— BY Richard White

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

— BY Ross Bradley

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

— BY Helena Wadsley

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

— BY Gil McElroy

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

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

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

— BY Ross Bradley

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

— BY Patricia Dawn Robertson

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

— BY Amy Fung

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

— BY Brian Grison

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

— BY Patricia Dawn Robertson

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

— BY Helena Wadsley

For his solo exhibition in Vancouver, running simultaneously with his exhibition at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, Etienne Zack has painted a world of painting machines. Zack’s new paintings depict paintings making paintings of themselves. His recent move to Montreal from Vancouver, where he felt he was slowing down, seems to have propelled him into intense productivity where he paints himself as a machine. He is the automaton of his Autopia. What has changed from his past work is the absence of built structures as still-life props. He feels he no longer needs these visual references and his new works clearly show his imagination is very vivid without concrete visual references.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

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

— BY Ross Bradley

Now that the WOW factor has begun to wear off and the crowds have thinned out, we can stand back and assess the new Art Gallery of Alberta as a place to exhibit art. To give credit where credit is due, the architect and planning team have achieved the external impact they were aiming – a structure which commands attention from as far as four blocks away. The use of the abstract sweep of metal that literally moves through the exterior glass façade to dominate the entrance foyer is very appropriate for Edmonton given its internationally recognized abstract metal sculpture and painting communities -Peter Hyde, Al Reynolds, Clay Ellis, Isla Burns, Vesna Makale, Doug Haynes and John King). This exterior/interior flow also allows the visitor to successfully begin their experience of the building from the street, enabling the transition from the busy world outside to the more contemplative atmosphere of the gallery. Once inside however, the experience continues to be about the building with its powerful lines that keep one from making the shift from architectural tourist to gallery visitor.

— BY Michael Harris

I remember the first time I saw Isabelle Hayeur’s Fire with Fire video installation. A four storey building seemingly ablaze, with projected flames filling the windows of the top three floors, best viewed from the derelict end of Vancouver’s East Hastings Street. At five p.m. each day, as dusk settled over a city overrun with Olympic boosterism, Hayeur’s work was switched on; staff waited 30 seconds between igniting the second floor projector, the third, and the fourth, to heighten the sense of inexorable consumption.

— BY Stacey Abramson

The recent donation by artist Tony Scherman of 11 of his artworks to the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) is as the title suggests – major. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1974, this Canadian painter has been upheld as the leading encaustic artist in Canada. The paintings that Scherman gifted to the WAG represent a shining overview of his career, ranging from meaty still lifes, to zoomed-in portraiture, to historical reflections. The stature of these six foot, luscious canvases is heightened by Sherman’s encaustic application of thick layers of opaque hot wax drips which build up to create haunting works reflecting the extreme emotions associated with life and death.

— BY Helena Wadsley

Grainy sepia and ochre tones with hints of pinks and yellows describe skin tones. Muted bathroom tiles and shower curtains mixed with brighter colours in the items of clothing such as matching bra and panties in fuchsia create the venue. A hip juts outwards. Hands push breasts upwards. A clutter of cosmetics gives the artwork a messy, unprofessional look. In each portrait in Evan Lee’s Flashers series, the woman’s head is absent, replaced by a white orb, caused by the flash bouncing off the bathroom mirror. Lee is drawn to the failure of these found photographs where the flash erases the face; the ruptured image revealing a rawness, but hiding individuality. These photos weren’t made with extensive pre-planning, and as such they contain a naïveté. For Flashers, the pivotal work in RESTRICTED, a five artists exhibition, Lee prints with inkjet on the back of photographic paper whose plastic surface resists the ink. He brushes into the unfixed ink to achieve a painterly look, but does not attempt to alter the image. The result is a sensual brushstroke over an ambivalent, anonymous sexuality.

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

— BY Portia Priegert

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

— BY Richard White

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

— BY Liz Wylie

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

— BY Stacey Abramson

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

— BY Richard White

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

— BY Patricia Robertson

Montreal-based artist Patrick Traer is akin to that Goth baby-sitter who told you spooky bedtime stories and then turned out the bedroom light, marched down the hall and blissfully watched Elvira on TV while you experienced night terrors. (continue...)

