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PUBLIC ART TAKES ROOT
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Sculptor Steve Tobin with his Trinity Root in New York City.
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Torode gifts Calgary with works by Steve Tobin, Jeff de Boer
Noted Calgary art collector John Torode, and his Torode Group have gifted the city with two additional public art works, one by an international sculptor, and another by a well-respected local artist. Following on Torode’s sponsorship of Dennis Oppenheim’s Device to Root out Evil, and Micah Lexier’s $1-million commission for a large-scale piece in the city’s Victoria Park neighbourhood, the company has announced new public works by sculptor Steve Tobin and local metal artist Jeff de Boer.
Tobin has sculpted one of his signature root works (his piece Trinity Root in New York memorializes the events of 9/11, a stylized conception of the roots of a huge sycamore toppled in the World Trade Centre collapse). The 24-foot-high carbon steel Calgary Root will be centred at the intersection of 8 Avenue and 8 Street SW, where Torode will open its new corporate offices. Further east, by the company’s Hotel Arts, de Boer’s Light the Universe and Everything is an 18-foot sphere that glows with a light show. Best-known for his intricate and whimsical narrative-heavy metalworks, de Boer’s public work includes pieces at the Alberta Children’s Hospital and the Calgary Airport.
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CARDIFF / MILLER WIN $50,000 HNATYSHYN AWARD
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Detail from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Paradise Institute, 2001, The National Gallery of Canada, anonymous gift.
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Following a remarkably successful, years-long partnership that has created groundbreaking work in installation, sound and video art, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been awarded the third annual $50,000 Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award. Long associated with the arts community in Lethbridge and the University of Lethbridge, they currently divide their time between central B.C. and Berlin, Germany. (continue...) |
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EMILY CARR HOMELESS SHELTERS HOMELESS
In early December, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver found itself in an unusual situation. Third-year industrial design students had debuted Homes for Less in October, a creative answer to the problem of homelessness in lower mainland B.C. Designed in partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Advanced Wood Processing program, the end result was a collection of small homes that could be set up anywhere in the province.
Built for less than $1,500 each, the homes are pre-fabricated in componenets, many of them made of recycled materials, and can be assembled easily. They’re designed to accommodate one person, and were created with the input of homeless people, and directors of shelters and support agencies. Each one has 64 square feet of living space, plus a sleeping loft (washrooms are extra), and two of the shelters can fit in one standard parking space. "The main objective of this project was to construct an experience about the reality of homelessness that would connect with people more than the statistics we keep seeing — and get more of us talking about real solutions," Emily Carr associate professor Christian Blyt said about the project.
The homes were set up on Granville Island, close to the University buildings, but by mid-December, despite interest piqued among several lower mainland municipalities, the shelters didn’t have a post-exhibition home. At press time, Emily Carr was trying to find takers for the innovative, low-cost units. |
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ALBERTA REVIEWERS PARTNER WITH SAN FRANCISCO SITE
Organized by Calgary-based curators Nicole Burisch and Anthea Black, Truck Gallery recently launched the Alberta art review site shotgun-review.ca, a partnership with a similar site based out of San Francisco and covering shows and exhibitions in the Bay Area. A line-up of news and views from public galleries and artist-run spaces around the province, the new site also reviews public talks and conferences with a focus on contemporary art. |
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URBAN SHAMAN NAMES NEW DIRECTOR
Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman Gallery has named artist and arts administrator K.C. Adams its new director, taking over from Steve Loft, who left to become curator-in-residence at the National Gallery of Canada. Adams’ work as an artist has been seen in solo and group shows in galleries including the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Confederation Art Gallery in Charlottetown, and the Art Gallery of Alberta, and has been acquired into the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. She has previously worked as program coordinator at Urban Shaman, and has worked as an administrator at Winnipeg’s Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art, and as a mentor for Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art. An artist-run centre with a focus on Aboriginal art, Urban Shaman presents gallery exhibitions in all contemporary media, along with talks, film series, and online projects. |
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NEW DIRECTOR TAKES HELM AT NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA
