Calgary Exhibition Reviews

ALBERTA: Dennis Budgen, A Fine Line: Works by Dennis Budgen, Nov 17, 2005 — Jan 7, 2006, Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts, Calgary
— BY Caterina Pizanias, PhD.

A Fine Line: Works by Dennis Budgen is the final exhibit in the year-long series celebrating Alberta's Centennial at the Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts. (continue...)

ALBERTA: Ryan Sluggett, Monsters and Their Niches, Nov 24 — Dec 22, 2005, TrépanierBaer, Calgary
— BY Wes Lafortune

As an artist, Ryan Sluggett is part philosopher, part storyteller. With paint brush, pencil crayon, pen, and spray can, he expresses his views about the world not in cold academic terms but with an almost childlike awareness. (continue...)

TORONTO: Toronto International Art Fair, November 3 — 7, 2005, Toronto Convention Centre
— BY Douglas MacLean

At the centre of Canada — and jokingly at the centre of the universe — Toronto is the only Canadian city that can support an event of the size and scope of the Toronto International Art Fair. For a fair to thrive, critical mass is essential, but so are its location and dates. Moving the fair into the bowels of the Toronto Convention Centre this year was a negative. Changing its timing to dates when other important international art fairs were being held was a double negative. Nevertheless, an estimated 1,200 people attended opening night. Over the next four days, however, attendance was somewhat thin and, although a few booths sold out, sales in general were less than remarkable. (continue...)

ALBERTA: Wyn Geleynse, Curtain, Oct 13 – Nov 12, TrépanierBaer, Calgary
— BY Kay Burns

The current exhibition at TrépanierBaer shows a definite departure for London, Ontario, artist Wyn Geleynse.

Previously Geleynse’s work consisted of installation environments incorporating objects and/or images as context and surface for film or video projections. Past works play with the relationship between the projected image and the material they are screened on. (continue...)

ALBERTA: What is Visible, Robert Lemay’s 20th anniversary show, until October 15, Douglas Udell Gallery, Edmonton
— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

Our postmodern era’s love of historic juxtaposition has proven to be a challenge for visual artists.

Suddenly freed from traditional constraints of highbrow art conventions, artists can now move between graphic realities and genres, copying and commenting from any and all visual art references — from sketches taken on a trip to Europe’s historic great galleries to lowbrow comic books and advertisements to images lifted from the TV. (continue...)

ALBERTA: The Art Formerly Known as New Media, Sept 17 - Oct 23, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff
— BY Kay Burns

The Art Formerly Known as New Media exhibition currently on at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff celebrates the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Banff New Media Institute. The exhibition is not meant to give an historical overview but instead offers some perspectives about this label through works that address possible interpretations of the term “new media.” (continue...)

ALBERTA: The Road: Constructing the Alaska Highway, until October 2, 2005 The Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton
— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

It used to be that museums were museums and art galleries were art galleries and neither the expositional twain would meet. (continue...)

ALBERTA: The McIntyre Ranch Project, until September 11, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge
— BY Douglas MacLean

As Chris Cran lets us know in his large painting featuring an anonymous talking head, McIntyre Ranch is... king big! Who better to tell the story in two words than Alberta’s master of wit and art. (continue...)

ALBERTA: Form-Space-Concept-Metaphor: Contemporary Alberta Sculpture, Triangle Gallery of Visual Arts, Calgary. Ends September 3.
— BY Douglas MacLean

Often I think the best comes out in summer, contrary to the popular belief that galleries go to sleep. A perfect example is Triangle Gallery’s venture to tell us the story of sculpture in Alberta. (continue...)

— BY Beverly Cramp

There’s something daunting about a retrospective of an artist with more than six decades of oft-reviewed work: so much life and art to absorb. Takao Tanabe’s show at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Chronicles of Form and Place: Works on Paper represents another challenge as well – it’s an exhibit of water colours, and pencil and graphite drawings; not the large paintings on canvas many associate with this veteran landscapist. But there is plenty to discover by meditating on the 60+ pieces in this show, marking the evolution of one of British Columbia’s premier portrayer’s of the west coast (and the Canadian prairies and Rocky Mountains, as we find out).

