DAVID GARNEAU, ROBERT HOULE, RUTH CUTHAND, NADIA MYRE, MARY ANNE BARKHOUSE

BY PATRICIA DAWN ROBERTSON

At the heart of The MacKenzie Art Gallery’s summer show, To Be Reckoned With..., is a version of the Indian Act. Montreal artist Nadia Myre enlisted the help of more than 200 collaborators to bead-over the Indian Act in a gesture of reclamation.

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THE OLD / NEW AESTHETIC OF PHOTOGRAPHERS JOSHUA JENSEN-NAGLE AND JOHN FOLSOM

BY JILL SAWYER

Among a handful of photographers showing at Calgary’s Newzones Gallery during the Exposure 2010 Calgary Banff Photography Festival, two are creating work that sparks a strong memory of another place and time.

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Dan Hudson, Cornice Drop, Cerro Bayo, Argentina, snowboarder Jon Cartwright, at The Edge Gallery, Canmore.

AGENDA: EXPOSURE 2010 / THE CALGARY BANFF PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

BY Jill Sawyer

As the annual Exposure photography festival grows every year, it keeps adding participating galleries and artists — this year a few dozen galleries in Calgary and Banff will be involved, organizing shows around local, national and international photographers during the key festival time through February 2010. Here are just a few of the highlights.

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Ian Johnston, Swimming Upstream in the Comfort of: Homage to Yves Klein, installation view, 2009.

ARCHITECT AND SCULPTOR IAN JOHNSTON MODELS HIS LATEST INSTALLATION ON THE ENDLESS MULTIPLES OF CONSUMER CULTURE

BY SUSAN ANDREWS GRACE

Ian Johnston looks deeply into the transience of physical substance — if matter was a river, it’s one into which he’s stepped, both as architect and artist. Johnston’s inspiration is materiality, and he’s fascinated with how and why things break. His new exhibition, Refuse Culture, balances between his biography and his inspiration.

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Stan Douglas, Klatsassin Portraits (Thief), laserchrome print, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

TAKING ON A PIECE OF HISTORY FROM THE CANADIAN WEST, STAN DOUGLAS CREATES A COMPELLING MYSTERY IN KLATSASSIN AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY

BY ANN ROSENBERG

There’s a true story about Klatsassin, the Chilcotin warrior at the centre of one of western Canada’s most dramatic historic incidents. In the spring of 1864, as the gold rush in central British Columbia was in full swing, Klatsassin and a small band of his followers attacked a road crew at work in the middle of Chilcotin territory. They killed a handful of men, and through the summer of that year, a few more people — settlers, prospectors — were killed, while the Crown carried out a relatively unsuccessful manhunt for the killers.

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Sylvain Voyer, Canola Foothills Country, acrylic and oil on canvas, n.d., 48" X 42".

STEP INTO THIS PRAIRIE PAINTER’S ENDLESS HORIZONS IN A FIVE-DECADE SURVEY SHOW AT THE ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA

BY MARY-BETH LAVIOLETTE

He has been called the “canola and sky king” for his eye-catching landscapes of vivid canola fields in full bloom and parkland forests of trembling aspen. But, as a first-time survey reveals, Sylvain Voyer’s practice is as broad as the North Saskatchewan he knows so well. Based in Edmonton for most of his life, the city’s Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA), is the site of a major exhibition this spring spanning nearly 50 years. That’s plenty of time for an artist to create a substantial body of work but, in Voyer’s case, make that plural — as in bodies of work. And make it generational — as in that storm of social and artistic change Voyer, experienced and responded to as a young artist in the 1960s and 1970s.

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BY Ann Rosenberg

Photographer David Burdeny documents a grand and endangered landscape

Abstract architectonic devices have been central to David Burdeny’s artistic career since he began showing in 2003. In the past, his black and white images, shot in many parts of the world, explored the effects of symmetry and asymmetry. In his Shorelines series (2001 to 2006), docks, abandoned railway tracks, fences, and pilings often thrust the eye to the point at infinity where the sea melted into the sky. It wasn’t important if they were shot in Richmond, Big Sur, Calais or Japan.

