Kelsey Stephenson | Connected Currents

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Kelsey Stephenson, "Flux," 2020

installation, each panel: 72x36” (27 panels total). Courtesy of the Gallery.

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: April 6 from 6:30-8:30 pm

The Art Gallery of St. Albert's newest exhibition is meant to immerse visitors in the beauty and fragility of Alberta’s watershed.

Connected Curents by Edmonton artist Kelsey Stephenson includes three related works, which trace the water’s passage as it flows across Alberta.

Suspended in the center of Gallery is Flux, a series of twenty-seven silk panels, each three feet wide by nine feet tall. The images are of iconic locations that Stephenson photographed across the province, focusing on the water that flows out of the glaciers to feed into the Athabasca, Bow and North Saskatchewan Rivers. Scenes of Alberta’s waterways flow across the panels and surround the viewer, emphasising how each of these sites are connected through water.

The exhibition’s second work, Currents, is monumental. Hundreds of works created using screen printing and cyanotype techniques are hung together to create a single constructed landscape, spanning over thirty-six feet long. The images include human activity along the rivers. Sites of industry, history and agriculture blend with views of seemingly wild spaces.

While Flux and Currents connect locations along the watershed separated by distance, the last series of individual works reconnect locations separated by time. Stephenson merges archival photographs from land surveys and early marketing brochures with the same view of the landscape today. Delicate and ghostly, these works drive home the dramatic changes that have taken place over the last century.

In this immersive exhibition, reflect on how Alberta’s natural water systems have evolved, and leave inspired to help preserve them.

• In-person tour: March 30 at 12 pm

• Virtual tour: April 5 at 12 pm on Facebook Live

Registrations can be made via the gallery’s exhibition web page.