— BY Quentin Randall

Process is a commonly used word in the creation of artwork. Many times the artistic process is concealed from the public. Studios are private spaces where the ritual of artistic process plays out. When the ritual is complete, the artwork is exhibited – a beautiful “container” which conceals the ritual or process involved in creating it. In Reveal/Conceal however, Eric Cameron and Chris Gardiner attempt to strip away aesthetics, revealing hints about their rituals.

— BY Rob Alexander

In her recent book Cultural Memories and Imagined Futures: The Art of Jane Ash Poitras, author Pamela McCallum – through the words of aboriginal artist and curator Shirley Bear – invites viewers to feel the work of Jane Ash Poitras, who is of Cree/Dene descent, rather than analyze it through western eyes and ideals.

— BY Ross Bradley

“What happens when we believe in something with all our hearts at the risk of inflicting pain upon others? How do we utilize emblematic objects and images to unify participation in cultural practices associated with absolute power and zealous conviction?” - Dean Drever

— BY Beverly Cramp

Modern art, with its philosophy of eschewing the traditional in favour of breaking new ground and experimentation, is often referred to, in art textbooks as a movement that is over, having ended sometime in the late twentieth century. That ‘death’ is greatly exaggerated as modern art’s influence, if not the outright creation of modern art, is still most definitely with us.

— BY Lissa Robinson

Tucked away in the inner chamber of the Mendel Art Gallery is an illuminating exhibition by Saskatoon-based artist, Michèle Mackasey. The show, face à nous, is a poignant portrayal of the bonds shared by single mothers and their children. Translated roughly as “faced with us” or “look at us,” face à nous includes six life-size portraits, one in progress (painted in the gallery) and an audio component accessible with headphones.

— BY Rachel Rosenfield Lafo

Context is everything when looking at art. Where an artwork is exhibited, what it is shown with, and how it is displayed directly affect its interpretation. Sonny Assu’s new installation at the West Vancouver Museum centers on this connection between presentation and meaning in his intelligently conceived and elegantly installed exhibition, Longing.

— BY Portia Priegert

There’s a certain audacity in titling a painting exhibition The Point Is, as curator Liz Wylie does at the Kelowna Art Gallery. It almost begs the question “What is the point?” – a freighted avenue of inquiry for a mercurial discipline whose contemporary relevance has been questioned to the point of declaring its death. But as Wylie notes in the catalogue essay…

— BY Ross Bradley

It seems appropriate that the Art Gallery of Alberta should follow up their recent Exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 – 1980 (June 25th to September 25, 2011), with a look at current practice in this challenging genre of the visual arts. In my mind, “Conceptual Art” focuses on the exploration of ideas rather than the more traditional creation of objects. The artist often seems to be asking the question “What if?”, and then proceeds to test the possibilities, without worrying about the…

— BY Monique Westra

This exhibition celebrates the 80th anniversary of the 1931 founding of the Alberta Society of Artists in Calgary. It includes a small historical section featuring early works by well-known artists that recall the origin of the society, as well as a much larger section devoted to contemporary practice, which is the focus of this review.

— BY Agnieszka Matejko

Some art movements are less fashionable than others. While it’s acceptable to admire – say, abstract expressionism - mere mention of surrealism in art circles is apt to elicit scowls. Such experiences don’t give surrealism any intellectual cache. So, it was with curiosity, dosed with reluctance, that I went from Edmonton to see The Color of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dawn Ades, one of the world’s leading scholars of surrealism, guest curated this high profile exhibition featuring the works of more than 80 artists, from over 60 prominent museums and collections around the world.

— BY Gil McElroy

The small community of Bowmanville is known today for being home to one of Ontario’s nuclear reactors. But its history dates back to the eighteenth century as a busy harbour and grain mill site. It also was the site of Camp 30, a WWII facility used to imprison...

— BY Rachel Rosenfield Lafo

Toronto-based artist Yam Lau creates hybrid worlds that blend real and digitally generated space in intersecting and overlapping layers of great spatial and metaphysical complexity. Two of his recent works were included in Surrey Art Gallery’s Dwelling, three, thematically-related exhibitions that focused on house and home...

