I honestly don't know if enough happens within the visual-arts scene for trends to emerge, but sticking to the positive side, a few individuals have really stepped up in the last year and their efforts are duly noted.
In thinking about the best shows of the past year, Josée Aubin Ouellette has been a common denominator. From the programming of the all-ages Hydeaway space which saw solo exhibitions by some of Edmonton's most promising emerging artists such as Justin Shaw and Alexander James Stewart to curating daringly different exhibitions by Chelsea Boos and Jonathan Kaiser during the usually bland lineup of Nextfest, Ouellette has also been active in her own artistic practice as a painter, fashion designer and co-organizer of Institute Parachute, which has been involved in various activities such as organizing portable art festivals in the last few years. Working with what she's got, and remaining conceptual about her surroundings, Ouellette is doing good work with no false pretensions.
Another artist gaining momentum is Gabe Wong. Meeting him during the preparation for his recent exhibition, Where Do You Come From? which gathered illustrators and graphic designers from across Canada for an edition-based poster show and accompanying art book, it was clear that Wong's sense of overwhelming meticulousness was the result of hitting full steam. As co-author and co-designer for the recently published We Eat Together cookbook as well as receiving one of the city's upcoming public art commissions, Wong is certainly flexing the multitude of possibilities for an Edmonton-based freelance illustrator.
And in terms of injecting a new perspective and energy into the arts community, I will go on record and say how glad I am Anthea Black is back in her hometown after being away for over 10 years as a print-based artist, a freelance arts writer and curator and at one time the executive director of Stride in Calgary. From being the first exhibitions manager the AGA has ever had to organizing printmaking workshops for queer youth and holding arts writing workshops and challenges, Black is genuinely interested in generating community in a critical and conceptually challenging manner.
*First published on Vue Weekly
Friday, January 1, 2010
Alberta Art Comes To Age*
In 2005 the Edmonton Art Gallery announced it would be renamed “The Art Gallery of Alberta” (AGA). In honour of the name change, it was also announced that the building itself would receive a dramatic redesign. Now, just five years later, the new building, designed by Los Angeles-based architect Randall Stout, has risen—a statement that the AGA is ready to stand alongside other major art institutions across the country and around the world.
Image credit: Taken from Flickr
Stout’s architectural vision combines Edmonton’s undulating river valley and the city’s functional grid system in a new space that serves artists as well as it serves the general public. “The public spaces will rival the Citadel’s when it was first built,” says Catherine Crowston, deputy director and chief curator of the AGA, referring to the mix of private and public spaces at the other end of Sir Winston Churchill Square. “Our intention is that it become a great space for people to see art exhibitions, but also to gather. The opportunities for public use are exciting.”
The public expects a lot from the new AGA, Crowston says, and she’s confident that it will deliver. Not only is the gallery’s architecture unique in the province, but the AGA is able to offer a world-class exhibition space; especially the third floor, which features 6,000 ft2 of open space and can be subdivided, as it will be for next summer’s Alberta Biennial.
Image credit: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Installation view: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2009 Foto: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York
For the AGA’s grand re-opening, Alberta expats Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller will launch the North American premiere of “The Murder of Crows,” which made its world premiere in the 2008 Sydney Biennale and its European premiere in Berlin’s prestigious Hamburger Bahnhof. “Janet and George can do one huge exhibition in the open configuration,” says Crowston. “In Sydney, they had an old 200 ft long wharf on the waterfront and they had a [similar] space in the vaulted ceiling room in the Bahnhof.” The artists created a piece specifically for the new AGA entitled “Storm Room,” a smaller work which will be shown in the RBC New Works Gallery. In addition, new retrospective exhibitions on Francisco Goya and Edgar Degas will feature as the gallery’s premiere exhibitions.
The new AGA opens its doors on Jan 31, 2010, celebrating with free admission on opening day and a full weekend of festivities. For more information, visit www.artgalleryalberta.com.
First published in Alberta Views, December 2009
Image credit: Taken from Flickr
Stout’s architectural vision combines Edmonton’s undulating river valley and the city’s functional grid system in a new space that serves artists as well as it serves the general public. “The public spaces will rival the Citadel’s when it was first built,” says Catherine Crowston, deputy director and chief curator of the AGA, referring to the mix of private and public spaces at the other end of Sir Winston Churchill Square. “Our intention is that it become a great space for people to see art exhibitions, but also to gather. The opportunities for public use are exciting.”
The public expects a lot from the new AGA, Crowston says, and she’s confident that it will deliver. Not only is the gallery’s architecture unique in the province, but the AGA is able to offer a world-class exhibition space; especially the third floor, which features 6,000 ft2 of open space and can be subdivided, as it will be for next summer’s Alberta Biennial.
