Five Alberta Artists Ponder the Pandemic

Loneliness and longing, but also humour, family and fake vacations.

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An eerie silence shrouds the visual arts community. Exhibition openings are a distant memory and many galleries are closed or open only by appointment. Apart from occasional online shows, we still know little about how artists are responding to the pandemic. Galleries West decided to peek inside studios to see what's being created across Western Canada – and the results are as illuminating as they are inspiring. In Alberta, our first stop in this five-part series, many artists are developing intensely personal themes with small, often spontaneous works intended for their friends and families. Some artists are coping with isolation through humour, while others are building resiliency through vulnerability. But whatever their approach, their work welcomes viewers into private experiences of the pandemic.

Chris W. Carson

While most of us prepared for a lonely winter holiday at home, Edmonton artist Chris Carson embarked on a whirlwind global tour. Undeterred by the pandemic, Carson and his husband, Shane Golby, frequented favourite haunts like Portugal and Ireland, as well as far-flung destinations like Egypt, Zimbabwe and Turkey – countries they would normally avoid due to their appalling attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people. Of course, Carson, executive director of the arts-service group CARFAC Alberta, didn’t actually leave Edmonton. His travel diary, posted on Facebook over 12 days, consists of digital collages. What makes his Fake-cation series so heartwarming is not just selfies set against magnificent temples, pyramids and waterfalls, but also his tongue-in-cheek stories about getting chased by guards in empty museums and other adventures. The series has a satirical undertone. Like the stereotypical tourists they mock, the couple apparently didn’t see much beyond their own cameras. For Carson, being homebound doesn’t have to hamper joy or creativity. “I don’t see COVID as all evil,” he says. “It has given us the opportunity to explore different things in a different way.” After a pause, he adds: “Fake-cations can be fun too.” 

Braxton Garneau

For an artist who completed his studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton only last April, Braxton Garneau is remarkably accomplished. His portfolio includes prints and installations, as well as portraits, and his work is getting snapped up for shows, including the upcoming group exhibition, Black Every Day, at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Nevertheless, the pandemic left Garneau feeling stuck. As a Black artist of mixed ancestry, he felt under growing pressure to tackle diversity, along with many other critical issues flooding the news. Eventually, he realized he needed a break. “I had to shut off the world,” he says. “I needed to paint something that brought me joy.” He turned to the most soothing part of his day – FaceTime calls with family, who had recently moved to the United States. Garneau, used to romping around with his siblings, found it peculiar to talk with them on the phone. For instance, his brother plays video games as they chat so Garneau sees only one of his eyes. Another brother takes calls lying down so only the top of his head is visible. Garneau, realizing his screenshots of these conversations were special, used them as the genesis for I See You, a series of oil paintings on canvas cut in the shape of his phone. The project brought moments of intense connection and Garneau, feeling uplifted by caring for his family, was able to return to his serious work. Now, he has eight portraits of mixed-ancestry sitters in poses reminiscent of the Dutch renaissance, on the go. Considering how much interest his work is garnering, that’s good news indeed.

Keith Harder

Airport waiting rooms are uncomfortable places where exhausted passengers mark time under harsh fluorescent lights. It’s hard to imagine anyone could find inspiration in such a purgatory. Yet that’s the case for Keith Harder, who recently retired from teaching at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose. His series of oil paintings, In Transit, gaze from an airport window overlooking the wintry tarmac. Ice crystals fill the air and twilight envelops everything in steel-gray hues. The trucks and loading carts Harder paints with razor-sharp accuracy seem to move back and forth, in lethargic rhythms. This wearying scene is a striking metaphor for the pandemic lockdown, which Harder views as a liminal experience: the past and the future are remote, while the present is filled with unease. “We are a culture of ascent and liminality that often feels like descent,” he says. “We do not know what to do with ourselves when our goals, productivity and agendas are put on hold.” Yet the solitary ennui these paintings conjure offers insight. Like meditative practices and other ancient rituals that aim to still the mind, these paintings offer a secular context to pause and ponder. Says Harder: “However unpleasant the experience is, it can also be a moment of transformation.” 

Ann Mansolino

Imagine living alone, a stranger in a town that looks out to a mountain that once buried sleeping townsfolk under its rubble. Then a global pandemic turns life upside down. It sounds like a setting for a Hitchcock movie. But this is where Calgary-based artist Ann Mansolino found herself last year after signing on for an artist residency in Blairmore, Alta., just down the road from Turtle Mountain, site of the 1903 slide that buried much of the mining town of Frank, killing some 70 to 90 people. Mansolino soon refocused her work to respond to her surroundings. “The mountain towers over the town, the studio and your experience as an artist,” she says. “It made total sense to work in response to that when I finally saw the metaphorical connection.” She created two moving and meticulously hand-crafted books. Safe Inside, printed on fibre-based metallic paper with a jewel-like sheen, is an intimate diary that documents her solitude. The frost-covered glass of her studio windows became a sheath separating her from the dangers outside. She recalls sitting in her car outside a grocery store in the pandemic's early days, afraid to go inside, while snow dissolved on her windshield and with it “everything else I thought to be solid in this life.” Mansolino’s other book, When the Mountain Falls, ponders what is truly stable. Soothing and deeply personal, the book suggests it’s not only rockslides and epidemics that ravage societies.  Yet, like Turtle Mountain, humans endure. As her book concludes: “The mountains may fall, but for many of us, our lives will eventually continue on.”

Erin Boake and Marnie Blair

Red Deer artists Erin Boake and Marnie Blair have been friends for years. They were pregnant together, their kids are friends, and they bought houses on nearby streets. Boake runs a thriving art school and is a prolific painter, while Blair, a printmaker, teaches at Red Deer College. For women on the go, the lockdown was devastating. Boake closed her school, uncertain if the business would survive. Blair lost access to her studio. Life came to a standstill. “What are we going to do in the house all day?” Blair recalls wondering. She decided to bake bread each morning for two weeks. She sent photos of her efforts to Boake, who transformed them into paintings, working long into the night after her children were in bed. In the morning, Blair would wake to a photo of the completed painting in her inbox. Eventually, Boake decided to auction the paintings online and donate the proceeds to Mustard Seed, a non-profit group that helps the homeless. The works sold quickly, thanks, in part, to media outlets that spread news of the project, Our Daily Bread. Friends helped out too, sharing recipes and dropping off sourdough starters. In no time at all, Boake and Blair had raised $2,000. Although the fundraiser is over, the duo has continued baking – and painting – with a line-up of clients waiting to purchase their work. ■ 

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