FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
A week in the life...
ArtWeek offers an opportunity to sample...After a year's absence entertaining pipe dreams of being a world class, international Biennial... on a budget, ArtWeek "the modest" returns with a solid line-up of exhibitions and events.
Here's my itinerary. The Glenbow's receptions (Friday, September 19, 4 to 7 p.m.) tend to be plush and hushed, but the food and art is always terrific. Marcel Duchamp: Dustballs and Readymades, etc. features copies of works of art with historical significance; fascinating if you're an artworld habitué, but likely to inspire furrowed brows if you came for the Cowboy show. However, if discovering how a urinal is both a work of art and erotic (!) gets your pulse racing, you will want to hear Eric Cameron (September 21, 2 p.m.) at the Glenbow Theatre. Also that afternoon, you can watch dada-inspired performance artists, the SKEP(tic)KS, guard Duchamp's sensibility, and a complimentary exhibition of Duchampian stuff from the collection.
Somehow between 4 and 7 p.m. I'll also attend three other openings. Down the street, The Banff Centre adjunct space is showing recent acquisitions. The gently notorious ManWoman - mandated by God to de-nazify the swastika and make us aware of our dualities and hypocrisies - is at Artisans. (I wonder if they know what they are in for?) ManWoman paints quick, IDiosyncratic responses to topical issues. The show includes "A Princess To Di For," "Mother Teresa Flashin' a Peace Sign," and a visit from Mr. Death.
Evan Penny makes some of the most beautiful and intelligent figurative sculptures in Canada. They range from deadpan and unnerving realism to conceptual and art historical meditations. A lot of bodies litter ArtWeek but few approach even the patina of Penny's sculptures. If you are looking for exceptional craft, subtle haunting forms, sensual shapes and an engaging response to the body and tradition, then you can't miss Evan Penny: New Works at Trépanier Baer.
Weary from the openings, we'll stumble into the Gala Bacchanal in the old The Banke space ($10 at the door). It will be crowded with partiers and the usual suspects from the encyclopedic University of Lethbridge Collections (art for all occasions, exhibitions prepared while-u-wait). Also here are Post-Photographs by Robert Lemermeyer and something called Golden Boy produced by United Missions (formerly Alberta Report favorites United Congress). The only show to come with a "viewer discretion" warning, Golden Boy includes jars full of "artifacts" retrieved from the body of a Victorian cyclist named Rafael Albert, hmmm.
The space also features must-hear talks (check your guide for times and dates) by CD-ROMers Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow; Governor General's Award-winning architect Jeremy Sturgess; curator of the Lethbridge collection Jeffrey Spalding; installation artist Janet Cardiff; and the guy who burns wood, Peter von Tiesenhausen. These talks are free, but two guys from Toronto, Richard Rhodes and John Bentley Mays, want five bucks for a slide show and to hear what a good time they had at The Venice Biennale, the Skulptur Projekte in Munster, and Documenta in Kassel.
Rhodes and Mays' Eurobash officially closes ArtWeek (September 27), but you may decide to bring your $5 over to performance impresario Charles Cousins' less officious Calgary Vaudeville Nouveau Floorshow. While there is no guarantee that the performances - by The Green Fools, Fred Holliss and Richard Sixto, Gavin Shaw, Obscene but Not Heard, and the man himself - will be any easier to swallow than the title, you can be sure the evening will entertain in the extreme.
Sandwiched between these events are a stack of painting and sculpture shows. Walter May at Paul Kuhn finds the enigmatic in the everyday and creates strange objects that defy logic and invite a hesitant touch. It's a fine compliment to the Duchamp exhibition. The Last Picture Show is a collection by NewZones gallery artists. It celebrates that gallery's upcoming move to a new building, next to Paul Kuhn, and their inclusion (finally) in ArtWeek. And don't miss Truck's Tongue, a rewarding group show concerning the problems of translation.
Pinch me. The New Gallery is showing paintings. And Painting Machines is the second such show in a row! Okay, only one work is of something; the rest are scribbles, logos, blurs and stripes (they're in season). Among the cool are John Eisler, who makes assemblaged "paintings" that nearly become architecture, and Roy Meuwissen, whose perplexing unpaintings respectfully cite Gerhard Richter, but with a twist on his twists. Most working in this abstract, late neo-geo wave (for-the-office designs that peaked in '88, but remain a strong undercurrent) tend to paint their pretty stripes or near-corporate logos really big. Meuwissen's tricky photo-paint blurs are intimate and subtle by comparison. The atmosphere in the gallery is cool, very cool, even post-human. The lone woman, Heather Raymont's wall scribbles shiver in two corners of the gallery; elsewhere they might be lyrical, but they are out of place amid this hip platoon.
Things have been pretty quiet at Art is Vital since the move from the mall, but the calm ends with their Faces and Figures show and competition. The work ranges from maudlin, grotesque and perverse, to thoughtful, quirky and beautiful; but these are the risks and pleasures in taking on the figure in an age suspicious of mastery and a tendency to illustrate rather than engage the body.
The yet-to-be-opened Institute of Modern and Contemporary Art (IMCA) is showing two installations in its huge space. High on my "I'll be there" list are Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow's interactive multi-media work Einstein's Brain - The Fall, and Spirit and Place, a cooperative installation by 10 young inner-city artists facilitated by Domingo Cisneros.
I've only scratched the surface and have omitted some really terrific exhibitions and events. So, be sure to pick up the ArtWeek booklets found at participating galleries, and check out the website.
Back To Main Contents
Back To This Issue Table of Contents