet the natural world. A skilled landscape and commercial photographer and videographer, he has taken filtered video cameras far north, to the shore of the Beaufort Sea, to Baffin Island, bringing the human experience into places of pure, vast nature. “This is about exploring our relationship with the land and figuring out where we fit into the natural world.”

Texture plays a large role in W.H Webb’s acrylic paintings — the tactile image of the many, deep ruts in a snowy, country road, or the craggy mountains of his realist landscapes. A former art teacher from England, Webb has an affinity for the wide-open spaces of Alberta, and uncovering the possibilities and dashed hopes of a bumpy prairie road. “I found my dream in Alberta,” he says from his home in Forestburg, Alberta. Webb was trained as an abstract expressionist, but now characterizes himself as a “high-definition” landscape artist. His love of landscape is reflected not only in the precise capture of light on roads and perspective of space, but in the emotional response Webb’s country roads and mountain scenes stir in the viewer. This summer he added sky scenes after being caught near a tornado in August. “The images will never leave me, all the whirling clouds, the drama of it all,” he says. Webb works on large canvases, and this show will include works up to six feet long. When a piece takes up an entire wall, its like stepping right into the Alberta countryside – full of light, with a huge sky stretching out ahead from a ruler-straight road.

Painter Darrell Underschultz uses his passion for 18th- and 19th-century landscapes in his contemporary art practice. His new works, at a dual exhibition with Lynda Kirby in April, will continue the theme. But classic landscapes are just the starting point for Underschultz. “My work is a modern take on 18th- and 19th-century landscapes,” he says. “I’m told that my work is more unusual in that I like to experiment with color combinations.” Though he has lived in Vancouver since 1989, Underschultz’s new works move past what he calls “the muted colour palette” of the city. For example, his acrylic work titled Autumn Glow has the ash-blue sky of a typical Vancouver autumn/winter day at the top of the painting, but it moves into a burst of orange and yellow near the bottom half. In another work, Limelight, the sky is entirely lit with pinks and yellows. Underschultz builds his paintings with complex washes of color that add depth. “Initially the color is opaque, and then becomes transparent near the end.” Most of his paintings have more than 50 layers. Talking about his work is difficult for the artist. He doesn’t like using the medium of words to delineate his paintings. “When I’m working, it’s like a second nature kicks in. It’s a very intuitive process for me.”

Leslie Poole has spent the last three decades perfecting his hand in … everything from Expressionism, to faux Picasso modernism, to brash landscapes, to tongue-in-cheek photorealism. Now the Vancouver resident returns to a long-term passion, the works of French realist/impressionist Édouard Manet’s flower portraits. Unlike a similar series completed several years ago, Poole’s most recent pieces reflect his own technique and emotional content. The paintings were created by spreading an undercoat of acrylic colour on a canvas by hand, then layering clear gel, then painting — all undertaken using his hand rather than brushes. He would scoop up a handful of acrylic paint or gel and ladle it on, then swirl the paint with his hand. Poole always seeks to challenge himself, and was using the technique on Manet’s flowers to change the way he approached landscapes. He has since painted a number of complex landscapes in the same manner, struggling to keep the composition and multi-layering effect of branches against a sky while using his hands to paint. He originally had no intention of showing the flowers, considering them warm-ups to the landscapes, but he was persuaded to make them public, and this show is the result.

Yuri Arajs calls himself a landscape painter, though many would disagree with him. As a minimalist who occasionally likes to use text in his work, he says people who look at his paintings often don’t see landscapes. “Maybe it’s because of my simplistic, minimal way of painting,” he says. Arajs spare works are also different in that he doesn’t paint on canvas. He primarily paints on wood surfaces and found metal, and the texture of those materials informs Arajs’ work. His solo show in Victoria is all new work. “Most of my paintings depict the sky and above the horizon. It allows me to focus on what happens in that area.” Certainly weather occurs on the West Coast, and Arajs’ exhibition aptly includes that word in its title. Arajs is also interested in what he calls activity, and how he uses that in his pieces about weather. To explain further, he points to one of the new works called Snow. “You’re watching the snow blow across a barren landscape driven by a gust of wind you don’t see.” Though his work is minimalist, Arajs spends many hours and days contemplating each painting before he paints a splash of color. “My work takes a tremendous amount of time to come out of me,” he says. “I wait for things to tell me what to do.”

