Ruth Cuthand, at home in Saskatoon. PHOTO: Liam Richards

RUTH CUTHAND’S TRADING SERIES PUTS THE LEGACY OF HISTORIC COLONIAL COMMERCE UNDER A MICROSCOPE

BY Patricia Dawn Robertson

Ruth Cuthand describes a recent crisis of faith she had about her art practice. “Was this really just a hobby?” she thought. “Was I turning my art into an expensive hobby? That was the issue I wrestled with in my 50s. Then the idea for the Trading project came up.”

(continue...)

SHORT

Artist Herb Sellin at the A7 Ranche. PHOTO: JUNE HILLS

THE CALGARY STAMPEDE IS IN THE SECOND YEAR OF A PROJECT TO MIX CONTEMPORARY ART WITH WESTERN TRADITION

BY BOB KEELAGHAN

“Repeatedly what comes up is Calgary being criticized for being culturally void,” says Tim Belliveau, one of three artists invited to participate in the Calgary Stampede’s Artist Ranch Project last summer. Belliveau should know. He’s a Calgary-based artist. He thinks part of the reason the project — which invites contemporary artists to creatively re-evaluate the traditions of western art — came together was that the Stampede itself was being blamed for branding Calgary as a cultural backwater. It’s the biggest white-hatted symbol in a city that both embraces and shuns its own cowboy story.

(continue...)

Artist Ann Kipling. Photo: Yuri Akuney

WITH A LIGHT, FREE HAND, THIS B.C. ARTIST CAPTURES THE CHANGING FACE OF HER MOUNTAIN HOME

BY Portia Priegert

Most mornings, Ann Kipling trudges up the hill behind her house, lugging her drawing board to a shady vantage point with a panoramic view of the Salmon River valley near Falkland, British Columbia. Kipling, now in her 70s, sits on the ground and waits for something to inspire her, whether clouds hovering over a distant ridge or sunlight splashing over a rocky outcrop.

(continue...)

Outside the new SFU Woodwards building, Vancouver. Photo: Gormann Lee

WITH THE NEW AUDAIN GALLERY AT WOODWARD’S, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY ESTABLISHES A CULTURAL STRONGHOLD ON VANCOUVER’S DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

BY Fiona Morrow

It’s a provocative image. A woman has her back to us, arms spread wide, hip cocked. She’s dressed in denim — jeans and jacket — and her black, shoulder-length hair is streaked with grey. This life-size portrait hangs in triptych form in a window facing Vancouver’s East Hastings Street — the main artery of the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood ravaged by poverty and drugs.

(continue...)

Bonnie Devine, Writing Home, installation, Urban Shaman. Photo: Scott Stephens

BONNIE DEVINE: WRITING HOME, FEBRUARY 12 TO MARCH 27, 2010, URBAN SHAMAN, WINNIPEG

BY Marlene Milne

The genesis of Bonnie Devine’s exhibition is a journey that begins on October, 2007 at the Art Gallery of Sudbury, where, as curator, she has just launched Daphne Odjig: A Retrospective Exhibition. The show will tour Canada and into the U.S., arriving at the National Gallery of Canada in late fall, 2009. But curating this show has renewed the creative urge in Bonnie Devine, the artist.

(continue...)

Illustration by Genevieve Simms.

IN THE RUSH TO CREATE ICONIC ARCHITECTURE AND ATTRACT BIG SHOWS, HOW FAR ARE MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES MOVING FROM THEIR CORE PRINCIPLES? PLUS: FOUR REGIONAL GALLERIES MOVE INTO THE FUTURE

BY RICHARD WHITE

In the spring of 2009, I was in Europe researching how different cities create their own “sense of place.” While in Paris, I couldn’t help but notice the role that large-scale exhibitions and iconic architecture play in creating that city’s identity. Everywhere, there were huge posters reminding visitors of the “not-to-be-missed” blockbuster retrospective exhibitions, all in iconic buildings around the city — Kandinsky and Calder at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Warhol at the Grand Palais, De Chirico at the Musée d’Art Moderne, and Rodin at Musée d’Orsay.

(continue...)

The Great Hall inside the newly renovated Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. PHOTO: Goh Iromoto.

DESIGN DETAILS: THE MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY

BY Jill Sawyer

Research and education form the foundation of recent upgrades to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. Now, with a $2.5-million grant from the Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Museum will be able to further support its mandate for building and displaying important public shows.

(continue...)

The Les Manning Gallery at the Historic Clay District in Medicine Hat, Alberta.

