Shorts: Five Cross-Country Shows

We head to Calgary, Winnipeg,  Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria.

Ron Moppett & John Hall: Framed

Five decades ago, Calgary artists John Hall and Ron Moppett, former classmates at what is now the Alberta University of the Arts, discovered a shared interest in roses. They formed the International Society of Rose Painters and began collecting everything from works of art to wallpaper and teacups with rose motifs. “You find roses in great works of art and in the worst kitsch,” Hall told the Calgary Herald at the time. The duo organized an exhibition, the Rose Museum, that opened at the Glenbow in 1974 and then toured to three other provinces. Now, flash forward as Hall and Moppett team up again for a  joint show, this one split between two commercial spaces in Calgary. Framed, on view until Oct. 7 at the TrépanierBaer and Loch galleries, includes artifacts from the Rose Museum. The artists also created six new collaborative works – one painted an empty faux frame that the other populated collage-style with boats, moons, licorice candies and the like. For instance, Löwenjagd, which translates from German as “lion hunt,” shows a cat-like creature with colourful paint-swatch spots, along with shards of glass and a vignette of a mountain at night. Hall is a hyper-real painter now based in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, while Moppett channels his strong structural impulse into various disciplines. Both shows open Sept. 9 as part of Calgary’s Art Hop.

The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts

A century ago, when Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, came to Winnipeg to speak about communing with the dead, his audience included physician Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and his wife, Lillian, a nurse. The couple went on to experiment with séances in their laboratory, documenting their experiences in black-and-white photographs. Those images are the cornerstone of The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03 until Nov. 10, along with two partner shows at the University of Manitoba. The project is curated by Winnipeg art historian Serena Keshavjee, who studied some 700 images during the pandemic. “The historic photos show a medium expelling an invisible force, the psychic force, through which ghosts or spirits could manifest or communicate in our world,” says Keshavjee. “In the photographs we see tables kinetically moving across the room, and a series of uncanny images of mediums with ectoplasm coming out of their nose, their ears, their mouth or even their eyes. The Hamiltons accepted that the dead could communicate.” Those eerie images found their own after-life when they were digitized in 2001, inspiring artists around the world. The show includes works by some 20 artists, including Grace A. Nagle, née Williams, a British artist and researcher, who made Fingertip Forgeries. An accompanying book, The Art of Ectoplasm, is due Nov. 1.

Phyllida Barlow: Eleven Columns

Acclaimed British artist Phyllida Barlow died earlier this year while working on an exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. A late bloomer, her career took off when she retired in 2009 after teaching for two decades at the Slade School of Art in London. She suddenly found herself in demand, exhibiting at prominent venues such as the Tate Modern and the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “To put it bluntly, I think the timing has been, for me, perfect,” Barlow said in 2017. “I’m ready for it and the work’s ready for it.” Known for large installations made from cheap materials, such as cardboard, wood and polystyrene, she had been working on a new site-specific piece for the Toronto show. Barlow, a descendent of Charles Darwin, was fascinated by the columns on the ground floor of the museum, a former aluminum factory. That interest prompted the display of her 2011 installation, untitled: eleven columns; standing, fallen, broken, along with various works on paper. The exhibition, Eleven Columns, is on view until Feb. 4. 

Carole Itter: Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger

Vancouver artist Carole Itter, recipient of the 2017 Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in the visual arts, likes collecting bits of wood from alleys and second-hand shops. She has assembled many of them into what she calls rattles, hanging sculptures composed of dowels, spoons, chair legs and the like. “They signal the connection between deforestation, production, consumerism and disposal while offering a performative invitation to an imagined sonic and physical interaction,” the gallery says. Itter and the late artist and musician Al Neil, for whom Itter created her Grand Piano Rattle, lived for years on the North Vancouver waterfront in a small blue cabin, now transformed into a floating artist’s residency. Itter’s practice has bridged performance, film and installation since the 1960s. Her solo show, Only when I’m hauling water do I wonder if I’m getting any stronger, on view at the Helen and Morris Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia until Dec. 10, gives an earlier era’s environmental ethos new relevance amidst the current climate crisis. 

Harry and Linda Stanbridge: Paint and Fire

The Stanbridges, Harry and Linda, who met as students at the Vancouver School of Art in the 1960s, have long been fixtures in Victoria’s art scene. Harry is a painter known for his strong colour sensibility, while Linda moved from drawing and painting to ceramics in the 1980s. They have worked side-by-side over the years, supporting each other in both life and art. Their upcoming show, Paint and Fire, on view from Sept. 9 to Sept. 21 at Victoria’s Madrona Gallery, is their first joint show in a decade. It includes Harry’s painting, Pink Rise, a bold collage of textured forms, including numerous grids featuring black circles. Both artists share an interest in formal optical challenges. Linda’s sculptures, Vessel One and Vessel Two, give the appearance of holding water although, as two-dimensional objects, that is clearly impossible. ■

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