— BY Quentin Randall

Everyone is a product of their environment. But it is often not until that environment is presented in an artistic form that the public can begin to understand the forces at work. Why? Because when our environment is presented as an external form through art, we are removed from it - only then can we really see and interpret the place which shapes us. The Group of Seven are the best known Canadian artists for capturing the sense (spirit) of place.

— BY Jack Anderson

If any art is recognized as 'Canadian' within the international art market, it is likely the soapstone carvings and graphic prints of the Inuit peoples of Canada's Arctic.

— BY Liz Wylie

Temporarily switching his inky studio apron for the classic black apparel of a curator, Kelowna-based printmaker Briar Craig bravely took on the role of organizing this intriguing exhibition of recent work by five printmakers from various parts of Canada. Craig is a great supporter and promoter of printmaking, but is all too aware of the defensive position one typically takes with a project that could be branded by many as old-fashioned due to its medium-based theme. To counter this...

— BY Ross Bradley

As Canada begins its withdrawal from active duty in Afghanistan, it is an appropriate time to look back at our involvement and impact over the past ten years. Al Henderson’s exhibition Light Horse Tales of an Afghan War is a very personal vision...

— BY Jeffrey Spalding

Walter J. Phillips may be the penultimate chronicler of early 20th century western Canada. While other Canadian artists during that time expended their affection upon the back country forests and ‘savage wilderness’ of central Canada, Phillips paid loving, tender homage to his homeland in Canada’s west from Winnipeg to Victoria. For this exhibition...

— BY Diana Sherlock

Two exquisitely paired exhibitions currently on view at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art & Design (ACAD) in Calgary — Toronto artist Stephen Andrews’ subject and Winnipeg/Montreal-based artist Eleanor Bond’s Mountain of Shame — show work by two artists that explores embodiment through the materiality of painting...

— BY Lissa Robinson

Collaboration among artists can yield surprising and interesting results, particularly if the artists have different aesthetics or work in different matters and mediums, or in the case of Les Choses Sont Contre Nous - a recent exhibition at AKA Gallery in Saskatoon - was initiated mostly through “virtual activity.”

— BY Rachel Rosenfield Lafo

Pretty Uglies, the name of one of 16 installations in Natalie Purschwitz and Kelly Lycan’s exhibition at Centre A, could just have easily served as the name for the whole show. This is because the assemblages made from different types of plastic and other materials are both disarmingly pretty and pretty ugly, seducing and repelling in equal measure.

— BY Quentin Randall

Photoshop and its relationship to Fine Art has been contentious for some time. The general sentiment around Photoshop art is that it is either gimmicky, niche or confined to the more commercial-friendly graphic design realm. It struggles to be taken seriously. In Under the Influence...

— BY Helena Wadsley

Quirky might be an understatement for Seattle-based, German native, Anne Siems’ paintings of forest animals. Perky critters - rabbits, owls, foxes and fawns - sit upright and alert to danger, while dressed in unwieldy lace collars and weighty stone pendants. Although the setting is not rugged...

— BY Richard White

At first I didn’t quite understand the title Fluxation. And to be honest, I am still not sure I have it right. However, I was intrigued enough to look up the definition which proved interesting as the term “flux” has several meanings. It could simply...

— BY Richard White

Upon walking into The Art Gallery of Calgary’s (AGC) Media Gallery, one is immediately transformed into a different sense of place. The room is dark, the music is brooding, the walls are a rich burgundy red, it has a leather couch and two chairs, as well as a large flat screen television with a gold gilded frame around it on the wall. In some ways...

— BY Brian Grison

The exhibition, Emily's Revenge, has a complex history and agenda. It was originally intended to focus exclusively on modernist women artists, and this review focuses on two such women painters. However, art by these women is so difficult to find...

— BY Ross Bradley

At first glance, it could be a nostalgic walk down memory lane; for many people who grew up in the fifties and sixties, it will indeed bring back memories of a much less complicated time when kids...

