Calgary Artist Portraits

Harry Kiyooka, Campanile Piazza San Marco Venezia, oil on board, 1994.

ALBERTA: Venetian Paintings, November 26 to December 23, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary

By Monique Westra

While Harry Kiyooka (b. 1928) has been neither as prolific nor as ambitious as many other artists in this province, he does occupy a singular place in the history of art in Alberta. As a professor at the University of Calgary, he influenced a generation of artists. Later, following his retirement in 1981, he continued to be a vigorous advocate for the local arts scene. One of his most important achievements...

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Brigitta Kocsis, Secret Mechanisms #5, acrylic on canvas, 2008, 84" X 66".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Secret Mechanisms, August 4 to November 2, Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, B.C.

By Portia Priegert

You could call Brigitta Kocsis a figurative painter, but that would shortchange the complexity of her work. True, there are figures, but they are disassembled and combined with mechanical components within a more abstract and painterly field. Drips, loosely reworked forms and swathes of color document her concern with process.

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Graeme Patterson, Woodrow, installation view. COLLECTION OF THE MACKENZIE ART GALLERY. PHOTO; BLAIR ROBINS.

SASKATCHEWAN: October 22 to January 12, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina

By Margaret Bessai

Just what is it that makes Prairie art so darkly delicious? Prairie Gothic, curated by Timothy Long for the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, explores the roots of what has become the prairie sensibility — art that observes from a place of isolation, thinks deeply and speaks drily.

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Peter Dykhuis and Gil McElroy, Cold War Artefacts: Logroad: The Baldy Hughes Project, installation view.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Gil McElroy and Peter Dykhuis, Cold War Artefacts: Logroad: The Baldy Hughes Project, July 15 to October 9, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George

By Janet Nicol

“I was an army brat,” artist and writer Gil McElroy says. “My father was one of the ‘cold warriors’ in the 1950s.” The Pinetree Line was one of three cross-country arrays of manned radar stations guarding against Soviet attack...

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Roy Arden, West Coast Poets / Minimum Security Forest, collage, 2010.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Roy Arden, Vox, November 24 to January 7, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver

By Janet Nicol

“What does voice mean?” This is the question Roy Arden is exploring in his upcoming mixed media exhibition, Vox at Monte Clark Gallery. Using collage, oils and sculpture...

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Colleen Philippi, Plaza Martini, oil, mixed media on wood, 2011, 46" X 17".

ALBERTA: Colleen Philippi, A to Z, September 17 to October 22, Newzones, Calgary

By Jill Sawyer

Five years in the making, Calgary artist Colleen Philippi has amassed a new series of tactile mixed media collages, based in meticulous references to pop culture, organic objects, segments of the human form, and meditations on colour.

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Mark Dicey, Untitled 2153, acrylic, gouache, pencil crayon and collage on paper, 2010.

ALBERTA: Mark Dicey, River Tour, September 15 to October 29, Jarvis Hall Fine Art, Calgary

By Jill Sawyer
encompasses the idea of movement, flux, and continuity, it’s no surprise that Mark Dicey settled on the river as a source of inspiration for...

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Michael Campbell, The Janice May II, mixed media installation, 2009.

CALGARY: Michael Campbell, Field Recordings of Icebergs Melting, September 3 to October 23, Esplanade Art Gallery, Medicine Hat

By Jill Sawyer

Lethbridge-based artist Michael Campbell spends part of every year on Hornby Island off the coast of B.C., where he keeps a cabin with access to a rich source of inspiration and creative material.

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An Whitlock, Crow(d), plaster, 2000 to 2010.

SASKATCHEWAN: Animal, September to December, Kenderdine Art Gallery, Saskatoon

By Jill Sawyer

In Su Rynard’s installation work, Bear, the starved-looking form of a young black bear hesitates on the edge between wilderness and civilization, drawn out of the forest by a scattering of garbage. Stills from Kenn Bass’s video projection, Fugue...

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Lisa Figueroa, Salmon Spawning, acrylic on canvas, 2011.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Peak Year, October 1 to 31, SAGA Public Art Gallery, Salmon Arm

By Janet Nicol

Steve Mennie will not be celebrating the unusually high volume of Adams River sockeye salmon that occurred in the autumn run of 2010. Instead, the Salmon Arm-based artist brings a warning to an installation he’s created in collaboration...

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Jackie Frioud, white porcelain ceramics, at Circle Craft Gallery.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Jackie Frioud, Slipstitch, September 2 to October 4, Circle Craft Gallery, Vancouver

By Janet Nicol

Jackie Frioud’s stitch-design ceramics complement narrative hooked rugs by Judy Robertson in a show called Slipstitch, at Circle Craft in Vancouver. “I was attracted to pottery as a functional form,” says Frioud, “even though my fine arts degree is in printmaking...

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Maquettes, bronze, at Studio West.

The Studio West foundry and gallery in Cochrane, Alberta, is one of the most prolific producers of bronze statuary in western Canada, with commissions for significant public works including the RCMP National Memorial and Calgary’s statue of Sitting Eagle. The gallery will open its doors this fall with a show called Monuments to Maquettes, October 1 to December 31, which will juxtapose the large bronzes (some more than 11 feet tall) with the small models used in their designs, and include open studio installations with works in progress.

Leah Dorion, Spirit Dancers, acrylic, beads on canvas, 2007, 36" X 48".

There’s a tactility in Leah Dorion’s work that mimics her subject — the expression of Metis women in dance and domestic activity. Based in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Dorion paints women in traditional pursuits, told in a colourful folk-art style, dotted with beads. Her show, Country Wives, on September 1 to October 15 at the Chapel Gallery in North Battleford, is one of three exhibitions this fall at the gallery by Metis artists.

Cathryn Miller, Plants (detail), mixed media.

Saskatchewan artist Cathryn Miller takes literal inspiration from books and printed material, creating tactile representations in paper sculpture of the written contents of her materials — pages of a book about plants are cut and sculpted into flowers. The work complements her other pursuit, creating new books with her own Byopia Press. Miller will show her new work in Altered, Addled, and Alphabetical at the Hand Wave Gallery in Meacham, Saskatchewan, October 1 to November 10.

Ephemerals UNESCO Project, video still, 2011.

The Aboriginal artist and curatorial collective The Ephemerals will bring their latest project to the University of Winnipeg just in time for the new fall term. Centred on the University’s Gallery IC03, with a series of vitrines on-site through December, Trending will include performance dates during the school’s Orientation Week September 6 to 9. Made up of local Winnipeg Aboriginal women artists, the collective’s project focuses on indigenous culture represented through identity in fashion.

Jeremy Drummond, 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living, installation detail, 2007 - 2008.

ALBERTA: Jeremy Drummond, 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living, May 5 to June 11, The New Gallery, Calgary

By Amy Fung

As a harsh yet sublime portrait of North American suburbia, 65-Point Plan for Sustainable Living is a collection of 65 aerial images depicting every Canadian province and US state.

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Susan Rankin, Boat Dream Wired Form, blown glass, steel, steel wire, 2004.

ALBERTA: Susan Rankin, A Valid Beauty, July 2 to August 21, Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat

By Amy Fung

Known for her intricate glass work depicting flowers and figurative vases, a retrospective of Saskatchewan/Ontario glass artist Susan Rankin at Medicine Hat’s Esplanade Gallery surveys her work over the past 20 years. Cognizant of the history of glass craft...

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Karine Giboulo, Democracy Village (Phase 1), detail, polymer clay, acrylic, Plexiglas, mixed materials, 2010.

SASKATCHEWAN: Karine Giboulo and Olia Mishchenko, Habitaptation, April 15 to June 12, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

By Amy Fung

Curated by the Mendel Art Gallery’s Sandra Fraser, Habitaptation is a playful critique on our modern world, and how we live together. Pairing Montreal’s Karine Giboulo and Ukrainian-born, Toronto-based artist Olia Mischenko, the exhibition looks at the structures that organize our society...

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Sheila Kernan, City That Never Sleeps, mixed media, 2011, 24" X 12".

MANITOBA: Sheila Kernan, July 1 to July 30, 2011, Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg

By Amy Fung

At first glance, Sheila Kernan’s works appear bright and viscous, almost abstract views of a familiar place. Upon closer inspection, or rather, stepping back, Kernan in fact has transformed her travel portraits into a medium wholly her own. Traveling from pristine mountain peaks...

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Brendan Fernandes, Aya Mama, video still, 2008.

MANITOBA: Brendan Fernandes, On Becoming, May 5 to July 2, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon

By Amy Fung

Looking through the lens of diaspora and difference, Brendan Fernandes has been complicating the notion of identity through his own Indian-Kenyan-Canadian heritage. Searching for an authentic way of being — or becoming — Fernandes questions authenticity. He begins by questioning his own identity...

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Joseph Tisiga, The White Shaman and his Stupefying Flying Red Chief, watercolour on paper, 2011, 22” X 30”.

YUKON: The Magic Show, May 19 to June 10, 2011, The ODD Gallery, Dawson City

By Nicole Bauberger

In an art world where anything is possible, the artist must create his own context. Joseph Tisiga imagines all of his artwork as the product of his fictional Indian Brand Corporation, also known as IBC. This spring, the Corporation will produce a show of watercolour and oil paintings exploring magic shows and persuasive illusions in Dawson City, Yukon.

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Barbara Astman, Dancing with Che: Enter Through the Gift Shop, selected works-in-progress, 2011.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Dancing with Che: Enter Through the Gift Shop, May 7 to July 31, 2011, Kelowna Art Gallery

By Portia Priegert

Toronto-based artist Barbara Astman explores the commodification of iconic revolutionary Che Guevara in a new exhibition in one of Canada’s most politically conservative cities. At the Kelowna Art Gallery, Astman creates a faux gift shop stocked with key chains, coffee mugs and other souvenirs featuring an image of Che, the enduring poster-boy of the radically chic.

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Bertram Charles (B.C.) Binning, Ships in a Classical Calm, silkscreen, 1948, 30" X 30".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Unseen Silkscreens, May 20 to May 24, 2011, Pegasus Art Gallery and ArtSpring, Salt Spring Island

By Janet Nicol

Unseen Silkscreens is a unique historical collection of prints initiated by the Sampson-Matthews graphic arts company in the midst of war. An important contribution to the Canadian art scene from 1941 to 1963, the prints have been gathering dust in attics and institution storage rooms for many decades since. But with this upcoming exhibit, a West Coast curator hopes to bring them back into the light.

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Robert Young, Tart, oil on canvas, 1994, 104" X 82".

The Evergreen Cultural Centre in Coquitlam teams up this summer with the Simon Fraser University Gallery in Burnaby for a retrospective of paintings by British Columbia artist Robert Young, the first survey exhibition of his work in 20 years. On June 18 to September 4, the selection of original works spans decades, showing the artist’s mastery of intricate detail, and his intellectual approach to classical themes and the modern world.

Furniture designed and made in Victoria by Morrison-Bush in the window of Standard Furniture, 1953.

For western cities without much history to draw on, there’s been a trend to celebrate more recent histories, in art, architecture, design, and culture. Opening July 22 at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, The Modern Eye spotlights cultural and quotidian touchstones between 1940 and 1980 — household goods, furniture and craft objects that embody a uniquely Canadian modernist aesthetic.

Brenda Joy Lem, A Car in the New World, silkscreen on paper, 2008.

Brenda Joy Lem pulls together the fragmentary nature of the immigrant experience in Canada in her new exhibition at the Richmond Art Gallery through June 12. Drawing on vintage family and archival images, she traces her own history as a descendant of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Canada, through Victoria and Vancouver, in the 1930s to open a hand-laundry business. She tells a personal and a universal story in silkscreen prints, digital video projections, and sound installation.

Megan Dulcie Dill, The Journey, oil on wood, 2011.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Megan Dulcie Dill, Salmon Cycles, August 23 to September 16, Campbell River Art Gallery

By Janet Nicol

Megan Dulcie Dill’s mixed media paintings celebrate the life cycles of salmon, each work taking up to two years to complete. Her process involves “corrupting” the original layer of a drawing. “I let the paint spill, speckle, resist and flow over the surface so that the initial image is quite obliterated,” she explains. “After this process I erase...

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Lorraine Gilbert, Shaping the New Forest (detail), dye coupler print, 1990, National Gallery of Canada.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Sarah Anne Johnson and Lorraine Gilbert, Global Nature, Kamloops Art Gallery, June 11 to September 3

By Janet Nicol

Sarah Anne Johnson and Lorraine Gilbert, Global Nature, Kamloops Art Gallery, June 11 to September 3 Sarah Anne Johnson and Lorraine Gilbert began exploring art and photography in different decades...

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Kristin Bjornerud, Sanctuary, watercolour and gouache on paper, 38" X 64", 2010.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Kristin Bjornerud, May 1 to 31, Gallery Jones, Vancouver

By Janet Nicol

Kristin Bjornerud’s aim is “to create paintings that are short stories, personal narratives told through the lens of folktales, dreams, and magical realism.” One such work is The Father’s House...

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Rande Cook, One’s Vision, red cedar, acrylic paint, 2011.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Rande Cook, August 6 to 26, Alcheringa Gallery, Victoria

By Janet Nicol

Rande Cook’s summer exhibition, eight carved panels, is inspired by a previous exhibition of his paintings called Innovative Visions of the Formline. “No matter how we look at things around us, there is a string of energy flowing through it all,” Cook says about his striking and detailed designs.

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Dan Donaldson, Bordello Fantasy, oil, mixed media on canvas, 2007.

Dan Donaldson’s fanciful large-scale portraits have their basis in real Life — Life Magazine, that 20th-century compendium of everything that ever happened in the world. At the Art Gallery of Regina, April 13 to May 14, the portraits are displayed like a timeline of imaginary history in Donaldson’s show, aptly called Art Imitating Life Imitating Art.

Elinor Whidden, Ford EXPLORER series, digital image, 2009.

Mixing the trappings of contemporary car culture with the theme of wilderness exploration, artist Elinor Whidden’s Ford EXPLORER series comes to Calgary’s Stride Gallery June 10 to July 22. In crisp photography, Whidden chronicles a journey into traditional fur-trading territory, ranging across the Canadian Shield with a few artifacts of the modern age — the remnants of our “Fordian Empire.”

Napoleon Brousseau, Gary Michael Dault, 2002. Collection of the Glenbow Museum.

Through June 19, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary flips the idea of portraiture on its head. The exhibition Portraits, the latest curated show from works in the Museum’s collection, features a selection of recognizable portraits — images of people — as well as some unusual interpretations. Portraits of ideas, moments in time, and objects representing abstract concepts can all redefine the intent of portraiture.

Chris Riley, Showoff, oil on canvas, 2010.

Opening just as the rodeo season is gearing up in Alberta, Chris Riley’s paintings bring a spirit of celebration of the West to Swirl Fine Art in Calgary’s Art Central. A self-taught painter from rural Alberta, her portraits of people and animals are saturated with colour and bold, forceful strokes. On through June, the show will open June 2 (first Thursday) with kinetic live performance and a sampling of Western culture.

Yvette Poorter, Wilderness of Elsewheres, 2002 – present, 16" X 20".

YUKON: Jennifer Crane, Mary Beth Edelson, Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler, Nate Larson, Chris Marker, Edweard Muybridge, Alain Paiement, Yvette Poorter, Charles Stankievech, Mario Villeneuve, March 23 to May 21, Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse

By Jill Sawyer

There’s a persistent belief among cinema historians that Edweard Muybridge created the early technology for moving pictures to help a friend win a bet. The bet was about whether or not a horse picks all four hooves off the ground in a full gallop, so to prove the point, Muybridge figured out how to photograph each split-second step of a horse in movement, showing one frame of his friend’s horse, airborne. Taking the experiment further, he shot a series of frames of the horse in gallop (techniques he would later expand into groundbreaking studies of locomotion), which, seen seamlessly one after the other, produced a short film.

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Dianne Bos, Leaves Under a Negative Landscape, Italy, gesso, gouache, photogram, solarized photogram, pinhole photograph negative on watercolour paper, 2010.

ALBERTA: Perception, January 22 to February 26, Newzones Gallery, Calgary

By Katherine Ylitalo

At Newzones, Dianne Bos debuts three unexpected collage/drawings of trees in Perception, a group exhibition that coincides with Exposure 2011, the Calgary/Banff Photography Festival.

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Heather Passmore, Form Letter, mixed media on letter paper.

ALBERTA: Heather Passmore, Form Letters, March 18 to April 21, The New Gallery, Calgary

By Amy Fung

After ten years of a professional art career, Vancouver-based artist Heather Passmore has gathered her share of rejection letters from galleries, granting agencies, and residencies. But she’s managed to get creative with the results...

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Eszter Burghardt, Lava for Dessert, archival inkjet print, 2010, 12" X 16.5".

ALBERTA: Eszter Burghardt, February 5 to 26, Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary

By Amy Fung

Obsessed with the diverse and living topography of Iceland, Eszter Burghardt came home to her studio in Vancouver and started re-creating the textures of the land...

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Donna White, Cyborg Collar, mixed media, 2010.

ALBERTA: Donna White, Cyborg Collars, February 11 to April 29, The Ledge Gallery, EPCOR Centre, Calgary

By Amy Fung

“I still think of myself as a cyborg,” says Calgary-based artist Donna White, whose Cyborg Collars are a visually alluring metaphor for a collective experience.

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Marko Modic, Canadian Rockies #78.

ALBERTA: Marko Modic, Alchemy, February 5 to April 4, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff

By Amy Fung

As part of Exposure 2011, southern Alberta’s annual photography festival, Slovenia-based Marko Modic has a Canadian premiere with Alchemy at the Whyte Museum in Banff. Modic, who hails from the artistic hub of Ljubljana...

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Sherri Chaba, The Silence of Chaos, installation view (details), 2010.

ALBERTA: The Silence of Chaos, March 4 to May 15, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton

By Ross Bradley

The idea of previewing an installation exhibition is somewhat daunting, as the nature of installation work is that it evolves as it’s created in the gallery space. Talking with Sherri Chaba about her upcoming exhibition, although there is a very well-defined concept in place, whether it will translate as envisioned is far from sure. As Chaba sees the work...

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Ian Johnston, Bag Suite in 4/4 Time (detail), ceramics and shelving, 2009.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Bag Suite in 4/4 Time, December 18, 2010 to February 6, 2011, Kelowna Art Gallery

By Janet Nicol

Ian Johnston, an architect-turned-sculptor based in Nelson, B.C., examines our relationship with the environment in this provocative installation focusing on the ubiquitous plastic bag...