DESIGN DETAILS: THE SHAW CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS

BY Katherine Wasiak

For decades, the Medalta Potteries in Medicine Hat, Alberta produced 75 per cent of all the dishes manufactured in Canada. Stoneware for the armed forces, railway dining cars, restaurants, and homes across the country all came from the Hat. Today, Medicine Hat’s Historic Clay District celebrates the community’s significant past in industrial ceramic production and nurtures a future for ceramics arts. Western Canada’s largest national historic site, the Historic Clay District covers 150 acres and includes the restored 1912 Medalta Potteries factory, the Hycroft China site, the last remaining beehive kiln from the massive Alberta Clay Products plant, and now, the new Shaw International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics.

(continue...)

Outside the new Montrose Cultural Centre in Grande Prairie, Alberta. PHOTO: Shai Gill.

DESIGN DETAILS: THE PRAIRIE ART GALLERY

BY Jill Sawyer

It’s difficult to tell whether Robert Steven is in an enviable position or not. He began his tenure as the executive director / curator of the Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Alberta, in October of 2006. Five months later, in March, the roof of the historic gallery collapsed under a load of snow, making the space completely uninhabitable, its future up in the air. On the bad side, after rescuing all the art in the Gallery’s considerable collection, he and his team had to map out a strategy for rebuilding. On the good side, he was in a position to completely rethink the future of the Gallery, an opportunity that doesn’t come along often, even in the career of an ambitious, innovative director like Robert Steven.

(continue...)

Edmonton’s new Art Gallery of Alberta, designed by Randall Stout Architects. PHOTO: Robert Lemermeyer.

DESIGN DETAILS: THE ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA

BY Amy Fung

With so much emphasis focused on the redesign of the exterior of Edmonton’s Art Gallery of Alberta, visitors might forget that the interior has also been completely redesigned by Randall Stout’s architectural firm. Building on top of the existing site northeast of Sir Winston Churchill Square, the new building not only adds an additional 35,000 square feet of functional space, it expands with an additional 18,000 square feet of off-site museum-quality storage. The gallery will have doubled its available space when it opens to the public on January 31.

(continue...)

The Quilt of Belonging at Surrey Art Gallery. PHOTO: © NICK WOLOCHATIUK

COMPLEMENTING THE WINTER GAMES, VANCOUVER WILL HOST HUNDREDS OF ARTS EVENTS — WE’VE CHOSEN A FEW HOT TICKETS

BY BEVERLY CRAMP

When the starter’s pistol goes off in late January, Vancouverites and visitors will be rushing to soak up as much culture as has ever been hosted in the city at one time. Programmed as a companion to the 2010 Winter Olympics, and running through mid-March, the Cultural Olympiad will bring a five-ring circus of arts events to the region — music, theatre, dance, film, new media, and more. Among the Olympiad’s visual arts exhibitions — a giant quilt made of 263 squares, a moveable tea party celebrated with people around the world, a mock-up of an Irish pub, part sculptural, part performance art, First Nations stories told on painted banners — these are our picks for shows not-to-be-missed.

(continue...)

Kenojuak Ashevak in her lithography studio. PHOTO: © MARTIN LIPMAN

THE GRANDE DAME OF KINNGAIT, THIS NORTHERN PRINTMAKER HAS QUIETLY BECOME ONE OF THE MOST HONOURED ARTISTS IN CANADA

BY AMY KARLINSKY

Kenojuak Ashevak’s art is easily recognized by its emblematic depictions in dazzling colour and careful detail. Her work is something of a northern bestiary, with its invention of fanciful appendages on common animals. Wings swell and swoon. Plumage glows with fantastical colour. Parading past are owls, ptarmigans, sea maids, goddesses, fish, suns, ravens and bears in formal and balanced combinations, making the implausible seem possible with the addition of a realistic detail or two — the curl of a talon, the exact contour of a duck’s neck.

(continue...)

BY HEATHER RAMSAY

Visual artists in British Columbia won’t know until after the Olympics what the state of arts support will be in the province’s near future, but reductions in government funding, and rumours of further cuts to the BC Arts Council budget, have left arts groups reeling.

The 2010 Cultural Olympiad funding is the only reason the Or can offer a show in February, she says. The exhibition, Ginger Goodwin Way, will feature dance, sculpture and other contemporary art practices exploring the idea of contested histories. The works, by several different artists, are inspired by a piece of Vancouver Island highway named after a miner whose killing in 1918 sparked B.C.’s first general strike. A commemorative sign was erected in his honour on Vancouver Island in 1996, but it was quietly removed when the BC Liberals took power in 2001.