— BY Gil McElroy

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

— BY Michael Harris

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

— BY Stacey Abramson

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

— BY Brian Grison

My first reading of Gerry Schallié’s 25 black and white photographs was that the Winchester Gallery exhibition consisted of late 19th-century documentary studies from a public archive or museum. They seemed oddly old-fashioned and reactionary.

— BY Mary Beth Laviolette

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

— BY Portia Priegert

Module, at the Kelowna Art Gallery, considers work created from multiples of similar units, bringing together three Western Canadian artists: Eliza Au, Ian Johnston and Lylian Klimek. Curated by Liz Wylie, the exhibition offers a spiritually informed collection that is more visually appealing than its functional title might suggest.

— BY Bettina Matzkuhn

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

— BY Michael Harris

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

— BY Beverly Cramp

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

— BY Diane Nelson

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

— BY Kimberly Croswell

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

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

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

— BY Stacey Abramson

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

— BY Stacey Abramson

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

— BY Beverly Cramp

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

— BY Patricia Robertson

The geography of the Big Empty, as the Great Plains are often called, is both a muse and a counterpoint for Saskatchewan’s emerging artists. This diverse group show, curated by Dan Ring and Jen Budney, is hard to pin down. From abstract acrylics to ceramic engines, the media and subject matter embraced by this large group of emerging artists is no longer confined by the traditional parameters of landscape painting or folk art.

— BY Mary-Beth Laviolette

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

— BY Liz Wylie

Although it initially seems straightforward enough, Ann Kipling’s work is complex and contradictory. Her drawings are at once beautiful, rich and sophisticated, yet also direct, uncomplicated and genuine. They are modest, yet ambitious, focused, but also universal. And though they are executed in traditional media — usually pencil on paper, sometimes with watercolour added, sometimes in ink — they push the limits of the drawing medium hard into the realm of filmic art. For, added to the usual means and vocabulary of drawing, is the notion of duration.

— BY Ann Rosenberg

The soundtrack of Louise Noguchi’s 1999 ten-video installation Study/Sketch is set up in the purposely darkened interior space at Centre A Gallery.

— BY Nicole Bauberger

What is the difference between art and garbage? In Abundance, Max Liboiron takes discoveries from Dawson City dumps and creates a modular installation depicting the town and its nuisance grounds, aiming to make trash valuable enough for viewers to take home. Liboiron avoids the pitfall of preachiness. The reports, research and dioramas she’s compiled could result in a show feeling too much like a school project, but the show’s inspiration is accessible and refreshingly lucid and fun. A seven-year-old boy spent half an hour playing with the installation the first morning it was open.

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

— BY Rob Alexander

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

— BY Portia Priegert

Derek Michael Besant infuses the mundane with poetic depth, transforming unmade beds in roadside motels into surreal landscapes of sumptuous voyeurism in Fifteen Restless Nights. His immersive blend of sound, text and image is an intimate yet powerful exploration of memory, language and the body — it lingers like a wayward dream on the fringes of awareness.

SASKATCHEWAN: Dorothy Knowles, Landmarks, June 20 to September 7, 2008, Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery

— BY Patricia Robertson

Saskatchewan landscape artist Dorothy Knowles is a Canadian icon — possibly the Emily Carr of the Back 40, or Saskatchewan’s lost member of the Group of Seven. So any exhibition of her work is an event, and the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery’s recent display of her paintings, Landmarks, offers an informed and evocative overview of Knowles’ exemplary body of work.

— BY Lorne Roberts

The recent creative history of Winnipeg brings up a number of successful artists influenced by Dadaists, graffiti art, and outsider artists like Henry Darger. The result is a form of fun, quirky Art Brut, but one that never sacrifices content for laughs. Winnipeg artist Dan Donaldson falls somewhere in that tradition, creating work with a whimsical, even childish side, with a more fully faceted perspective than might be at first apparent.

— BY Brian Grison

Cameron MacDonald's exhibition of over 700 labeled cans, ranging from 120 grams to 2 liters, was set up on the floor and against the walls of the Ministry of Casual Living, a 12- by 12-foot gallery space in Victoria. Viewable only through the gallery's single window, the display mimicked a typical big-box store display — shelves and pyramids of canned fish lined the walls and rose from the painted concrete floor.