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Meghan Hildebrand, Rivers and Logs, Once and Future, mixed media on wood, 2010, 30" X 45".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Meghan Hildebrand, April 2 to 15, Madrona Gallery, Victoria

By Janet Nicol

Meghan Hildebrand always admired the group of quilt-makers at the Powell River Fine Arts studio in her home town — enough so it inspired her to paint with a quilt-like technique. She mixes acrylic paint and collage to create canvases...

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Terry Billings, Revealed Wasp Drawing 1, wasp nest paper, canvas, acrylic, 2006.

SASKATCHEWAN: Terry Billings, Flash, February 1 to March 13, Chapel Gallery, North Battleford, SK

By Amy Fung

Spanning 30 years, Terry Billings’ artistic career has always addressed the relationship between nature and culture, especially the boundaries between very public forms of understanding of nature and our individual subjective understanding...

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This image taken near Jericho Charlie’s home at Senákw, the Kitsilano Indian Reserve, on August 15, 1891, was the inspiration for three pastel portraits by Maisie Armytage-Moore. Photo Courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Entwined Histories: The Maisie Hurley Collection, January 23 to August 23, North Vancouver Museum

By Janet Nicol

Though she wasn’t Native, Maisie Hurley (1887-1962) spent most of her career as an advocate for B.C.’s Aboriginal people, invited to join the Native Brotherhood of B.C., and founder of the Native Voice newspaper...

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Carrie Walker, Because the original was not in good shape, pen and ink on paper, 2003, 19" X 25".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Fire Work, January 6 to February 12, Trench Contemporary Art, Vancouver

By Janet Nicol

Carrie Walker transforms a significant personal loss into an exhibition, appropriately named Fire Work, at Vancouver’s Trench Contemporary Art...

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Natasha Smith, Door 1 (detail), mixed media collage.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Natasha Smith, Joining Worlds, January 28 to February 26, Art Gallery of Golden, BC

By Janet Nicol

Seven doors create the canvas for Natasha Smith’s exhibition, Joining Worlds, and each door has its own character and history, which she considers as she layers the surfaces in collaged drawings with mixed media...

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Al Henderson, Rob’s Story (detail).

Al Henderson is best-known for his figurative sculptures in stone and bronze, detailed public commissions with traditional techniques. His latest work, seen in Light Horse Tales of an Afghan War, March 19 to April 2 at Douglas Udell Gallery in Edmonton, is a departure, combining sculpture and illustration in depicting the Afghanistan conflict as seen by Canadian soldiers in the South Alberta Light Horse Regiment. A former member of the Regiment, Henderson has taken their visceral memories and translated them into graphic, comic book-style panels, elegant figurative sculpture, and unusual bronzes — casts of bullet-torn metal and other battlefield memento mori.

Renee Duval, What About Now, oil on canvas, 2009, 48" X 52".

Originally from B.C. and currently based in Montreal, painter Renee Duval has a way of dividing the focus of the viewer in each of her paintings — they’re about the process of viewing as much as they’re about their subjects. Many of her works foreground trees and bushes, ostensibly the paintings’ subjects, but the viewer is drawn to focus on what’s beyond the branches, to peer through. More recent canvases offer glimpses of Vancouver scenery, as if seen through peepholes and hidden cameras. Renee Duval: New Paintings is on March 3 to 26 at Vancouver’s Elissa Cristall Gallery.

Mike Andrew McLean, Weather Observatory, Abbot Ridge, Glacier National Park, BC 12:35, August 9th 2009 (PC#123), 122°, C41 colour photograph.

After originally showing the works from his series Range at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, photographer Mike Andrew McLean returned to the Rocky Mountains last summer to complete the series, which will be at the Kamloops Art Gallery January 15 to March 12. McLean goes a little off the beaten path, capturing the expanse of the parks beyond the traditional tourist sites. His idea with the series is to understand where our historical perspective on the mountain parks meets contemporary reality.

Mong Yen, Quiet Path, egg tempera on canvas, 2010.

There’s an Alex Colville quality to the natural landscapes of Mong Yen, on exhibition in Quiet Path at Coquitlam’s Place des Arts February 10 to March 5. Dotted with solitary man-made objects, they have a sense of quiet and windswept distance in them. Originally from Cambodia, Mong arrived in Canada via refugee camps in Vietnam, and now spends his time painting unexpected landscapes around his Coquitlam home.

Chinese propaganda poster, Study well and grasp the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, 1975, from the collections of Barry Till and Richard King.

As an exchange student in China in the 1970s, Barry Till covered the bare walls of his dorm room with an inexpensive and easily accessible form of art — the ubiquitous propaganda posters printed under the direction of Mao Zedong. Now curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Till has pooled his collection with posters collected by University of Victoria professor Richard King for the AGGV’s show Communist Paradise, on through February 6. The collection of more than 70 posters is full of happy, healthy young workers blissfully serving the goals of the party.

AES+F, Last Riot 2 (detail), video still, 2005 – 2007. Courtesy Triumph Gallery and Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.

Russian conceptual photo- and video-based artists AES+F (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evsovitch, and Evgeny Svyatsky) bring their three-channel HD video project Last Riot to the Richmond Art Gallery February 3. Shown in collaboration with the Vancouver Biennial, the 2007 piece gets into the place where war, torture, and environmental destruction take on a video-game quality, making the world into a fantasy playground where nothing ever seems quite real.

Kelly Richardson, The Erudition (detail), three-channel video installation, 2010.

Kelly Richardson’s new three-channel video installation, Erudition, opens on an alien landscape, where lush trees grow out of a wrinkled desert, and move statically in the wind. Opening at Lethbridge’s Southern Alberta Art Gallery January 15 to March 6, the work was created as part of a 2009 residency at SAAG’s Gushul Studio in the Crowsnest Pass. Known for works that populate natural landscapes with eerie special-effects interventions, Richardson has exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian.

Shirley Elias, Virtuosity, acrylic on canvas, 40" X 30".

It’s obvious that Shirley Elias had her original creative inspiration in the world of music. A former concert pianist who now blends both artistic worlds (her paintings are collected by some of Canada’s most accomplished musicians), Elias’ paintings swirl with colour and motion. She describes how she “follows” the movement of colour across the canvas, in the same way the ear follows a line of music. “As a pianist, my performances were about connecting with an audience from the stage, using colours of sound within a structured musical framework,” she says. “My work as a painter is based on a similar principle.” Elias will have solo shows February 12 to 28 at Webster Gallery, Calgary and April 28 to May 28 at Birchwood Gallery in Winnipeg.

Kristin Nelson, Kristin and Pamela, Fall, pigment on photo rag, 2010.

Part crafter, part fine artist, painter, installation artist and performer, Kristin Nelson takes a subjective look at pop culture and fringe communities in her show My Life With Pamela Anderson and other works at Winnipeg’s aceart March 3 to April 8. Incorporating everything from printmaking to yarn art, the show is a full compendium of Nelson’s prolific body of work.

Nicole Cherubini, G-Pot, green with branches, 2006.

SASKATCHEWAN: A Peek at the Institution of Art, October 1, 2010 to January 9, 2011, The Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

It’s not every day that a public gallery is actually serenaded by art fans, but attendees of the opening event for the Mendel Gallery’s Under Skirt will be presented with four original songs performed by the Lethbridge-based Cedar Tavern Singers. The tunes are dedicated to the Mendel.

Under Skirt features an array of artists hailing from across Canada and the United States. Its aim is to be... (continue...)

Jay Simeon (Haida), Mouse Woman (Kugan Jaat), alder.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Stories Related Through the Art of the Northwest Coast, October 2, to November 13, Maple Ridge Art Gallery

By Helena Wadsley

Over the past 30 years, the art of First Nations people on the Northwest Coast has undergone a clear transformation. Styles and techniques have evolved to bring in contemporary materials and motifs, and artists are influenced by modern issues, often political and environmental. But traditions and folklore remain, pulling stories down through generations, along with the knowledge of carvers, and heritage motifs. (continue...)

Steve Gouthro, Mirror #1, oil on canvas, 2010.

MANITOBA: Deadringer, October 14 to November 27, 2010, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon

By Jill Sawyer

“I’ve been taking photographs of reflections for 30 years,” says Steve Gouthro over the din of a Brandon bar. “Mirrors are interesting, because they have a way of framing things.”

For his fall show at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba... (continue...)

Chris Charlebois, Bound Together, oil on canvas, 2010, 30" X 60".

By Helena Wadsley

Dense with colour and texture, Chris Charlebois’ paintings rarely involve a paintbrush. A palette knife loaded with a few colours is used to apply the thick paint, beginning with broad gestures. As the layers build up, Charlebois applies less paint and becomes more detailed. Connection to location is key to his work... (continue...)

September 11 to November 21, Winnipeg Art Gallery
October 2 to October 31, Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg

Wanda Koop, Helicopter (from the series Northern Suite), acrylic on plywood, 1986. Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

“The truck comes next week to pick up the work,” explains a harried Wanda Koop from her Winnipeg studio. “We’re in the last throes of getting the Winnipeg Art Gallery show together and... (continue...)

Dominique Rey, General Infinite Love, oil on canvas, 2008, 42" x 30".

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

Pilgrims is Dominque Rey’s first solo painting show. For ten years, the Winnipeg-based artist was consumed with photography and video, so this marks a return to the art form she’s practiced since age ten... (continue...)

Michael Cutlip, Bunny Land, mixed media on panel, 2010, 48" X 48".

By Helena Wadsley

Fall, one of Vancouver’s rainy seasons, is a good time for an exhibition of Michael Cutlip’s work. The colours of his mixed media landscapes evoke warmth...

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Egbert Oudendag, untitled, oil, 24" X 18".

By Helena Wadsley

Egbert Oudendag found the picturesque in everything, from the garbage cans at his back door to boats stranded on a sandy shore. Using a limited palette of subdued tones, he captured a subtlety of light and sensitivity to form...

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William Betts, The Joshua Tree, California, 1958.

By Helena Wadsley

Family photo albums were once filled with grainy snapshots of holidays and birthdays taken with Instamatic cameras. The difference that technology has brought us is that, now, everything is captured within the camera. William Betts, a Texas-based artist... (continue...)

Marcus Bowcott, Booming Grounds Low Tide, oil on canvas, 2009.

Marcus Bowcott’s latest paintings will be familiar to anyone who’s traveled the highways and river banks of British Columbia. The series, on November 19 to January 8 at Evergreen Arts Centre in Coquitlam, depicts the lonely waterways, log booms, and woodpiles of the timber trade. Bleak and beautiful, Cut Blocks, Stacks and Bundles are alternative landscape portraits.

Amy Chang, Romeo & Julia, clay, terrissage, electric fire, 2010.

Vancouver-based artist Amy Chang brings her latest show, Imperfection to Vancouver’s Gallery of B.C. Ceramics in October. Her pieces, known for their hard-edged whimsy, are sculptural and narrative. This latest series is based on grim fairy tales, retelling stories that haven’t always ended in happily ever after.

Man Ray, Noire et blanche (negative version), 1926 ©2010 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

The Surrealist photographer Man Ray had an important role in changing the west’s view of African art. His iconic photographs of African objects, and the design movement that sprang up around them, moved swiftly through the worlds of music, art, and popular culture. Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology at UBC hosts Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, circulated by International Art & Artists October 29 to January 23.

Tani Hamagishi-Allen, Iolanthe, collage and acrylic on canvas, 2010.

The alien life forms in Tani Hamagishi-Allan’s Porcelain series, floating oddities in collage and mixed media, are the artist’s response to consumer culture. The significance is in the paintings’ repetitive themes, which she’s given an undercurrent of disposability. Currently based in Nanaimo, B.C., Hamagishi-Allan will show the series at Victoria’s Boucherat Gallery September 3 to October 10.

Amy Rice, It’s A Closed System — I Would Know You Anywhere.

There’s a folksy quality to Amy Rice’s prints — they fit perfectly into the red-hot Etsy-fuelled art and design market that underpins our current culture. Rice began making the prints — mixed-media collages on found objects — to help fund her organic farm operation in Wisconsin. When the prints outsold the produce, she sold the farm and moved to Minneapolis to make art full time. Rice has her Canadian debut show at Victoria’s View Art Gallery in October.

Thomas Anfield, Travelers, acrylic on canvas, 2010, 59" X 39".

After successfully introducing his families of sock monkeys in a show last fall at Vancouver’s Petley Jones Gallery, Thomas Anfield returns to the gallery October 16 to 31. This time out, his grinning acrylic playthings are leading complex, busy lives in a colour-saturated world.

Chris van Rooyen, Flight of the Locust, photograph.

The Canadian premiere of the annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition returns to the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton (on through January). Featuring 60 winners from 43,000 entries from around the world, each image is accompanied by the photographer’s story of how he captured the shot.

Guy Laramee, Borges’ Last Coffee, basswood, table with metal stand, chair, 2006.

The Triangle Gallery in Calgary participates in the annual Artcity Festival with Logotopia: The Library in Art, Architecture and the Imagination (September 9 to 21), circulated by Cambridge Galleries and curated by Sasha Hastings. An exploration of millennia of library projects, from ancient Alexandria to the internet, the show includes work by artists, writers, and architects including Douglas Coupland, Alberto Manguel, Michael Lewis, and Ray Bradbury.

Melanie Gilligan, still image from the multi-episode drama Popular Unrest, 2010.

The Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre has the North American premiere of Melanie Gilligan’s multi-part fictional video narrative Popular Unrest (to October 24). Set in an odd future unraveled by the global financial crisis, the absurd, satirical story follows the conventions of popular forensics-style television shows. Gilligan is an artist and writer based in the U.K.

France Jodoin, Under the silent fog the tolling bell measures time, oil on linen (two panels), 2010, 80" X 140".

Calgary’s Weiss Gallery showcases the moody, maritime canvases of France Jodoin October 21 to November 20. The Quebec-based painter has created a series of dramatic, windswept scenes suggestive of endless weather and lost horizons. “I wanted to create a recognizable but imaginary geography,” she says. “Focusing on the large and small spaces that exist between the sea and sky that suggest infinity.”

Dionne Simpson, Urban e-Scape, Liquid Paper, pigment, ink on delineated canvas, 48" X 48".

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

Toronto artist Dionne Simpson’s latest series of works investigates what she calls the “widescape” of Calgary. Simpson wants to depict the city from a fresh perspective, employing the unique woven canvas technique she’s perfected...

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Herald Nix, Log Boom #1, oil on board.

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

Herald Nix was literally laying the groundwork for his forthcoming fall exhibition when he spoke about the show. The low-key landscape artist has been building a new studio in his backyard in Salmon Arm, B.C. Nix needs more elbow-room so he can produce larger canvases of the lush, plein-air images inspired by the scenic topography of Salmon Arm...

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Heather Cline, Love Through Barking Dog, acrylic and mixed media on canvas.

By Patricia Dawn Robertson

Regina artist Heather Cline says she’s more concerned with the incidental than the monumental. Her latest work, Populating Veduta, depicts 13th Avenue in Regina’s Cathedral district, a neighbourhood she loves for its diversity and epic quality (vedutas are tourist paintings of cityscapes.) Cline, whose work can also be found at Regina’s Mysteria Gallery and Art Placement in Saskatoon, wanted to capture those small, quiet moments gleaned from everyday life in her city... (continue...)

Allen Sapp, Untitled (Bison), acrylic on canvas, c. 2000, 30" x 40".

There’s a poignancy in the paintings of Allen Sapp, never more so than now, as he reaches the later stages of a remarkable career. From May 15 to 25, Canada House Gallery in Banff will show four decades of Sapp’s paintings, taking viewers through historical views of life on the northern plains, many of them taken from Sapp’s Cree childhood. The scenes depict a joyful, outdoor life, reminiscent of the same simple pleasures found in William Kurelek’s work. Now 82, this show traces Sapp’s most prolific decades as a painter, with work that tells a multi-faceted story of a well-lived life.

Rolande Souliere, Platform, street barriers, reflective sheeting, clamps, metal, wood and mirrors, 2008. PHOTO: Peter Endersbee

There are multitudes of influences in Raymonde Souliere’s installation, on June 25 to August 1 at The New Gallery in Calgary. A member of the Michipocoten First Nation now living in Sydney, Australia, Souliere has created work that repurposes northwest coast motifs, rendering them in traffic signage and construction materials. The result is an abstract form that blends indigenous culture, Modernism, and confrontation of the constructed, regulated world. Each of the pieces in the installation telegraphs its own messages about cultural identity, appropriation, and resistance. Originally from Toronto, Souliere didn’t start expanding her visual art practice until she settled permanently in Australia — before that her work was focused on Aboriginal craft and adornment. Moving so far away from Canada opened up her practice to the freedom of installation — something she’ll bring back home with this show.

Barbara Amos, Melt, oil on canvas, 2010.

ALBERTA: Barbara Amos, May 15 to 28, Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton

— Jill Sawyer

In the midst of installing two major public art pieces — one at the Lois Hole Hospital in Edmonton and one at Cardel Place in Calgary — Barbara Amos will have a show at Agnes Bugera Gallery in Edmonton in May. The public work is all large-scale, based on her Realidoscope series — paintings split apart into multiple geometric shards, and then pieced back together to form an abstract design. The paintings at Agnes Bugera are landscapes, forming the bases of the work that will be puzzled apart and rearranged. All the work is based on the idea of capturing moments of change, and it is all created in the moment. “Being in that place is more important than the work,” she says about placing herself within the landscapes that become her subjects. “It may be a bit like fishing. It doesn’t really matter if you catch anything. It’s all about the experience of just being there, in the grandeur of a simple but exquisite place and time.”

Represented by: Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton; Avens Gallery, Canmore; Abbozzo Gallery, Oakville, Ont; Marcia Rafelman, Toronto.

Jim Davies, Hush, acrylic on canvas, 43" x 60".

After installing 14 commissioned public works in Edmonton’s new Mazankowski Heart Institute, in collaboration with poet Stuart Adams, painter Jim Davies returns to landscape with his new show at Scott Gallery in Edmonton May 29 to June 15. An instructor in fine arts at the University of Alberta, Davies’ acrylics and watercolours reflect places that combine qualities of familiarity and mystery. It’s as if these places were created from fragmented memories.

Lorne Beug, Thunder Reef, ceramic, 1980.

ALBERTA: In the Stillness, May 7 to September 10, 2010, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery

— Patricia Dawn Robertson

The title of curator Jane Edmundson’s show In the Stillness reflects the somber and leisurely vibe of off-season campus life. To create a peaceful viewing space, Edmundson has dipped into the three-dimensional archives at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. The diverse set of works she chose includes pieces by international stars and regional sculptors, including Robert Rauschenberg, Tony Urquhart, Robin Peck, Gordon Ferguson, Vincent Tangredi, Alan Reynolds, Peter Johnston, Alex Wyse, Lorne Beug and Muriel Castanis. Most of these sculptural works have been tucked away for at least a decade, so there’s some excitement in her voice as she talks about the unique Robert Rauschenberg piece, “Tibetan Garden Song”, that will have it’s own little niche in the gallery. “It’s a quiet, contemplative piece so I wanted to give it some space. Also, I didn’t want it to have to compete with a more dramatic piece, say from Tony Urquhart’s box collection.” Apart from guarding against clashing aesthetics, Edmundson is also keen to introduce accessible works to the public. “All of these works are minimalist or abstract, but they reference real objects in the world,” she says.