Image credit: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Installation view: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2009 Foto: Roman März © Courtesy the artists, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Luhring Augustine, New York
For the AGA’s grand re-opening, Alberta expats Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller will launch the North American premiere of “The Murder of Crows,” which made its world premiere in the 2008 Sydney Biennale and its European premiere in Berlin’s prestigious Hamburger Bahnhof. “Janet and George can do one huge exhibition in the open configuration,” says Crowston. “In Sydney, they had an old 200 ft long wharf on the waterfront and they had a [similar] space in the vaulted ceiling room in the Bahnhof.” The artists created a piece specifically for the new AGA entitled “Storm Room,” a smaller work which will be shown in the RBC New Works Gallery. In addition, new retrospective exhibitions on Francisco Goya and Edgar Degas will feature as the gallery’s premiere exhibitions.
The new AGA opens its doors on Jan 31, 2010, celebrating with free admission on opening day and a full weekend of festivities. For more information, visit www.artgalleryalberta.com.
First published in Alberta Views, December 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Glenn Ligon, Illingworth-Kerr Gallery, September to December, 2009
*
(image source: www.acad.ab.ca)
During a residency at Alberta College of Art & Design in 2007, New York artist Glenn Ligon filmed his version of the last scene in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. After the film was developed, the footage returned damaged and the results led to the ghostly film ‘Death of Tom’. This looped film was featured in Ligon’s recent exhibition at the Illingworth-Kerr Gallery alongside ‘Untitled (Minnesota Massacre)’, a series of 19th century painted panels the artist discovered in storage at the Glenbow museum.
Based upon stage versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s original story ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, Edwin S. Porter’s silent film introduced early 20th century film-viewing audiences to one of the first narrative depictions of race relations in film. During a recent artist talk, Ligon showed documentation of the making of ‘Death of Tom’, wherein Ligon and other actors restaged the scene of Tom’s death and the visitation of 'little Eva' as an angel. He called the completed film’s damaged footage both a “failure of representation”, and an “excavation”. The resulting film, screened within a small black box of a theater, is of eerie, abstract beauty. White shapes upon a black screen seem to shiver, breathe, and struggle to define themselves. Jason Moran’s accompanying music plays to this struggle. Shapes crackle like static, are pulled like wool, and pulse skittishly as Moran’s errant themes become melancholic, pick up hopefully, and stumble as the screen flickers and becomes blank. Moran plays to each damaged scene, each chord pulled gently by slight suggestions of tone or mood. The obscured actors have morphed into tiny threads of light, their human presence visible as streaks of coherent film, shifting and stretching like the shadows of shoes glimpsed from beneath a door.
As the film continues to loop, each time introduced by fragments of the original titles, Moran’s score adapts different versions of itself, its mood shifting palpably. The music seems to age, loosen, lighten, and become heavier, placing itself within and upon the film as an accompanying, then central character. Moran is known for improvising compositions from the phonetic and melodic textures of looped recordings of songs and conversations; a hypnotic structure which brings to mind Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ performed by the Kronos Quartet. The role of Moran’s music in Ligon’s film is both a narrator and activator of versions, possibilities, adaptations, and conversations about the film.
The first notes of Moran’s score as it accompanies the fragments of the film’s title instantly evokes “silent film”, a style within a period of film’s history instantly linked to narratives of oppression which, as writer Jon Davies observes, have “tainted the entire American narrative cinema, whether explicitly or implicitly”. What becomes apparent is that Ligon’s film subtly demonstrates how this history retains its presence through mere suggestion of the silent film refrain.
Leaving the black box structure, a slide projector automatically flips through snippets of text collected and arranged by Ligon. The texts evoke another theatrical version of history. Its dramatic tones describe “The Great Tableau”, “The Great Moral Exhibition of the Age!”, and various “Life Like View”s of violence, its tastefully withheld details “left to the imagination”. The slides, emphasized by the sounds of Moran’s music coming from the tiny theater, are projected upon a high white wall where a makeshift set of stairs allow viewers to see what is on the other side: several large paintings propped or fastened to wooden supports, which depict naïvely-rendered and stagey scenes of conflict between Native and white figures. These figures are all set against outdoor village or landscape scenes which evoke a style in between the sideshow backdrop and the outsider artist’s intimate, fleshy tones.
The placement of the stairs and small size of the platform from which to view these works forces the viewer to strain to try and see much of the paintings’ details, and each new angle cleverly obscures other paintings from clear view. This need for a better viewing angle, particularly as these paintings are both oddly beautiful and grotesque in their glimpsed violent acts (one of the paintings shows a child nailed upside-down to the outside of a house), implicates the viewer in the act of shameless gaping. This is fitting, as these paintings, collected by the Glenbow in the 1960s, are fragments of a 19th century traveling panorama used to display and entertain crowds with a dramatically heightened view of the 1862 Sioux / Dakota uprising against white settlers in Minnesota. In his artist talk, Ligon relayed that the Glenbow felt the panels were “difficult to deal with”, keeping them stored and out of view of the public for the majority of their stay at the museum since their acquisition.
Both ‘Death of Tom’ and ‘Untitled (Minnesota Massacre)’ explore the residual power of distorted, damaged representation, creating entirely new stories out of already-obscured historical texts, and playing with our continued susceptibility to dramatizations of those texts. Ligon’s collaboration with Jason Moran explores this sense of innate history through a much more direct positioning of the artist against and within the text, leading to an installation which continually manifests, as Ligon suggests: “its own structures and desires".