Brown hopes the exhibition, an exploration of official and unofficial narratives, will create a space to talk about funding levels. The province’s visual artists and arts organizations already scrape by with some of the lowest funding levels in Canada — a sad situation considering European curators are buzzing about the high-level conceptual art coming out of the province, she says. Artists like Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen, Geoffrey Farmer and Mwfanwy MacLeod have had some of their first shows in galleries like the Or, and their groundbreaking work has brought international attention to B.C. “These people were forged in the public sector art movement,” Brown says.

Spencer Herbert, NDP MLA and culture critic maintains that the government’s own documents reveal that a dollar spent in arts funding brings $1.05 to $1.36 back to the province’s coffers in taxes. The arts and culture sector in B.C. also generates 80,000 jobs and $5.2 billion annually.

Two different pots of provincial money provide essential operating funds for arts organizations — gaming funds through the Ministry of Housing and Social Development, and arts grants through the B.C. Arts Council. In 2008/09 $18 million in gaming grants went to 840 arts organizations throughout the province and in 09/10 only $8.9 million went to 350 groups. B.C. Arts Council spokesperson Chris Gudgeon says they were able to maintain their funding levels (at around $18 million) this year by counting supplemental funds given out last year. Clients had been told to save that money for 2009/2010, but, he admitted, the 2010/2011 budget is still up in the air.

Jennifer Pickering, director of Kelowna’s Alternator Gallery, says the public may not understand the cuts. “This isn’t special project funding,” she says. “This is how we pay our phone bills, staff and rent.” The Alternator, which also offers media arts space, workshops and residencies, is in a better position than most — their multi-year gaming funding was restored in August after a huge outcry from across the province saw the government reverse some of the original cuts. But she doesn’t know what the facility, now housed in the Kelowna Arts Centre, will look like in two years. “Maybe we’ll be back to meeting in people’s basements,” she says.

Pickering is also worried about losing locally-based artists to larger cities. The Alternator, which puts on solo shows essential to career development for emerging artists, has already had to scale back. “There is so much demand to provide so many things,” she says. But without secure cultural funding, not even she, originally from Vernon, will be able to continue living and working in the B.C. Interior.

Judy Chicago, The Fall (detail), modified Aubusson tapestry, wool and silk, 1993, 54" X 216", woven by Audrey Cowan. Collection of Audrey and Robert Cowan. PHOTO: © DONALD WOODMAN

THIRTY YEARS AFTER THE DINNER PARTY, MAVERICK ARTIST JUDY CHICAGO FINDS NEW LIFE IN AN ART GALLERY OF CALGARY RETROSPECTIVE OF HER ICONIC TEXTILES

BY MARY-BETH LAVIOLETTE

As an artist and a feminist icon, Judy Chicago is feeling pretty good these days. “I have outlived my critics. That’s why my career is a miracle!” she says from her home in New Mexico. “I set out to break the cycle of erasure with The Dinner Party and in the mid-90s, when my career was in the toilet, it looked like The Dinner Party would be erased too.”

(continue...)

Barbara Heller, Afghan Woman, Cover Up Series.

BY MARY-BETH LAVIOLETTE

Textiles have become a surprisingly fertile social and political medium for artists (mostly female – plus a very few men). Like Judy Chicago found 30 years ago, it becomes particularly effective to subvert the traditional “womanly arts”. Here are a few contemporary practitioners.

(continue...)

Scott Rogers at the Dawson City dump.

NOTES AND PHOTOS FROM ARTIST SCOTT ROGERS’ RESIDENCY AT THE KLONDIKE INSTITUTE OF ART AND CULTURE

BY SCOTT ROGERS

THE PIT

Sometime in May, I was standing in a dark bar, illuminated by Christmas lights and packed with a mob of people as diverse as the decor. A song came on the stereo: Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Suddenly, across the room an elderly woman, likely over 70, shuffled out of her chair and climbed atop the wobbly Formica table. She gained a steady footing and proceeded to gyrate for the crowd, which started to cheer. Cameras and glasses were raised to document and toast the improvised go-go performance. As the song wrapped up, she got down, teetering to the exit, waving to the crowd as she passed into the 2 a.m. twilight.

(continue...)

Brent Laycock, Tulip, acrylic 24" x 24".

PRAIRIE PAINTER BRENT LAYCOCK’S LANDSCAPES PLAY WITH PERCEPTION

BY DINA O'MEARA

“I always see a subject more as a launching pad for something else,” artist Brent Laycock says from his home in southwest Calgary. “Sometimes something that seems at first glance to be dull and boring is complex and interesting. What I want to do is take landscape themes and abstract them a little further.”

(continue...)

Artist Dana Holst in her Edmonton studio.