Peter Menzel, The Costas of Havana, Cuba, Family Portrait, 2005.

ALBERTA: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, April 16 to June 20, 2010, Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery

— Patricia Dawn Robertson

The modest Cuban family depicted in the Hungry Planet exhibition at the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery is the same family photographer Peter Menzel and his collaborator, writer Faith D’Aluisio, met while scouting for their previous book project, Material World. “We spent three days driving around Havana with a government representative,” explains Menzel, a California-based photojournalist. “They wanted us to document a high-rise family from the new developments, but they finally relented and let me photograph Old Havana.” Material World captured its subjects in front of their homes, with all their possessions on public display. The book jump-started Menzel’s success, after 40 years behind the lens. “The idea to use food as a subject came out of an assignment I was given by the German magazine Geo,” he says. “They were doing a nutrition special so I decided to photograph my subjects with a week’s worth of food. This was the perfect follow-up to the Material World project.”

Menzel read a World Watch report that said more people in the world are now overfed than underfed. “I became obsessed with my fellow Americans, who were huge,” he says. “We are eating ourselves to death.” Menzel and D’Alusio found 12 families in 12 countries. They followed them to the grocery store, discussed their eating habits and calculated how much food they consumed in one week. The results — 48 revelatory colour photographs. The travelling exhibition is organized by COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in Napa, California and is shown in Red Deer with some local exhibitions, including Red Deer Eats.

Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, Salt of the Earth: Arrival, photograph, 2008, 14" x 42".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: From Different Perspectives: Photographs from the Agricultural Landscape, April 8 to June 9, 2010, The Reach Gallery, Abbotsford

— Jill Sawyer

Open just since 2008, The Reach Gallery in Abbotsford was created to reflect the culture of the Fraser Valley region, through visual art and heritage exhibitions. So it’s fitting that this spring show centres on images of farmworkers, in a region known for its rich agricultural output. The landscapes in this show aren’t exactly bucolic. Curator Scott Marsden has brought together four artists — Craig Berggold, Elaine Brier, Carole Conde, and Karl Beveridge — who have documented scenes of migrant farmworkers in North American fields and orchards. Using stylized techniques, Conde and Beveridge have documented Mexican workers in Ontario, while Brier uses a traditional social documentary style to depict the work lives and home lives of Mexican apple pickers in the Yakima Valley of Washington State. Berggold’s work was inspired by assignments he did for the Canadian Farmworkers Union in B.C. in the early 1980s — he was hired to document working conditions of itinerant agricultural workers, which he did using actors, and setups. Each of the photographs depicts a true incident that poisoned, injured, or killed farmworkers or their children. “This show is about farm workers, as opposed to farm work,” Marsden says. “It shows that these are complicated lives, and that they are part of the agricultural landscape. Their stories are rarely told — about the only time you hear about them is when there’s some sort of horrific accident.”

Steve Amsden, Ridges Up High, acrylic on canvas, 2007, 30" X 40".

Before he moved closer to Vancouver, painter Steve Amsden spent decades exploring the landscape around the Kootenay region of B.C. — the Slocan lakes, peaks of the Selkirks, and the rolling hills that surround the city of Nelson. His paintings, mostly inspired by sketches and photographs captured on hikes and ridge walks, can trace their inspiration to a handful of Canadian landscape artists — from Lawren Harris to Kootenay painter Les Weisbrich. Amsden has a solo show at the Maple Ridge Arts Centre in his hometown of Maple Ridge, B.C., April 17 to May 29.

James Gordaneer, Palaeo Plain, acrylic on canvas, 1970. PHOTO: Courtesy Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Prolific Vancouver Island painter James Gordaneer has been inspired by almost every movement in late 20th century art, from Modernist Abstraction to Neo Expressionism. His show at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria will chronicle the great sweep of his 60 years of putting paint on canvas, including his most recent period, in which he’s decided, somewhat cheekily, to take complete artistic license. Everything reflects his life as a fixture on the Victoria art scene, and his devotion to teaching and mentorship. On from April 9 to June 6, the show will be accompanied by a hefty catalogue, with content by curator Nicole Stanbridge, and former AGGV curator of contemporary art, Lisa Baldissera.

War Brides installed at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary.

MANITOBA: Bev Tosh: War Brides, August 24 to October 30, 2010, Portage and District Arts Centre, Portage La Prairie

— Patricia Dawn Robertson

Like thousands of Canadian women during World War II, Bev Tosh’s mother Dorothy met and married a foreign serviceman, in her case a Commonwealth airman training in Canada, who took her to New Zealand after the war. When Dorothy turned 80 in 2001, Tosh painted her as a young war bride, and since then, the commemorative project has grown in depth and magnitude. Now a Calgary-based painter, Tosh continues to mine the rich subject matter of identity, memory and displacement. Tosh conducted hundreds of first-person and email interviews with war brides from North America, Europe, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Her exhaustive efforts culminated in a show at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa in 2007, and the show has been touring since, with stops at the Royal B.C. Museum and Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. War Brides is on display at The Portage and District Gallery Art Centre in late summer, while a companion show is on at the Otago Settlers Museum in New Zealand. Still, after more than a decade, the project hasn’t left her — she’s still collecting stories and painting portraits.

Bev Tosh is represented by Masters Gallery, Calgary

Jake & Dinos Chapman, War, painted bronze, 2004.

SASKATCHEWAN: Diabolique, (Part 1) March 26 to June 4, 2010, (Part 2) June 18 to August 14, 2010, Kenderdine Art Gallery, Saskatoon

— Jill Sawyer

Curator Amanda Cachia came upon the idea for Diabolique through the work of ten powerful female artists. In 2008 she created a show at the Dunlop Art Gallery, where she’s director/curator, called Pandora’s Box, which surveyed work by artists including Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, and Annie Pootoogook, centring on social and historical themes of female sexuality, and touching on violence against women. “It made me want to look at violence and conflict on a more general level,” she says. The result is Diabolique, which Canadian Art named one of the top ten shows in Canada of 2009 when it opened at the Dunlop. This summer it arrives, in two parts, at the Kenderdine Gallery in Saskatoon. Next spring it will show at the Military Museums in Calgary. The context for each of the 22 works in the show — by artists including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Rebecca Belmore, David Garneau, Althea Thauberger, Douglas Coupland, and Raymond Pettibon — is contemporary conflict. The exhibition is split into two parts to accommodate its sheer volume, but Cachia finds that fitting, as well. It mirrors the two World Wars, two of the most compelling conflicts of the 20th century — just when they thought it was over, the violence began again.

A doll from the Sewing our Traditions exhibition at the Yukon Arts Centre.

There are multiple layers of meaning in the works in the Sewing Our Traditions. Developed by YAC for exhibition during the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, the show brings together a collection of more than 50 handmade dolls, each depicting styles and techniques of northern and northwest coast Aboriginal dress, traditional and contemporary. Using traditional materials — leather, sealskin, beading — the dolls have a heritage quality to them, along with an aesthetic beauty. Curated by Jennifer Bowen, the dolls reflect the unique skill involved in many of these traditional handicrafts, passed from one generation to the next. Sewing Our Traditions is on at YAC in Whitehorse from June 3 to August 28.

Mel Bolen, Frozen Drop, stoneware clay, wheel thrown, altered, carved, with glaze and terra sigillata surfaces, fired in a salt vapour kiln, 2009.

SASKATCHEWAN: Mel Bolen, Melcontent, July 2 to August 12, 2010, The Hand Wave Gallery, Meacham

— Patricia Dawn Robertson

Saskatchewan master potter Mel Bolen grew up in Regina in a house without art. He studied engineering in the 1960s but was smitten when he took a pottery course, and since then he’s spent 40 years in the ‘clay biz’ producing innovative functional and sculptural work. Bolen’s current exhibition, Melcontent, at The Hand Wave Gallery continues the advances he made for his Induction show in Saskatoon in October last year. “I spent 16 months on a tangent,” Bolen explains. “I took some risks and really scared myself. When the new work was exhibited, it just about sold out. I knew I was on to something as a lot of my peers, who aren’t wealthy, invested in the work.” The new works in question, which are sculptural in shape, are also salt-fired. “The whole kiln turns into a glazing atmosphere. I stack the pieces, laying one work atop the other. The finished pieces look like tide pools in B.C., or a galaxy.” The fat, gourd-like shapes have been pushed to the limit, and have the stretch marks to prove it. And while Bolen agrees he can still fall back on producing functional works, the fine art sculptures he produces in his church studio in the Carmel Hills keep him engaged.

Represented by The Hand Wave Gallery, Meacham; Lando Gallery, Edmonton; Pacific Gallery, Saskatoon; North Star Pottery, Humboldt, Sask.

Jean Sonmor, October Prayer, Inspired by the Land, installation view, Allen Sapp Gallery, 2010.

SASKATCHEWAN: November 15, 2009 to November 15, 2010, Allen Sapp Gallery, North Battleford

By Jill Sawyer

Curator Dean Bauche, director of the Allen Sapp Gallery in North Battleford, northwest of Saskatoon, took more than a few ideas from his last successful venture. He and his curatorial team had created an exhibition called Through the Eyes of the Cree, about acclaimed painter Allen Sapp, whose work anchors the permanent collection at the Gallery.

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Nobuo Kubota, Hokusai Revisited, laminated pine, painted and unpainted fir, video projection, 2008.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Hokusai Revisited, Kelowna Art Gallery, June 5 to July 18, 2010

By Portia Priegert

Nobuo Kubota pays tribute to influential Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai in an upcoming exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery called Hokusai Revisited, but his multi-media installation doesn’t mirror in material form paintings and woodblock prints by Hokusai, who lived from 1760 to 1848. Rather, Kubota, a first-generation Japanese-Canadian, evokes tangentially his predecessor’s interest in the forms and rhythms of nature.

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The Camper installation, on location, courtesy Truck Gallery, Calgary.

ALBERTA: Museum of the Bow, July 6 to 26, 2010, Truck Gallery, Calgary

By Mary-Beth Laviolette

The white 1975 Dodge Empress is a period piece — pristine-vintage with original decor. But the Alberta license plate is current and below the back window is a sign identifying the motorhome as CAMPER: Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig. Belonging to the Calgary artist-run centre, Truck, CAMPER is the gallery’s home-away-from-home in the warmer season, used for off-site art projects and for engaging people who, as Director Renato Vitic describes it, “would never step into a gallery.”

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Detail of textile art by Patricia Chauncey (left) and Hilary Young (right) from Double Vision – Morphos Inquiry.

Vancouver’s Numen Gallery will bring together two masters of complex textile art for the show Double Vision – Morphos Inquiry January 5 to February 14. Vancouver-based mixed media artist Patricia Chauncey, and London-based artist Hilary Young have created an installation inspired by the complex botany and scientific inquiry found in the work of A.S. Byatt, Charles Darwin, Carl Jung, and Vladimir Nabokov. Their influences — Victorian and Edwardian imagery, curio cabinets and fossils — can be clearly seen in their three-dimensional, highly technical textile works.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Murder of Crows. Installation view: Nationalgalerie, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2009. PHOTO: Roman Marz. Coutesy the Artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin; Luhring Augustine, New York.

ALBERTA: Murder of Crows and Storm Room, January 31 to May 9, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton

By Amy Fung

As the largest installation to date by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, “The Murder of Crows” (2008) makes its North American premiere as one of the inaugural exhibitions for the newly redesigned Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.

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Jason Mathis, TJ & Neko, acrylic on panel, 2009, 21" X 15".

ALBERTA: Shanell Papp, Christopher Moore, Dave & Jenn, Jason Mathis, Lisa Brawn, Len Komanac, January 15 to February 26, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery

By Jill Sawyer

Judging by the contemporary art coming out of Lethbridge these days, the (other) windy city is a cornucopia of kitsch, its flea markets and hardware stores filled to the brim with model train parts, taxidermy, unironic Canadiana, vintage comix. From David Hoffos’ detailed dioramas to Chai Duncan’s plaster beaver statuary, the city’s artists are constructing whole worlds from found materials, yard sale treasures, and Value Village cast-offs. Josephine Mills, curator of ,i>Snap, Crackle, Pop at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, ackowledges there may be a bit of that in her show.

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Gordon Smith, B VI, serigragh on wove paper, ed. 55 / 65, 1968, 18.5" X 18.5". Printed by Blackmore Press, Montreal.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: The Printed Pictures, December 8, 2009 to March 7, 2010, Burnaby Art Gallery

By Michael Harris

Prints will always be met with some faint suspicion — anything with a remove from the artist’s hand will plunge the viewer (and, more so, the calculating buyer) into the same quagmire that photography more violently produced. Gordon Smith’s very extensive printmaking career has raised its share of this suspicion — he printed Christmas cards; he liked screen printing because it was “easy to do”; he gets 50-odd pieces for the “work” of one — but the work itself has also gone a long way toward alleviating that suspicion.

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Glenn Clark, Okanagan Park, oil on panel.

On the slope up to the Silver Star Mountain Resort outside Vernon, B.C., the Gallery Odin is planning a winter group show with a collection of their local, regional, and national artists. The group includes oil painter Glenn Clark, whose landscape work is rooted in the lakes and hills around sunny central B.C. The winter exhibition will also include the milky coastal landscapes of Edward Epp, the detailed realism of Gary Whitley, and the frozen Antarctic peaks of Karel Doruyter’s painting, among many others.

Palaya Qiatsuq, Dancing Owl.

In late February, Appleton Galleries in Vancouver will host a carving demonstration by master carver Palaya Qiatsuq from Cape Dorset in Nunavut. Known for the light movement in his “Dancing Owls” series, the show is part of a project undertaken by the Nunavut government to bring their artists — carvers, weavers, and printmakers — to a wider public audience during the Winter Olympics. Qiatsuq will be carving at Appleton Galleries February 23 to 25.

Gregg Simpson, Summer Days, oil on canvas, 2008, 22" X 24".

In February, a popular time to visit Vancouver this year, the Leighdon Studio Gallery will feature two works by 25 long-time B.C. artists — each artist will have one recent work and one work from before 1990. The artists, including John Koerner, Audrey Capel Doray, Gregg Simpson, and others, are donors to the Coast Art Trust Society, which built a small collection of B.C. artwork at the University of Victoria’s Maltwood Gallery. This show, called Momentum, is curated by one of the Society’s members, Pnina Granirer.

Dirk Staschke, Plethora, mixed media and ceramic, 2009.

Exhibiting in a two-man show at Vancouver’s Gallery Jones, both Brendan Tang and Dirk Staschke are working in the same element — pushing the tradition of fine ceramics as far as they can. Beginning with delicate, detailed, baroque and Asian-looking figurines, they aggressively modernize their objects to bring them firmly into the 20th century, encrusted with kitsch, excessively layered and repurposed into representing the overkill of consumer culture. Work by Tang and Staschke will be at Gallery Jones January 7 to 30.

The collaborative installation work of Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy tackles one of the most current and complex ideas of the modern socio-political sphere. For Horse & Sparrow, installed in Calgary’s The New Gallery in the Spring, the concept was sparked by the free market economic theories of John Kenneth Galbraith, and traces the development of international economic policy, and the ways that Galbraith’s theories on capitalism, and their consequences have leaked into our everyday lives. This show fits well with Ibghy and Lemmens’ history of creating work that challenges mass deceptions, and the language surrounding it.

Max Dean, Robotic Chair, installation view. PHOTO: NICHOLA FELDMAN-KISS

ALBERTA: Robotic Chair, February 12 to April 11, Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery

By Jill Sawyer

In February, the Red Deer Museum and Art Gallery will reopen after a year-long renovation, bringing Max Dean’s kinetic sculpture Robotic Chair to Alberta for the first time. A collaboration between the artist, professor Raffaello D’Andrea, and artist / industrial designer Matt Donovan, this remarkable piece animates one of the world’s most mundane objects. Collapsing, and then finding its way back into wholeness again, it’s striking that this robotic motion can elicit an emotional response in the viewer — the chair appears to take on a monumental struggle, and the audience roots for it as it collects all its limbs and then slowly bends back upright. The project is the result of a 20-year endeavour to explore the possibilities of robotics in kinetic installation, and psychological responses they inspire. Dean has represented Canada twice at the Venice Biennale, and has exhibited his work at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, and at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Robotic Chair has been acquired into the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Arthur Renwick, Silver, colour photograph, 2009, 46" X 44".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Mask: Artists and Curators, January 29 to April 4, Richmond Art Gallery

By Beverly Cramp

As a boy in the Haisla First Nation village of Kitamaat in northern British Columbia, Arthur Renwick grew up listening to his grandmother’s stories and began drawing pictures at the age of six. Later, he studied at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and finished an MFA at Montreal’s Concordia University. Now based in Toronto, Renwick’s first major exhibitions involved multimedia landscape photography, until a few years ago when he began a series of larger-than-life photographic portraits documenting First Nations people who had come up against cultural assumptions about their heritage throughout their careers. “I began photographing authors and actors while talking to them about the history of images and the Indian,” says Renwick. “I was interested to know if they felt compromised by the stereotypical images of the past. Then I asked them to create a facial gesture to express their thoughts of that history.” The latest in the Mask series grew out of a First Nations curatorial conference at UBC in November 2008 and will be shown at the Richmond Art Gallery through April. In his artist’s statement, Renwick describes the new portraits as “…more than humorous, a body of images that depicts a culture alive, reactive and very comfortable with challenging and mocking the norm.”

Represented by: Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto

Helen Stadelbauer, Space Breaker, linocut on paper, 1949. Collection of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary. PHOTO: GLENBOW MUSEUM

ALBERTA: At the Crossroads, March 19 to April 28, Triangle Gallery Calgary

By Jill Sawyer

Featuring oil paintings, watercolours, and works on paper, mainly from the Glenbow Museum and the archives of the University of Calgary, this retrospective show brings together two artists who were intrinsically tied to the creative development of Calgary and the Alberta art scene. This is the first exhibition to focus on the work of Helen Stadelbuaer (1910-2006) and Wes Irwin (1897-1976). Both artists have been credited as two of the earliest proponents of Modernism in Alberta, and they both brought elements of avant-garde, mid-century style and technique to their work. Stadelbauer was a founder of the art department of the University of Calgary, and administered it for close to 30 years. Irwin was a founding member of the Alberta Society of Artists in the 1930s, and its second president after A.C. Leighton. He was an experimental art educator, teaching for decades at a Calgary high school after finishing an M.A. at Columbia University. “Both artists witnessed around them the transformation of a pioneering society into a modern one, and the impact of modern art on western Canada,” says At the Crossroads curator Mary-Beth Laviolette. “Both developments are reflected in their art as they strove to till the soil for a more visually educated and creative society.”

