From the Editor - September 20, 2022 Issue

September 19, 2022

9:30 PM

Western Canada's art magazine since 2002

Portia Priegert

From the Editor

This issue of Galleries West features an interview with Peter Morin, an interesting Tahltan artist I have wanted to write about for years. So, I was glad to hear he is having an exhibition with his mother, Janell, in Smithers, B.C.

Smithers is a northern town of some 5,300 people near Tahltan territory, which comprises a vast swath of beautiful land – an area larger than Portugal – that includes the headwaters of the Skeena, Nass and Stikine rivers.

As I couldn’t get up to Smithers to see the show, it seemed a good time to revisit Galleries West’s Q & A format. I like chatting with Peter – he has a gentle way and a ready laugh – and he has helped me understand the ongoing challenges Indigenous people face under colonialism. I remember one emotional conversation a few years back over tea here in Victoria, when he told me about his mother and her Alzheimer’s journey – a topic we revisit in the Q & A.

In the end, Peter’s busy schedule – he was getting ready for a sabbatical, packing for a cross-country trip to Smithers, and then flying to another launch in Winnipeg – meant our interview had to be conducted on a tight timeline via email. Even so, it offers lots to ponder, and I encourage you to read it.

I also want to thank the folks at the Smithers Art Gallery, who reminded me again of the important work done by art centres in small communities. The show looks great, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you see the images generously shared by Michelle Gazely, an artist who works at the gallery.

Moving on to the rest of this issue, you’ll notice several articles that share concerns related to the human body – its physicality, its emotions and its traumas – as well as an interest with ‘otherness’ – how people who look different can be misunderstood and unfairly ostracized.

On the physicality front, a large group show, Movement: Expressive Bodies in Art, has just opened at the National Gallery of Canada. Ottawa arts journalist Paul Gessell’s assessment? While pleasing, it’s surprisingly sedentary for a show that focuses on dance and other forms of movement.

Meanwhile, in Nelson, B.C., artist Amitai Ben David takes a personal look at childhood trauma, informed by his mother’s experience of being orphaned and hidden during the Second World War. His paintings celebrate what he calls “the damaged and the imperfect.”

Those themes are echoed by the four artists in a Winnipeg exhibition titled Embodied: Yvette Cenerini’s work relates to her paralysis, Susan Aydan Abbott’s to unresolved trauma from sexual abuse, Michèle Bygodt’s to perceptions of the Black body, and Riisa Gundesen’s to anxiety and gender.

We also review a Calgary exhibition of portraits by Hamilton, Ont., artist Nathan Eugene Carson, which, in the words of Calgary arts writer Lissa Robinson, are “wonderfully flawed and uncomfortably human.”

Our final article looks at artist and architect Eduardo Aquino’s exhibition, Tapume, an installation of construction-site hoarding in the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. On the surface, the exhibition seems more involved with the urban environment than the human body. Yet emerging writer Charlie Topnik, who is being mentored by Galleries West as a winner in this year’s writing contest at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, was struck by its ability to induce a meditative state. Her conclusion: “Ultimately, Tapume is as we are – plain, rough, impressionable and fleeting, yet with a capacity for peace and reverence. Therein lies its beauty.”

Looking ahead, we are working on stories about Métis artist David Garneau, Vancouver artist Vanessa Brown, and the launch of a major touring show at Calgary’s Nickle Galleries that revisits the history of innovative textile-based art on the Prairies.

Until next time,