Review
ARTCITY
VISUAL ARTS EXHIBITION
September 6 to 21
Telus Convention Centre
Esthetic treats abound at the annual Artcity Festival, but perhaps the overlooked beauty is how the combined efforts of Calgary’s hard-working arts community produce such a relevant and dynamic event. The Visual Arts Exhibition at the Telus Convention Centre builds on this year’s theme Spread
Clues for interpreting the works are anywhere that there is urban sprawl, daydreaming, fear of disease or even the waste paper that infiltrates and informs every facet of city life.
Calgary’s suburbs become a strange place to explore in, Edge City, the collaboration between artist Rébecca Bourgault and environmental designer Gregg Casselman. The two have devised a satirical driving tour through Calgary’s outskirts, tracing a path from the various golf courses to man-made lakes and past cookie-cutter homes, complete with guide book. This piece is one of the many gems in the show, keeping in mind the spirit of the Artcity Festival, which combines visual art, architecture and design under one broad spectrum. Sarah Graham’s beguilingly pretty work, Canadian Suburbs, becomes part of the meaningful context that Bourgault and Casselman create.
Other works suggest that the imagination is a perfect antidote to life in the ’burbs. Chris Millar’s glowing paintings escape to ghostly architectural spaces with eccentric detail – they become spatially alive as a black light flickers on and off to trigger a second image, illuminated and hovering above intensely detailed grounds. Calm ceramics by Chris Faulkner suggest another landscape, where he forgoes the functionality of the vessel in favour of mischievous forms. Arranged together, their silhouettes rise like the skyline of a lunar colony.
Closer to home, the show addresses fears of SARS, mad cow disease and West Nile Virus without the usual sensationalism seen in the media, but rather adding shades of complexity with intimate portrayals of disease. Amy Gogarty’s rich ceramic tiles evoke diseases of yore – the kind we read about in history books. Her nebulous arrangement of tiles, mosquitoes, bits of medical text and delicate textures of painted flowers offer many paths to interpret. Don Mabie’s new work proves that a daily dose of doodling could make anyone feel a little better. Having been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes, his colourful style of all-over drawing fills his Blood Glucose Testing Guide with a gleeful record of his daily activities.
The overwhelming esthetic of Spread preferences layers of detail, and the combination of media make for visually complex works with open-ended meanings. The works of Angela Inglis and Laura Vickerson, cleverly paired in a play between similar materials, are no exception. For Inglis, strands of shredded documents and glossy porno turn waste paper into seductive surfaces – fingerprints of our insatiable consumption of information and images. In Vickerson’s work, the patterns of torn security envelopes take on a comforting guise when sewn onto sheer fabric. The work is hung several feet from the wall, to cast a shadow and reveal an intricate pattern design reminiscent of her rose petal works.
Other artists in Spread include photographer Chrystal Cherniwichan, painter John Eisler, Vancouver artist Marlene Madison, and emerging artist Michael Jones’s excellent spectacle of Starstruck. |
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