Kelly Mark, REM, video still, 2007.

SASKATCHEWAN: Stupid Heaven, January 16 – April 9, 2010, Kenderdine Gallery, Saskatoon

By Patricia Robertson

“I respond to things,” says Toronto artist Kelly Mark of her forthcoming survey show at the Kenderdine Gallery. Curated by Barbara Fischer, the exhibition includes old and new works by this enfant terrible of neo-conceptualism. The artist’s subversive humour and playful subject matter could be mistaken for a post-feminist mash-up, but when asked if she’s a feminist, Mark replies, “F—k no! I mean as women, we are all inherently feminist but I don’t want to be ghettoized.” Much of the artist’s material is what she calls re-creation. She’s borrowing from old materials and giving them a new twist. “Sometimes I cross the line,” she confesses. She’s also not afraid to satirize her role as underpaid artist. Though she hasn’t punched a clock in seven years, she still likes to explore the concept of work. In one piece she’s dubbed “Minimum Wage”, Mark frames her gallery contract and hangs it on the wall. “I ask the gallery to pay me a minimum wage for the time my work is up on the wall,” she says. “It often comes out more than my artist fee and then we frame it and make it part of the show.”

Represented by: Diaz Contemporary, Toronto, Lawrence Eng Gallery, Vancouver, Platform Gallery, Seattle

Rob Kovitz, Ice Fishing in Gimli (a novel) at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art.

MANITOBA: Ice Fishing in Gimli, December 12 to February 21, Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg

By Patricia Robertson

“I’ve never made a dime off my books,” says Winnipeg architect-turned-artist Rob Kovitz. “My projects have always been a luxury, something low-key I did on the side.” Ice Fishing in Gimli is an eight-volume response to Kovitz’ three-year exile in the remote fishing community in Manitoba’s Interlake. The books include original writing, a pastiche of eloquent quotes and evocative imagery, and are available for loan at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Institute. “I could have been on the moon or at the North Pole,” says Kovitz. “When you walk out onto that ice in the middle of the lake, it’s very disorienting.” The artist describes himself as more of a writer than a visual artist and cites Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin as a creative influence. “Maddin’s in the book,” Kovitz says of his epic saga of desire, boredom, madness, failure, the Wandering Jew, weather, murder and esoteric ice fishing techniques. The Gimli period produced a “good madness” — Kovitz gained much from his solitary experience in the stoic Interlake. “It was a remarkable journey. I got this book out of it, didn’t I?” he laughs.

Bryce Erickson, Super, oil on panel, 1994, 16" X 22".

SASKATCHEWAN: February to March 2010, The Stall Gallery, Saskatoon

By Patricia Robertson

Don’t call Bryce Erickson a photorealist. The Saskatoon painter’s depictions of his environment may dazzle viewers with their precision and clarity, but his unique version of painterly reality is still, in his own opinion, abstract and impressionistic. It’s also firmly based in narrative. Erickson has 40 years logged at his easel, so this retrospective solo show spans a lifetime of seeing and portraying his environment. He retired from his day job in 2000. “I decided I’m going to go to my studio to paint while I still have my wits about me,” he says with a laugh. When he chooses subject matter, Erickson rejects the “picturesque” and is not interested in doing calendar work. Instead his haunting and honest paintings encompass autobiographical memories. “There are images that keep coming back to me so I like to paint them,” he says. “Why was this important to me? Why is this still important to me?” Always, a sense of place remains central to the painter’s life and work. “West central Saskatchewan is like my Back 40.”

Represented by: The Stall Gallery, Saskatoon

David Owen Lucas, Prairie Castles, oil on canvas, 2009.

MANITOBA: Concinitas: A Look into Brandon, March 4 to April 17, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba

By Patricia Robertson

In the 1950s, painter David Owen Lucas lived near the epic Regina Legislative Building. “We used to ride our bikes to ‘the Ledge’ and play Cowboys and Indians. That’s what shaped my appreciation for architecture.” Now, Lucas teaches part-time in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba, and when he’s not teaching art, he’s immersed in his studio painting large-scale urban icons. He’s concerned with how the character of a city is defined by its architecture, observing that there are beautiful aspects of the historic prairie skyline that are lost, ignored and devalued. His passion for prairie architecture has previously focused on Winnipeg, but when he was invited to depict the heritage of Brandon for the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, he jumped at the opportunity. “A lot of the heritage architecture has been lost,” he says. “It’s been torn down, so I like to include a tone of mystery, magic and a little bit of threat. Yet there is also joy and celebration in this subject. For me, it’s about the whole environment — pure prairie, and how I perceive the world and our particular horizon. We live on flat ground. We all share the same horizon.”

Deryk Houston, Clean Mountain Air in the Muskwa Kechika, acrylic on canvas, 36" X 36".

ALBERTA: The Muskwa Kechika, March 13 to 29, Canada House Gallery, Banff

By Beverly Cramp

Looking at Deryk Houston’s impressionistic paintings for the first time, viewers would be forgiven if they thought they were seeing the works of a landscape artist. His upcoming show at Canada House Gallery consists of about 20 acrylics on canvas that are based on a horseback trip Houston took into northwestern British Columbia’s Muskwa Kechika wilderness area. But Houston’s practice also includes photography and installation pieces about war and peace, some of them featured in the National Film Board’s 2003 documentary film From Baghdad to Peace Country. “I spent a lot of time in Baghdad,” says Houston. “I toured bomb shelters and hospital wards. It took an enormous toll on my emotions. To balance this part of my life, I seek out places where there is no one. So all my works are related to the issue of war, but the peaceful works are the flip side — that life is precious and we should be protecting it.” Stylistically, the Muskwa Kechika paintings are a departure for Houston. “Normally I use bigger brushes to portray what I see. But for these new pieces, I had to go into a tighter style to depict what I was searching for structurally. Visually it looks different but it’s still the same message.”

Represented by: Canada House Gallery, Banff; Art Works Gallery, Vancouver; Collective Works, Victoria

Joice Hall, Ominous Beauty, oil on canvas, 2004, 24" X 72". Private collection.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Surreal.Real.Ideal, March 20 to May 23, Kelowna Art Gallery

By Portia Priegert

Joice Hall is known now as a painter of large-scale landscapes that depict, in precise detail, the panoramic sweep of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley, a place she and her husband, fellow painter John Hall, have called home for a decade. But an upcoming 40-year retrospective at the Kelowna Art Gallery posits that Hall’s work goes beyond realism, and teams ‘the real’ with notions of ‘the surreal’ and ‘the ideal’ as organizing principles. “At the core of Hall’s art is realism, and a belief in the power of representation in its various forms within a nature-based imagery,” the show’s curator, Patricia Ainslie, writes in the catalogue essay. But Hall, who passed through an early phase of figurative work, reaches beyond the mundane, entering a terrain of introspection and reverence. “Her work goes beyond what the eye can see,” says Ainslie. The artist agrees: “What I’m trying to do in all the paintings is to bring forth a very spiritual, universal quality in the work so that everybody, no matter where they are, can look at it, understand it and get some kind of spiritual feeling, whether it be the landscape, or still life, or people, or festivals in Mexico.”

Represented by: Wallace Galleries, Calgary

Theresa Sapergia, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2009.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: I Like Canada and Canada Likes Me, August 21 to November 9, Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George

By Portia Priegert

Theresa Sapergia considers a post-apocalyptic world without humans in her new exhibition of large-scale painting and drawing at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George. Her focal point is a 20-foot-long painting depicting a flooded city — with Prince George’s iconic roadside attraction, a giant woodsman known as Mr. PG, poking up from the water. “The meek of the earth, the little critters, the mice and rabbits and whatnot, have taken refuge on him as though this is the last bit of space to stand on,” says Sapergia, who returned home to Prince George two years ago after completing a Master’s degree at Concordia University in Montreal. “There are no more people. You can still see the detritus of our culture, but it’s being washed away.”

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Terry Kazakoff, Bob and Darcy, watercolour, 20" X 26", 2009.

The Leighton Art Centre sits on a gloriously scenic bluff south of Calgary, the former home of painters A.C. and Barbara Leighton. This fall, the Centre will be the site of Open Water, the annual juried show of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. This is the first time the show has been based in Alberta, and only the second time it’s journeyed to western Canada. Worth the short trek from the city, it runs September 5 to October 24, and will feature 63 paintings of 300 open-call submissions. Long-active in Alberta, this show solidifies the Society’s presence in the province.

Kim Dorland’s painting studio at Emma Lake.

ALBERTA: Canadian Content, September 10 to October 8, Skew Gallery, Calgary

By Patricia Robertson

“The more Canadian the work gets, the more international it gets,” says Toronto painter Kim Dorland. On day two of his artist-in-residence gig at the Emma Lake Workshop in northern Saskatchewan, he’s already been at the easel at work on a new series about Tom Thomson. “I was supposed to take the summer off, as I spent the spring in the studio producing 40 paintings, but now I’m feeling re-inspired by Emma Lake,” he adds.

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Lisa Brawn, Lady With a Hat: Self Portrait, woodcut, 2007.

ALBERTA: Take Me To Your Leader, October 24 to November 16, AXIS Contemporary Art, Calgary

By Patricia Robertson

“I’ve hit a vein. I’ve got my medium. I’ve got my genre. I don’t have to reinvent it when I work at it. I can just do it,” says Calgary artist Lisa Brawn about her woodcuts. Brawn is fascinated by, and alert to, the eccentric world around her. She explores her natural curiosity through startling portraits of obscure dictators, carnies, cowgirls and evangelists.

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Virginia Boulay, Earthen Path, 2009.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Nature’s Muse, September 19 to October 3, Effusion Art Gallery, Invermere

Although Calgary-based landscape painter Virginia Boulay was born in Vancouver, her grandparents had land on the Alouette River northeast of the city. “I can still recall floating along the river and collecting rocks,” she says. Boulay’s work has a well-defined style with strong lines and vivid contrasting colours. The painter also works as a graphic designer and says that may explain her bold use of line, while paintings like “Earthen Path” exemplify her unique style. She’s influenced by painters like Anne Savage, Emily Carr and Georgia O’Keefe whom Boulay calls her “mentors in spirit.” Effusion’s Nature’s Muse exhibition draws from Boulay’s favourite natural sites, like the mountain landscapes near Calgary and the wide open prairie of Eastend, Saskatchewan, where she spent five weeks at a retreat in 2004. She cites writer Sharon Butala and her late rancher husband Peter as local creative influences while in Eastend. “They were so generous,” she recalls. “They gave me a personal tour of their land, and I painted the Butala family homestead.” She can’t wait to return to Saskatchewan to complete a winter series.

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: Effusion Gallery, Invermere, B.C.

Kathryn O’Regan, Untitled, porcelain, earthenware, 2008.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Offering, November 7 to 30, The Gallery of BC Ceramics, Vancouver

“I seldom use a wheel, preferring to work directly with clay starting with coils and slabs,” says multi media artist Kathryn O’Regan. “I mainly work with simple tools. Everything I make is one-of-a-kind and sculptural in form.” O’Regan’s hand-built clay sculptures are organic shapes, often coloured in brilliant hues — they could easily be mistaken for underwater sea creatures. “I’m influenced by the environment around Vancouver — the shapes and textures,” she says. She also paints and makes tiles, which she calls her ‘clay canvases’. But her main focus is on the most basic material. “Clay has always been a base for me,” she says. “I keep returning to it. The excitement of clay has never gone away. I’m always surprised by what comes out of the kiln, even though I have a good idea of what the final piece should look like.” O’Regan will be showing her new clay works, many embedded with glass, at The Gallery of BC Ceramics. Three years ago, she met an artist in Turkey who created huge murals using bits of glass. It inspired her to begin exploring the mix of glass and clay. She continues to travel extensively, recently finishing an artist-in-residence stint in Tasmania. “It’s a great opportunity to meet other artists and learn from them,” she says. “The adventure of learning is ongoing.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: The Gallery of BC Ceramics, Vancouver

Myfanwy Pavelic, JD Reading, graphite on gessoed board, c.1980.

The new Mercurio Gallery in Victoria is carving out a niche as the place to see work by the Limners, a group of significant Vancouver Island artists loosely connected in the later half of the 20th century — Myfanwy Pavelic, Herbert Siebner, Max Bates, and others. To mark a fall Art Gallery of Greater Victoria show on Limner Colin Graham, Mercurio will show work by Graham and a collection of his cohorts. Called The New Victorians: The Colin Graham Legacy, it runs October 1 to 31.

Unidentified (Italian), Portrait Of A Woman, oil on canvas, c.1500-1600. MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina Collection, gift of Mr. Norman MacKenzie.

SASKATCHEWAN: Close Strangers: Distant Relations, September 19 to January 3, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina

David Garneau wants to challenge the notion that “art must be educational.” The Métis artist and educator brings this subversive agenda to the MacKenzie Art Gallery this fall when he curates Close Strangers: Distant Relations. In this passionate engagement with the Gallery’s permanent collection, Garneau wants to have his audience be “moved rather than convinced.” The audio-based storytelling experience he wrote for each work takes the viewer on a 20-minute journey with an iPod. Visitors will be guided through a maze as the audio story unfolds, and each work is connected to the next — it’s a narrative told in 20 fictional voices. “These are first-person accounts,” Garneau explains. “They’re not reliable. I used poetic language.” Among the works chosen for the audio maze are Ernest Lindner’s “Food for Life”, Janet Werner’s “Grey Girl”, “Unknown, Formerly Attributed to Titian” and Sanford Fisher’s “Hanging Out the Wash.” Garneau’s own internal dialogue about the works is an imaginative response he assumes most people have when they look at art. This private dialogue takes place outside of art history within a more subjective realm. “We look for mirrors and metaphors of our lives or narrate possible worlds in the picture,” he says.

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: Mysteria Gallery, Regina

Leila Armstrong, Castor Canadensis, mixed media.

ALBERTA: 12 Point Buck, October 2009, Window Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge

Opposing perspectives led two Lethbridge artists to collaborate. “Our different interactions with nature caused spirited debates,” says Leila Armstrong. While Chai Duncan thinks unadulterated interaction is possible, Armstrong disagrees. “I believe all interactions are mediated by other influences, including preconceptions about nature and effects of our anthropomorphizing animals.” Their positions are also complementary — they’re both interested in exploring representations of nature as artifice. “We see the unpredictability, danger and chaos of nature being abandoned for an ideal pastoral retreat where man and beast co-habit in equanimity,” Armstrong says. “This fantasy is sustained through the fetishization of fauna in toys, figurines, statuary and stuffed animals, and flora in landscape photography and painting,” Duncan adds. The artists have produced a series of digital images, called 12 Point Buck, with fantastical, ideological narratives about nature, which like all narratives are ideologically laden. The show was at The Parlour in Lethbridge last March, and in September 2010 goes to Harcourt House in Edmonton. In their first video, Deer Me, they take a deer from the coulees and transform it into a loose narrative about an anthropomorphized creature donning a toy mask and wolf skin coat — it’s all about our fantasies about nature.

— Katherine Wasiak

Ryan Marsh Fairweather, Worry Dolls, glass, 2009.

ALBERTA: Cities, October 16 to November 14, Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, Calgary

Bee Kingdom is a collective of three graduates from the Alberta College of Art and Design’s 2005 Glass Program — Phillip Bandra, Tim Belliveau and Ryan Marsh Fairweather. Why the name Bee Kingdom? Because their studio is in garage (their kingdom) of the house they share in Calgary’s inner city, where they live and work collectively like bees in a hive. Also, hot glass has the texture of liquid honey. Cities will be an eclectic collection of glass, paintings and digital drawing. Visually the work is playful and colourful, and on a conceptual level the artists are attempting to assimilate ideas from philosophy, myths and their observations of contemporary urban living. Marsh Fairweather’s work is a futuristic world of amoeboid and robotic creatures inspired by Japanese cartoons and anime. He calls it “cute culture.” Belliveau links the landscape and living creatures in a curious and narrative manner, and Bandra’s recent work draws inspiration from sand castles, factories and office towers in an attempt to capture the duality of the urban world — both playful and hollow. Together, it’s an exhibition of young, ambitious artists just beginning to develop a vocabulary and links between imagination and reality.

— Richard White

Represented by: Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, Calgary; Axis Contemporary Art Gallery, Calgary; Elevation Gallery, Canmore AB; Stratus Galery, Banff, AB; Alberta Craft Council Gallery, Edmonton.

Robert Amos, Imaginary Landscape, ink and watercolour on Chinese paper.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Traces of the Brush, September 7 to October 31, Eclectic Gallery, Victoria

A long-time fixture on the Victoria art scene both as a painter of the city and as an arts writer for more than 20 years, Robert Amos will surprise those who aren’t familiar with the full extent of his art practice. Many know Amos for his whimsical acrylic paintings of Victoria life and landscapes, which he has been painting since 1975. He has also been creating works influenced by Eastern brush and ink techniques, which he was exposed to while working at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from 1975 to 1980. “The gallery has a huge collection of Chinese and Japanese works,” he says. “I had a tremendous opportunity to study them as well as see demonstrations from visiting Eastern artists. I was able to see what they did first hand.” Amos took these techniques and melded them with his own Western ideas. “Typically, Chinese brush and ink art depicts imaginary landscapes — rocks, mountains and water. I experienced lots of these landscape themes here in British Columbia. But how do you paint pine trees and falling water? You can learn the forms but the content should be what’s in your heart.” Traditional Eastern art also incorporates inscription — after much experimenting, Amos found his inscriptions in James Joyce’s writings. “Joyce is difficult to read. I found that if you read his books one word at a time, you can see the material as a series of small poems. After studying his work, I knew I had found what I was looking for.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Eclectic Gallery, Victoria

Jan Kabatoff, Athabasca Ice Fall, photograph, 2009.