— BY Helena Wadsley

Painting is a well-mapped terrain; we have reached an era where it seems as if everything within the medium has been done, from all styles of representation to abstraction and back again. In this climate, painters strive to create their own visual languages. Pushing the Edge, the title of a three-person painting exhibition at the Diane Farris Gallery...

— BY Cliff Eyland

Wanda Koop is an important Winnipeg artist who, along with a few others in the late 1970s and early 1980s, took the unusual step of also becoming an entrepreneur. From the beginning she promoted herself...

— BY Amy Fung

Amy Fung: From the Timeland catalogue, the voice you assume is very much about being an outsider coming in, traveling to this land, and really decentering the center of the art world, which is basically Toronto in Canada.
Richard Rhodes: I don’t believe in centres anymore. I believe technology decenters everything. There are still centres that have everything and that people still aspire to, like the Toronto art scene for instance...

— BY Amy Fung

As Timeland, the 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, provoked an ongoing provincial dialogue about identities and regional representations, its accompanying panel discussion did little to shed light on the laudable and the discordant elements of the exhibition.

— BY Helena Wadsley

A pile of blistered and scarred dog remains, interspersed with the occasional fish head - the stuff of nightmares - are the images to be found in Howie Tsui’s drawing series, Of Manga + Mongrels. While this Hong Kong - born, Ottawa resident artist has lived all over the world, his work is most strongly influenced by Japanese culture.

— BY Richard White

Who knew Calgary art collectors are hoarding more than 30 Jean-Paul Riopelle paintings? Monique Westra, former Senior Art Curator at the Glenbow Museum and Rod Green (owner) Master’s Gallery did…and they combined forces to create an inspiring exhibition of one of Canada’s most important mid-century artists.

— BY Ross Bradley

Over its 14 year history, the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art has provided a snapshot of the leading edge of the visual arts scene across the province. The community and the audience have looked forward to seeing and experiencing what is thought to be the “state of the arts.” We have also been introduced to many younger artists who have since taken their places as key figures on the contemporary art scene. These exhibitions were curated in-house, often in partnership with other provincial institutions and with an understanding of the local activity.

— BY Gil McElroy

First Nations artist Neal McLeod is a multi-disciplinarian. Saskatchewan-born, he not only paints but writes, having published two books of poetry and a work of non-fiction addressing the history of the Cree people in western Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. Not surprisingly, McLeod is an also an academic, currently teaching at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario where the Art Gallery of Peterborough mounted Sons of a Lost River, an exhibition of McLeod’s paintings organized and toured by Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

Born in 1939 in Saltcoats, Saskatchewan, Robert Sinclair hails from a generation of artists who, with the western landscape in mind, sought to bring fresh new perspectives. They were all born before the Second World War and in Alberta, this would include, among others, Norman Yates, Harry Savage (his non-representational watercolours) and for awhile, Takao (Tak) Tanabe. Theirs was a modernist perspective; in favour of evoking a sense of limitless space and a paring down of the landscape to its most basic elements. Comfortable with the language of abstraction, you could almost say that the landscape under their influence became almost immaterial, more about a state of mind - best left to the viewer’s imagination.

— BY Helena Wadsley

Artists from India have recently made a grand entrance into the international, avant-garde art scene. Milan, Tokyo and London have held major exhibitions showcasing contemporary Indian art, and have included several of the artists participating in In Transition: New Art From India at the Richmond Art Gallery. The Saatchi show in London ended a week after In Transition opened, which might explain why artist Hema Upadhyay, was seated on the floor of the gallery when I visited, constructing her matchstick chandelier, Loco-Foco-Motto, the red tips giving the piece a festive air. Fire and its potential implied in the unlit matchsticks, is an important element of Hindu ritual, symbolizing creation and destruction. Double meaning is a common element in the works in this exhibition.

— BY Ross Bradley

From minimalism to expressionism, the recent work by Pat Service and Arlene Wasylynchuk explore the landscape from seemingly opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Service, from Vancouver and Wasylynchuk, from Edmonton both share a passion for the western Canadian landscape and a link to the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop in northern Saskatchewan dating back to the 1990s.