THE WEIRD, WONDERFUL WORLD OF EDMONTON PAINTER DANA HOLST

BY JILL SAWYER

There’s a heartbreaking quality to Dana Holst’s girls. She captures them at a precise fleeting moment of independence, when childhood is quickly moving into adolescence. They’re proud and sunny, posing with their dance costumes and baby dolls, but Holst often paints an almost imperceptible shadow of uncertainty into their faces — as if they’re living the last unburdened moments of their lives.

(continue...)

Jennifer Angus, installation view, Insecta Fantasia, the Newark Museum.

INFLUENCED BY ECOLOGICAL EMERGENCY OR A SIMPLE FASCINATION WITH SCIENCE, THESE FOUR CANADIAN ARTISTS ARE INSPIRED BY INSECTS

BY PORTIA PRIEGERT

Bzzzzzz – splat.

Your first impulse may be to slap or spray, but a growing swarm of artists is getting an itch to work with everything from ants and aphids to wasps and weevils. While bugs have long inspired creativity — think of scarab beetles decorating ancient Egyptian tombs — contemporary artists are finding interesting new ways to look at the diverse and populous insect world.

(continue...)

Illustration by Christina Ung.

PRESIDENT AND CEO JEFFREY SPALDING’S ABRUPT DEPARTURE FROM THE GLENBOW MUSEUM REIGNITES CALGARY’S DIZZYING DEBATE OVER CONTEMPORARY ART

BY MARY-BETH LAVIOLETTE

When Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and its CEO and President, Jeffrey Spalding parted company in early January, ending a five-year contract still in its infancy, there were barely enough words to describe the dismay and anger sparked in the local art community. Spalding had been on the job for exactly 13 months, enough to create more than a ripple of interest across the country and, within the city itself, a palpable sense of excitement.

(continue...)

Heather Benning, Doll House, installation view, 2008.

AFTER A SERIES OF STARTLING LARGE-SCALE INSTALLATIONS, HEATHER BENNING’S NEW WORK JUST LOOKS LIKE CHILD’S PLAY

BY ANDREW MARKLE

A few kilometres from Sinclair, Manitoba, just off Highway 2, an abandoned farmhouse stands alone in an open sea of grassland, a marker that says, We were once here. On this flat landscape, the house looms out of the ground like a skyscraper, and the only sign of life is from the occasional trucker driving by or the steady chunking of oil derricks pumping with mechanical regularity, day and night, in the surrounding fields.

(continue...)

Goota Ashoona, Parents Swinging Child, beluga whalebone, 2008.

A DELICATE BALANCE CARVING ETHEREAL FIGURES IN FOUND WHALEBONE, THE ASHOONA STUDIO KEEPS IT ALL IN THE FAMILY

BY NICOLE BAUBERGER. PHOTOGRAPHS BY PATRICK KANE

Goota Ashoona’s Whalebone Carver holds twin male figures in her hands. They form a ring, joined at hand and foot, gleefully proceeding from her heart-shaped torso. Her torso has a hole through the middle, the shape of the whale vertebra it’s carved from. In Bob Kussy’s Mother, a mother carries a child in her hood, their faces carved from the porous, vulnerable centre of a whalebone. Smooth, hard wings grow from their bodies, sporting propellers.

(continue...)

Artist David Diviney. Photo Rebecca Rowley.

THE DO-IT-YOURSELF DECONSTRUCTIONS OF DAVID DIVINEY

BY PORTIA PRIEGERT

It looks like a mountain range of snow, pile upon pile of billowing white that evokes a northern winter of record-breaking ferocity. But as viewers draw closer to Drift, any illusion of a blizzard’s harsh grip melts like a spring chinook. Turns out, Drift is just a snow job.

(continue...)

Stan Douglas, Overture (1986). Courtest the artist and David Zwirner, NY.

The MacKenzie Art Gallery unspools the best in Canadian projection-based art

BY Jill Sawyer

The film opens with a grainy, flickering black-and-white shot of a train track in the Rocky Mountains, the camera following the line as it precariously balances itself high on a mountainside, disappearing in and out of tunnels. The camera has been mounted on the front of a train, filming a moving picture that would have been a novelty when it was shot, in the earliest days of film at the turn of the century. As the film continues on an endless, seven-minute loop, forever circling into tunnels and out again, a seemingly disconnected voiceover reads from the first paragraph of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

(continue...)

Luke Lindoe’s Virgin Mary and Christ Child, installed on Calgary’s St. Mary’s Cathedral in 1957.

Calgary gallerist Virginia Christopher watches over the legacy of this southwestern Alberta iconoclast

BY Jill Sawyer

Virginia Christopher likes to describe her old friend Luke Lindoe in terms of his uncanny ability with clay. In southwestern Alberta, where he lived off and on for much of his life, he had a knack for searching out the best deposits in an area known for its first-class studio clay. “He had an intuition about water courses,” she says. “He understood the drift of things in the Cypress Hills, he knew where the deposits would end up.” It was a skill that brought him again and again to those arid river valleys around Medicine Hat, where he could range out onto the prairie, searching for dinosaur bones and inspiration for an outpouring of artistic work — sketches, paintings, pots, plates, sculptures.