Among the most scenic corners of Canada, the northwest coast of British Columbia, where the city of Prince Rupert occupies a series of forested hills at the mouth of the Skeena River, presents an endless supply of inspiration for a painter. Based in Prince Rupert, landscape painter Edward Epp has taken in the grand scenery, with its heavy storms, soaring conifers, and ancient cultural heritage, and given it an abstract, colour-washed quality. By blurring the lines, he emphasizes the spirit and culture of the region, the mystical timelessness of that coastal world. “The mystical side of nature was an important feature to many early modernists, including our own Emily Carr, yet the expression of such spiritual concerns in art has become less fashionable in recent times,” says the Marion Scott Gallery’s Robert Kardosh. “Epp is a contemporary artist who still senses the importance and ongoing relevance of the spiritual side of human existence.” Originally from Saskatoon, Epp has been painting for more than 20 years in northwestern BC, occasionally venturing up to the arctic, where he has painted with a plein air technique, capturing the immediacy of the scene in front of him, even for oversized canvases. He travels to the remote reaches of the Kitimat River Valley, and to the remnants of Haida culture on Haida Gwaii, and to the working port of his home city, creating a bold sense of a moment in time, layered with multiple meanings.

From March 7 to May 31, the Winnipeg Art Gallery presents a retrospective of work by historic Manitoba painter Lionel Lemoine FitzGerald, curated by University of Manitoba professor of art history Dr. Marilyn Baker. This comprehensive exhibition brings together paintings, commercial work and ephemera from Fitzgerald’s acclaimed career in the first half of the 20th century, and puts it in the context of students and peers like Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

“I like to think of the early years as thesis,” Ted Godwin says. “The late 1950s and mid 1960s were times of big dreams and breaking temples.” That feeling is directly reflected in this work, a collection of paintings Godwin did between 1958 and 1968 — they shout with the exuberance of a young man exploring new territory. The 50 paintings included in this exhibition are big and bold and hold the power of a classically trained artist flinging his knowledge of composition and form to the wind — and creating emotionally charged and beautifully executed abstract paintings.

With the assistance of the people of Victoria, Nhan Duc Nguyen has been constructing a shrine to the ancient spirit guide Lao Noi Kieu, who influences matters of citizenship and nationhood. The project, Lao Oi, Lao A…, is inspired by Nguyen’s own childhood experiences in Vietnam, where shrines designed by ordinary people and organizations petitioned for resolution and harmony in the health and welfare of the community. The artist has requested contributions of public material — such as flyers, announcements, pamphlets, curios, newspaper and magazine articles that focus on the social and political life of Victoria. They will be integrated into the shrine and displayed alongside previous petitions to Lao Noi Kieu assembled by Nguyen. The construction of the shrine will be the final stage in a process of research, including personal interviews, public discussions and a residency at Open Space Gallery that began in the fall of 2007. For this last component, Nguyen would like the people of Victoria, including artists, First Nations, community leaders, visitors to Open Space and the general public, to contribute to the creation of a special petition to Lao Noi Kieu that will focus on a definition of “nation/citizenship,” with special emphasis on their city.

An inveterate traveler, David Barker paints landscapes from graphite and pastel studies he makes on his trips around the world. His paintings are ostensibly of a boat, an abandoned farmhouse or an old Venice building covered with graffiti. But the actual subject isn’t what particularly interests Barker. “I’m looking for a situation, a place, a space or an object that is very much from the past but which says something contemporary,” he says. “I’m intrigued when superimposed on the ‘then’ is the ‘present’.” Barker has been at work in his studio on DeCourcy Island in the Georgia Strait, preparing for his first show in Vancouver, a selection of paintings he’s created at different stops around the world. He was born in England, grew up in New Zealand, completed his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Hawaii and now divides his time between his studios in Canada, New Zealand and Venice. Getting ready for his show, Barker is writing a few words about each painting. The words come easily, as his paintings have a large narrative component. “In some cases the story is less obvious,” he says, “and at other times, it’s very obvious.”

