VINTAGE MODERN - AGENDA: EXPOSURE 2010 / THE CALGARY BANFF PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
1 of 3
Spring 2010 Cover
Spring 2010 Cover
2 of 3
"Pleasure Craft"
Stev’nn Hall, "Pleasure Craft," at Elevation Gallery, Canmore.
3 of 3
"Cornice Drop"
Dan Hudson, "Cornice Drop," Cerro Bayo, Argentina, snowboarder Jon Cartwright, at The Edge Gallery, Canmore.
VINTAGE MODERN - AGENDA: EXPOSURE 2010 / THE CALGARY BANFF PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
BY: Jill Sawyer
As the annual Exposure photography festival grows every year, it keeps adding participating galleries and artists — this year a few dozen galleries in Calgary and Banff will be involved, organizing shows around local, national and international photographers during the key festival time through February 2010. Here are just a few of the highlights.
When Calgary’s Arts on Atlantic gallery moved across Ninth Avenue last year, it expanded its space, drawing in a larger group of local painters, photographers, and mixed media artists. For Exposure, the gallery will feature a handful of photographers, including Michelle Rainey, Greg Gerrard, Roberta Murray, Stephen Murphy,David Scollard and Jan Boydal. Artist Paul Stack will show a series of delicate landscapes shot with a pinhole camera.
At the Alberta College of Art & Design’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery, catch alumnus Attila Richard Lukacs, with his series of Polaroids, seen last year at the Art Gallery of Alberta — these young men in languid fighting poses have the same painterly quality as Lukacs’ most famous portraits. At The Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery, catch stills and video from The End, part of Iceland’s official 2009 Venice Biennale entry, by painter / performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson and his partner in art, David por Jonsson. The piece was shot last winter on Lake Minnewanka as part of a Banff residency.
Calgary’s Skew Gallery will show the documentary work of Amalie Atkins, a Saskatoon-based artist who doesn’t limit her work to stills — she also creates video, textile art, and tiny costumes for a stop-motion animated series. Kent Monkman, best known for his large-scale canvases that mix Aboriginal sociological and gender-identity themes with grand 19th century style landscapes, will bring a variety of media to his show The Triumph of Mischief at the Glenbow Museum.
Find work by large-format abstract landscape artistsMichael Levin at Weiss Gallery, and David Burdeny at Herringer Kiss. Dean Turner’s stark documentary shots — each one shares volumes about the place it was photographed — will be at Calgary’sArtfirm Gallery.
In Canmore, among shows at the Avens Gallery, the Canmore Artists and Artisans Guild, and theCanmore Geoscience Centre, a new gallery recently opened in the town’s Spring Creek development — The Edge Gallery will feature documentary work by Dan Hudson. Best known around town (and to sports magazine editors) as a master of the ski/snowboard shot, Hudson’s work is as much about landscape and location as it is about athletics. On Canmore’s main street, the Elevation Gallery will host a two-person show by photographersSarah Fuller — whose stark documentary work often captures the odd, overlooked elements in a familiar scene, and Stev’nn Hall. His landscapes, many of them shot from moving vehicles, are then leached of light and colour, and scored through to take on a patina of 1970s snapshots.
A few kilometers down the highway in Banff, the Whyte Museum will bring together a selection of work by Calgary documentary photographer George Webber. These photographs, shot during the past decade or so on Alberta’s Blood Reserve, have a richness and emotion that makes the most of the black and white format. Catch the popular wildlife images of Jason Bantle at his own Banff Gallery, All in the Wild, and the work of Carole Harmon (along with that of her accomplished ancestor Byron Harmon) at the Harmon Gallery.
And Calgary photographer Bill Peters will bring his series of abstract urban landscapes, When the City Isn’t Looking to Banff’s Willock and Sax Gallery. For a complete updated list of Exposure 2010 shows and events: www.Exposure2010.ca.