Expect a renewed focus on contemporary Canadian art at Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada with the appointment of Marc Mayer as director. Director general of the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal for the past four years, Mayer put a focus on acquisitions and planning exhibitions for seminal Canadian artists of the late 20th century. Formerly head of visual art in the cultural services section of the Canadian Embassy in Paris, Mayer has held positions at galleries including the Brooklyn Museum, and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. |
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MANITOBA TO SWAP ARTISTS WITH THE MARITIMES
The Manitoba Arts Council has announced a new program partnership with the New Brunswick Arts Board, for artists to travel between the two provinces for creative residencies. The program will cover up to $10,000 for a one- to three-month residency, and will create an annual exchange between the two provinces, in artistic disciplines including visual and media arts, and literary and performing arts. Judith Flynn, chair of the Manitoba Arts Council, adds that preference for the first two years of the program will be given to applicants of Francophone descent “in accordance with our ongoing commitment to fostering the extremely strong and vibrant artistic and cultural Francophone community in Manitoba.” |
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VANCOUVER MUSEUM ENDOWS CULTURAL SCHOLARS SERIES
The Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver has launched a new series for visiting senior scholars that will enrich the city in scholarship and research into a variety of arts practices connected to anthropology. Called the Claude Lévi-Strauss Visiting Scholar Fund, the program was begun with a $50,000 donation by Vancouver philanthropist Dr. Yosef Wosk, which was then matched with $25,000 each from the University of British Columbia and the museum itself. The program will bring key international researchers and thinkers to Vancouver for study in structural or symbolic anthropology, mythology, visual or performative culture, critical museology, and similar areas of study. It is named after one of the pre-eminent anthropological scholars of the 20th century — Lévi-Strauss was particularly interested in the First Nations cultures of North America, and visited UBC twice in the early 1970s. |
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SOBEY AWARD GETS RICHER
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Daniel Barrow, Craft Room, mixed media, 2006. Barrow is shortlisted for the 2008 Sobey Art Award.
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Runners-up for the annual Sobey Art Award will now receive $5,000 in prize money, which makes the Sobey easily one of the richest prizes in Canadian art. The increase is in addition to $50,000 awarded to the winner. Organized in conjunction with Scotiabank and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Sobey Art Foundation shortlists artists from regions across Canada (one criteria is that they have to be under 40), with the help of a curatorial panel. This year, the panel included Gemey Kelly of the Owens Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Nathalie de Blois of the Musee National des beaux-arts du Quebec, David Moos of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Anthony Kiendl of Winnipeg’s Plug-In ICA, and Scott Watson of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia.
Shortlisted artists for 2008 include Vancouver photographer and video artist Tim Lee, Winnipeg media artist Daniel Barrow, Mississauga-based mixed media and performance artist Terence Koh, Quebec-based installation artist Raphaëlle de Groot and Moncton, New Brunswick painter Mario Doucette. Work by shortlisted artists is on at the Royal Ontario Museum, where the winner and runners-up will be announced on October 1. |
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MOA CLOSES, GROWS
Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology has moved on to phase two of an ambitious expansion project that will increase its size by 50 per cent by 2010. To do that, the Museum will close its doors until early March of next year. By then, though a portion of the site will still be under construction, most of the Museum’s public spaces will be reopened. The full gala re-opening is planned for January 2010, coinciding with the Cultural Olympiad. Some of the Museum’s public programming will continue off-site during the full closure. |
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KAMLOOPS BRINGS IN NEW CURATOR
Most recently guest curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Jordan Strom has been appointed interim curator at the Kamloops Art Gallery. An artist, writer, and curator of contemporary art, Strom has taught video art and experimental film at Emily Carr University. Some of his recent projects have included curating a group exhibition about the connection between art and domestic space called Interior of Design at Vancouver’s Republic Gallery, and a collaborative installation at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. |
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PRINTMAKERS GATHER IN EDMONTON
More than 80 artists from close to 30 countries will have work in the first-ever Edmonton Print International September 26 to October 17 in the city’s Capital Art Gallery and at satellite locations such as SNAP Gallery and the University of Alberta. Selected through a combined curatorial process and open juried competition — the jury included Tetsuya Noda from Japan, Belgium’s Maurice Pasternak, and Canadian print artist Davida Kidd, more than 1,200 works were submitted.
