Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
15 November 2022 Vol 7 No 23 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2022
Portia Priegert
From the Editor
Who says art can’t change the world? We were encouraged to read that the Royal Ontario Museum decided to refresh its Indigenous exhibits after launching a show by Cree artist Kent Monkman. His show, reviewed in the last issue of Galleries West, invokes Indigenous ways of knowing – alongside a pair of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle’s fossilized high-heels.
Last week’s story by Globe and Mail arts writer Kate Taylor suggests the museum may have felt red-faced about its Indigenous exhibits, last updated in 2018, after conversations with guests at Monkman’s opening reception. Out, according to museum director Josh Basseches, are the costumed mannequins. Let’s hope we’ll also see greater emphasis on the reality that Indigenous people are still here on this land with vibrant and evolving cultures when the exhibits reopen. Chalk one up for art!
Meanwhile, this issue of Galleries West highlights a landmark show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art that looks at the role music plays in work by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. We also look at the Sobey Art Award exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, featuring work by the five regional finalists, including two Westerners, Yukon-based Krystle Silverfox and the winner, Winnipeg’s Divya Mehra, who takes home $100,000. The show has a musical element too: Atlantic finalist Tyshan Wright recreates musical instruments played by Jamaican Maroons exiled to Halifax in the late 18th century. We’ll let you know when the Sobey winner is announced this week.
Music is also central to an Art Gallery of Alberta show, Ghazal – Songs for Home, Edmonton artist Riaz Mehmood’s diasporic love song to the Pashtun people of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Elsewhere in Alberta, Chitra Ganesh, an American artist whose show, Astral Dance, is on view at Contemporary Calgary, dips into South Asian culture with references to Bollywood posters, vintage Indian comics and Hindu goddesses.
This issue includes a review of a powerful show by Vancouver artist Chantal Gibson that includes books dipped in liquid rubber, forever sealing their pages behind a shiny black coat. Our final article explores work by Vancouver-area artist Graham Landin that makes me wonder, on first glance, if an itinerant modernist was somehow shipwrecked on a tropical isle with a chainsaw in tow.
Looking ahead, we are working on stories about a powerful Winnipeg show by Stanley Wany, who recreates the spaces of a slave ship, and a Vancouver exhibition about a long-ago collaboration between ethnomusicologist Ida Halpern and two West Coast Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chiefs, Billy Assu and Mungo Martin. And in other news – we’re excited to be preparing our annual art books issue for early December. Do let us know about your latest publishing projects!
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Ashlynn Chand, Paul Gessell, John K. Grande, Yani Kong, Lissa Robinson, John Thomson
We acknowledge the support of the Government of Alberta Media Fund, the Government of Canada Periodical Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts.
