2019-Procession-WIlliam Kentridge-more-sweetly-play-the-dance-photography-charles-cousins0086.jpg
William Kentridge, "More Sweetly Play the Dance," 2015, eight-channel HD video installation with four megaphones and sound, 15 min., installation view at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, 2019 (collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; photo by Charles Cousins, Art Gallery of Alberta)

Year-End Views: Edmonton

Ten snapshots reveal the breadth of the arts in uneasy times.

by

Definitions change fast in revolutionary times, and in Edmonton’s arts scene over the last year, the idea of a gallery as simply a white-walled inside space seemed insufficient.

While reliable institutions like the Art Gallery of Alberta, the downtown artist-run centres and the commercial gallery district over on 124th Street delivered the expected art openings paired with wine and music – you’ll notice a good number of innovative deviations in my 10 snapshots of the last year.

1.

William Kentridge’s Procession, at the Art Gallery of Alberta, was truly moving – both in a literal and a gut-punch-emotional way. Its macabre, damning parade of shadowy figures marching slowly across theatre screens to funerary music was a reaction to polarized class divisions in South Africa, but it is absolutely universal in its tension.

2.

Philosophically, Procession is a cousin to the community-initiated production of protest signs, printed and painted at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists, in conjunction with Climate Justice Edmonton, Beaver Hills Warriors and Extinction Rebellion Edmonton, then deployed at the climate emergency march at the Alberta legislature last October, with special guest Greta Thunberg.

Well attended by members of the arts community, the rally attracted thousands and received international media attention with semi-trailer trucks surrounding the event in counter-protest, honking.

3.

A highlight of the 124th Street commercial scene – Bugera Matheson, Bearclaw, Peter Robertson, Scott and the Front galleries – was aAron Munson’s thoughtful show, Being. His large-scale photographic prints of nearly microscopic chemical reactions are an easy metaphor for our own moments of whirling, biological self-doubt. The show, at the Front Gallery, featured a video of enveloping darkness that was especially hypnotic. Elzbieta Krawecka’s Aglow, at Bugera Matheson in November, was also appropriately stormy in our stressed-out city. 

4.

Shifting to the celebratory, last summer’s Rust Magic International Street Mural Festival continued to add large-scale art to the city's grey walls by artists local to international – including Edmonton’s own Jill Stanton and Japan’s OneQ. A gigantic hockey-scrap, cartoon-hands tag of the city’s name by L.A. graffiti writer Slick was almost universally endorsed. An amazing panel discussion at MacEwan University and a street artists’ show – including portraits by hometown boy Tim Okamura, now based in New York – culminated in the Peter Robertson Gallery’s entire exterior being painted by Amuse 126, a Chicago-based graffiti artist. All this in a city with a zero-tolerance policy for unapproved street art.

5.

Keeping the conversation on the streets, artist-run centre Harcourt House was the only gallery in Canada to celebrate the 100th anniversary of one of the most influential art and design movements in modern history with its captivating exhibition, Edmonton and the Bauhaus. With a guided tour to miraculously still-standing buildings that epitomize Bauhaus ideals, the show noted the movement’s many female luminaries, including under-credited photographer Lucia Moholy.

6.

The Edmonton Arts Council’s public art commissions brought to the city’s sometimes-neglected northeast sector a giant sculpture, 53°30'N – Berlin artist Thorsten Goldberg’s gorgeous 1:1,000 scale re-imagining of faceted topographic mountain-scapes on the same latitude as Edmonton. A national leader in its support for the arts, the council also released its ambitious 10-year plan, Connections and Exchanges.

7.

Another initiative from the Edmonton Arts Council was Leanne Olson's 18-month City of Edmonton artist residency at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre. Her show, With All Things Considered, at the new Mitchell Art Gallery at MacEwan University, featured a collection of photographs, as well as chunks of garbage, literally. It was something to consider as we continue as a society to embrace Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s “tyranny of objects.”

8.

While the innovative DC Art Projects sat empty, re-evaluating its strategies for supporting art and artists, and the Bleeding Hearts Art Space abandoned its physical space for liminal installations, over in the coyly-named “Mice District” (in deference to the corporate-named Ice District downtown) Alberta’s first provincial artist in residence, Lauren Crazybull, had a solo show of her distinctive portraits of her Indigenous peers at both the McMullen Gallery, at the University of Alberta Hospital, and the fiercely independent art and music venue, The Aviary. In a show later in the year, street-art activist AJA Louden also threw his work up on The Aviary's walls, including his grouchy mascot, Piney P.

9.

An exhibition by finalists for the Sobey Art Award is on view until Jan. 5 at the Art Gallery of Alberta. It's the show's first appearance in the West, and winner Stephanie Comilang and runners-up Anne Low, D’Arcy Wilson, Kablusiak and Nicholas Grenier have all taken home large cash prizes. From Kablusiak’s soapstone Listerine bottle to Grenier’s deep dive into art itself, as well as Comilang’s dystopian films, narrated by a drone that was voiced by her mother, the show captured the unease of our time, yet offered humour and hope.

10.

And if we’re embracing the idea of winners in art, Dyscorpia, at the Enterprise Square Galleries last spring, was Edmonton’s show of the year. Curated by artists Sean Caulfield and Marilène Oliver, Dyscorpia brought together artists, writers, computer programmers, filmmakers, musicians and thinkers in the medical humanities to explore how our bodies and minds are increasingly blurring into technology with little certainty about the potential consequences. A navigable virtual reality archipelago and CAT-Scan bodies, as well as harrowing animations and actual artificial intelligence that learned our movements, were embedded with more traditional painting and sculpture, as the show's symposium urged us to consider intrusions into our autonomy while we still can.

While the provincial government’s recent five-per-cent cut to the Alberta Foundation of the Arts was hardly devastating, at year’s end artists were waiting to see how substantial cuts to the province’s municipalities, including Edmonton, will affect local arts funding. 

Regardless, there are two events in Edmonton’s art ecosystem to anticipate in 2020. First, the move by the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists from its facility on main-drag Jasper Avenue to a larger space to the northeast in a more affordable neighbourhood, Queen Mary Park. And, second, the long-anticipated opening of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre in the Quarters District downtown, set to be a bold manifestation of the inspiring Indigenous contemporary culture collective, which first began producing art in 2015. ■

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