The point is to present both the art and the technique behind printmaking. Artist Walter Jule, general secretary for the EPI, says that
traditional printmaking will be shown alongside contemporary digital techniques, and print-based sculptures, installations, and video projections, book plate miniatures, digital murals, and fabric.
Born from the remnants of 2002’s TrueNorth Biennial, EPI 2008 has been growing in momentum, in large part because of Jule. Edmonton, and particularly alumni and faculty of the Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta, have done particularly well in international competitions and awards during the past 30 years. The city’s print community has participated in international exchanges for decades, but this show will bring together the breadth of contemporary international printmaking into one setting. The EPI jury will award $30,000 in prizes during the show.
There are at least 50 print biennials around the world, most of them in Europe, and EPI hopes to fill a gap in North America. “I compare the development of printmaking to weather patterns,” says Jule. “A new movement starts in one place and it flows around the world, partly because of these kinds of shows.” — Amy Fung |
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KIDS GET EXPOSED TO PLEIN AIR
Vernon, B.C.-based landscape painter Jerry Markham will open a show
on November 1 at Calgary’s Webster Galleries that brings together two generations of plein air painting. Markham, who has contributed to landscape painting instructional books and regularly leads plein air workshops, took a group of Calgary high school students into a city park in June to teach them some of the fundamentals of the technique. The idea behind the show, which will include work by the students, is to show the development of a painting, from outdoor studies to finished work. |
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CALGARY NETS $1 MILLION SCULPTURE
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Artist's rendering of Micah Lexier's Half K public sculpture, Calgary.
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If expenditure is any indication, Calgary has reached a new high in the realm of public art acquisition. Launched by Torode Development for their downtown condo project Arriva, the $1 million art commission went to Toronto-based conceptual artist Micah Lexier, who has worked on multiple exhibitions and projects in Calgary, and whose new work, called Half K, is large and public enough to draw new attention to the city’s recently slumbering art scene. Made of a half-kilometre of painted steel pipe, Half K twists itself on a grand scale around the heritage school building that Torode has incorporated into the condo development. Lexier’s work was selected by a seven-member jury, headed by CEO John Torode, that included Alberta College of Art and Design president Lance Carlson, Calgary artist Chris Cran, and Rene Marcous-Devine, former art program director at Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park. |
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ARTIST EXCHANGES GUNS FOR TREES
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Collected guns make raw material for Pedro Reyes’ artwork.
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One of the artists included in the Vancouver Art Gallery‘s spring show The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social, will take his work a step further, planting a tree in the city‘s Strathcona Park using a spade fashioned from guns collected in a firearms amnesty. After soliciting guns as part of an exchange program for food stamps in Culiacán, Mexico, artist Pedro Reyes fabricated more than 1,500 spades as part of his art work Palas por pistolas. Each of the spades was distributed to residents of Culiacán, with 27 reserved for sale to support the project. Each buyer had to agree to plant a tree with the spade, and the Vancouver Art Gallery is the first to fulfill Reyes‘ wish. A snake maple will be planted in the park, with the artist in attendance. Trained as an architect, much of Reyes‘ work centres on the social and physical environments of Mexico City. He has had solo shows at the Seattle Art Museum and the Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, and participated in the 2003 Venice Biennale. |
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WINNIPEG ART GALLERY APPOINTS DIRECTOR
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Stephen Borys, director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
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In June, Dr. Stephen Borys will take over as the director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He arrives in the city from Florida, where he was curator of collections at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. Closely associated with Florida State University, it’s the largest university-affiliated gallery in the U.S. A teacher as well as a curator, Borys was born and raised in Winnipeg, going on to work as senior curator at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he also taught in the Art History department. With a PhD. in Art and Architectural History from McGill, an MA from the University of Toronto and a BA in Art History from the University of Winnipeg, among other roles, Borys was the assistant curator in European and American art at the National Gallery of Canada, and worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. |
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GALLERY ARRIVALS
Winnipeg’s Urban Shaman Gallery has hired Melissa Wastasecoot as Interim Director, now that former director Steve Loft has taken up the newly created position of Aboriginal curator-in-residence at the National Gallery of Canada. Most recently president of Urban Shaman’s Board of Directors, Wastasecoot was asked to step in to see the gallery through the transitional phase before the Board chooses a new director in
Fall 2008.