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BY Jill Sawyer

With Krazy! the Vancouver Art Gallery draws a line between comics, culture and contemporary art

When the Vancouver Art Gallery opens Krazy! on May 17, the gallery will take a giant leap over the line that still sits between contemporary art and visual culture. Conventional wisdom puts painting, fine art photography, even installation on one side, and on the other the colour-saturated, fast-moving pop wallpaper that surrounds all of us — comic books, animation, and video games. The show is a fantasy catalogue of one hundred years of pop culture touchstones, from the endearing early animated films of illustrator Winsor McCay to the social relevancy of Chris Ware’s meticulous strips. Co-curated by the VAG’s senior curator Bruce Grenville, with artists Seth and Art Spiegelman, animator Tim Johnson, cultural critics Kiyoshi Kusumi and Toshiya Ueno, and game designer Will Wright, Krazy! combines a multitude of media and historical documentation, combined into a dynamic survey of past, present and future. Galleries West asked Grenville for his take on some of the show’s top talent.

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BY Portia Priegert

With recurring imagery, this B.C. painter’s vision moves into the world of myth and metaphysics

Looking at Rick Rivet’s paintings is like embarking on a journey through a dream world — images emerge and recede, symbols float into awareness and wash in on waves of sumptuous colour. His work is highly expressive, with mark-making techniques that range from bold slashes to slowly graduated fields of thick colour. Through it all are Rivet’s ruminations on nature, memory, metaphysics and indigenous mythologies.

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BY Beverly Cramp

8 Artists Building Buzz in the West

BY Beverly Cramp, Kimberly Croswell, Amy Fung, Amy Karlinsky, Wes LaFortune, Daniel McRoberts, Portia Priegert, Steven Ross Smith

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BY Beverly Cramp

With a year long celebration, western canadian artisans step into the spotlight

If recognition of fine craft is still languishing behind fine art in Canada, this year may help the genre step out further from the shadows. Led by the Canadian Crafts Federation, 2007 marks the official Craft Year, a country-wide umbrella of awareness and events that’s giving artisanal work a boost. It’s an idea that has easily found a home in western Canada. (continue...)

BY Wes Lafortune

Western Canadian Artists to Watch

Contemporary fine art photography in Western Canada is enjoying unprecedented acclaim. With emerging talent and new technology, the visual landscape of the West is being transformed by a group of artists who have stretched the boundaries of photography to create new ways of viewing our world and in turn are capturing the attention of galleries, museums and collectors. (continue...)

BY Allan Antliff

In April 1997 three accomplished artists — Morna Tudor, Gary Bolt, and Lisa Samphire — established Starfish Glassworks in downtown Victoria, BC. Since then, Starfish has become the region’s premier centre for showcasing work in glass. Every year thousands of visitors line the mezzanine overlooking the glass-blowing studio and admire the finished work on display in Starfish’s gallery. (continue...)

Angela Grossman: Clique (detail), 2004, mixed media on paper

BY Beverly Cramp

CAPTURING the moment when a girl becomes aware of being looked at.

In her quintessential art studio located in one of Vancouver’s Gastown heritage buildings, Angela Grossmann gingerly steps around piles of unfinished artwork. The floor is splattered with paint, as are many of the other surfaces.
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Calgary Sculptor Reinhard Skoracki with Marriage

BY Wes Lafortune

Calgary-based sculptor Reinhard Skoracki, 63, has been reborn.

Fully in charge of his life after retiring from a high-powered career in the advertising business and a period working as an entrepreneur, Skoracki has a message that he wants to communicate through his pocket-sized bronze sculptures: Wake up! (continue...)

Marjan Eggermont, with In the Past, part 1, etched steel Photo by George Webber

BY Jacek Malec

Marjan Eggermont, one of the most prolific and progressive Canadian print artists of her generation, is reinvigorating the art of printmaking by turning to contemporary imagery and breaking the shackles of conventionality.
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