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Visual Arts by Anne Severson First pick this week is Toronto’s Cathy Daley with her appealing swirling and statuesque black dresses that speak in a post-feminist voice on female identity. If you wear a black dress to the opening, you too can be part of the Daley party dancing on the walls at Newzones on February 18 at 5 p.m. In colorful contrast, the smaller room has the goofy cartoon characters of rising star, Jeff Nachtigall, with his loose, intuitive manner mockingly displayed in his mixed media paintings on wood. Trepanier Baer’s opening on February 19 at 6 p.m., introduces new works by gallery artists as a way of welcoming to the stable Montreal’s established painter Carol Wainio and Lethbridge’s newest star, David Hoffos. In the fall, Hoffos displayed a dark, creepy, interactive installation at Illingworth Kerr that will be presented in Barcelona, Spain this March. This is an artist to watch, as he plays around with technology and operates in the new genre. In contrast to these contemporary works, older graphic formalist paintings of the late Roy Kiyooka – well loved by Calgarians – will open as part of the Saskatchewan Connection. A gallery walk of the Saskatchewan Connection on February 20 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. has been organized around the Glenbow exhibitions of under-recognized revolutionary Arthur McKay and the Regina Five. If you start this modernist walkabout at Virginia Christopher’s Arthur F. McKay: Mandala Paintings from the Early ’70s, it’s an easy stroll to Trepanier Baer’s exhibit of Kiyooka, who was an associate of the Regina 5. A few more blocks and Newzones has Nachtigall, a representative of a new generation of Saskatchewan artists. Next door is Paul Kuhn with a Group Show of Saskatchewan Painters. It’s a bit further over to Wallace and back again to Canadian Art Galleries, but both of them present works by the Regina Five. CAG also has works by Otto Rogers, a related, meditative Saskatchewan formalist. Nearby is Glenbow with the central exhibition and the 46-minute video by Fumiko Kiyooka, the daughter of Roy. She profiles the history of the group and its associates during their time in early ’60s Saskatchewan, when these rebellious characters wrenched the prairies into the international modern art stream. This mini-artwalk focuses on the modern formalist abstract painting, which engulfed and unified so much of Saskatchewan and a lot of Alberta starting in the late ’50s and early ’60s. These were exciting post-WWII times, where anything seemed possible. Desiring to go beyond the traditional landscape regionalism that went back to the late 1900’s, they looked to New York, the booming international center of the art world. After McKay’s experiences with new art there, Regina painters wanted to bring New York abstraction to geographically isolated Saskatchewan. These were heady times and, with supporters including the Saskatchewan Arts Board, workshops were held at Emma Lake near Regina with renowned New York art critic Clement Greenburg, and avant-garde artists such as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. In the heart of the remote prairies, a new sense of energy revolutionized painting. It creates an understandable background for eclectic Calgary, extending this rebellion by revolting against formalism to produce the diversity of new works listed at the beginning. In fact, an afternoon in these galleries could snap the whole contemporary art scene into perspective. If you want more context, a slide and discussion series on Understanding Abstract Art is held at the Glenbow, 7 p.m. on February 25, by Victoria Baste of The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, and March 11 by Brydon Smith from the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. It’s free with Thursday nights’ reduced $5 admission. Last chance on February 18, 4 p.m. at the Nickle with the closing ceremony by eight Tibetan monks of Ganden Jangtse for the Avaloketeshvara Mandala. It’s interesting to note that much of Arthur F. McKay’s work was inspired by the meditative universal oneness of the original Mandalas.

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