— BY Portia Priegert

Gary Pearson’s paintings typically explore communal spaces – bars, restaurants, jazz concerts. But those social settings also underline the sense of disconnection of the solitary figures central to Pearson’s work. They create, in tandem with his somber palette, a certain melancholy. Even when he includes multiple figures, the feeling of isolation remains strong, in part because his subjects seem frozen in stereotype. (continue...)

— BY Allan Antliff

Woodrow is a remarkable multimedia installation honouring a rapidly disappearing farm town in southern Saskatchewan where the artist’s father was born and where his grandparents spent their lives. (continue...)

— BY Nicole Bauberger

In Eva Brandl’s Valse Suite, the viewer walks into space. Most of the installation’s pieces have gaps, holes, or pieces cut away, and conceptually it leaves space to wonder in. Brandl, born in Germany in 1951, lives and works in Montreal within an installation-based, European, minimalist aesthetic. For this Whitehorse show, she combines the work with Still points (of the turning world) from 2005. (continue...)

— BY Lorne Roberts

In this mid-career survey show at the Musee d'art contemporain in Montreal, Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer welcomes viewers into the gallery with a yellow Post-it note stuck to the wall, and a simple message scrawled in pencil: "It's not the work, it's the worker." (continue...)

— BY Brian Grison

Patrick Landsley, born in Winnipeg in 1926, is the quintessential modernist. His aesthetic developed within the formal concerns of late Cubism represented by the work of artists like Juan Gris and Ben Nicholson, but his paintings are more spontaneous than the modulations of space in Gris' work, and his compositions are less cerebral than Nicholson's.

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— BY Ann Rosenberg

Carol Sawyer’s photographs, videos, slide projections and sounds in installations linger in the mind long after they have been experienced. Although she is not currently as well known as Jeff Wall and his peers, in time her work will be judged to be among the best produced by Vancouver artists during the last two decades — it is always exquisitely wrought, strong in concept, poetic and leavened with a subtle sense of humour. Through mid September, several exhibitions of Sawyer’s current work have opened in Vancouver, her first since she installed a 2004 permanent installation called Tribute to the Cambie Works Yard.

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— BY Jennifer McVeigh

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

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— BY Ann Rosenberg

At this time of year, jolts of colour are welcome, and the hues in Peter John Voormeij’s paintings, when viewed at a distance through the generous windows of the Elliott Louis Gallery, have an exhilarating effect. Moving in closer and examining the individual pieces and their titles, pondering the rationale behind the show, certain questions arise.

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— BY Steven Ross Smith

Hovering is the word that comes to mind, in both the literal and figurative senses, when viewing the eleven large acrylic paintings on plywood, and ten small pastels on paper, in Grant McConnell’s latest show at The Gallery in Saskatoon. His paintings hover between representation and abstraction, between the literal and the metaphoric, between light and dark, between the airborne and the earthly, between surface and image.

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— BY Ann Rosenberg

His career began with “Fragments”, a series of approximately 90 small-format square colour photos on many subjects, shot between 1982 and 1985. With “Fragments”, Roy Arden developed his personal “pictorial skills” while still at art school, self-generated extensions of some of the categories already established in the bank of visual materials he collected as a child. His own early photos laid claim to several recurring subjects that, whether at home or abroad, Arden would record with his Rolleiflex.

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— BY Beverly Cramp

George Vergette is known for creating mixed media panels that are made luminous by his expert use of resin. The application of many layers, often over bits of acrylic- or oil-painted text, produces a sense of depth. Vergette’s latest mixed media show at Bjornson Kajiwara gallery in Vancouver, The Waning Light, works with maquettes and found objects, bringing together past technique and introducing forays into new territory. The show is alive with notions of nature and man.

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— BY Portia Priegert

The dissimulation of identity, with its promise of temporary release from social norms, has long intrigued artists. Cultures around the globe have exploited the potential of costumes and masks, including Western artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Matthew Barney. Disguise plays a central role in the concept of the carnivalesque as developed by cultural theorist Mikhail Bachtin. He sees it as a mechanism that reveals subconscious truths and opens new avenues of social access.