Chad Jacklin likes to play mad scientist in his Regina studio. The artist’s chosen medium, found art, makes a clear statement about consumerism, outmoded technology and junk. The materials for his salvaged artwork are all destined for the garbage heap. He explains that he’s interested in giving value to the formerly useless. Jacklin, who is self-taught, has been “making stuff” since he was 12 or 13, when he built lawn furniture and sold it to his suburban Regina neighbours. “I also made a go-cart that was so enormous it wouldn’t fit out of the backyard,” he jokes. Who’s in Control Here?, his work for the Mysteria Gallery Dioramas show, is fashioned from a 1950s-era ham radio set. “There are all of these tubes and gauges and knobs,” he explains. “When you turn the knobs, they don’t work. Inside the piece are rabbits in lab coats who are actually in control. It’s my comment on the modern workplace. I meet so many people these days and they’re not doing what they want to be doing. We’ve let technology kind of sneak in, and it’s always sold as the next best thing. But it’s overtaken our lives and it’s distracting us.”

From the introduction of ocular devices such as the zoetrope or phantasmagoria, to the development of video art, to the broad and thrilling work that falls under the category of “new media,” the evolution of the moving image in artistic practice has had an interesting connection to creative communities all over the world. While he has shown extensively in Europe since graduating from the Masters program at the Glasgow School of Art in 2001, this will be Scottish artist Jason Dee’s first Canadian show. still.moving.memory. is about the intersection of media, past and present. In this co-presentation with Winnipeg’s Video Pool Media Arts Centre, Dee makes connections between dead and current media practices, taking celluloid images from film and video, chopping them up and re-visioning them back into the film’s moving loop. The viewer experiences a stillness through the movement of a single frame, slowed down from multiple images captured in a second of film. Dee creates an intimate experience, allowing viewers to take in all that the speed of film and video usually don’t allow.

As he’s proven recently with a series of high profile public commissions, Micah Lexier can work at almost any scale, from city-block-encompassing to wall-sized. For this show in Calgary, he will be exhibiting 20 years of smaller metal sculptures, which have often taken the form of number sequences and text. It’s work in just one of the many media Lexier is known for. Remarkably multi-talented, with a hand in multiple means of expression, Lexier’s work is always intriguing — whether he’s revisiting a bunch of guys named Dave ten years after first shooting their portraits (David: Then and Now, Plug-In, Winnipeg) or designing a light- and projection-based work for Saskatoon’s new Persephone Theatre (Aneco public art project, Saskatoon). Originally from Winnipeg, with an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Lexier had his first solo show in 1982. Since then, he’s amassed a long list of public and private collections that hold his work, and he travels constantly, for exhibitions, curatorial projects and public commissions.

The main aim of Edmonton-area painter Igor Postash is to fool the eye in a whimsical way — was that a man in a tuxedo carrying a candle or a striped cat? Is that an allusion to another artwork? Look again. Postash came to Canada from the Ukraine in 1995, a survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the 1980s, which makes his humourous take on life and art that much more remarkable. Though he’s had commissions for public work, including a mural series in West Edmonton Mall, and he does work as a decorative painter and a painting teacher, his passion is for fine art. His surreal, illustrative images of everyday life draw the eye to search out every detail, and the work invites the viewer to invent a story to go with the image. Bursting with colour and a strong narrative sense, the work is consistently themed toward the upbeat. “I strongly believe that art has to heal people and carry nothing but positive energy,” Postash says. “That’s what I try to display in my work.”

After graduating from the Masters program at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, Winnipeg-based artist Jennifer Stillwell has been showing across the globe, garnering an excellent reputation — she was a Sobey Art Award semi-finalist in both 2002 and 2006. In 2006 she was commissioned by the Winnipeg Arts Council to create a permanent public art piece near the intersection where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet — a massive and exciting project for a conceptual artist like Stillwell. For this newest self-titled exhibition at Plug-In, she uses installation, sculpture and wall works to connect home, banality and movement. From truck grills used as tools in clay to thousands of Slurpee cup labels transferred onto a canvas, the works further her conceptual language. Stillwell’s work reaches beyond the gallery walls, letting viewers imagine spaces and times outside of the exhibition, and while this is something that many artists strive to do, Stillwell looks at the idea of escape in a different way. She encourages viewers to step into an industrial-themed domestic sphere, creating a strange tension between the comforting and the sterile, the present and the past.