ALBERTA: Glacier: A Journey, September 12 to November 12, Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff

“I don’t want my work to become a science project,” says Canmore artist Jan Kabatoff. “I want to retain my own response to the glacier.” Kabatoff’s latest project, Glacier: A Journey, began in 2005 when she started documenting the glaciers near her studio at The Banff Centre, a project that later expanded to two other continents. The result of that ice-filled journey is a magnificent multimedia installation slated for the Whyte Museum this fall. These disappearing icons, as she calls the glaciers, have become an obsession for the artist. She’s pulled together paintings, mould impressions, hand-dyed textiles, photographs and audio tracks on the subject. “Ice and water are metaphors for change and transformation in my work,” she says. The research and documentation for this massive project has stretched the limits of Kabatoff’s artwork, and her life. “I was trekking up to the glaciers and hanging over crevasses to record the sounds of melting,” she recalls. “It was pretty challenging.” She adds, “I have a feeling of awe regarding these massive, massive bodies of ice. And they could be gone within our lifetime.”

— Patricia Robertson

Ted Oster, Untitled, acrylic on paper, 15" X 12".

There’s a haunting quality to Ted Oster’s paintings — in place of eyes, his animals have large, round voids. Oster, a Winnipeg-based artist originally from northeast Ontario, believes the eyes represent the spirit, and can’t be duplicated. He paints small dots, evidence of the earth that pulls every living creature in, into each of his animal portraits. Opening November 21, see Oster’s unique, stylized Woodland paintings at Winnipeg’s Wah-Sa Gallery.

James Henderson, Qu’Appelle Valley, oil on paper board, c.1925. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery.

In a tradition spanning from Paul Kane to Nicholas de Grandmaison, the work of James Henderson represents a vogue for cross-cultural Aboriginal portraiture that still exists in Canada. Called “the man who paints the old men”, Scotland-born James Henderson (1871 – 1951) made his home in the Qu’Appelle Valley north of Regina, where he painted portraits of members of the Sioux, Cree, and Blackfoot, and the landscape around him. Saskatoon’s Mendel Gallery hosts a retrospective of Henderson’s work, Wicite Owapi Ocasa, September 25 to January 10.

Eric Deis, Hipsters and Drug Dealer, photograph, 2009.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Shadows Cast on Imagination’s Past, October 1 to 25, Elissa Cristall Gallery, Vancouver

Eric Deis’ photographs mix colours, light, shadow and human activity. Take one of his most recent works, titled ‘Hipsters and Drug Dealer’, which will be shown for the first time at the Elissa Cristall Gallery this fall: bright yellow light from a restaurant illuminates a lone figure on a night street. A short distance away, a circle of young people lounge outside a pub building with three floors of apartments above (several of the windows reveal miniature vignettes). On the roof of the building is a large satellite dish lit up in an unreal blue. Closer inspection reveals there is a movie shoot underway in the back lot behind the apartment building, which is providing a hard edge of blue shadow in some places. In the far background, the sky has a post-apocalyptic feel from the city’s light pollution. Every inch reveals more detail. “My images are multi-layered and the foreground and the background undulate in relationship to one another,” says Deis, whose large-format photographs are neither staged nor manipulated in any way. Captured in situ, they balance colour exactly as photographed, making for hyper-real pictures as detailed as any allegorical renaissance painting.

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Elissa Cristall Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.

Lyle Schultz, lastangel, mixed media on canvas, 2009, 4' X 3'.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Blue City Veins, October 2 to December 4, Grey Area Gallery, Chilliwack

After graduating six years ago, artist Lyle Schultz’s work is already in the permanent collections of the Emily Carr House in Victoria and Medicine Hat College. His patrons include Scott Thompson of Kids in the Hall and John Wright of the band no means no. Schultz’s work has a humourous edge — his gallerists describe him as an artist “creating a unique and diverse universe of eccentrically electric and eclectic absurdities.” Schultz’s multi-media works range from paintings and comics to animation and short film. While he has worked for many years on an aquatic-themed comic called Hello, My Name is B.O.B., the Chilliwack show will feature his new paintings on canvas — mostly acrylics, some polymers and grease pen. The concept will be one Schultz has worked with since college. He moved to Vancouver Island in 2003 and lives in Victoria. “I see cities as huge eating and digestive organs,” he says. “In some ways they’re about the clash between nature and the city, how they are getting along or not.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Grey Area Gallery, Chilliwack, B.C., Boucherat Gallery, Victoria, B.C., Sooke Harbour House, Sooke, B.C., Polychrome Gallery, Victoria, B.C.

Kaua Gita, Bird of Paradise Suspension Hook. PHOTO BY JANET DWYER.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Contemporary Art of Papua New Guinea, November 5 to 26, Alcheringa Gallery, Victoria

By Kimberly Croswell

Hailans to Ailans, the Melanesian pidgin title for “From the Highlands to the Islands,” honours a broad regional spectrum of traditional and non-traditional art practices. Victoria’s Alcheringa Gallery pairs local Coast Salish and Papua New Guinean works in wood, metal sculpture, fibre art, painting and performance art — at stake in the exhibition are issues of identity, memory and extreme cultural shifts.

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Jan Boning, Untitled, serigraph, n.d.

MANITOBA: A Life in Print, September 10 to October 16, Martha Street Studio, Winnipeg

“This show is very much like a retrospective,” says Winnipeg artist Frieso Boning about his late father Jan Boning’s serigraphs on exhibition at Martha Street Studio this fall. “We pulled a lot of the prints out from under the bed.” Frieso curated the exhibition with Martha Street executive director Sheila Spence. Jan Boning was born in Holland in 1931. He immigrated to Canada in 1957 and started producing art in 1963, working at a silkscreen shop and making prints of his own work until he started his own shop, Omniscreen. In addition to his own work, Jan Boning made prints for artists like John Erkel, Audrey Riller and Tony Tascona. “A lot of my father’s work, which dates back to 1963, is hard to find,” says Frieso Boning. “It’s probably in dentist’s offices and private collections. I don’t even have any of his prints in my home.” After the show is taken down, he hopes to secure an archival home for his father’s body of work at the University of Manitoba or the Winnipeg Art Gallery. “So it doesn’t go back under the bed again.”

— Patricia Robertson

Betto (groom), hand coloured photograph, n.d. Photograph attributed to Adlolfo Farsari. From the Hall Collection of 19th Century Photographs of Japan.

ALBERTA: Koshashin, April 4 to June 7, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton

The Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton captures one of the most important periods in Japanese history with its exhibition Koshashin, April 4 to June 7. From the Hall Collections of early Japanese photography, one of the largest in existence, it shows a time when both photography and Japan were modernizing quickly. Shot by both western and Japanese photographers mostly between 1852 and 1868, the collection was built by Edmontonian Arlene Hall, and has rarely been seen.

Robin Ripley and Diana Burgoyne, Interface/Interfacing, installation detail: sewing notions and electronics, 2009.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Interface/Interfacing, July 14 to September 5, Numen Gallery, Vancouver

‘Electronic folk art’ is a guiding principle behind new media artist Diana Burgoyne’s work. She uses materials that are inexpensive and accessible, exploring relationships between people and technology, and assembling installations that have a ‘home-made’ quality in their electronic components. She does it to make the work less intimidating, and more human. Burgoyne developed her ideas as a student, when a new music composer presented her class with a Casio board, worth about $10, describing it as the electronic folk instrument of our culture. “I took what he was saying into my own practice and began buying my materials from Radio Shack,” she says. “The materials I use can also be learned easily, either through the Internet or from Radio Shack itself.” The Interface/Interfacing exhibition at Numen Gallery is a collaboration between Burgoyne and long-time art studio partner Robin Ripley. The playful installation consists of a sewing needle drawn along a thread suspended along the gallery wall. As the needle moves it comes into contact with a series of thimbles below the suspended thread. A hand-made amplifier circuit, visible to the eye, is connected to the thimbles so when the needle touches a thimble, the sound is loudly heard. There are two special thimbles placed closely together and when either is struck by the needle, it flips a switch on another circuit that plays pre-recorded sounds.

— Beverly Cramp

Silke Otto-Knapp, Figure (bending), watercolour and gouache on canvas, 2007.

ALBERTA: Standing anywhere in the space in a relaxed position, July 25 to September 27, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff

At first glance, Silke Otto-Knapp’s watercolour paintings of ballet and contemporary dancers appear less complex than they really are. If fact her work — shown internationally at galleries including the Tate Britain and Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts — is layered with multiple conceptual and experimental elements. German-born but living and working in London, Otto-Knapp applies thin layers of watercolour paint to her canvases, exploring dance and the body. Her luminous metallic figures appear to float in tightly constrained compositions establishing a critical dialogue between the body and the space around it, says Kitty Scott, Visual Arts director and interim senior curator at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. “It’s that relationship to space and the body that she is really interested in. She wants to distinguish the body from space and at the same time keep them as linked and united as possible,” Scott says. Otto-Knapp achieves her fluid representations of the body through meticulous research and observation. “They’re not spontaneous paintings,” Scott adds. “They’re conceptualized and thought through,” Scott says. As part of this summer show, the gallery will present Otto-Knapp’s work — some of which was created at The Banff Centre during a 2008 residency — in a way that involves viewers, and reminds them of their own physical presence in the space that surrounds them.

— Rob Alexander

John Burrow, Sugar Lake, oil on canvas, 2008, 11" X 14".

ALBERTA: August 6 to 31, Art Beat Gallery, St. Albert

Though John H. Burrow, a former advertising illustrator, moves easily between many different styles, most of his work focuses on rich impressionistic florals and bright, whimsical folk art scenes. Regardless of what he’s painting, including classic landscapes, his work connects directly to his love of the land and the outdoors, and the combination of two elements: light and shape. “I like things that show character, usually by being out of the norm of geometric shapes or straight lines, things that have a twist to them,” says Burrow, who lives in the Shuswap Lake region. “Showing a definition of character in the design, and the way the lighting is on the subject, are probably the two most important things in my compositions.” Before he puts his oil paint — which he describes as having a “rich, buttery flow” — on the canvas, Burrow turns to his sketchbook. “I have some old-fashioned standards,” he adds. “One of them would be do a good drawing and plan it out thoroughly before I begin painting.”

— Rob Alexander

Represented by: Art Beat Gallery, St. Albert, AB; Avenida Art Gallery, Calgary; Birchwood Gallery, Yellowknife; Westlands Art Gallery, Cochrane, AB; Picture This!, Sherwood Park, AB.

Michael Cameron, y5y2, oil on canvas, 2009. Courtesy of Skew Gallery.

Dogs in various forms streak through the paintings of Michael Cameron. They also gaze, fly, howl, and unhinge their jaws. In a solo show, Intermediary, at the Art Gallery of Calgary April 24 to June 27, Cameron presents a range of canines against abstract but recognizable backgrounds — the eye goes directly to the dogs.

Allyson Mitchell, Midge, 2005.

MANITOBA: Ladies Sasquatch, Winnipeg Art Gallery, May 30 to August 16.

Toronto-based sculptor and installation artist Allyson Mitchell brings her show Ladies Sasquatch to the Winnipeg Art Gallery May 30 to August 16. It’s a startling amalgamation of feminism and fun fur. Working mainly with found textiles and folksy craft techniques, she’s set up a free-standing set of wild women. Curator Carla Garnet describes them as symbolizing “the mythical feminine as something not easily captured or domesticated.”

David Hannan, Pile (detail), polymerized gypsum, model railroad tree, 2009, 48" x 36" x 24".

MANITOBA: Faunamorphic, July 3 to August 15, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon

By Diane Nelson

The pieces in Faunamorphic are bold and dramatic. Some are contorted, others are distorted. The well-toned thighs of a wolf elegantly, almost lazily entwine upward, slowly evolving into … something not quite animal and not quite human, possibly alien, a creature out of step and out of place.

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Marleen Vermeulen, Spirit of the Forest, oil on canvas, 2009, 48" X 48".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: New Works, May 27 to June 11, Kurbatoff Art Gallery, Vancouver

A funny thing happened to Marleen Vermeulen when she moved to the West Coast 15 years ago. The Dutch-trained artist, who had been painting small abstracts, began instead to create large impressionist paintings from her studio on the Sunshine Coast. Vermeulen’s new environment, so unlike anything she had encountered in densely populated Holland, led her to want more ‘shape’ in her art. “I was blown away and inspired by the space around me,” she says. “I felt I had been thrown here in the middle of nowhere. I had to re-invent myself and I embraced it fully.” The new paintings started with figurative works, but soon gravitated to the seascapes and landscapes that Vermeulen encountered around her. Her palette became dominated by earth tones, with blues and grays in seascapes, and ochre and greens in forest landscapes. She describes it as “a very West Coast palette.” Vermeulen also works with strong textures, the contrast between smooth and textured brushstrokes adding depth. The size of her oil and canvas works also distinguish them. The 11 new paintings at Kurbatoff Art Gallery this summer range from 6 feet by 4 feet, to square canvases of 4 feet by 4 feet.

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Kurbatoff Art Gallery, Vancouver B.C.

Weiming Zhao, Assiniboine Park Foot Bridge, oil on canvas, 16" X 20".

MANITOBA: Capturing a Fleeting Moment, May 28 to June 13, Woodlands Gallery, Winnipeg

There’s a softness and peace that fills Weiming Zhao’s canvases that almost feels like an exhalation, sinking into the safety and beauty of nature. The sense of tranquility in his paintings takes on a greater meaning, underscored by the story of his journey to find those beautiful settings. Growing up in remote northwestern China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, drawing and painting were an escape for Zhao, who taught himself how to read and speak English, and taught it to others. The language brought him to Canada, where he studied at Brandon University in Manitoba. After five years in Canada, he returned to China for his family, and they’ve since settled in Brandon. In 2003, after three decades without art, he picked up his brushes again, and has since produced a portfolio of more than 1000 paintings. It may not have occurred to Zhao to paint anything but the landscapes and wildlife of the eastern prairies, and the parks of his small Manitoba city — the settings provide an endless source of joy and inspiration to him.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Woodlands Gallery, Winnipeg

Harry Steen, Girl with Chair, oil on canvas, 2008, 38" X 46".

ALBERTA: Lethbridge

The tiny, vibrant Trianon Gallery in Lethbridge opens a two-month show May 2 that brings together 12 Calgary artists – emerging, mid-career and established. Artist / curators Christine Cheung, Kim Neudorf and Jane McQuitty have gathered together early works from each artist, mixing media, comparing and connecting. Artists include Chris Cran, David Foy and Jennifer Saleik, Harry Steen, John Will, Marcia Harris, Mary Scott, and Susan Menzies.

Mary Ann Barkhouse, Boreal Baroque, installation view. Image: Robert Mclaughlin Gallery.

SASKATCHEWAN: Boreal Baroque, The Mendel Art Gallery, April 17 to June 7, Saskatoon

“There’s an underlying humour to Mary Anne Barkhouse’s work,” says Linda Jansma, curator at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario. “She’s bringing nature back into the living room.” Barkhouse’s travelling Boreal Baroque exhibition, whose only Western Canadian stop is at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, contrasts the opulence of the Louis 14th period with an animal theme. Bats sleep upside down on elaborate chandeliers, a fox lingers on a chaise longue and beavers consort on a three-sectioned gossip chair. An artist and environmentalist, Barkhouse lives in Haliburton, Ontario, just south of Algonquin Park, where she finds her inspiration. “The works in Boreal Baroque are very much a result of the colours I see out my back window,” she says. “Back in the woods, it often reminded me of upholstery...the rocks covered in moss have a definite plush upholstered look, as do the trees covered in snow. So from that, it was a quick connection to the forest as a living space for all of these different species, and then situating them on suitably fabulous furniture.” While the tone may be impish, Barkhouse’s green message packs a deft political punch as she artfully forges the connection between our fragile ecosystem, and the resources we plunder from it.

— Patricia Robertson

Brian Boulton, Untitled, graphite and pastel pencil on paper, 2008. At Winsor Gallery.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: July 18 to August 8, various venues, Vancouver

“Drawing is really important and should be recognized in and of itself,” says Vancouver-based curator and art history professor Lynn Ruscheinsky. “For a long time, drawing was considered something done by artists as a planning activity for paintings, sculpture and other larger artworks. But drawing is gradually being accepted as an important art form.”

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Lorenzo Dupuis, Market Gathering, acrylic on panel, 19" X 24".

SASKATCHEWAN: Recent Work, April 18 to May 14, The Gallery / Art Placement, Saskatoon

Saskatoon painter Lorenzo Dupuis started working with crowd scenes and portraits about a year and a half ago. Prior to that shift, the veteran artist concerned himself primarily with landscapes and the occasional still life. “I use a small digital camera to capture moments of life at markets, in malls and on streets during different types of weather,” Dupuis explains. “I’m attracted by faces and gestures that say something about people, possibly about what they’re thinking and feeling.” Dupuis’ new works — Market Vendor, Market - Selling Pumpkins and Market - Gathering embody an earthy prairie sensibility that reflects Saskatchewan’s agricultural roots. The social and cultural importance of market day to locals is reflected in the intensity of focus of the market vendors as they sell their wares. Dupuis lists among his influences the Dutch masters — his market subjects are rich, colourful and dynamic, with an emphasis on emotionality reflected in the layered brushwork. “One of my favourite 17th century Dutch painters is Frans Hals,” Dupuis says. “His portraits speak deeply about his subjects. His use of paint is incredible. I love his quick fresh marks. As well as being descriptive, they tell us something about the artist.”

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: The Gallery / Art Placement, Saskatoon; Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton; Newzones Gallery, Calgary

Louise Cook, A Day’s Hike, oil on canvas, 30"x60".

SASKATCHEWAN: May 29 to June 20, Assiniboia Gallery, Regina

Sodbusters share a fierce connection to the land. While some farm it and others experience it on snow-packed sled trails, Louise Cook prefers to paint it. Her family’s farm near Spruce Home, Saskatchewan provided the first setting for Cook’s grassroots aesthetic. For 35 years, the Saskatoon-based artist has been joyfully depicting the rolling hills, vast prairies and verdant coulees of her home province. A Day’s Hike portrays a lovely area near Hanson Lake. “My husband likes to fish for trout and I paint,” Cook says about the area. “I’m so inspired by the corduroy-like landscape where the lakes are deep. I love the fall colours, the odd swamp lake, dead trees and odd land forms in this place.” She adds that she much prefers to paint outdoors. “I just love the immediacy of plein air. You are right there. It’s just like having a conversation across the table.” While Cook has travelled extensively and recently sought out rich subject matter in Ontario’s fall landscape, she finds herself returning to the lush Prairies for creative solace. “It resonates. It has a magnetic connection for me. This is where I find some kind of absolute eureka.”