(continue...)

Justin Ogilvie, Decision, coloured pencil on canvas, 2006, 37” X 37”. Ogilvie was a finalist for the 2007 Kingston Prize.

In the ever-growing world of fine art competitions, what does it mean to make the shortlist?

BY Heather Ramsay

Tomas Svab was like hundreds of other art students in Canada in the spring of 2005. He was scrambling to finish his last year at Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design while juggling practical problems — finding enough room to work at school, making do with equipment shortages and wondering about the amount of space he’d have to hang his photo installation in the overcrowded grad show.

(continue...)

Les Manning working at the Fule International Ceramic Art Museums in Fu Ping, China

Creating abstract, sculptural forms that evoke Alberta landscapes, this artist and mentor has taken Canadian ceramics to the world

BY Katherine Wasiak

Les Manning is an artist, senior arts administrator, advisor, juror, lecturer, workshop leader, and strong advocate for ceramic arts. His passion for the form has taken him around the world, exhibiting in Asia, Europe, Egypt, the United States, New Zealand, Australia and across Canada, and his sculptures are found in collections in Canada, the United States, Japan, Asia, and Europe. “It’s wonderful to be able to do something you’re passionate about,” he says. “I love where my life has taken me.”

(continue...)

Jennifer Saleik (left) and David Foy with Dave and Jenn, You’re a Long Way From the Sea, two-sided painting: mixed media, 2008, 50" X 37" X 6.5".

Partners and painters, together Dave and Jenn are creating something entirely new

BY Kay Burns

The signature on their artworks, and the label references in exhibitions, reads ‘Dave and Jenn’. David Foy and Jennifer Saleik have gone well beyond the usual interpretation of the term ‘collaboration’ and have forged new paths through joint practice, willingly shedding their individual identities and discovering new techniques and creative results in the process. This is how they got there.

(continue...)

Chris Flodberg, Giant Squid, oil on canvas, 2007, 72" X 72".

Chris Flodberg, Lisa Wood and Dougal Graham are looking at classic subjects with a fresh eye

BY Kay Burns, Amy Karlinsky and Ann Rosenberg

(continue...)

Daphne Odjig Photo Courtesy Martin Lipman, Canada Council

With a retrospective show opening at the Kamloops Art Gallery, painter Daphne Odjig is celebrated for her far-reaching influence

BY Marlene Milne

Behind the auditorium of Laurentian University in Sudbury, a gravel road cuts through the rocks and foliage of the Canadian Shield. Sealed bags dot the natural canvas of the outdoors at random intervals. Huddled for warmth and shelter from the rain and night chill a committed crowd waits expectantly for Rebecca Belmore’s performance tribute to Daphne Odjig. A car speeds through, stopping on a grassy pitch, the car’s brights go on and the story begins. Breathing, at first soft, escalates to panting as Belmore reenacts the journey in the painting From Mother Earth Flows the River of Life (1973). She rips open a sack, kneels, and in broad circular swipes, merges the red sand with the wet ground. It becomes a struggle, a labour, a ritual, and a metaphor...the layers of crimson mirroring Odjig’s own ripples through the history of Canadian art. At the finish, an exhausted but triumphant Belmore, soaked in red, reaches the car and embraces Odjig, the grandmother of the Woodland School.

(continue...)

Aganetha Dyck in her Winnipeg studio. Photo Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press, March 28, 2007 Reproduced with Permission.

Twisting natural process into fine art, this Winnipeg-based master artist elevates everyday objects

BY Brian Brennan

The newspaper headlines, predictably playful, talk about her “cooking up a honey of a show” or “minding her own beeswax.” With help from swarms of honeybees, veteran Winnipeg artist Aganetha Dyck makes provocative sculpture and mixed-media installations that explore how knowledge is transmitted between humans and other species. “I have millions of collaborators,” she says with a laugh. “I look after them well.”

(continue...)

Whyte Avenue in Edmonton's Old Strathcona District

Tasked with attracting members of the “creative class”, Western Canadian cities are all confronting the challenges of developing truly vital cultural districts

BY Richard White

For most Western Canadian cities, the last half of the 20th century was a time of decline at the core — everybody was literally fleeing to the suburbs. Even Vancouver, for all its urban vitality, saw the deterioration of its Granville Mall, Gastown, Chinatown and East Hastings districts. But the first decade of the 21st century has been much kinder to our city centres — they’re quickly morphing from places to work into urban playgrounds. While much has been written about the booms in downtown Vancouver and Calgary, there have also been significant changes in the city centres of Kelowna, Edmonton and Winnipeg, and there are a few reasons for the shift.

