Brian Battista and Angela Bedard are two of the up-and-comers featured in 7 by 7

Stride Gallery showcases some up-and-comers with its current summer exhibition 7 by 7: Rising Talents Selected by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Operating since 1985, Stride can boast bringing up three generations of local talent, regional artists and national prodigies. And the gallery’s dedicated Calgarian art fans have witnessed the peaceful co-existence of artists old and new at the gallery’s jam-packed opening nights.

The official opening of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts took place in Ottawa, on March 6, 1880, founded by the then Governor General of Canada, Sir Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne, and his wife, Alberta. Yes, that’s the connection this province has to the establishment of a nationwide arts institution — the name Alberta, as in Her Royal Highness Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria and known to a few as a feminist artist and sculptor.

I’m not sure if the royals or academics knew this was the birth date of the great Renaissance master Michelangelo, but according to the Governor General, in a text originally published in the Ontario Society of Artists Exhibition catalogue in 1883, the RCAA would be healthy enough “…to offer as a prize to the most successful students of the year money sufficient to enable them to pass more time in those European capitals, where the masterpieces of ancient art can be seen and studied.” At that time, the artists were provided a hotel in Quebec to engage in their crafts and the Queen purchased work from the exhibiting artists. Now, the RCAA is populated with a slew of Alberta artists, who have hand-selected younger artists to enliven and embolden the Dominion, but with less perks than the roaring 1880s.

The first piece you encounter in Stride’s small gallery space is from Brian Battista, selected by Calgary veteran John Will. It is a large painting of a three-eyed deer and an elderly man with a weird green cane below the banner “Fortune Favours the Bold.” This garish ensemble of taro-style symbolism is indeed bold.

Romy Straathof’s delicately stitched bits stretched across two black frames, weaves together broken words such as “Yukon Territories” and “Canada” with disparate ink colourings. The two hand-stitched images, selected by Jane Kidd, are suspended from frames by the white thread, which holds together miniscule squares of cut-up paper. I imagine the underpinnings of this meditative work embodies the shaky contracts that loosely hold together our vast stretch of landscape.

A photo of a little pink geisha creating a motion blur with her arms in a ’70s-style hotel lobby by Robert Lemermeyer is lauded by architect Jeremy Sturgess, most likely for its elegant design principles.

Championed by Katie Ohe, Robin Murphy’s strange modernist wall monument Voices, with its red gloss paint, is a representation of the body and how it communicates beyond language, a subject she often explores through her work.

Jenna Frischke’s playful jewelry, selected by Jackie Anderson, ranges from tactfully-drawn bird necklaces to playful but gaudy fake pearl, Sailor Moon wares.

Archive, Angela Hendry’s installation, drips from the ceiling as gooey, glass-encased plasma fetuses, holding inside their icky ooze everything from cellphones, lipstick, a mini pieta, a toy carousel horse, to a dime store pocket watch. The artist utilized translucent plastic or resin to encase these objects, which hang from the gallery ceiling. The resin is stretched to thin wires, attached to overhead beams, giving the impression they are housed in an organic substrate and dripping down to eye level.

It’s Governor General Award-winner Rita McKeough, however, who has selected one of the highlights of the show. Portions of an exploded assemblage of cake is all that remains on the desk and floor of Angela Bedard’s Eat Like a Lady, along with iron arm casts, which resemble instruments of medieval torture. Bedard’s restraint-based performance on opening night involved the artist attempting to eat an entire cake with a fork while wearing the straight iron garments, preventing either arm from bending at the elbow.

In addition to the seven artists showing at Stride is the Joseph Plaskett Award-winner, Vitaly Medvedovsky. Her painting Hunt is a beautifully crafted photo-realist winter riddle that takes place in an average suburban playground. Men hover over a children’s elephant slide, while a man atop a wooden horse, blowing a horn, sounds the proverbial “Charge!” In the foreground, a gnome who resembles Andre the Giant supports another gnomish character with a misshapen head and large mustache. They are leading the static wooden horse, while another man in the background presents a white ceramic bowl to the elephant slide in a gesture of offering. The hunt begins for the spectator to locate the potentially bereft intension behind this great image.

The Joseph Plaskett Award of $25,000 is intended for an individual to study in Europe for a year. History seems almost unrelenting in its repetition, as the Governor General’s remarks in the early 1880s echo in the present. While at the local artist-run centre, from reputable local senior artists such as John Will, Chris Cran, Arlene Stamp and Ron Moppett, the younger generation has undoubtedly studied and will continue to emulate their predecessors, while charting their own strides forward.