Review
DEPARTMENT OF ART FACULTY EXHIBITION
Nickle Arts Museum
Runs until February 7
University of Calgary
Faculty art shows are often self-congratulatory affairs with the learned men and women of the department trotting out one of their latest pieces to show students that they still can create art after years of lecturing and scores of academic conferences.
The University of Calgary art-faculty exhibition now on at the Nickle Arts Museum not only achieves this, but also surprises with works that range from discussing the role of visual arts in universities to using some of the most recent computer-graphics technologies to create art that comments on our social fabric.
Ray Arnatt is first out of the gate with his installation entitled The Unswept Floor at Home and Abroad. Arnatt is a long-serving professor of art at the U of C who has worked as a sculptor in England and Canada, and in this work he explores the prospect of teaching at an institution that, in his words, forgot to mention "visual arts in its March 2003 Update of the Academic Plan under section 4.4 Creativity and Innovation in the Arts."
For this installation he revives the art of rhyparography (painting or writing about sordid or depressing things) with Ray Arnatt’s 2003 Rhyparography Awards. Kicking off the list of "honours" is the Alberta Bullshit Award, which the artist describes as being "awarded to the administrator who can shout ‘Bullshit’ the loudest in a departmental meeting." The trophy is a cow pie handsomely mounted and ready to be hung on the wall of the lucky recipient.
The piece is wickedly funny, but with its bitter overtones it meanders from the overarching message that the institution is failing in its mission to support visual artists. If it’s as bad in the hallowed halls of the U of C art department as Arnatt suggests in this installation, then perhaps next semester he should award a visual arts student at the university with the Blind Optimism Despite All Contradictory Evidence Award for pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there.
Moving away from the internal politics of the art department and into pure esthetics is the work of Bill Laing. Born in Glasgow and based in Calgary since 1974, Laing is the head of the printmaking department at the U of C. His prints and paintings have been exhibited across the world and in Motif #16 we can see why. This painting, made up of three separate panels, forms a delicate and rich visual canvas full of patterns – including the underside of a leaf – to create mood, mystery and beauty.
Another faculty piece that is both challenging and visually stimulating is Scenes From the Cave, a collaboration between Prof. Marjan Eggermont and student Julie Stromer. The cave in this case is the walk-in display unit at the Faculty of Medicine used to create virtual reality. In this instance, instead of being used for bioinformatics (mapping and organizing information used in life-sciences research, including the human genome), the cave helps create art, with the team of Eggermont and Stromer exploring the issue of homelessness.
Using the work of Greek surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico as a starting point, the two created digital outputs using the virtual-reality lab. We see a dark landscape punctuated by statue-like figures that roam the streets, representing the homeless population of Calgary. It’s a dark and disturbing piece that raises alarm about the desperate situation on Calgary’s streets as effectively as any news report.
The faculty show at the Nickle proves that, although visual arts are often neglected today, there is a continuing need – even duty – for artists to explore, document, comment on, criticize and provoke the communities where they live, work and teach. |
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