Open to meaning
The 2002 Alberta Biennial incorporates elaborate visual rhyming
EXHIBIT REVIEW
2002 ALBERTA BIENNIAL
Runs until November 23
Nickle Arts Museum (U of C)
The Alberta Biennial exhibition has been getting a lot of attention – people have been drawn from all over the country to see it and The Globe and Mail has given it rave reviews. The exhibition has already had a successful run at the Edmonton Art Gallery, and is now in Calgary at the University of Calgary’s Nickle Arts Museum.
The success of the show is mainly due to the strength of the curatorial selections and the thoughtful presentation of the artists' work as chosen by co-curators Catherine Crowston, from the Art Gallery of Edmonton, and Diana Sherlock, an independent curator in Calgary. Gallery-goers can expect a very smart and concise group show that celebrates the great diversity of artistic practices in our province.
The underlying curatorial proposition for this year’s exhibition strikes a conscientious note.
"We try to build interesting relationships between the works of the artists, so that as you walk through the exhibition the viewer can participate in the process of making meaning by looking at the relationships between the works" explains Sherlock. "The richness of this kind of exhibition is that a multiplicity of meaning can happen."
Indeed, there is something in the nature of this show that resists all notions of the neutral art gallery environment in which the art object is isolated from potential distractions. The idea of the unimpeded viewing experience has been displaced, and the gaps between artworks have been filled.
There certainly is a lot of conceptual and esthetic rhyming between works. In Glen MacKinnon’s Pearls, an enormously scaled-up version of a necklace, the viewer’s position is secured before a ridiculously foreshortened object. Pearls rhymes with Construction, Gord Ferguson’s installation that includes a pyramidal structure made of pieces of concrete, which diminish from large slabs to vertiginously small pebbles. In both of the works, the viewer is simultaneously seeing close-up and into the distance. They complement and reinforce in each other the sculptural desire to self-consciously address the viewer’s physical position in relation to the artwork.
Perhaps one of the dangers that the show flirts with is that an emphasis on visual rhyming may cause divergent works to look perfectly complacent. For example, I noticed at first glance an esthetic link between Kristina Kudryk‘s large triptych, a garishly bright painting full of tropes and gestures from throughout art history, and Mary Scott’s and even so the deepest strata…, a free-standing work that includes equally garish hair accessories attached to three stools arranged around a table.
Nearby are Luanne Martineau’s drawings, The Four Seasons. The oozing and odorous landscapes are drawn in a "well-versed" old-masterish manner, and seem to share a similar topical concern with Scott’s – namely the excesses of consumption. However, upon a closer and more intimate look at Scott's sculptural work, I noticed that the stools became like surrogate figures literally connected in conversation by their bizarre plastic circuitry. One has toppled onto the table, exhausted and vulnerable. It suggests a sort of understated allegory of the use of language itself with a nod to the wonderful eccentricity of this system that binds us. The poetry of Scott’s piece has very little to do with the heavy quotation marks and illustrative gestures of the neighbouring pieces.
Differences reveal themselves within the show's paintings, especially in the treatment of surface and the implications of the human touch. One can see the way the brush has very carefully filled in the intricate and ragged edges of a digitized image in Arlene Stamp’s Lost Painting Series. The evident use of the human hand shines brightly in opposition to the rigid conceptual system she has imposed on herself.
Opposite to Stamp’s installation are Chris Bennett’s paintings, which use broader fields of colour with softly handled transitions that show as close an affinity to photography as to abstract painting. And the human touch is altogether removed from Dean Driver’s near-monochrome paintings – the edges of the images are so exact and the surface so mirror-like that it appears to be completely manufactured.
In the room adjacent, the work of Eric Cameron elevates the human touch to a philosophical plane. Underlying the absurdity and perversity of his elaborate performance-installation Springs Eternal is Cameron’s subservience to the mechanistic controls of modernism and a reinforcement of his grand idea that the as the material of paint accumulates, it brings forth inevitable outcomes.
The visual resonance of the show is definitely high key. There is no fear of bright colours, of conflated or inflated scale, or obsessiveness of materials. The result is a further step towards accessibility – the works on the whole seem immediate rather than subdued. They are here and now, bright and bold. The artworks are vibrant, like our community, and deserve the enthusiastic local and national interest they are receiving. |
