Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
23 May 2017 Vol 2 No 11 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2017
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
It’s been six months since Galleries West launched as a biweekly digital magazine. The constant deadlines are a big change from publishing three times a year, as we did with the print magazine. So too is our new interest in metrics and algorithms. But the change has made it easier to cover stories as they happen, and highlight exhibitions while people can still get out to see them.
Aside from immediacy, the digital magazine allows us to broaden our reach. No longer limited by press runs and delivery vans, we have seen more people accessing our stories – some 32,000 unique views over the last four months, some from as far away as Australia.
We’ve obliged by offering a mix of stories, reviews and news with links that take readers to our main website if they want more information. Some people are confused about the two websites. For me, the best analogy comes from the art world. Galleries West Digital is like a temporary show of new acquisitions, but the stories are also a part of the permanent collection – the website we’ve always maintained as a backup to the print issue.
We designed Galleries West Digital so it is navigated visually. You scroll across the images, but scroll down to read. If you’re on a coffee break, that may be all you have time for. But if you’re interested in a particular artist or want to see more images, you can click on the link at the end of the text.
Our focus is on finding engaging stories about artists and exhibitions across Western Canada and the North, regions that often get little attention from national arts publications. In this issue, for instance, we catch up with Tim Okamura, an artist from Edmonton who has achieved remarkable success in New York by painting portraits of people the art world often overlooks. We also look at a gutsy project by Nicole Bauberger, a Yukon artist who paints what is arguably the most common understanding of the Canadian landscape – the view from the highway. And Winnipeg writer Stacey Abramson is back with a review of Filipino-Canadian artist Patrick Cruz at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg.
I encourage you to sign up for a free email reminder. The magazine, which we post every second Tuesday, is free and we never share your personal information. As a subscriber, you support a dialogue about the arts and help artists reach a wider public.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Stacey Abramson, John Thomson