(continue...)

Dogfish, Raven and Sun Pendant, Fred Davis, Haida, mastodon ivory, 14K gold, abalone shell. 2.5" X 1.5" X 1.25", at Coastal Peoples Fine Arts Gallery

First Nations Sculptors Scale It Down

BY Beverly Cramp

It’s becoming more and more popular for galleries specializing in contemporary First Nations art to exhibit collections of smaller-scale work. But the styles and techniques for miniature sculpture have been around for a very long time.

(continue...)

Artist Sarah Beck with Mother mannequins

Mother is on January 18 to April 6 at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon.

BY Steven Ross Smith

“I love using advertising because it’s a universal language,” says Sarah Beck. “People respond to it and understand it.” Beck’s work takes the common elements and images of consumerist culture and weaves them together with a contrary point of view. Both visually and conceptually, it reflects on and critiques globalization, militarism, fashion, advertising, and exploitation of labour. “It’s my goal to act as a social barometer and cultural activist,” she says.

(continue...)

Painter Alex Janvier

Acclaimed painter Alex Janvier headlines the Art Gallery of Calgary's fall season

BY Amber Bowerman

As part of the 2007 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art (co-presented by the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton and Banff's Walter Phillips Gallery), the Art Gallery of Calgary hosts an exhibition of the work of Cold Lake, Alberta-based painter Alex Janvier through January 5.

(continue...)

Nicholas de Grandmaison, Jim Knife, n.d., pastel on paper, 76.2 X 55.9 cm. Collection of Mark Ferrari

In a meticulously assembled exhibition, the University of Lethbridge reveals the life of plains portraitist Nicholas de Grandmaison

BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

"You have here a series of formal ceremonial portraits of people that capture the essence of the sitters," says curator Gordon Snyder. "It's like he could see right through them. One of his subjects said that de Grandmaison had taken all the conceit out of him in the process of painting his portrait, and then in two strokes put it all back in."

(continue...)

Art Gallery of Calgary CEO Valerie Cooper (at left) and curator Donna Wawzonek. Photo by George Webber

At the Art Gallery of Calgary, CEO Valerie Cooper talks about reviving and stabilizing a near-dead institution

BY Bruce Weir

More than any do-it-yourself suburbanite, Valerie Cooper knows how a renovation can grow out of control. After all, since taking on her duties as president and chief executive officer of the Art Gallery of Calgary in 2004, the two heritage buildings that house the operation have been in a near constant state of repair.

(continue...)

Robert Genn at "Shale-splitters" on the Opabin Pass, Yoho National Park Photo by Stan Munn

Influenced by classic Canadian painters, this BC-based artist brings his own eye to a striking landscape

BY Brian Brennan

A chance sighting of a famous Canadian painter left an indelible impression on Robert Genn as a child, and seems to have foreshadowed his long career as a landscape artist. In 1940, at age four, he was riding through Victoria's Beacon Hill Park in the back of his grandfather's Hupmobile coupe when he spied a woman in her late 60s sitting outdoors on a folding chair, painting a bridge. "Look, Papa, an artist," exclaimed the boy. "Her name is Emily Carr," confided his grandfather in hushed tones. "Some people think she's crazy."

(continue...)

Artist Shanell Papp with her 2005 installation Homebody

With a population just over 80,000, the southern Alberta city of Lethbridge has a surprisingly strong creative lure

BY Katherine Wasiak

"Visual art here is no passing fancy," says Marilyn Smith about the city of Lethbridge, Alberta. Director of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, one of a few institutions in the city devoted to contemporary art, Smith lived in Lethbridge in the early 1970s, and returned in 1995. She noticed a difference right away. "The community is more vital now, and has grown in the number of people involved (in art) and the depth of their commitment," she says.

(continue...)

Linda and Harry Stanbridge outside their home Photo by Bob Matheson

Outside Victoria, Linda and Harry Stanbridge share an artistic, intellectual and spiritual collaboration

BY Brian Grison

Harry and Linda Stanbridge live in a house of windows and light that they designed and built just outside downtown Victoria in 1980. They have been married for 35 years, only a few years less than they’ve been pursuing careers as artists.

(continue...)