— BY Patricia Dawn Robertson

It takes skill to build an art career in a modest region, with a pragmatic population that frequently favours football and curling over gallery-going. But the new geography of art means that the local and the global are becoming less stable concepts. Curator Jeff Nye explores this in his essay for the catalogue of the Mind the Gap survey show of 29 Saskatchewan artists at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina.

— BY Amy Fung

Since taking home the grand prize in last year’s RBC painting competition, Slave Lake, Alberta-raised Brenda Draney has completed a new series of works that accentuate the absence of what we think we know. Premiering at Latitude 53 Gallery, Hold Still is a collection of paintings, drawings, and watercolours that focus on how we remember, as much as what we remember.

— BY Patricia Dawn Robertson

What we resist often defines us. As a youth, each artist in this show is stalked by a different set of adversarial life conditions. Associate curator Jen Budney has identified the common ground between them and developed a fine show illustrating their plurality while respecting their differences.

— BY Brian Grison

James Gordaneer has been drawing and/or painting pretty much every day since approximately 1950. His formal education was brief, but it included influential Canadian mid-twentieth-century artists: Jock MacDonald, Carl Schaefer and Yvonne McKague Housser. This history situates Gordaneer among the first generation of Toronto artists to follow the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto painters who introduced New York abstract expressionism to English Canada in the 1950s. However, unlike most of his colleagues during those years, Gordaneer never entirely rejected representation for the sake of pure abstraction. This polarity in Gordaneer's work is one of several that an in-depth discussion of his art, philosophy and career would reveal. The focus of this review of his recent retrospective at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is his drawing practice.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

Is it possible that contemporary glass is overtaking ceramics as the pre-eminent craft in Alberta? Not so much in terms of number of practitioners, but in quality and range of work, breathe-of-imagination and engagement with contemporary society and visual culture? That’s a big order to fill and yet as this juried exhibition suggests, the energies and input of emerging artists are high, while many established artists continue to impress.

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.”

— BY Richard White

In 1959, five senior Calgary artists — H.B. Hill, Wes Irwin, Douglas Motter, Jim Nicoll and Marion Nicoll — built the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation with a small initial endowment. The Foundation would create a civic art collection by buying art and accepting donations and exhibit the work in public spaces throughout the city, everywhere from bus barns to recreation centres, from City Hall hallways to administrative meeting rooms and offices.

— BY Portia Priegert

It was Jayce Salloum’s “map of the world”, a sprawling collection of envelopes, photographs, plants, doodles, feathers and other found objects, all pinned to a bulletin board, that gave curator Jen Budney the idea for history of the present. Although, as she acknowledges, “map of the world” has a whimsical flavor at odds with the politically engaged videos that have made Salloum one of Canada’s best-known artists abroad, it shares the same concern with the multiplicity of experience.

— BY Richard White

When entering the Nickle Arts Museum’s first gallery, I was immediately confronted with a large-scale triptych with three skeletal humanoid forms on each side panel, tugging on a red piece of cloth that extended across the middle panel, each piece bringing multiple associations and references to the whole. Painted in 1973, “Tearing the Robe” sets the stage for an exhibition that challenges the viewer to look internally and externally, past and present, to try to understand the world we share. “Suffer Little Children” is a haunting painting that is more abstract than figurative — bone-thin arms reach toward each other inside what looks like a faceless sinister figure wearing a huge cloak that engulfs everything. There is definitely a dark side to Ron (Gyo-Zo) Spickett’s expression of the human condition, and these works have much in common with the tortured souls in Francis Bacon’s work.

— BY Liz Wylie

As a one-off exploration while in the thick of working on another, unrelated series of paintings, Calgary-based artist Bill Rodgers decided one day to reproduce in paint the cover of an old book that had belonged to his grandparents. The next two years were spent working solidly on the group of 18 paintings that make up the central component in this exhibition, Studies in Citizenship. Such are the compulsions that lead to obsessions that can consume any of us.

