M.N. Hutchinson

Life Preserver and Life Boat by Suzanne Franks

Poring over Fast Forward’s visual arts archive reveals that 2007 has been an active year for visual arts — with a particularly keen focus on exhibitions, screenings and performances in Calgary’s artist-run centres, media centres and public galleries. The 10 (plus!) shows included here acknowledge the great work of artists and cultural workers who take the cake this year:

• Smother by Suzanne Franks (Calgary), Nickle Arts Museum — Smother was, quite simply, a landmark exhibition by Calgary artist Suzanne Franks. With two major installation works and a series of sculptures, Franks created complex narratives of motherhood and obsessive studio practices in relation to contemporary culture. Her proficient handling of textiles that are unusual within a visual arts context — nylon, screen mesh and plastic sheeting with grommets and other obsessive details — made the formal quality of the exhibition particularly awe-inspiring.

• Welcome to My Party by Amalie Atkins (Saskatoon), Stride Gallery’s Project Room — Stride’s presentation by ex-pat Calgarian Amalie Atkins was a charming and transformative use of the Project Room space. As a darkened theatre for this mini-retrospective, Atkins’s archive of quirky prairie-inspired Super-8 movies was a perfect fit. From the local roller rink to a snow-covered National park, her ability for magical, hilarious storytelling is a DIY dream come true.

• Common Threads, curated by Lee Plested (Vancouver/San Francisco), Illingworth Kerr Gallery, various artists — This much-awaited touring exhibition, which originated at Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Art Centre, brought a heavy dose of craft fever to the city. The exhibition included projects that have inspired feisty international dialogues on subversive crafting, such as KnitKnit’s Sundown Salon, but this craft-o-rama curated by Lee Plested also pointed to compelling links between utopias, modernity and craft practices. Home of much of the academic focus of Craft Year 2007, the Alberta College of Art and Design’s conferences, panels and lectures were a treat for crafty chats of all persuasions, particularly Amy Gogarty’s talk on relational craft.

• Winnipeg Babysitter, curated by Daniel Barrow (Winnipeg), presented by Emmedia Gallery and Production Society, various artists — This packed screening was a “be there or be square” event for aficionados of experimental Canadian video art and DIY alike. Daniel Barrow’s curatorial archiving project collected footage from Winnipeg’s public access television station. It was probably the first exhibition legitimizing video as a folk art media.

• Scentbar: Fragrances for Troubled Times by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (Winnipeg), presented by M:ST Performative Art Festival, The New Gallery and Emmedia — Dempsey and Millan always manage to cause a shakeup of ideas around art, performance and feminism wherever their work is presented. For M:ST 3.5’s presentation of Scentbar, the two took aim at consumer culture, memory and nostalgia in the perfectly ironic location of Art Central.

• Where the ocean meets this guy by Jason De Haan (Calgary), in Stride Gallery’s Project Room — In what seemed to be the zenith of his fascination with the ocean and with boats, landlocked Prairie bumpkin Jason De Haan built a boat in Stride’s basement. Over the course of a month-long residency, his vessel took shape, overflowing the confines of Stride’s notoriously small Project Room, until the mast of the boat finally rose up through a hole in the floor and towered puzzlingly into the gallery’s main space. The tight visual metaphors in De Haan’s earlier works came into fruition here, as the installation was an invigorating workout in futility, humour and feats of imagination.

• Salvaging Utopia by Lisa Benchop (Calgary), Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik (Berlin) and Stephan Gilot (Montreal), at Truck Gallery — This year, Truck’s thematic programming finally came into its own with tightly thought-out exhibitions ditdahditdit, Endgames and Salvaging Utopia, the best of this group. The show managed to comprehensively explore ideas of science fiction, modernist imaginings of the future, faith and failed utopias in three short works. The 2007 Alberta Biennial: Living Utopia and Disaster flirted with these ideas but failed to fully define them. These ideas have touched our architectures, habitats and visual cultures, and Salvaging Utopia revealed the evidence with eerie installations by an excellent group of artists.

• Through the Gilded Looking Glass by Brendan Tang, My Beautiful War by Paul Robles and The Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics by Mireille Perron, all at The New Gallery — Among the many craft-based exhibitions this year, these three strong showings at TNG offered vigorous testament to the idea that craft is thriving in virtually every medium. Tang focused on rowdy ceramic mash-ups using china and found pieces, reassembling them into vases and wall works with little commentaries on race, masculinity and crafting cemented right in. My Beautiful War combined politically charged imagery with traditional paper-cutting techniques and decorative patterning galore, whereas Perron’s The Laboratory of Feminist Pataphysics assembled her wry multidisciplinary sculptures into a show that fully articulated her ongoing critique of academia and corporate culture. TNG couldn’t have programmed a more appropriate swan song for the final exhibition at their old space on 9th Avenue S.W., given the gallery’s history of supporting Calgary artists who do politicized, performative works.

• Kind of Sort of Yours but Actually Mostly Mine, video screening co-ordinated by Wednesday Lupypciw for Rupture: Artcity Festival of Art, Design and Architecture, various artists — A tightly curated sampling of video work by artists from across the country, the Kind of Sort of program hit the right notes on intimacy, technical virtuosity and longing. Showings by Stacey Watson and Paul Atkins represented opposite ends on this spectrum of ideas, from the meditative to off-the-cuff and hilarious. As Artcity moves towards a roaming festival of performance, installation and site-specific works, the evening’s format is sure to develop into a not-to-be-missed annual event.

• World Upside Down, curated by Richard William Hill at the Walter Phillips Gallery (The Banff Centre), various artists — Exhibitions at the WPG never fail to raise important critical issues in contemporary art, and World Upside Down is a shining example. Richard Hill’s investigation of the points where social satire and pop culture meet was pleasurably, intellectually dense, and with the inclusion of comics and posters, the performance maintained an esthetic wittiness that never felt too weighty. Yinka Shonibare’s rearrangement of Thomas Gainsborough’s well-known colonial portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews was a key point in the exhibition that also included film stills from Planet of the Apes, and works by General Idea and local emerging artists Terrance Houle and Jarusha Brown, among others. The gallery’s emphasis on curatorial excellence is backed by careful research and precise installation, hence making Banff an essential stop on any gallery-goer’s list.

• Bonus — It was a delight to see Montrealer Daniel Altmejd in Alberta for the first time, at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. His sculptural spaces evoked horror and fascination through their use of mirrors, elaborate lighting and, of course, his visceral, decay-ridden figurative elements.

• Double bonus — While the exhibitions in Calgary’s commercial gallery scene are more appropriately discussed by those who critique them on a regular basis, kudos go out to Trepanier Baer Gallery, Paul Kuhn Gallery and Skew Gallery, among others. Their work to exhibit and increase the recognition of the many contemporary artists living and making a practice in our city is an integral part of the community.