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: Assiniboia Gallery, Regina; The Gallery-Art Placement, Saskatoon; Wallace Galleries, Calgary

Barbara Heller, The Herald, tapestry, 49" x 39.5".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Future Reliquaries, May 5 to 23, Elliot Louis Gallery, Vancouver

Years ago, a teacher told Barbara Heller, one of Canada’s premier fibre artists, that she had to look for her own “authentic personal image” — something that appealed at a visceral level and that would form the core of her art. “One of my APIs is dead birds,” she says. “It started when I noticed a cat that killed birds and left their dead bodies everywhere. I began to make these tapestries of dead birds as a way of honouring the birds. At the same time, the first Gulf War was underway and my dead bird tapestries became anti-war tapestries. The process was really about finding something I have passion for, and trying to work that into universal themes.” Heller’s latest pictorial tapestries at the Elliot Louis Gallery continue the concept. There will be three pieces based on a dead seagull she stumbled across on Granville Island in Vancouver, where she opened a fibre art studio in 1979. Heller’s large tapestries take many months to complete — her latest are idea-based, while also being powerful generators of emotion. “This show is a cerebral body of work,” she adds. “ It’s more bright and colourful than what I’ve done before.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Elliot Louis Gallery, Vancouver

Chris Millar, Dave and Becca’s Sunday, acrylic paint sculpture, 2008, 12" X 11" X 10". Photo: Trépanier Baer.

ALBERTA: Simon & Farfenougan & Hunter, opens mid-June, TrépanierBaer Gallery, Calgary

Over the past few years, Calgary-based artist Chris Millar has become known for a series of meticulously rendered, narrative-intense paintings which, at first glance, could be called “comic book style.” They invite the viewer to get close, read thought and dialogue bubbles, follow the stories of pop cultural dissipation that unfold across his canvases. Superheroes, characters from Star Wars and Star Trek, mingle with the masses and live their messy lives in detail — it’s wildly illustrative and engaging work. This summer, Millar brings the same imagination to an installation show with a multi-layered backstory. Simon & Farfenougan & Hunter creates a tale of lost record albums, abduction, and obscure folk stylings. He brings to the project, which includes audio, text, and found and created objects, his usual obsessiveness, building a world of evidence to support his narrative. Originally from Claresholm, Alberta, Millar has participated in the 2008 Thick and Thin show at the Glenbow Museum, and was chosen for the 2005 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: TrépanierBaer, Calgaryj25

Lyndal Osborne, Archipelago (detail), sunflower stalks and grapefruit skins chine colle with lithograph drawings or painted, wire, glass beads, DNA model connectors, laboratory glassware, metal caps and Bunsen burners, sea balls, seed pods, Sculpey, silicone rubber, resin, papier mache, paint and dye. 2008, dimensions variable.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Ornamenta, March 13 to May 3,
Penticton Art Gallery

By Amy Fung

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.

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Installation view, Hysteria and the Body, with Louise Bourgeois’ Arch of Hysteria (foreground) and Saint Sébastienne (background).

SASKATCHEWAN: January 16 to March 29, The Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

By Patricia Robertson

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.

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Sylvain Tremblay, Discussion sans mot, mixed media, 2008, 48" X 60".

ALBERTA: January 15 to February 8, Thompson Landry Gallery, Calgary

By Dina O’Meara

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.

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Galen Felde, Sleepwalker, acrylic on wood panel 21" X 46".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: This Brief Dance, February 12 to March 14, Bellevue Gallery, West Vancouver

Blurred trees dissolving into the background, a bird figure, mesh wire, a telephone pole. These are elements in Galen Felde’s latest canvases, a continuation of her examination of our relatively brief time here, and our difficult relationship with nature. Or at least, that’s one interpretation. “I don’t like to be didactic about my work,” Felde says from her Vancouver eastside studio. “Although I have a fairly specific intention when I create a painting, I prefer to let people decide what they’re seeing.” Felde uses urban imagery and natural elements to engage ideas of identity and context, who we are and where we live. “The work is [about] the place we live and an attempt to bring us into the moment — to be thoughtful but also to enjoy it.” She mixes the human and the natural in a continuing fascination with crows. Felde sees representations of people in the birds, and their attraction to urban environments. “The crow imagery I use is intended to describe a contradiction in humans. We come from nature, but seem to end up so far from it.”

— Beverly Cramp

Galen Felde is represented by: Bellevue Gallery, West Vancouver

Elizabeth Wiltzen, The Last Hour, oil on canvas, 30" X 60".

ALBERTA: Faces of Peru, March 21 to April 19, Gibson Fine Art, Calgary

An avid backcountry hiker, Elizabeth Wiltzen has left the Rocky Mountains to explore the people and places of Peru. Wiltzen recently spent a month touring and hiking the South American country, moving from the city to the rugged trails up in the Andes. The exotic faces, street scenes, colours and geography compelled her to tackle the unique cultural and physical landscapes. “I was really jazzed by how visually different they are, from every level,” she says. “I was intrigued by them and felt excited about doing something new.” The Canmore-based artist isn’t changing her style so much as shaking it up and invigorating herself through the exploration of new themes. She’s best known for her intimate oil mountain landscapes, inviting the viewer to experience the weighty silence of a snowed-in mountain pool, or the sheen of sun off a fir-lined lake. Wiltzen also recently started experimenting with urban themes by participating in an on-line project by an American artist to interpret posted photographs.

— Dina O’Meara

Represented by: Gibson Fine Art, Calgary; The Avens Gallery, Canmore; The Artym Gallery, Invemere BC.

Darrell Underschultz, Autumn Glow, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 30".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Arcadia Revisited, April 4 – 25, Petley Jones Gallery, Vancouver

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.”

— Beverly Cramp

Darrell Underschultz is represented by: Petley Jones Gallery, Vancouver and Masters Gallery, Calgary

Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, Untitled (Poplars), oil on canvas, 1929. Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery. Acquired in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold O. Brigden.

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.

Leslie Poole, Leaf Wall / Manet, acrylic on canvas, 40" X 26".

ALBERTA: After Manet, April 18 to May 5, Scott Gallery, Edmonton

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.

— Dina O’Meara

Represented by: Scott Gallery, Edmonton; Virginia Christopher Fine Art, Calgary; Van Dop Gallery, New Westminster, B.C.; Winchester Galleries, Victoria

Yuri Arajs, Untitled (snow), detail, acrylic, graphite, iron dust, varnish, on wood, 2008, 23.5" X 47".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Untitled (Weather), May 28 to June 20, View Gallery, Victoria

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.”

— Beverly Cramp

Yuri Arajs is represented by: View Gallery, Victoria; Gallery 360, Minneapolis, MN

Edward Epp, Autumn Sky, Skeena - West of Terrace, acrylic on canvas, 2006, 56" X 71".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Mystic North, March,
Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver

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.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Marion Scott Gallery, Vancouver; Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton; Summit Gallery, Calgary; Odin Gallery, Vernon, BC

Jude Griebel, Françoise as a tree on her father’s lawn, oil on canvas, 2008, 48" x 36".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: The Maybe People, February 7 to 21, Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver

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.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver; Herringer Kiss Gallery, Calgary; Cella Gallery, Los Angeles

Attila Richard Lukacs, After Goya A, 12 Polaroid photographs.

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.

Keer Tanchak, Present (detail), oil on aluminum, 2008, 47" x 48"

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.

Marten Berkman, Pillar of Light, stereoscopic photograph, 2007.

YUKON TERRITORY: Remote Sensibility, March 26 to May 24, Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse

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.”

— Jill Sawyer

Armand Vallée, Northern Spring, oil on canvas, 1987, 18” X 24”.

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.

WH Webb, Cleared Passage, acrylic on canvas, 36" X 30".

ALBERTA: Alberta Drawn, March 28 to April 9, West End Gallery, Edmonton

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.

— Dina O’Meara

Represented by: West End Gallery, Edmonton and Victoria; Wallace Gallery, Calgary; Assiniboia Gallery, Regina; Barbican Gallery, Plymouth, England; Hollander York, Toronto

Michael Levin, Black Sun, c-print, 2007, 34" X 34".

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.

Ted Godwin, A Little Colour Rain, oil on Masonite, 1959, 46" X 41". Private collection.

ALBERTA: The Regina Five Years 1958 – 1968, September 26 to November 7, Nickle Arts Museum, Calgary

By Dina O’Meara

“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.

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Stacia Verigin, Entireland (detail), sawdust and glue, 2003 - present. Image courtesy of the artist.

SASKATCHEWAN: September 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

By Betsy Rosenwald

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.

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Bob Boyer, The Mountain, the Night and the 49, oil and beeswax over acrylic on canvas, 1988. Collection of Phillip Gevik, Toronto.

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.

Installation view, Mary Kerr and Norval Morrisseau, Copper Thunderbird at Legacy Gallery, Victoria.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Copper Thunderbird: Invention, Inspiration and Transformation, July 9 to November 30, Legacy Art Gallery, Victoria

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.

— Brian Grison

Taras Polataiko, Muybridge Human Locomotion 356/5, archival Chromogenic print, 2005, 37" X 25". From the Human Locomotion series.

SASKATCHEWAN: November 6 to 15, Darrell Bell Gallery, Saskatoon

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.”

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: Darrell Bell Gallery, Saskatoon

Haydex Li, Growth 1, pen on paper, 2008, 15" X 22".

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.

Holly King, Bluff, 1999. Collection of the Glenbow Museum.

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.

Jennifer Stillwell, Dock and Propeller (detail), fans, power cord, 2004.

MANITOBA: December 12, 2008 to January 24, 2009, Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg

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.

— Stacey Abramson

Represented by: The Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto.

Igor Postash, Dream About a Son Who Isn’t Born Yet, 2008.

ALBERTA: An Adventure in Seeing, September 26 to October 25, Art Beat Gallery, St. Albert

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.”

— Beverley Beckley

Represented by: Art Beat Gallery, St. Albert, AB; Webster Galleries, Calgary

Micah Lexier, Revelation 8, laser-cut hot-rolled steel, 2007. From the Lives and Works series.

ALBERTA: November 20 to December 20, Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary

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.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary; Birch Libralalto, Toronto; Gitte Weise Gallery, Berlin.

Jason Dee, still.moving.memory (detail), video, 2008.

MANITOBA: still.moving.memory, December 18, 2008 to January 24, 2009, PLATFORM: Centre for Digital + Photographic Arts, Winnipeg

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.

— Stacey Abramson

Chad Jacklin, Who’s Really in Control (detail), mixed media and found objects, 2008.

SASKATCHEWAN: Dioramas, September 3 to November 8, Mysteria Gallery, Regina

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.”

— Patricia Robertson

Represented by: Mysteria Gallery, Regina

David Barker, Three Muses, Venice, oil on board, 33" X 22".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Now and Then, September 21 – October 31, Omega Gallery, Vancouver

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.”

— Beverley Cramp

Represented by: Omega Gallery, Vancouver

Nhan Duc Nguyen, heyseeds: Lao Noi Kien (Ancient citizen), multimedia altar installation, 2005. Glenbow Museum.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Lao Oi, Lao A... (O Ancient One...), October 17 to November 8, Open Space Gallery, Victoria

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.

— Brian Grison

Work from Don Jean-Louis’ Silver Works exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Silver Works, Sept 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

By Liz Wylie

Qualicum Beach, B.C.-based artist Don Jean-Louis has been on his own quirky and individual path of contemplation, research and discovery for decades. Beginning in Toronto in the 1960s as an artist who drew directly from nature (microcosmic close-up studies in graphite of seed pods), Jean-Louis moved into more conceptual, even industrial, areas of work, dealing with coloured light and formed plastics. He was intellectually engaged by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and communications theories of the time, and they informed his work.

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Lisa Neighbour, The Periodic Table, electrical wire, sockets, bulbs, plugs, 2003.

Through October 3, the Kenderdine Art Gallery at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon hosts 18 Illuminations, collected works of 18 artists organized around the concept of light. Objects and installations are both literal and illusory, using the ethereal and scientific qualities of light to project a variety of ideas. Among the 18 artists: Dana Claxton, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Micah Lexier and Ed Pien.

Anna Coghlan, Day before yesterday 1, mixed media on canvas, 2008, 30" X 40".

Mixed media artist Anna Coghlan will share an exhibition with sculptor Michael Hermesh at Kelowna’s Art Ark Gallery October 9 to 23. Originally from England, Coghlan travelled and worked in the third world throughout her 20s, and the experience influenced her artwork — she’s particularly interested in the effects of environments on the human body, and her figures are marked with symbols and fading detail.

Teresa Posyniak, The Transfer, encaustic and mixed media on paper, 2007, 31" X 21".

ALBERTA: Consensus: The Blackfoot Portrait Series, October 3 to November 15, Bilton Contemporary Art, Red Deer

Creating portraits in encaustic, among other methods, Calgary artist Teresa Posyniak captures the theme of resiliency as a positive force within the individual, and realizes the beauty of the human body and its relationship to its environment. Posyniak had been drawing the figures of women since the late 1980s, and the idea for Consensus came up after she met Linda Many Guns, a Blackfoot Elder from the Siksika Nation near Calgary. Their friendship led to a portrait sitting, and discussions about how Many Guns wanted to be perceived, the role of her culture in the images, and her relationship to the landscape and Blackfoot community. All of those questions created the framework for Posyniak’s larger series. “My pieces about Linda and others are initiated by me, and my subjects work with me to come up with imagery which not only describes them, but also describes their Blackfoot heritage,” Posyniak says. Many Guns has been involved in the planning for the show, and will be present for several special events around it. “We hope to speak to the public together about the ‘consensual approach’ to making this work,” Posyniak says.

— Beverley Beckley

Represented by: Bilton Contemporary Art, Red Deer; Masters Gallery, Calgary; Mountain Galleries, Banff and Whistler

Derek Michael Besant, untitled image from Fifteen Restless Nights, ink on nylon fabric, 2006, 8' X 6.5'.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Fifteen Restless Nights, August 2 to November 2, Kelowna Art Gallery

A sumptuously voyeuristic sensibility permeates Fifteen Restless Nights, Derek Michael Besant’s photo-based documentation of unmade beds in roadside motels across Canada. Large-format black-and-white images printed on suspended nylon scrim, accompanied by audio and text narratives, tap into one of the seminal experiences of the road trip, inviting reflection on Besant’s ongoing exploration of memory, language and the body. Besant’s handling of his images — including the addition of white contour lines around portions of the bed linens — brings to mind the visual language of airport scanners, yet also has the sensuous quality of a charcoal drawing. Besant says he plays with the tension between seeing and not seeing clearly. “These themes all respond to associations of forgetting and remembering, the faulty mechanisms we use to claim our identity. The unmade bed retains some aspects of whoever slept within its covers.” The Calgary-based artist established an international reputation in drawing and printmaking in the 1970s before moving in the mid-1990s into photo-based imagery, intrigued by the era’s emerging technologies. Fifteen Restless Nights was commissioned by Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre for the city’s 2006 Nuit Blanche cultural event and has since been exhibited in galleries in Hungary and Slovakia.

— Portia Priegert

Jack Beder, Talbot Lake, Jasper National Park, oil on canvas panel, 1970, 12" X 16".

On October 10, the Jasper Yellowhead Museum in Jasper, Alberta, opens a retrospective of landscapes by Montreal-based painter Jack Beder (1910 – 1987). An artist who travelled widely, particularly in Canada, and was always inspired by his environment, this show is the first to collect the landscapes Beder painted in Jasper National Park, painted in 1969 and 1970. The show is curated by Douglas MacLean of Canadian Art Gallery, with the Beder estate.

Paul Lapointe, Circle of Earth, cast paper pulp, quill, dyed wood, 2008.

SASKATCHEWAN: Return to Earth, July 4 to August 15, Hand Wave Gallery, Meacham, SK

To hear Paul Lapointe describe it, he lives on the doorstep of the world’s best art supply store. His home in Batoche, Saskatchewan — where Louis Riel was defeated in 1885 — backs onto rolling parkland and provides him easy access to the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. It’s here the artist finds many of his supplies, from coarse bison hair to delicate hornet’s nests and ancient wood. Though his repertoire has grown over four decades to include wood etchings and sculpture, Lapointe’s roots are in painting. When he married in 1969 he told his bride he’d give up painting in five years if he wasn’t making money. “I’m not making money, but I’m still painting,” he says. Return to Earth focuses on sculptures made from natural materials gathered on daily walks. “Since I walk the Earth a lot I wanted to play with those materials,” he says. Sounding every bit the reverent outdoorsman, Lapointe tells of Aboriginal pictograms painted onto rock using natural pigments in northern Saskatchewan. Christian missionaries who considered the images pagan once covered them with paint. The paint faded but the ancient art below was indelible, and that, says Lapointe — a self-described Luddite — is proof that everything we can do, nature can do better.

“The structure had gone through many different uses,” he says. “It started as a monastery, then became a prison, then it was used as a school and now it’s been donated to a local fine arts school.” Campbell says his art practice investigates the inherent properties of the photograph and its relation to the viewer, as well as landscape as a component of societal identity. “I’m taking these images and re-purposing them for the context of an exhibition and my own artistic intent. There’s also the appropriation of (these images of Islamic architecture) in Vancouver. And within the context of Vancouver itself, I’m juxtaposing images of an old space that is currently in a state of disrepair versus Vancouver, where many structures are new, modern and clean.”

— Amber Bowerman

Represented by: Hand Wave Gallery, Meacham, SK; Avens Gallery, Canmore, AB

Blaine Campbell, Ibrahim, chromogenic print, 2006, 44" X 32".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: A Repurposed Architecture, April 18 to May 31, Republic Gallery, Vancouver

A decision to drop out of the corporate world and enroll in Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design was the right one for Blaine Campbell, judging by the awards he’s won since graduating in 2007 — national award winner of the BMO 1st Art! Competition and Contemporary Arts Society of Vancouver emerging artist award). Campbell’s Republic Gallery exhibition focuses on his photo-based practice, though he also works in the inter-media and sculpture fields. Sometimes Campbell combines genres, as he did with his winning piece for the BMO 1st Art! competition, which fuses photographic and sculptural elements. A Repurposed Architecture consists of photographic work inspired by the contours of a building complex in Istanbul that Campbell visited in 2006.

“The structure had gone through many different uses,” he says. “It started as a monastery, then became a prison, then it was used as a school and now it’s been donated to a local fine arts school.” Campbell says his art practice investigates the inherent properties of the photograph and its relation to the viewer, as well as landscape as a component of societal identity. “I’m taking these images and re-purposing them for the context of an exhibition and my own artistic intent. There’s also the appropriation of (these images of Islamic architecture) in Vancouver. And within the context of Vancouver itself, I’m juxtaposing images of an old space that is currently in a state of disrepair versus Vancouver, where many structures are new, modern and clean.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Republic Gallery, Vancouver

Phil Darrah, Trafalgar, acrylic on canvas, 100.5" X 68.75".