Highway 22 on the Cowboy Trail, south of Longview Photo Courtesy Travel Alberta

Find a summer’s worth of great gallery destinations, from Sooke to Winnipeg Beach

BY Jill Sawyer

Summer is road trip season, a time to explore beyond urban borders and discover destinations further off the beaten path. There are cultural gems in all corners of the western provinces, many of them maintained by gallerists passionate about their regions and their hometowns. Here is a short list of farther flung galleries and studio spaces that put road trippers in touch with local culture.

(continue...)

Jonathan Forrest: Saskatoon-based abstract painter Jonathan Forrest at work in his studio

With a CUSTOMIZED colour mix, abstract painter Jonathan Forrest is searching for the aesthetic essence of himself

BY Steven Ross Smith

The rectangle has become Jonathan Forrest’s primary shape — beds of vibrant acrylic colour that he lays on the canvas with varying degrees of thickness and texture. “The rectangle is a neutral container for the colour,” he says, “there’s no meaning or vested interest in the rectangle.” He feels that the rectangle allows the viewer a direct relationship with the painting and its coloured surfaces within, of course, the rectangular canvas. For a show this summer at Calgary’s Newzones Gallery, Forrest’s canvases range in size from 24 by 32 inches to 5.5 by 7.5 feet.

(continue...)

Les Graff, Patio Plant / Red Rain, 2002, oil on canvas, 50" x 64"

After quitting his day job to paint full time, this Alberta-based artist could finally go deep into the prairie landscape

BY Brian Brennan

Les Graff graduated from the Alberta College of Art in 1959 at age 23, and had his first solo exhibition, at the Edmonton Art Gallery, three years later. But it took a long time after that — 29 years to be exact — before he was able to fulfill his dream of painting full-time. In the meantime, the Camrose-born artist worked as an Alberta government cultural bureaucrat, building programs to support the province’s artists and arts organizations.

(continue...)

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Detail from the Paradise Institute, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Anonymous Gift, 2002. Image Courtesy The National Gallery of Canada

Contemporary art draws a crowd in Yorkton, Saskatchewan

BY Lorne Roberts

In the past, selling tickets in small-town Saskatchewan may have involved the traveling circus, or an itinerant preacher passing through on horseback. These days, it’s more likely to involve a big game for the local junior hockey team. But in the Yorkton region recently, contemporary art has been bringing in the crowds. The Paradise Institute, an internationally celebrated video and audio installation with a strong prairie connection, was in town for three months in the fall of 2006, proving that smaller centres can sustain interest with special exhibitions that are unusual, challenging, and Canadian.

(continue...)

Tania Kitchell, Burning Cold, at the Yukon Arts Centre, Feb 23 - March 10, 2007

The Yukon Arts Centre invites artists from across the country to the Canada Winter Games

 BY Kay Burns

Asked about what makes up our Canadian identity, most Canadians would see sports and culture playing a significant role. The Canada Winter Games, taking place in Whitehorse — February 23 to March 10 — will integrate and celebrate a broad range of activities that showcase talents and skills of many Canadians, athletically and culturally.

(continue...)

Etienne Zack: Wiggler, acrylic and oil on canvas, 54" x 60"

Junk and the Realm of Ideas

Dylan Cree interviewed Vancouver artist Etienne Zack in mid-May while Zack’s paintings were being exhibited in solo shows at Equinox Gallery in Vancouver and Thomas Dane Gallery in London. (continue...)

Emily Carr, Vanquished, 1930, oil on canvas, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust

The Vancouver Art Gallery examines Emily Carr from all angles

BY Robin Laurence

The subtitle of the latest Emily Carr exhibition, “New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon”, is revealing. It tells us that this ambitious show, which debuted at the National Gallery of Canada in June and lands at the Vancouver Art Gallery in early October, is not so much about Carr’s art as it is about the shifting ground from which it is viewed. One of the show’s leading approaches to its subject is to contrast ways in which Carr was read and publicized in her own day with how she is seen and interpreted, through modern filters, in ours.
(continue...)

Joe Plaskett, Red and White Flowers, 2006, pastel on paper, 21.5" x 29.5"

BY Brian Brennan

Today, as he approaches his ninth decade, Plaskett is still exploring his potential as a painter. He makes his pictures at his inherited country home in Suffolk, England, where the view from every window offers him glimpses of foliage, trees, and flowers that he incorporates into his landscapes and still lifes. An expatriate for fifty years, Plaskett has found his artistic inspiration in England and Paris while finding steady support and a regular market for his work in his native Canada. “I owe my livelihood to the country I come from and to its enlightened citizens,” he says.
(continue...)

Conservator Cheryle Harrison talks about the challenges and joys of preparing Emily Carr’s iconic work for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s touring exhibition (continue...)