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— BY Nicole Bauberger

The Yukon provides an excellent context to consider opposites — the easy assumption that natural is good and manufactured is bad falls away in a place where a person can die from lack of manufactured shelter. In this place, The Natural & The Manufactured, a project that has entered its third year of residency and exhibition at Dawson City’s Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, marks out a conceptual territory. The artists’ talks, with Carin Mincemoyer and Jefferson Campbell-Cooper, take place before the viewers are allowed to see either exhibition, and the series is serious about exploring ideas.

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— BY Helena Wadsley

Successful students are often the products of good teachers, and each artist in Cartographies is either a professor or a recent graduate of the University of Guelph. The Masters program there is rigorous, one where, as graduate Martin Golland suggests, the timid artist would be out of place. While the work of each artist in this show is distinctly individual, there resides in each work an unmistakable affection for paint paired with a process that involves both accumulating and dissolving tangible subject matter, and the results are stunning.

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

— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

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

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BRITISH COLUMBIA: Marianna Schmidt: Carnaval Photographs & Paintings, June 25 – Aug 30, Teck Gallery, SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver; Selected Prints & Drawings, Jul 10 – Aug 26, Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby; Mixed Media Works 1963-2002, Jul 13 – Sept 15, Evergreen Art Centre, Coquitlam

— BY Ann Rosenberg

Over 100 expertly chosen works by Marianne Schmidt are hung in three concurrent shows in the Lower Mainland, and the installation of work at each venue elucidates and astounds. Together, they constitute a fitting memorial for a reclusive, eccentric artist who died at 87 in 2005. At the time, she had been virtually forgotten by the local art community, which had recognized her unusual gifts when she began her career in the mid-‘60s after enrolling in the Vancouver School of Art at age 42.

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— BY Wes Lafortune

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

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— BY Dina O’Meara

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

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— BY Beverly Cramp

"...all knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no questions, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself. Nothing is given. All is constructed." Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher and poet, 1934.

At first glance, animal lovers will have a difficult time viewing Corri-Lynn Tetz’s latest paintings at Bjornson Kajiwara Gallery. Six of the seven works are images of hunters posing with their kill:

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— BY Marlene Milne

Entering the Red Shift Gallery and experiencing the paintings of Riel Benn made me think about the concept of "persona": how an alter ego gives the freedom to manipulate, to comment and observe, and to wryly make political statements.

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— BY Beverly Cramp

Growing up in British Columbia, it’s hard to escape landscape. “You’re surrounded by it and it becomes part of your identity,” says Erin McSavaney, whose first solo show of paintings and collages at Atelier Gallery is made up of industrial, man-made landscapes. McSavaney had previously focused on images of the natural world including forest interiors, mountains and rivers.

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— BY Steven Ross Smith

The enduring process of rendering a view of nature into art is re-focused through a 21st-century lens in a two-artist exhibition titled Handheld Landscape at AKA Gallery in Saskatoon. Toronto’s Toni Hafkenscheid and B.C.-based artist Tim van Wijk use photographic and sculptural/dioramic media, respectively, and the term ‘handheld’ signifies a “theme of re-visioning the landscape into pocket-size portions.” The reduction is more conceptual than actual here.

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— BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

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

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— BY Brian Grison

Day by Day is an exhibition of 77 drawings gleaned from 39 years of journals kept by sculptor Mowry Baden. Most of the drawings do not in fact resemble typical journal entries, because by 1980 Baden had developed the habit of either drawing on other sheets of paper and tipping them into the books or filling a whole page with one or more drawings, and using other pages for writing. In other words, he developed the strategy of segregating the drawings from his more personal thoughts. This evolution of the relationship between journal writing and sketching ideas for sculptures becomes apparent when certain early drawings in the exhibition are studied. The drawing dated July 24, 1962 is on the lined pages of a small notebook in which he began writing when he was a 22-year-old undergraduate student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1958.