At the Nanaimo Art Gallery on Vancouver Island, Ed Poli has been appointed Gallery Manager. He comes into the position after a career in business, civic involvement, and community activity, including involvement with the Downtown Nanaimo Arts, Culture and Entertainment Committee, and the Downtown Business Development Committee. After a management career in the civil service, Poli was instrumental in the development of the city’s Community Economic Development Strategy. |
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WHYTE OPENS BIGGEST-EVER SHOW
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George McLean (Walking Buffalo), Norman Luxton and Jonas Rider on the day Luxton was made honourary chief, 1935. Photo Byron Harmon.
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Banff’s Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies has outdone itself with a summer exhibition two years in the making. The exhibition, called The Stuff of Legend: The Luxton Family in Banff and the Bow Valley, centres around the family of the remarkable adventurer and entrepreneur Norman Luxton, who was one of the earliest settlers in Banff. The show brings together documentation, photographs and artifacts of Luxton’s eventful life — he set out from the West Coast of B.C. in the dugout canoe Tilicum with Captain Jack Voss in 1901, traveling across 10,000 miles of the Pacific Ocean before abandoning the voyage in Australia — with the help of the Eleanor Luxton Historical Foundation. |
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ALBERTA ARTISTS HEAD TO LIVERPOOL
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Painter Mark Holliday will
participate in the Studio Alberta show in England.
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Five Alberta artists, with curator Donna Chyz of Artfirm Gallery in Calgary, head across the pond this summer to open a show in the city of Liverpool, which celebrates its status this year as European Capital of Culture. Hosted by the artist-run gallery Wolstenholme Projects, the show Studio Alberta will run from June 29 to July 13. Artists Carl White, Keith Diamond, Mark Holliday, Michael Jones and Laurie Steen have all been chosen to participate — most have a close family connection to England, and in some cases, to Liverpool. Chyz says that part of the motivation for putting the show together is to establish connections with that city’s art scene, with the aim of creating exhibition exchange opportunities between northern England and Alberta. The work created for Studio Alberta will be strongly focused on creating a sense of place that encompasses both locations, and will include painting, drawing, photography, and video. |
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STONE ANCESTOR RETURNS HOME
Facilitated by the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and the Sto:lo Tribal Council and Sto:lo Nation, a stone sculpture that had been in the collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle returned back north across the border after 100 years away from home. Spirited away in the early 20th century, the sculpture is a stone representation of Sto:lo ancestor T‘xwelátse, following the legend that T‘xwelátse was turned to stone as a punishment for mistreating his wife. The Sto:lo people, who live in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, had been working on repatriating the sculpture for almost 15 years. |
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ASHEVAK, METCALFE, JANVIER AMONG GG WINNERS
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Kenojuak Ashevak, The Enchanted Owl, stonecut, 2006, 61 x 66 cm, Edition of: 25 (red), 25 (green). Printer: Eegyvudluk Pootoogook / Iyola Kingwatsiak. Reproduced with the permission of:
Dorset Fine Arts.
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Cape Dorset artist Kenojuak Ashevak, Alberta painter Alex Janvier and Vancouver-based conceptual artist, curator and teacher Eric Metcalfe are among this year‘s recipients of the Governor General‘s Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Created to honour career achievement by Canadian artists and presented by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, each of the Award-winners receives $25,000, making it one of the most valuable prizes in visual and media arts in Canada. (continue...) |
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REICHERT WINS MANITOBA GRANT
Winnipeg-based fine art photographer Don Reichert is among this year’s recipients of the Manitoba Arts Grants, worth $25,000. Awarded by the Manitoba Arts Council to artists in all disciplines, the grant will allow Reichert to produce a new series of digital images on canvas and paper. A major contributor to the visual arts in Manitoba, Reichert had his first solo show at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Winnipeg in 1960, before teaching for 14 years at the University of Manitoba. His work is represented by the Martha Street Studio and Ken Segal Gallery, both in Winnipeg. |
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