John Eisler: Strobe #2, 2004, oil on panel, 35" x 23.5"

SEVEN WESTERN CANADIAN ARTISTS ARE LEADING A RESURGENCE IN ABSTRACT IDEAS

BY Douglas MacLean

As a student at the Ontario College of Art in the mid-1970s, I produced some innovative abstract work with a floor polisher as my brush. At that time, however, the phrase on everyone’s lips was, “painting is dead.” So I moved on to video work.
(continue...)

Grafitti by Bugs and Kido

Graffiti art is crossing the street— no longer stuck in the alley, it is becoming a legitimate form of artistic expression.

BY Wes Lafortune

This summer two graffiti artists (they prefer to be called writers) plan to scale a building in Calgary and spray paint a mural on its brick wall.
(continue...)

Tony Tascona: Fall Out, 2002, ink on paper, 26.5" x 17.5"

Ed Note: Tony Tascona died suddenly of heart failure on May 28, 2006 at the Victoria General Hospital in Winnipeg. He was 80.

BY Brian Brennan

When you look at the list of awards received by 80-year-old Winnipeg artist Tony Tascona over his lifetime, you see the kinds of honours you would expect to find on the résumé of a distinguished senior artist: member of the Order of Canada; honorary doctorate from the University of Winnipeg; honorary fellowship from St. John’s College at the University of Manitoba, and so on. (continue...)

Illingworth Kerr: Landscape, 1977

The fine line between collection and compulsion turns into a line of work for two serious art buyers: Ian Sigvaldason and Henry Beaumont.
(continue...)

Galleries West asked four prominent Western Canadian collectors to share thoughts, insights and tips about the art of collecting art. (continue...)

Brian Jungen, Prototype for New Understanding #8, 1999, Nike Air Jordans. Collection of Colin Griffiths, Vancouver

GAINING MOMENTUM WITH SOLO SHOWS IN NEW YORK, VANCOUVER AND MONTREAL

BY Julia Dault

There are two very sound ways into a subject like art. The first is descriptive, requiring answers to questions about the length, breadth, width, colour, surface, density and weight of a thing. The second is conceptual and is thus less concerned with the physical qualities of the object. Here, the idea is of essence and the goal is to play with it in all of its limitless possibilities, toying with the notion of artist’s intention along the way. (continue...)

E.J. HughesSteamer Arriving at Nanaimo, 2005, watercolour, 14" x 17"

THE ARTIST WHO ALMOST BECAME A POSTMAN CAPTURES THE ESSENCE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA IN HIS STYLIZED REALIST PAINTINGS

BY Brian Brennan

E.J. (Edward John) Hughes joined the ranks of Canada’s most sought-after painters in 2004 when a painting he had sold for $150 in 1951 fetched $920,000 — $600,000 above the asking price — at a Toronto auction. “Way more than I expected,” he told a Vancouver Sun reporter.
(continue...)

BY Beverly Cramp and Rod Chapman

GAIN A TECHNOLOGY EDGE WITH ONE OF THESE LEADING GALLERY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE OPTIONS

If you can make it in New York City, the saying goes, you can make it anywhere. Richard Thompson took that gamble in 2003 by opening a Manhattan office for his gallery software company, Theo Digital.
(continue...)

Michael Massie, Labrador: festivitea, 2005, bloodwood, bone horsehair, sterling silver, brass, 10" x 12" x 12.75

BY Amy Karlinsky

A purely Canadian art form, Inuit art encompasses objects of beauty and deceptive simplicity. (continue...)

Art activities at Camp He Ho Ha near Edmonton

BY Gilbert A. Bouchard

Art and healthcare have been linked for as long as human beings have produced works of art and worried about their physical well-being.

In fact, some of the oldest pieces of art ever produced by human beings were fertility-linked, including abstracted masks and other highly decorated objects used in shamanistic healing rituals. The Renaissance split the sciences from the fine arts, but by the 20th century, medicine had started to reincorporate art into healthcare via the professional practice of art therapy. (continue...)

Ron Moppett: Red/Yellow/Blue, 2005, oil and acrylic on canvas, three panals, 36" x 31.75" x 75" overall

BY Wes Lafortune

Now retired from college life, Ron Moppet begins a new chapter.

Ron Moppett is experiencing a period of creative renewal. Not that he was ever really stagnant, but as the longtime director/curator (now retired) of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at Alberta College of Art & Design, he had been spending more time filling out paperwork instead of doing what he’s been preparing for his entire adult life: creating paintings that evoke the mysteries of the universe. (continue...)

Takao Tanabe: Queen Charlotte Summer 2/83, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 26" x 60". Collection of the artist.

BY Brian Brennan

A retrospective launching this fall in Victoria will take the “beautifully grand” landscapes of West Coast painter Takao Tanabe across the nation. (continue...)