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— BY Amy Karlinsky

Two intriguing shows in Winnipeg this spring have both been initiated, in part, by the presence of printmaker Lynne Allen, a Tamarind master printmaker, Fulbright scholar, and head of the School of Visual Arts at Boston University. Allen, who was in Winnipeg earlier in the year, delivered a week-long workshop for Aboriginal artists at the Manitoba Printmakers Association Martha Street Studio. The first show, at Urban Shaman Gallery, curated by Director Steve Loft, is Across a Divide: Two Master Printmakers Ahmoo Angeconeb/ Lynne Allen. This is a spacious show, beautifully installed, and supported by ample white space and cryptic wall quotes, provoking the viewer to examine the underpinnings of the two distinct bodies of work. Two-person shows lend themselves to questions about similarities and differences, and in this case the differences are striking.

— BY Beverly Cramp

North America’s love affair with the automobile takes on a double meaning in Chris Woods’ latest works on modern culture. At least two of his large, allegorical oil paintings show contemporary people in modern settings wielding medieval-looking swords.

— BY Lorne Roberts

In his first solo show at Ken Segal Gallery, Winnipeg-based artist Douglas Smith looks at the almost mind-boggling precision behind movement and travel in the global age, and interprets it through the realm of fine art.

— BY Amy Fung

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

— BY Jack Anderson

With the bison already familiar to us within First Nations’ artistic practices both past and present - notably, for example, in the installation and video work of Vancouver artist Dana Claxton and in the turbulent paintings of Saskatchewan artist Neal McLeod - we are forced to ask not if this symbol can still be deployed, but how it can remain meaningful within the array of artistic discourse that has so frequently referred to it.

In his first solo commercial painting show, Bison Heart, Saskatoon artist Adrian Stimson adopts the bison as a broad cultural symbol of First Nations people, their diverse cultures and their history since colonialism.

— BY Wes Lafortune

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

— BY Lorne Roberts

I think the general public tends to like my paintings and the art world tends not to like them. And the art world likes the installations while the general public is perhaps mystified by them."

— BY Beverly Cramp

With the rise in conceptual art and new media, traditional printmaking techniques such as lithography, intaglio and woodcuts can often be regarded as passé, and because of its attention to craft and tradition, printmaking is sometimes viewed as ‘all technique and no concept’. But a recent exhibition by a group of art instructors from Greater Vancouver shows that printmaking can be experimental and progressive.

— BY Allan Antliff

Technical virtuosity and sentimentally find their resolution in Marilyn McAvoy’s meditations on the theme of memento mori which updates the 17th century tradition of Dutch vanitas painting and gives it a personal touch. The Dutch depicted exquisitely beautiful arrangements of flowers, fruits, and vegetables in finely crafted vases and plates and inscribed them with stages of decay – wilted petals, fruit that is blemished or over-ripe, chipped and cracked porcelain – to remind us of the fleeting nature of life’s passage and our mortal imperfections in the face of God. McAvoy evokes the theme of time’s passage by way of personal loss and the enduring ways in which we remember those who have passed away. 

SASKATCHEWAN: Conex-Us, Jan 19 – March 25, 2007 Mendel Gallery, Saskatoon

— BY Cathryn Miller

Conex-Us is the first of three exhibitions at Saskatoon’s Mendel Gallery organized by Adrian A. Stimson under the umbrella title Articulation. The project explores different meanings and contexts for the word “articulation”, and Conex-Us is an examination of the interconnectedness of artists, curators, and the wider cultural community. A show of work by 12 artists, it is also an exploration of the curatorial process.

SASKATCHEWAN: Alicia Popoff: Time Within, Nov 18 – Dec 7 The Gallery / Art Placement, Saskatoon
— BY Cathryn Miller

Alicia Popoff’s recent paintings are luminous, with a quality of light that reaches the viewer before the detail in the paintings. (continue...)

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Michael Hermesh, Oct 26 – Nov 10, 2006 Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna
— BY Portia Priegert

Figurative artist Michael Hermesh has no shortage of baggage – roped bundles, bulky satchels and bulging suitcases feature conspicuously in his bronze and ceramic sculptures. (continue...)

ALBERTA: Marie Lannoo: Sight Unseen, Oct 21 to Nov 25, Newzones Gallery, Calgary
— BY Wes Lafortune

This collection of new paintings by Marie Lannoo does not represent objects. Instead, it’s a nexus of techniques and emotions that transcend the convenient categories often placed around creativity. (continue...)