ALBERTA: Representation, May 8 to 27, Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton

Tragedy and travel in the late 1990s had a profound impact on the work of painter Phil Darrah. Following the death of his mother and a move south of Edmonton to an acreage at Mulhurst Bay, and in the midst of making preparations for a working-trip to Greece, Darrah sat back and took stock of his role as an abstract painter. The shifts in his work since — most notably from highly symbolic stripes, blocks and orbs to more literal landscapes — marked one leg of his artistic journey. In Representation, viewers will see where Darrah has journeyed next, though there’s little fear that he’ll have strayed too far from his abstract roots. “Ultimately I want my paintings to have poetic rather than literal references,” Darrah told the Edmonton Journal in 2005. “While it’s not important that viewers always get the references, it’s important for me that they are there.” Retired from teaching at the University of Alberta since 2003, Darrah has much more time to explore the shifts in his own work and surroundings. “For the first time I’m in the studio every day without too much distraction,” he told the Journal. “As one gets older you start to notice change, while before you were too busy fretting at the university with the arcane ideas of education.”

— Amber Bowerman

Represented by: Peter Robertson Gallery, Edmonton; Sopa Fine Arts, Kelowna

Terrance Houle, Urban Indian #7, digital print, 2007.

ALBERTA: June 20 to September 23, The Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton

By Amy Fung

On one side of the Art Gallery of Alberta are some of the national treasures of Canadian art history. Painted by the Russian-born Nicholas deGrandmaison, early 20th century scenes of Southern Alberta ranchers and cowboys along with intimate portraits of Blackfoot and Peigan people are primary documents of Alberta’s visual cultural history. Grandmaison’s oeuvre leaves a cherished legacy of raw romanticism that at once aggrandizes and encapsulates Aboriginal identity politics that persist into contemporary times.

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Brenda Joy Lem, It Furthers One to Cross the Great Water, silkscreen on Stonehenge paper, 2006.

ALBERTA: Continuous and Unbroken, April 5 – May 25, Esplanade, Medicine Hat

Like a twice-exposed photograph, Toronto artist Brenda Joy Lem’s silkscreen prints often feature many distinct images blended together in a haunting collage. Lem deftly overlays eastern villages with western landscapes, and historical clippings with contemporary images in an attempt to understand her identity as a third-generation Chinese-Canadian. “Imposing an Asian landscape onto an image of Moose Jaw is kind of like saying, ‘we were here,’” she says. The granddaughter of Yip Foo, one of the first Chinese immigrants in Moose Jaw, Lem bears witness to the world her grandparents and parents lived in. “I feel as though, on a spiritual dimension…I can be present for my mother’s childhood, carrying water in the fields,” Lem told Min Sook Lee, a Toronto filmmaker. The prints are accompanied by a video installation addressing the sexualization and stereotypes of Asian women. Viewers enter a small temple to watch images of Lem’s female ancestors, but must first remove their shoes and bow to fit through the narrow door. “It creates a respect and awareness,” says Lem. The exhibition features pieces from the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery collection and is curated by MJMAG’s Heather Smith. The Organization of Saskatchewan Art Councils will next tour the exhibition across Saskatchewan from June 2008 through 2010.

— Amber Bowerman

Represented by: Open Studio, Toronto

Duncan Regehr, Jinx, oil on canvas on panel, 30" X 24".

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Magic, May 8 to 22, Petley Jones Gallery, Vancouver

Many different words have been used to describe the paintings and drawings of Duncan Regehr — figurative, representational, theatrical, and work that bends perspectives and stretches space. These are words that the artist himself isn’t necessarily comfortable with. “Certainly figurative,” he agrees but adds that he has worked in a variety of styles since he was a child, when he worked alongside his father, Peter Regehr, who was also an artist. “The focus on myth and transformation is really the key to this show,” says Regehr of his exhibition of 18 oils at Petley Jones Gallery. These new canvases are part of a larger body of work that Regehr has been creating since 2000 that concerns transformation. More precisely, this extended body of work is concerned with “illusion, the unknown, myth, the psyche and prestidigitation” to quote Regehr’s exact words. An actor as well as an artist, Regehr has played Zorro and a variety of heroes and arch villains. It should be no surprise his visual art deals with allusions and mythology too. “Notions of transformation have always been bleeding over the boundaries from theatre, film and painting.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Winchester Galleries, Victoria; Petley Jones, Vancouver; Sylvia White Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Bella Perla, Portland, OR

Artist Ken Dalgarno.

SASKATCHEWAN: Sculpted Landscapes, June 1 to 23, Allie Griffin Art Gallery, Weyburn

By Patricia Robertson

We’ve all heard the stereotypical descriptions of the Prairie landscape as flat, uninteresting and banal. When driving through southern Saskatchewan on the Trans-Canada highway, many bored travellers have been known to put the car on cruise control and keep going until the monotony ends.

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Marie-Josee Laframboise, Points d’inflexion et de rebroussement 2.

ALBERTA: Points d’inflexion et de rebroussement 2 (Points of Inflection and Reflection 2), June 26 to September 14, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge

As with many large-scale installation pieces, Marie- Josée Laframboise’s mixed-media sculptures must change somewhat to fit diverse gallery spaces. But rather than seeing the varied spaces as a limitation, Laframboise thrives on the opportunity to improvise a little. “Emerging out of a variety of themes and specific material qualities, these artworks enable me to outline, configure and capture a given territory, whether concrete or conceptual,” she says. When the Southern Alberta Art Gallery hosts Points d’inflexion et de rebroussement 2 this summer, Laframboise will draw inspiration from a very concrete territory by incorporating the topography of Lethbridge into the installation. Using her trademark iridescent netting, Laframboise will offer her interpretation of the southern Alberta landscape based largely on the study of topographical maps. Constructed using everyday materials like paper, plastic containers, string, wire and, of course, netting, Laframboise’s works demand active participation from viewers, who are challenged to determine where the works begin and end and how to navigate through the room-dominating puzzles. “My last project used a net to create an abstraction containing elements that relate to physical and mathematical concepts,” says Laframboise. “The use of the net, which is associated with many different forms of space, is an approach of paramount importance to me at the moment.”

— Amber Bowerman

Represented by: Pierre-Francois Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal

Adrian Fish, Staged (detail), C-Print, 2007.

MANITOBA: Staged, July 11 to August 27, Platform: Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg

Performative spaces have a grandiosity and presence unlike any other. Toronto- and Halifax-based artist Adrian Fish explores these rooms and their psychological complexities in his series Staged at Winnipeg’s Platform: Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts. Theatres around Toronto — the city where Fish received his Masters of Fine Arts from York University — are the focus of this series. His images present a host of architectural styles, and create distinct experiences that blend into a voyeuristic experience for the viewer. The camera is turned to the audience, putting the viewer in the position of performer. Void of an audience, the spaces that are captured in his large-format photographs illustrate the giant internal gasp that performance creates. Adding to the dramatics of the photographs, Brian Joseph David’s audio piece Voice Over will be played in the space. David’s compilation of over 5,000 film tag lines — read by an actual voice over artist — gives the space an additional element of presence. Fish is interested in the environment that both silence and architecture can create together. The sprawling silent rows and corridors of the audience sections are centre stage in each image. He invites the viewer to look into the vacant chairs and balconies to experience the presence that the emptiness creates.

— Stacey Abramson

Represented by: Loop Gallery, Toronto; Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa.

Wally Dion, Pipe Carrier, acrylic on canvas, 2006, 94" X 120".

The MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina will feature the work of Saskatoon painter Wally Dion June 7 to September 21. A member of the Yellow Quill First Nation, Dion’s work will encompass the portraiture of his Red Worker series, along with his Starblanket series of sculptural paintings incorporating computer hardware.

Production still from Dana Claxton’s Mustang Suite.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: The Mustang Suite, June 9 to July 31, Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art, Kelowna

By Portia Priegert

The horse has long held a revered place in the plains culture of the Lakota people, who see it as an honored friend or relative, a four-legged nation unto itself, not simply as a mode of traditional transportation. In the early 1880s, Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk paid tribute to the horse by creating a ceremonial dance in which four horses, representing the cardinal directions, joined human dancers. The dance has inspired Dana Claxton’s new video- and photo-based installation The Mustang Suite.

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Greg Girard, Six Hundred Things, #24 Pinghu Lu, photograph, 2005.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: New Works, May 22 – June 21, Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver

By Ann Rosenberg

Since moving to Asia in 1983, Vancouver-born artist Greg Girard has been building a successful career as a commercial photographer, documenting many well-known sites and personalities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and in other locations in mainland China. His photojournalism has appeared in magazines including Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Paris Match, Stern, and The New York Times Magazine. In addition to freelance and contract work, Girard has built an impressive body of fine art photographs that he’s shot on his own time.

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Jordan Broadworth, Echo, oil on canvas, 2007, 21" X 22".

The Vancouver Island-based painter and sculptor Ice Bear will open a show July 17 to 30 at the Community Arts Council of Greater Victoria. Originally from the Georgian Bay area of Ontario, Ice Bear (aka Chris Johnson) is known on the West Coast for his large-scale public sculptures and murals…Toronto-based abstract painter Jordan Broadworth will be featured at Calgary’s Newzones Gallery May 10 to June 28. A finalist in the RBC Painting Competition in 2002, Broadworth’s canvases, awash in large gestural strokes and squeegee drips, are described by the gallery as “as much about the physicality of painting as the act of painting itself.”

Brian Flynn, Nairac, carpet underlay, 2007.

Through May 18, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria features Irish artist Brian Flynn, who uses a unique sculpting process to transform utilitarian carpet underlay into art. The work in this show is based on a specific event in the history of the Irish Republican Army — the assassination of British undercover officer Robert Nairac. The AGGV presents this show as part of their Lab 7.5 series.

Lorne Beug, Dragon Moon, archival inks on canvas, 46" X 45" (triptych), 2008.

SASKATCHEWAN: Unfolding Worlds, April 18 to May 17, Nouveau Gallery, Regina

The latest work by Regina-based artist Lorne Beug is a dreamy glimpse into a modern take on 18th and 19th century decorative wallpaper and panels. In the exhibition Unfolding Worlds: Night Gardens & Wonder Cabinets, Beug brings viewers into a fantastical garden setting through panels and papers. After becoming interested in the panoramic wallpapers made during these centuries, Beug created his own wallpaper, invoking Shakespearian descriptors and the buzzing beauty of a ripe garden in the moonlight. He starts with the idea of the paneled vistas and deconstructs them into paper, scroll and canvas panel works, producing a disjointed and contemporary take on the idea. Through his use of midnight shades juxtaposed with vivid greenery and wildlife, Beug brings viewers into a world unlike any other. He has also created a series of poetic dioramas or “wonder cabinets.” Gilded trinkets are placed beside natural specimens such as minerals and apothecary jars of earthly elements. The cabinets also examine the categorical nature of humans to organize and display objects of curiosity in an anthropological manner. The combination of the two bodies of work in the exhibition creates a fanciful experience of escape and wonder.

— Stacey Abramson

Represented by: Nouveau Gallery, Regina

Dieter Schlatter, Chipman Alberta #8 Showpiece, acrylic, canvas, photo transfer, 36" x 72".

ALBERTA: May 10 to 26, Canada House Gallery, Banff

Like many young boys steeped in the mythology of the West, Swiss-born Dieter Schlatter wanted to be a cowboy. While he may not be riding the range, the self-taught painter instead developed the ethos of a cowboy poet, recording the juxtaposition of past and present and how it affects this western landscape. “I’m interested in history and how the landscape works into that and technology and nature, how we experience nature through technology,” says Schlatter.

It would be easy to look at Schlatter’s many-layered, mixed-media paintings and say he is recording a lost world, given his use of historic maps and documents alongside black-and-white photographs of bison, the railway and cowboys, but B.C.-based Schlatter — also a filmmaker, chef and writer — does not see it that way. Instead, using his photographs and a striking palette of black, what he refers to as “violent” red and a rust coloured sienna, he is documenting the western landscape, without judgement or nostalgia. “I’m just saying how it is,” he says. “When I make paintings of bison grazing around oil pump jacks, that’s just how it is.”

— Rob Alexander

Represented by: Canada House Gallery, Banff

Terry Isaac, Wolf Song, acrylic on canvas.

BRITISH COLUMBIA: New Works, Gallery 421, Kelowna

Recently relocated from Oregon to Penticton, popular wildlife artist Terry Isaac has been inspired by the wild things he’s found in his new backyard. Featured at Gallery 421 in Kelowna, Isaac is a student of Robert Bateman and has tracked and studied wildlife all over the world. His intricate portraits of animals in their natural habitat have led to a thriving practice in prints, originals, and illustration, and as a teacher — he has published a series of popular books and DVDs on painting technique. Isaac is a particularly skilled painter of birds, capturing their difficult and delicate feather patterns in an almost photo-realistic detail. His new subjects, now that he’s made the move to the Okanagan, include birds and waterfowl indigenous to the region’s lakes, and he’s well-known in the area for his popular painting workshops.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Gallery 421, Kelowna; Peninsula Gallery, Sidney, BC; Evans Gallery, Kelowna; Direct Art, Prince George, BC; Lloyd Gallery, Penticton, BC; Picture This, Sherwood Park, AB

Ken Steacy’s “Toronto 2504 AD” from Douglas Coupland’s book Souvenir of Canada 2.

The new Place Gallery in Victoria will open a collaborative exhibition of work by Douglas Coupland and Ken Steacy, August 14 to September 23. Longtime collaborators, both artists worked together on Coupland’s book Souvenir of Canada 2. A series of drawings from the book are central to this show…At the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a summer show called The Land: Inuit Perspectives, on May 10 to September 1, explores the rare depictions of landscape in Inuit art. Comprising prints, drawings, sculpture and textiles, the show is drawn from the existing collection of the Gallery.

Coal Harbour, Craig Yeats, 40" x 30", 2006, acrylic on canvas

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Vancouver Paintings, opens Feb 6, Rendezvous Art Gallery, Vancouver

A master of the palette knife, Craig Yeats’ newest acrylic landscapes continue in his expressionist style. “About six or seven years ago I started using the palette knife extensively,” he says. “It’s what distinguishes my work.” Texture, color and design are overriding concerns, though Yeats doesn’t ignore subject matter entirely. “My work isn’t literal, but I get it close enough to the place it represents. I’m trying to get to the heart of the place.” The geographical areas that interest Yeats are often in the greater Vancouver area, and this show will be no exception. It will include paintings from Vancouver-area landmarks like Fishermen’s Cove, Horseshoe Bay, False Creek, Coal Harbor and Vancouver’s Inner Harbor. Boats and sailing are often featured prominently in his work. Yeats began working in watercolours as a teenager, painting ocean scenes from near his West Vancouver neighborhood. It spurred him on to do university studies in fine arts, including an MFA from the University of North Carolina in 1977.

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Rendezvous Art Gallery, Vancouver; Brights’ Gallery, Burlington, Ontario

Still Life, Pomegranates on Green, Ronald Boaks, Fujiflex print, edition of 10, 2005, 54" X 48"

ALBERTA: Paintings & Still Life Photographs, Feb 7 to March 8, The Weiss Gallery, Calgary

There are many artists who work in more than one medium, but it’s rare to find an artist who combines media in the way that Ronald Boaks does. He began as a painter of delicate and muted abstracts, canvases that have evolved to become bolder and more colour-saturated. Then, maintaining his painting practice, he discovered a new way to represent the work —as backdrop in a series of lush still life photographs shot with a large-format Linhof camera.

The technique began as an experiment — Boaks discovering the possibilities in still life photography, and looking around for subjects at hand. His house in Toronto is full of objects and art — his wife’s aunt was acclaimed early Canadian abstract painter Kathleen Munn — and Boaks says that in his house it’s “common to see objects in front of paintings.” So the still life subjects suggested themselves readily. Putting up an old plywood table as a shelf, he began placing things in front of his paintings, posing them for the camera. His photographs are a mix of living and inanimate objects — flowers and fruit, sculpture, china, books, bowls — the accoutrements of a life full of intellectual curiosity.

The balance of colour is clearly important to Boakes — both in his paintings and in the photographs. Some of the photographs have an almost otherworldly richness of colour — deep apple greens and burnished oranges that suggest the extremes of nature found only in tropical regions. Others frame a paleness and simplicity that’s more in the context of his earlier paintings. In fact, Boaks says now that he’s finding it more difficult to feature his newer paintings as photographic subjects. The newer paintings are too active, and don’t work well in his compositions.

The work is all in balance — both structurally and in terms of colour, and he describes the simple technique forced on him by the medium of large-format photography. “When I look through the camera, everything appears upside down to me, and that helps me to check the composition.” He likens it to the old painters’ technique of looking at a subject through a mirror to see it anew. This show at Calgary’s new Weiss Gallery, which will combine paintings and photography, is the first Boaks has had in western Canada. He describes the new work in its connection to moments in time. The paintings represent this moment, now, while the photographs capture a moment that has already passed, but has been preserved.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: The Weiss Gallery, Calgary; Moore Gallery, Toronto; The David Kay Gallery, Toronto

Phases of the Moon, Maynard Johnny Jr., serigraph edition of 100, 10" X 30"

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Pacific Prints 2008, Jan 8 to Feb 29, Alcheringa Gallery, Victoria

With a simplicity of design that combines traditional forms with modern lines, it’s no surprise that painter, printmaker, and carver Maynard Johnny, Jr. has a sideline in creating logos for First Nations organizations. Affiliated with the Coast Salish and Kwakwaka’wakw people of Vancouver Island, Johnny’s work incorporates the classic symbols and forms of the region — killer whales, grizzly bears, salmon, frogs — and splashes them with bright modern colours or places them in unusual repeating patterns. Working with a variety of materials — acrylic on canvas, acrylic on paper, serigraph — he’s largely self-taught. Originally from Campbell River, BC, Johnny also often works in wood and precious metals. Victoria’s Alcheringa Gallery will feature his print work as part of their popular Pacific Prints exhibition along with a selection of other gallery artists, including works from Canada’s Northwest Coast, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. New and limited edition prints by Susan Point, Johnny and lessLIE will join rare works by noted printmakers including Wayne Young, Art Thompson and Ron Hamilton.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Alcheringa Gallery, Victoria; Inuit Gallery, Vancouver; Coastal Peoples Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver; The Path Gallery, Whistler, BC; Stonington Gallery, Seattle

The Great Carpe Diem,J.C. Heywood, serigraph, 2000, 29.5" X 41" Photo: City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection

BRITISH COLUMBIA: A Life in Layers, Jan 22 to March 9, Burnaby Art Gallery

One of Canada’s pre-eminent printmakers, J.C. (Carl) Heywood will have his first major retrospective at Burnaby Art Gallery. Having spent more than 40 years executing his ideas through a variety of printmaking techniques, the exhibition called A Life in Layers will show his progression as an artist. “Evolution is a good word to describe this show, because it explains how he arrived at his unique style,” says curator Geraldine Davis. “The prints in the exhibition will illustrate the influence of Carl’s art history inspirations, his experience living in Paris where he was mentored by Stanley Hayter, and how his printmaking changed with the international exposure he’s had throughout his life. Carl is like a chameleon, an adventurer, the way he absorbs experience.”