— BY Stacey Abramson

The work of Greg Staats overflows with poetic politics — two terms that rarely work well together. The visual language he creates speaks of loss and memory, and aspects of Aboriginal culture in a gentle yet permeating tone. Working inside the simplicity of nature and enhancing it with the complexity of the personal experience within it, his work leaves viewers relating his experiences with their own.

— BY Gil McElroy

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novel The Little Prince, the title character inhabits a tiny planet the size of a house. It’s difficult not to think of Saint-Exupéry’s children’s story when confronted with a small sculptural metal sphere — clearly a planet or moon-like thing — from which emanates a radio tower that’s bigger than the object on which it sits.

— BY Michael Harris

Winnipeg-based artist Grace Nickel’s ceramic sculptures have always had an attention to detail that combines with organic forms. Her work has taken her across the world, receiving critical praise everywhere from Taiwan to Chicago to New Zealand. Her latest creation, Devastatus Rememorari, takes Nickel to a new level of creation filled with intersections of memory, beauty and destruction.

— BY Mary Beth Laviolette

Born in 1932 and a student of Luke Lindoe in the 1950s, the late Walter Drohan made pottery partially anchored in the Bernard Leach tradition of functional stoneware and oriental glazes. Neil Liske (born in 1936 and still making art), graduated in 1970 from the University of Calgary with a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts. His focus was and still is dramatically different — grounded in Abstract Expressionist movement in ceramics. His emphasis was on experimentation and sculptural form instead of finely crafted pottery. This exhibition includes an inspired example of Liske’s philosophy — his 1970 two-piece hand-built sculpture, Bolted Boxes, made from stoneware and literally joined together with two hefty bolts.

— BY Bettina Matzkuhn

Do you remember the awkwardness of holding an unfamiliar tool in your hand? Wondering how much pressure to exert, and how to make it work properly? Lou Lynn’s mid-career retrospective Retro-active evokes both a physical and conceptual unfamiliarity. Her glass and metal sculptures are markedly not functional, yet they imply a purpose.

— BY Diane Nelson

The lights are on, but nobody’s home. At least, not anymore. Yet there’s something oddly comforting about Heather Benning’s manipulated photos of old, abandoned buildings in varying stages of decrepitude. Part of a new exhibition called In Essence…, Benning’s works pay homage to days gone by, and a way of life now seldom lived. But while there is a sense of loss in these pieces, and a lament for what used to be, there is also celebration, in that what is gone has not been forgotten.

— BY Michael Harris

An artist is always double. There’s the person who is the “author” or “painter” or “violinist” — the person who commits the act of art-making, about whom we develop a fantastical biography by patching together clues from the work; and then there’s the person proper, the man who pays taxes, walks his dog, is allergic to peanuts.

— BY Beverly Cramp

Among the stone carvings of bears, birds, whales and other Arctic animals at the Inuit Art Gallery in Vancouver, are works that reflect a less traditional Northern life. Contemporary pieces by Mosesee Pootoogook, Isaaci Etidloie, Jamesie Pitseolak and Johnny Manning reveal a new sensibility shaped by access to computers, the Internet, and television. This is their experience of living in the north, one more separated from the landscape and wildlife than the lives their parents had there.

— BY Kimberly Croswell

A mini-retrospective of George Littlechild’s work over the last ten years, Red and White Inside Out is a series of works portraying the personal and social ambiguities in “mixed race” identity.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

Spanning a dozen years of Peter von Tiesenhausen’s work, between 1997 and 2009, this exhibition echoed, not so much in an aural sense but with a reverberation between many of the works on display. Even without knowing much about von Tiesenhausen’s work, it was possible to see how one idea has sparked many outcomes, and can be expressed in different media with different results.

— BY Stacey Abramson

Since 2003, Manitoba artist Tim Schouten has been exploring the Treaties of Canada, historic agreements between the Government of Canada, signed between 1871 and 1954, and the country’s Aboriginal people, granting rights and setting boundaries. His work explores the relationship between the treaty language and lands they encompass, and the visual and written stories that are connected to them. Each work in the series depicts the exact location where a treaty was signed. This exhibition shows the second set of Treaty Suites of the series.

