Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
10 March 2020 Vol 5 No 5 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2020
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
One reason Galleries West magazine started up 18 years ago was to help connect Western Canada’s many art communities.
Artists are a varied and independent lot, and Canada’s geographical expanse can make it challenging to learn about creative folks from other regions. It’s not unusual for people in Vancouver, for instance, to be unaware of any but a few top artists in Calgary or Winnipeg.
I was reminded of this last week while interviewing Anna Gustafson, an artist who lives on Salt Spring Island, for a story in our next issue.
She was in Victoria, where I’m based, to install her work in a group show at the Bateman Foundation. I stopped in for a chat because photographs of her show in the window space at Calgary’s Esker Foundation had caught my eye.
Over tea, Gustafson pulled out her laptop to show me more of her work, including recent experiments growing salt crystals on words sculpted from electrical wire.
I wondered if she had heard of Winnipeg artist Elvira Finnigan, who also uses salt in wonderful ways, most notably to preserve the leftovers from dinner parties. I know about Finnigan from a fascinating 2016 story that Sarah Swan wrote for Galleries West.
How interesting that two women half a continent away from each other who are both working through grief – in Gustafson’s case, related to ecological crisis, and, in Finnigan’s, other human-made crises – would independently gravitate to the same powerful metaphor.
As Swan writes: “Salt is necessary for life. It seasons, cures, preserves. It heals and acts as an antiseptic. There’s salt in our sweat and tears, and our bodies have about the same percentage of salt as the ocean. In times past, it has served as currency, travelled along trade routes, provoked wars and inspired revolution. In the Bible, salt came to symbolize purity, perfection, fidelity. And yet, too much salt kills.”
In this issue, we bridge the geography of Western Canada with stories about two group shows – one in Winnipeg that that brings together important beaded works by Indigenous artists and another in Vancouver that reflects on parenting and creative practices.
We also cover Jason Baerg, Vivian Maier, Jane Harington and a Rembrandt show touring to Edmonton and Regina.
I hope you enjoy this issue. As always, we welcome your feedback.
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Stacey Abramson, Paul Gessell, John Thomson, Richard White, Dorothy Woodend