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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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’ 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.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”