From September 26 to November 16, Glenbow Museum president Jeff Spalding curates a whimsical tour through dream spaces and reversals. Through the Looking Glass connects contemporary art to the visions and themes of Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. Artists include Kent Monkman, Bill Viola, William Kentridge, Terrance Houle, Holly King, Mark Lewis, Luc Courchesne, David Altmejd, Evan Penny, Leila Sujir, Lynne Cohen and Chris Cran.

The surreal technology depicted in Haydex Li’s pen drawings are reminiscent of the poster-sized felt pen colouring projects available in hobby and toy shops in the 1970s. Their intricate lines fill all available space. But Li’s point is clear — the growing excess of technological complexity is pressing on all sides, and we may have fooled ourselves into thinking we can control it. A graduate of the University of British Columbia and regional winner of the BMO First Art! Competition in 2006, Li’s drawings are at Vancouver’s Numen Gallery to September 28.

Taras Polataiko is currently fascinated with the human body in motion. He has made a series of photographs based on the famous studies of 19th century photographer Edward Muybridge, whose work with stop-motion photography advanced the science of understanding human and animal movement. “I’m using much longer exposures with my models,” Polataiko says. “I’ve chosen a variety of visual sequences from Muybridge’s catalogue of people ironing, running or doing chores.” In this contemporary dialogue between technology and the human body, the artist explores how they influence behaviour and perception. Polataiko started his art education in the Ukraine and Moscow before immigrating to Canada in 1989, where he earned an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Working in video and still photography and installation, he is also a painter. Polataiko has created a tribute to 1960’s Italian painter Lucio Fontana. The canvases appear to be cut or slashed, as Fontana was known to do, only Polataiko elects to paint in the cuts, creating an illusion for the viewer. “These pieces, The Cuts Series, are all about space, gestures and simple elegance,” he says. Gallerist Darrell Bell says the series fits in well with Polataiko’s artistic motivation. “It’s all about illusion,” Bell says. “Some people even use the word magician.”

This exhibition combines two threads of inspiration. One focuses on Mary Kerr’s designs for costumes, props and stage design for Copper Thunderbird, a play about the life and paintings of Ojibwa artist Norval Morrisseau, written by Métis playwright Marie Clements and directed by Peter Hinton for the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Surrounding Kerr’s work on the walls of Victoria’s Legacy Gallery are about a dozen paintings from three decades of Morrisseau’s work, selected from the permanent collection of the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Gallery. Kerr, one of Canada’s most distinguished theatre designers and a professor at the University of Victoria, has created illustrations in graphite, pen and ink, watercolour and gouache for costumes based directly on particular paintings of magical characters in the cosmology that Morrisseau created. The ten actors in Copper Thunderbird become the mythical characters that activated Morrisseau’s work and spiritual centre. Next to the illustrations, about a dozen large photographs of the play’s set and lighting design are based on a concept Kerr describes as “kinetic sculpture on stage,” with references to Bauhaus composition, Alexander Calder’s mobiles and the theatrical magic of Peter Russell. Her designs for Copper Thunderbird are experiments with architectural concepts, unusual materials and colours, and the mythic presentations of the human condition that Morrisseau made real.

On September 20, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina opens Bob Boyer: His Life’s Work, the first major retrospective for one of the leaders in contemporary Aboriginal art in Canada. Before his untimely death in 2004, Boyer created a comprehensive legacy of painting stretching back 25 years — including his seminal blanket series of large-scale, politically charged representations of northern Plains symbology and contemporary references. Developed in collaboration with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, the show will tour nationally.

Flatlanders: Saskatchewan Artists on the Horizon introduces a new generation of prairie artists who are redrawing the parameters of place. They reach beyond the physical reality of flat land to explore social, metaphysical, conceptual, even scientific methods of mapping its geography. In traversing these alternative landscapes, they are shaking up the conventional notion of regionalism.