The Works Art & Design Festival, Edmonton
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"Tree"
Aaron Sidorenko and Mark Holliday, "Tree." Encaustic on Board.
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"Sonnet II"
Barbara Johnston, "Sonnet II," 2011. Handmade box with circular accordion structure and digital type using book board, Japanese kozo, Brazilian marbled and Text wove papers, 18 x 17 x 4.5 cm. Photo Credit: Laura O’Connor, Alberta Craft Council.
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"Tree"
Aaron Sidorenko and Mark Holliday, "Tree." Encaustic on Board.
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"Elegy: A Meditation on Mortality"
Sandra Vida, "Elegy: A Meditation on Mortality" Still capture from Video Installation.
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"Birds 1"
Wendy Passmore-Godfrey, "Birds 1," 2011. Paper construction and mache, wood, wire, fires, ephemera, paper, books, 71 x 46 x 48 cm. Photo Credit: Laura O’Connor, Alberta Craft Council.
The Works Art & Design Festival, Edmonton
June 21 to July 3, 2012
By Ross Bradley
Gone are the days of people lining up around the block to see hot or occasionally risqué shows. This is not to say there were not lots of things to do and see at the 27th annual Works Festival in Edmonton’s downtown core. With over 50 exhibitions in 31 venues, this art and design extravaganza offered great variety.
There was indeed a nudity warning on the Big Tent at Winston Churchill Square, but there was no lineup to get into the PopSex exhibition, with its emphasis on historic material from 1920’s Berlin. David Folk’s filing cabinet of contemporary gay porn was certainly worth investigating but, in our jaded society, it barely raises an eyebrow.
Sharing the tent was Indigeneity, an artist-run collective that promotes contemporary First Nations art and artists. The highlight, three short videos by Christiana Latham, deserved a much larger screen to be viewed properly. The melding of traditional aboriginal chants and images with the cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, demonstrates how tradition and pop culture can combine to speak to youth in all cultures.
Another gem that took some searching was Sandra Vida’s video installation, Elegy: A Meditation on Mortality. Less of an installation than her previous work, this visually rich and textured piece did indeed offer a moment of reflection after the festival’s overload of images. Having just returned from an exhibition in Paris, it also demonstrates why Alberta media artists are gaining an international reputation for excellence and innovation.
Perhaps the strongest of the temporary exhibitions was the work of Aaron Sidorenko. These large-scale landscapes and portraits explore the ancient traditions of encaustic painting in a contemporary context. In Tree, a collaboration with Mark Holliday, this use of pigment embedded in wax on such a monumental scale combines the subtle nuances of colour and surface with the power of the Romantic era of landscape painting. His portraits feature an interesting combination of materials and surfaces that produce a dynamic three-dimensional canvas.
One important thing The Works has always done is to provide a much-needed reminder to Edmontonians that they have a vibrant public gallery community beyond the Art Gallery of Alberta, with year-round exhibitions worth seeking out. Three artist-run centres as well as the Visual Arts Alberta Association and the Alberta Craft Council were official sites, providing a taste of the talent in local studios.
A particularly strong presentation was the Pulp Paper Pages exhibition in the council’s gallery. In partnership with the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Arts Guild, it provided an opportunity to explore all things paper. In this day and age, when the traditional book form is losing ground to the computer tablet, this exhibition explored many possibilities of what a book might be. For example, artist Barbara Johnston’s Sonnet starts with a traditional poetic form and literally lifts it off the flat surface into an elegant sculptural creation. Wendy Passmore-Godfrey, on the other hand, starts with the traditional book and deconstructs it into a playful sculpture in Birds I.
Unlike earlier versions of the festival that boasted major exhibitions of international art, this year’s version hosted more intimate interactions with both artists and their work. Like any good treasure hunt, the gems, both rough and polished, were there. It just took a little more time and digging to find them. But the search was well worth the effort.