After graduating from the Ontario College of Art in 1963, Heywood soon became dissatisfied with the art scenes in the small Ontario towns where he lived. In 1967 he found his way to Paris, where he worked at Surrealist painter and printmaker Hayter’s Atelier 17. The studio’s printmaking techniques influenced artists including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Max Ernst, as well as the developing styles of American artists Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

“Because of these influences, Carl’s style came from a whole range of historical references that blended with his visual sensibility,” Davis says. “But his work is not just historical. Carl finds ways to bring these influences to life, and even though these influences are modernist and recognizable, he re-invents them. Carl is extremely articulate and formal, which is not very common today.”

Davis talks about a screenprint called Little Schwitters Suite-Monumental, which Heywood made in 1999 (part of a series he called the UV Screenprints from 1996 to 2000): “Carl is updating the role of collage and assemblage, brought to prominence by Karl Schwitters and later taken up by cubists. But Carl uses his own ephem-era.” An image of a fish has been borrowed from earlier Heywood works, for example. Davis also refers to a work called Japan Flowers with Water (part of a series called The Etchings from 1981to1991), which uses the common technique of cross-hatching in new ways.

Ultimately, the Heywood retrospective illustrates the artist’s unique way of working. “It’s his absolute love of detail and attention to tone and texture that is central to Carl’s art-making,” Davis says. “That and the fact he likes to display all the nuances of printmaking technology.”

— Beverly Cramp

Represented by: Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary; Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto; Jean-Claude Bergeron Gallery, Ottawa

Morning Light, David Graff, mixed media/wood, 2007, 30" X 60"

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Tutt Art Galleries, Kelowna

David Graff came to art-making through craft, and has applied the techniques learned as an artisan to create a thoroughly unique painting style. Beginning as a singer-songwriter with a lengthy career behind him, in 1994 Graff took up the craft of faux-finishing, working on residential and commercial interiors in Canada and the U.S. Through that, he began to incorporate the old-world artisan technique of gilding — hammering metal leaf onto surfaces, and it transformed his work. In 2000, he began showing a series of paintings that combined gilded metals with standard paints, dyes, and chemical effects, etching into the surfaces of his artworks to create unique effects. Originally from the Alberta foothills town of Edson, Graff’s creative work, both in music and painting, has given him an international career. The success of his gold-leaf and gilded paintings has drawn collectors from around the world. He continues to experiment in a studio in Bowen Island, BC, where he works with his wife, Holly Graff, an artisan who has incorporated many similar gilding and burnishing techniques to a series of bowls, urns and other vessels.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Tutt Art Galleries, Kelowna; Stephen Lowe Art Gallery, Calgry; Whistler Village Art Gallery, Whistler, BC.

Painted Room, Chris Dorosz, mixed media, 2006, from Dream House

MANITOBA: Opens Feb 15, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg

Winnipeg is famous for its art fundraisers — posh spreads at the Hotel Fort Garry, the now legendary, wall-to-wall frenzies at aceart, MAWA’s carnivalesque Dollhouse where bidding comes under pressure of time, Platform’s triple exposure . . . the list goes on. Even the dreaded Bingo nights, run by the provincial lotteries corporation are prairie ritual for non-profits — where stoic board members and tense volunteers pace the floor, recovering from the anxiety of providing ten warm bodies to ensure they’ll profit from the event. Ten is required, or it’s a “no go” on the easy $3,000.

Plug In has been an Institute of Contemporary Art for some time, shifting its mandate from an artist-run centre to. . . still something like an artist-run centre where seriously good art, architecture and design reign. It’s still trendy and naughty, ambitious and committed to excellence, but like other arts organizations, Plug In ICA requires funds beyond what membership, publication sales, equipment rentals, and the public sector can provide. Its recent art fundraisers begin with novel premise for artistic interpretation.

Like the Fabulous Fakes with a Twist, a send up of Group of Seven painting and the subsequent Fab Fakes, a riff on Pop Art, the upcoming Dream House is an exhibition and a fundraiser. Curator Steven Matijico explains that the show “explores the uncanny topography of the domestic environment.” The premise is a foil for artists to reconsider the built environment from multiple points: consumer driven, fantasy laden, consumption infused, gender making, material expanding, and body encoding. Will it be an average “contents sale?” I doubt it. The early images are intriguing, raising hopes for more imaginative and provocative work. The preliminary roster of artists and furniture designers includes Keith Oliver, Lynn Richardson, Bernie Miller, Elvira Finnigan, Ken Lum, Germaine Koh, Douglas Coupland and Chris Dorosz, a roster sure to change and expand as the opening draws near.

Canada’s climate ensures that most of us construct our domesticity in some way through the perennial engagements with food, shelter, pleasure, comfort and nurture. Dream House opens February 15, when curbside snowbanks crunch and thicken, car exhaust obscures pedestrians, and weary Winnipeggers peek out their doors, suffering from cabin fever. The show’s six-week duration may be ample time to heal the worst afflicted.

— Amy Karlinsky

Melon Truck on the road to Giverny, Michael Markowsky, oil on canvas, 2007

ALBERTA: April 3 to 13, Axis Contemporary Art, Calgary

While art can often be dangerous, the practice of making art is rarely death-defying. Michael Markowsky may prove that theory wrong with his latest series of drawings and paintings which he calls “Driving Artworks.” Originally created on a sketch pad while Markowsky drove the freeways of Los Angeles, he quickly reconsidered that technique and enlisted friends to do the driving while he sketched from the passenger seat (or in some situations, while strapped to the top of his car). Remember that this is California, where anything goes. And the technique is not completely unusual — contemporary artist and envelope-pusher Matthew Barney recently completed a series of artworks sketched on the outside hull of a boat while he sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. The results of Markowsky’s efforts make up a series of Impression-istic and very colourful scenes that move with a lightness and freedom that easily suggests the open road. Originally from Calgary, where he graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 1999, Markowsky also attended Cooper Union in New York and the Royal College of Art in London before getting his MFA at the Art Center in Pasadena, California. Since then he’s been living and working in southern California, where the freeway systems and scenic drives provide an endless source of inspiration.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Axis Contemporary Art, Calgary

On the Surface, David Wilson, acrylic on canvas, 72" X 54"

ALBERTA: Nocturne, opens Feb 14, Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton

When he started painting his popular night scenes about five years ago, the subject helped to free David Wilson from an earlier style he found restrictive. Formerly working in high realism, he began to experiment with a looser technique that appears to tie in well with the blurring of night and neon in his new work. Wilson is particu-larly fond of the effect of headlights on rain-slick streets, blending the shiny streaks of red and yellow with the blinking signage and glowing streetlights of the city at night. His night paintings are dominated by buildings and vehicles — with an occasional shadowy figure crossing the street or disappearing into a late-open shop. Paint-ing full time in his studio in Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood — a likely spot for urban inspiration — Wilson’s new work is unwaveringly popular. “I literally can’t paint enough,” he says. The work will be featured as part of a night-themed group show in February at Edmonton’s Agnes Bugera Gallery, alongside work by other artists including Gordon Harper and Ian Rawlinson.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Agnes Bugera Gallery, Edmonton; Atelier Gallery, Vancouver

Tribal Dancers in Blue, Sorel Etrog, 1968 - 1969, oil on masonite, 60" X 47.75"

BRITISH COLUMBIA: The Links: Meditations on the Human Condition, opens March 6, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver

By Beverly Cramp

Famous for the large modernist sculptures he began creating in 1959, Sorel Etrog actually started his practice drawing and painting. Michele Becker, the curator of his March show at Buschlen Mowatt Gallery says that few people realize Etrog continued to draw and paint while he worked on his famous sculptures — work reminiscent of the human body merging into the massive bolts and hinges of heavy machinery.

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Lynn Richardson, at work on Business as Usual

ALBERTA: Business as Usual, Feb 28 to April 5, Harcourt House Gallery, Edmonton

By Amy Fung

Our great Canadian north, a place as elusive as it is majestic, has suffered from serious ecological and industrial upheavals. The trials of technological affects on the northern landscape often remain silent in the media, but installation artist and sculptor Lynn Richardson has playfully re-imagined the northern landscape in Business as Usual.

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John Chalke, Grey Pod Up, Grey Pod Down, wall piece, stoneware clay, multiglazed, multifired.

ALBERTA: January 17 to 21, Willock & Sax Gallery, Banff

By Amber Bowerman

It was 20-below on a November weekend, closer to 30-below with the wind chill, but ceramists John Chalke and his wife Barbara Tipton were headed to their rustic cabin west of Sundre in the Alberta foothills in spite of the bitter cold. They would be firing up their three-chamber wood-fired kiln for the last time until spring. It’s a huge undertaking. Packing the more than 100 clay pieces — pots, bowls, plates and more — into the chambers takes six or seven hours itself. “It’s not the firing that’s a problem,” Chalke explains. “It’s that you have to pack the kiln in a certain way. It’s like you’re moving and you’re packing a chest.”

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All Part of the Inexpressible and Unthinkable, Sylvain Bouthillette, oil, spray paint, chalk on wood, 2005, 90.5" X 96"

SASKATCHEWAN: Dharma Bum, Jan 8 to April 6, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon

In the catalogue that accompanies his exhibition Dharma Bum, Sylvain Bouthillette writes, “My work is a form of meditation incarnated into action.” It is action and art that appears to be wild, but is underscored by the Montreal artist’s Buddhist meditation practice. This travelling exhibition — the first mid-career assessment of the artist’s prolific output — features more than 30 works selected from the period 1990 to 2006 by curator Bernard Lamarche. It includes paintings, sculpture, photographs, sound works, and prints.

Influenced by Joseph Beuys, the American “bad painting” movement, punk rock and popular culture, tattoos, advertising, trash aesthetic, and more, Bouthillette has created a mischievous and irreverent phantasmagoria of sights and sounds. A manic quality energizes the work, but is accompanied by the artist’s driving intention. “These works are meant to be a manifestation of wrathful compassion,” he says. There are rotating clown heads, scratched up tiger images, cute stuffed squirrels, elegant horses, and a gyrating hare. Bouthillette’s materials and media are boundless — aerosol, oil, latex and acrylic paints, charcoal, wood, crayon and chalk; there are silk-screened images, installations, gouged effects, photographic collages, lino and inkjet prints, sculptural and sonic elements, and more. He writes: “Through my art I try to bring forth a space where it is possible to see things with an uncertainty that is enlightening, intelligent, and filled with curiosity.”

— Steven Ross Smith

Represented by: Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto.

Season’s End, Eve Kotyk, encaustic on panel, 2007, 15.75" X 17.75"

SASKATCHEWAN: The Muse, April 4 to 26, 2008, McIntyre Gallery, Regina

Eve Kotyk began as an abstract painter, under the influence of Otto Rogers and Robert Christie in the University of Saskatchewan Fine Arts program in the late 1980s, but eventually she felt a need to “seek something more human” in her art. Images — trees at first, and more recently people — have emerged, rendered in encaustic on panel. Kotyk enjoys the challenge of heating and blending beeswax and damar resin, then adding oil pigment, preferring to mix her own colours to achieve a softer palette. She feels that the encaustic medium creates a toned-down softness, yet gives luminescence and warmth. She says it creates a distance between the viewer and the subject, yet draws the viewer in. The paintings for this exhibition — in sizes ranging from 2 feet by 18 inches to 4 feet by 3 feet — will include a series of portraits. She’ll also produce new paintings of expressive, even vivacious trees, which she also considers portraits.

— Steven Ross Smith

Represented by: McIntyre Gallery, Regina

Souvenirs, Sydney Lancaster, mixed media, 2007

ALBERTA: thought & memory: curiosities, March 1 to 23, Arts on Atlantic, Calgary

Like the crows and ravens that figure so prominently in her work, Edmonton-based artist Sydney Lancaster is a collector. She collects found objects to use in her work, and also the memories and ideas that form the basis of the mixed-media pieces. “I’m really interested in the relationships we establish between memory and tangible reality, and how part of the human path is really about re-writing our own stories as we go,” she says. “Sometimes this is absolutely conscious, sometimes less so.” Her current work mixes assemblage and collage to create something unique and powerful with an underpinning of good design. Incorporated found objects — bark, inkjet prints, fragments of text — are layered with oil and acrylic paints, inks, plaster and beeswax, sometimes carved through to reveal new surfaces. “I’m focused on the intersection between an outward reality (what we want to or choose to see and reveal) and what lies below the surface,” Lancaster says, adding that she’s also trying to impart a sense of the risk involved in revealing what’s hidden. On the staff at Latitude 53 artist-run centre in Edmonton, Lancaster has participated in a series of group shows and festivals, both as an artist and as a poet.

— Jill Sawyer

Represented by: Arts on Atlantic, Calgary

Jacob Semko: Tension through the landscape of nothingness, waterless lithograph on Oakwaraw, chine collé onto Sommerset tin, 43.5" x 94"

SASKATCHEWAN: Sept 10 to Sept 22, Rouge Gallery, Saskatoon

Emphatically committed to the craft of printmaking, young Saskatoon artist Jacob Semko pushes the technological limits of lithography in a two-person exhibition this fall with one of his mentors, Saskatoon printmaking legend Nik Semenoff. Incorporating newer photolithographic techniques as well as traditional chine collé (rice paper first printed upon, then glued to a thicker paper and finally over-printed again), the illusion of his trompe l‘oeil images are complex technical tours-de-force. Often working on the scale of large paintings rather than drawings, Semko has gone so far as to build his own lithographic press, though he’s more than a craftsman. A recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he is committed to the art and aesthetics of printmaking — his subtle, evocative works are more than the extravagantly beautiful abstractions they initially appear to be, limning instead a personal territory of tensions and anxieties. Employing photographic representations of tissues and shiny silk fabrics stretched and pulled by tension points, his images externalize a personal and social disquiet familiar in these times.

— Jack Anderson

Represented by: Rouge Gallery, Saskatoon

Tim Fraser: Seawall Facing Ocean, 2007, oil on canvas, 36" x 60"

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Seawall Composed, Sept 22 to Oct 11, Ian Tan Gallery, Vancouver

The seawall in Vancouver’s Stanley Park has been Tim Fraser’s muse for more than 15 years. The setting is imbued with the strangeness of dreams, like strolling through an uninhabited setting made from a box of plastic toys. His flat painting style emphasizes the strong, elementary forms he uses to conjure the path, trees, and water. The shapes are enlivened by his nuanced use of colour — gentle purple in the crook of a tree, the blue cast of shadow on clipped grass or the mottled red of a maple about to drop its leaves. The sheen of fantasy is in the quality of light, that intense early morning or late evening slant uncannily like the backlit radiance of an electronic screen. Fraser grew up in Surrey, B.C. and has always viewed the park as his preferred destination for strolls and picnics. He perceives it as a place of constant change, now underscored by the storms of 2006. Many artists have focused on a particular landscape with significant reward, and Fraser is no exception.

Bettina Matzkuhn

Represented by: Ian Tan Gallery, Vancouver

Normand Boisvert: Lueur Automnale, 2007, oil on canvas, 40" x 60"

ALBERTA: Nov 17 to Dec 22, Stephen Lowe Gallery, Calgary

Born in Trois-Rivières in 1950, landscape painter Normand Boisvert is a self-taught artist who has staked a name for himself as a keeper of quintessential Quebec. He started with his first small studio at the age of 17, painting diligently and selling his work for $5 to $15 apiece, soon expanding into another Trois-Rivières studio and building his repertoire. “He works in a naïve style,” says Alice Law, director of the gallery. “All of the works are oils on canvas.” The practice of naïve art has a strong tradition in Quebec because of its storytelling qualities. In Boisvert’s case, the story is about a man in love with the land and colour. According to writer Claude Marcouiller, “many have tracked the artist’s progress, from his beginnings with the figurative through his black period to his colourful nudes, leading to the landscape…” Boisvert’s landscapes have attracted the most attention in recent years. Most often depicting scenes of villages, the colourful works are detailed with homes and out-buildings that appear as if they have always been part of the sites Boisvert interprets. Well-known in central Canada, the artist is building a growing reputation in the west.

— Wes Lafortune

Represented by: Stephen Lowe Gallery, Calgary; Rendezvous Art Gallery, Vancouver.

Michel Leroux: Mystere en Fleurs, 48" x 36"

ALBERTA: October, Art Mode Gallery, Calgary

The distinct style of Quebec-based landscape painter Michel LeRoux will be showcased this fall at Calgary’s Art Mode Gallery. Leroux began as a letterer, following his family’s vocation of sign-making before pursuing a career as a full-time artist. A teacher at the Montreal Institute of Graphic Arts in the 1970s, LeRoux also worked in advertising design. Known for his colourful landscapes, the Canadian wilderness dominates his canvases. “I have chosen to paint the plant world which, like any other subject matter, may fit into a contemporary trend,” says LeRoux. “In my opinion, its most powerful pictorial quality has been underestimated — its relation to human beings.” Using a post-Impressionist style, Leroux has brought a unique vision to landscape painting. Observing a Leroux painting, says Art Mode director Yvan Filion, the word that most often comes up is serenity. “Even if the painting is of a cascading waterfall, it’s peaceful.”

Wes Lafortune

Represented by: Art Mode Gallery, Calgary and Ottawa; Adele Campbell Fine Art Gallery, Whistler; Galerie Michel Bigue, St-Sauveur, QC.

Darlene Hay: Lush Wild Flowers By Lake, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 36" x 66"

SASKATCHEWAN: On the Wild Side, Nov 2 to 24, Assiniboia Gallery, Regina

While Darlene Hay’s new body of acrylic paintings celebrates Saskatchewan’s wild grasslands and wetlands, they also bring forward some questions about our attachment to these spaces. Following on a widely-exhibited previous body of work entitled Endangered Spaces, the current paintings speak obliquely of the destruction of landscapes — something that often goes hand-in-hand with economic development and diversification. These works are more personal. As aesthetic responses to places she simply likes to visit, they embody a return to her artistic roots — they are informed not only by gestural color-based abstraction, but by the Saskatoon and Emma Lake-centered prairie landscape tradition as well. Impressionistic in execution, Hay’s work here exhibits a more individualistic use of color than in the past — rather than pale waning colors, we find her palette more strongly and freely employed. Yet despite the evocative beauty and intimate feeling of these works, we still worry about what is beyond the horizon. In the end, Hay’s undisturbed landscapes are clearly only idyllic on the surface.

Jack Anderson

Represented by: Assiniboia Gallery, Regina; Newzones, Calgary; Shayne Gallery, Montreal.