*Review by Kim Neudorf
Works cited:
Coburn, Tyler. Glenn Ligon: I Am… Art Review (London, England) no. 29 (January/February 2009) p. 56-65
Davies, Jon. Glenn Ligon’s Death of Tom. Xtra September 2008. 5 December 2009
*
(image source: www.acad.ab.ca)During a residency at Alberta College of Art & Design in 2007, New York artist Glenn Ligon filmed his version of the last scene in Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent film ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. After the film was developed, the footage returned damaged and the results led to the ghostly film ‘Death of Tom’. This looped film was featured in Ligon’s recent exhibition at the Illingworth-Kerr Gallery alongside ‘Untitled (Minnesota Massacre)’, a series of 19th century painted panels the artist discovered in storage at the Glenbow museum.
Based upon stage versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s original story ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, Edwin S. Porter’s silent film introduced early 20th century film-viewing audiences to one of the first narrative depictions of race relations in film. During a recent artist talk, Ligon showed documentation of the making of ‘Death of Tom’, wherein Ligon and other actors restaged the scene of Tom’s death and the visitation of 'little Eva' as an angel. He called the completed film’s damaged footage both a “failure of representation”, and an “excavation”. The resulting film, screened within a small black box of a theater, is of eerie, abstract beauty. White shapes upon a black screen seem to shiver, breathe, and struggle to define themselves. Jason Moran’s accompanying music plays to this struggle. Shapes crackle like static, are pulled like wool, and pulse skittishly as Moran’s errant themes become melancholic, pick up hopefully, and stumble as the screen flickers and becomes blank. Moran plays to each damaged scene, each chord pulled gently by slight suggestions of tone or mood. The obscured actors have morphed into tiny threads of light, their human presence visible as streaks of coherent film, shifting and stretching like the shadows of shoes glimpsed from beneath a door.
As the film continues to loop, each time introduced by fragments of the original titles, Moran’s score adapts different versions of itself, its mood shifting palpably. The music seems to age, loosen, lighten, and become heavier, placing itself within and upon the film as an accompanying, then central character. Moran is known for improvising compositions from the phonetic and melodic textures of looped recordings of songs and conversations; a hypnotic structure which brings to mind Steve Reich’s ‘Different Trains’ performed by the Kronos Quartet. The role of Moran’s music in Ligon’s film is both a narrator and activator of versions, possibilities, adaptations, and conversations about the film.
The first notes of Moran’s score as it accompanies the fragments of the film’s title instantly evokes “silent film”, a style within a period of film’s history instantly linked to narratives of oppression which, as writer Jon Davies observes, have “tainted the entire American narrative cinema, whether explicitly or implicitly”. What becomes apparent is that Ligon’s film subtly demonstrates how this history retains its presence through mere suggestion of the silent film refrain.
Leaving the black box structure, a slide projector automatically flips through snippets of text collected and arranged by Ligon. The texts evoke another theatrical version of history. Its dramatic tones describe “The Great Tableau”, “The Great Moral Exhibition of the Age!”, and various “Life Like View”s of violence, its tastefully withheld details “left to the imagination”. The slides, emphasized by the sounds of Moran’s music coming from the tiny theater, are projected upon a high white wall where a makeshift set of stairs allow viewers to see what is on the other side: several large paintings propped or fastened to wooden supports, which depict naïvely-rendered and stagey scenes of conflict between Native and white figures. These figures are all set against outdoor village or landscape scenes which evoke a style in between the sideshow backdrop and the outsider artist’s intimate, fleshy tones.
The placement of the stairs and small size of the platform from which to view these works forces the viewer to strain to try and see much of the paintings’ details, and each new angle cleverly obscures other paintings from clear view. This need for a better viewing angle, particularly as these paintings are both oddly beautiful and grotesque in their glimpsed violent acts (one of the paintings shows a child nailed upside-down to the outside of a house), implicates the viewer in the act of shameless gaping. This is fitting, as these paintings, collected by the Glenbow in the 1960s, are fragments of a 19th century traveling panorama used to display and entertain crowds with a dramatically heightened view of the 1862 Sioux / Dakota uprising against white settlers in Minnesota. In his artist talk, Ligon relayed that the Glenbow felt the panels were “difficult to deal with”, keeping them stored and out of view of the public for the majority of their stay at the museum since their acquisition.
Both ‘Death of Tom’ and ‘Untitled (Minnesota Massacre)’ explore the residual power of distorted, damaged representation, creating entirely new stories out of already-obscured historical texts, and playing with our continued susceptibility to dramatizations of those texts. Ligon’s collaboration with Jason Moran explores this sense of innate history through a much more direct positioning of the artist against and within the text, leading to an installation which continually manifests, as Ligon suggests: “its own structures and desires".
*Review by Kim Neudorf
Works cited:
Coburn, Tyler. Glenn Ligon: I Am… Art Review (London, England) no. 29 (January/February 2009) p. 56-65
Davies, Jon. Glenn Ligon’s Death of Tom. Xtra September 2008. 5 December 2009
*
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