BRITISH COLUMBIA Ross Bollerup Good Dog, Sept 14 – Oct 21, Evergreen Cultural Centre, Coquitlam
— BY Beverly Cramp

It’s true that many of the pieces in Ross Bollerup’s show Good Dog contain images of dogs, people and balls. Bollerup does write in his artist statement specifically about his family dog Jessie (who was at the show’s opening night reception). Yet the images evoke more than dog as man’s best friend. (continue...)

MANITOBA: Cliff Eyland: Cameras, Cellphones and Hard Drives, Sept 21 to Oct 21, Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg
— BY Lorne Roberts

Since at least 1981, Cliff Eyland has been working in tiny, file-card sized paintings, mostly on board. He’s exhibited widely with the style, including an ongoing installation project in the Raymond Fogelman Library at the New School University in New York, (continue...)

ALBERTA: Charles Malinsky: The Journey – We’ll Meet Again, Sept 9 to Oct 7, Herringer-Kiss Gallery, Calgary
— BY Wes Lafortune

Painter Charles Malinsky is on a spectacular journey. From his birthplace in Canada to his adopted home in Spain, Malinsky weaves tales using figures that at one moment seem familiar, and then suddenly evade us like apparitions disappearing into thin air. (continue...)

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Shima Iuchi: Illuminations of Kamloops, Sept 9 - Oct 29, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond BC
— BY Bettina Matzkuhn

Imagine the mountains surrounding the confluence of the North and South Thompson rivers illuminated by the setting sun. Now imagine them glowing from a light source within. Consider the grand scale, the mass of stone and trees and rushing, silty water. Then contrast this with the fragility and feather-light quality of paper, and the ephemeral presence of the human voice. (continue...)

SASKATCHEWAN: Kevin McKenzie: Re-Animator, Jul 19 – Sept 24, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina
— BY David Garneau

Kevin McKenzie's Re-Animator stirs up some interesting questions about how we read photographs. If you stumbled into this exhibition knowing nothing about the artist, you would see one show. But if you read the artist's and curator's statements, you would find yourself contemplating an entirely different one. (continue...)

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Lisa Samphire Pattern in Light August 4 - September 5, 2006, Circle Craft Co-operative, Vancouver
— BY Bettina Matzkuhn

Lisa Samphire’s glass vessels are enrobed in rhythmic stripes, circles, striated bands and blocks of colour. Their patterning isn’t ‘put on’, rather it is literally built into the material. In textiles, metal or clay, the patterns would generally be applied to the surface; in Samphire’s glass, the pattern is both decoration and structure. (continue...)

MANITOBA: Clay Ho! Let’s Sew!, July 20 – Aug 31, 2006, Gallery 803, Winnipeg
— By Kristen Pauch-Nolin

Defined by a wild and diverse range of styles, the cohesion of Clay Ho! Let’s Sew at Gallery 803 in Winnipeg’s Elan Designs showroom is found through quirk, rather than an overarching theme or shared aesthetic. Jenny Moore Koslowsky, Johanna Schmidt, Mari Ono, Kelli Rey, Denise C. Miller, and Naomi Schmidt each create work that is funny, industrious and straightforward, drawing inspiration from personal experience. (continue...)

MANITOBA: Situation Comedy: Humour in Recent Art, June 10 — Sept 10, 2006, Winnipeg Art Gallery
— BY Amy Karlinsky

Situation Comedy is a surprisingly abstruse and alienating experience. Consisting of over sixty works culled mostly from American sources, the exhibition was curated by Dominic Molon and Michael Rooks for Independent Curators International based in New York. (continue...)

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Lindy Michie, Passionate Reflections, June 18 — July 8, 2006, The New West Gallery, Sidney, BC
— BY Grant Hayter-Menzies

It's not particularly important to know that Victoria-based painter Lindy Michie's grandmother was the famed Scottish artist Anne Redpath, or that her father, Alastair Michie, is a noted painter and sculptor in the UK, but (continue...)

ALBERTA: Lylian Klimek, New Green, June 6 — Sept 3, 2006, Art Gallery of Calgary, Calgary
— BY Nicholas Roukes

H.G. Wells's lesser known book, Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth (1904), presents a scenario in which a "new scientific wonder" escapes control and produces runaway genetic mutations — giant leeches, plants and cockroaches, and a new race of giant people (continue...)