— BY Stacey Abramson

The simplicity of a black and white portrait lends itself to overwhelming reflection of human emotion and expression. If executed with great care and passion, the camera captures intimate details, bringing them into the image, and then to the viewer. Winnipeg photographer, activist and artist Sheila Spence has spent two decades capturing the subtleties of the human character — photographing friends and family in stark black and white. Curated by Mary Reid, Pictures of Me is a retrospective examination of Spence’s work, including her portraits and several other series that get at the connection between the camera shutter and emotional expression.

— BY Beverly Cramp

Curated by Lynn Ruschneinsky, who teaches at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Langara College, Elliot Louis Gallery’s fourth annual show of emerging artists included painting, sculpture, and photo-based work by 16 artists from across Canada and from New York. Ruschneinsky effectively made several mini-exhibition areas in the gallery’s large white space by forming a moveable wall into an X-shape in the middle of the gallery, creating places to experience the work more intimately.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

It hardly mattered that I had already seen some of the mixed-media work featured in this exhibition of shadowy illusions. For the first time, almost all of the 25 Scenes created by the Lethbridge-based artist were on display, and whether this latest presentation had me peering into small windows or stepping into the darkness toward ghostly video projections on figurative cut-outs, Scenes from the House Dream seemed like an entirely new work.

ALBERTA: Alex Janvier, September 6 to 18, Canada House Gallery, Banff

— BY Rob Alexander

Alex Janvier’s work is remarkable and unmistakable—though the 73-year-old artist of Dene Suline and Saulteaux descent has his influences, namely Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, his style is very much his own. Janvier combines a palette of rich, natural colours—found along a river bank, in a deep forest or a field of wildflowers—with abstraction, negative space and long, sinuous lines like winding streams and cirrus clouds.

— BY Jennifer McVeigh

The title of this exhibition is a demanding one - imposing nearly impossible expectations. At a time when the definition of photography is being stretched to near disintegration by the use of digital technology, how can one show possibly address the wide spectrum of practices happening in the province today? How can the work selected represent a whole generation of artists?

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ALBERTA: The 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art; June 27 – Sept 9, 2007, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Oct 27, 2007 – Jan 6, 2008, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff

— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

As soon as you enter the first display area of the 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, you’ll know that you’re in for a fun, but challenging time. The first piece is a series of quirky, super-horny elk — animals sprouting huge racks of antlers all over their bodies — created by Edmonton’s Paul Freeman. Typical of Freeman’s most recent work, the images are purposefully contrarian and inherently puzzling.

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— BY Wes Lafortune

The Solstice arrived early at Calgary’s Virginia Christopher Fine Art. The exhibition by Calgary-based painter Peter Deacon covered more than seven metres of the gallery’s wall space, a multi-media piece comprised of 37 panels.

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— BY Dina O’Meara

You don’t walk into a landscape by Sean Randall, you manoeuvre your way through his vision of fields, scrub and bright skies, attracted by the artist’s use of texture and colour to build a sense of perspective the closer you come to the canvas.

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— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

The Art Gallery of Alberta has chosen to launch their brand-new Kitchen Gallery space with a deconstructive show of David Cantine’s postmodern still-lifes. Called Unflat — a retrospective celebration of work from a 30-year career — is a great companion to the Flat show down the hall. Both exhibitions are celebrations of the city’s historic abstract painting tradition.

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— BY Amy Fung

The mysterious abyss of light and shadow where the horizon meets the break of light is at the center of David Edwards’ latest work. Luminescent and austere, the glow consistent throughout Land Forms suggests an unfathomable possibility against the surrounding shadows. Moving beyond the turbulence of painting in a war-ravaged and disconnected world, the Zimbabwe-born, Vancouver-based Edwards is not interested in creating a narrative - rather, all of his pieces stand alone as nostalgia confused with realistic depiction.

— BY Wes Lafortune

Angel Vincench’s artwork speaks eloquently for those who are unable. Behind the Abstract (Abstracto parece pero no es- It seems Abstract but it is not) is an exhibition of paintings by the Havana-based artist, recently shown at Axis Contemporary Art in Calgary.