| Why not head out on the highway for an April arts excursion? Make your destination Lethbridge or Banff this month and the visual-arts exhibitions that await are worth the drive.
The Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge is home to one of Western Canada’s finest collections of contemporary art and two exhibition spaces. On display until April 25 are Present Day Epics by Wang Qingsong and Faye HeavyShield’s installation Blood, with new works connecting history, community and her Blackfoot ancestry.
HeavyShield’s highly-acclaimed work incorporates a broad range of media and is also included in A Question of Place at the Walter Phillips Gallery of The Banff Centre until May 23. In body of land, over 200 photographs of brown skin are folded to resemble teepees and pinned to migrate across the wall. Curator Candice Hopkins develops a strong narrative in the show by describing Métis settlement on road allowances, and patterns of nomadism and adaptability in aboriginal culture, to reference the installation by HeavyShield.
Similarly, Brian Jungen’s drawing Bush Capsule Study first references a traditional dwelling, but is then constructed out of contemporary materials that viewers might recognize from Jungen’s repertoire – white armchairs and polyurethane.
A Question of Place also includes work by Jimmie Durham, Zacharias Kunuk, Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Truman Lowe.
Back in Calgary, photographer Colwyn Griffith presents some uncanny Canadiana. His takes on the Banff Springs Hotel, Peggy’s Cove and Niagara Falls reveal a bizarre twist to these familiar tourist landscapes. It opens on Friday, April 16 at Stride Gallery. And the highlight at the Art Gallery of Calgary this month is a solo exhibition by local artist Noel Bégin called An Lithospheric Semilocus – Undermine Litotes. |
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