Kate’s Red Dress by Jeanne Stangeland

Each spring, a fresh crop of artists graduates from Calgary’s educational institutions, BFA in hand. This year, the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) 2008 Grad Show displayed the works of over 180 graduates from May 15 to 21. Meanwhile, changes in the University of Calgary’s Graduate Exhibition, Art 08, have created the opposite situation, with 14 graduates occupying the Nickle Arts Museum for a month and a half. While ACAD bills its graduates as producing “Canada’s finest emerging artists and designers,” the University of Calgary condescendingly explains that “this is often [the graduates’] first exhibition at an art gallery,” and “each student... takes responsibility in organizing the exhibition.”

There are some awkward curating decisions, such as the installation of Jeanne Stangeland’s small Picasso-inspired ceramics in the same space as her work Kate’s Red Dress. Kate’s Red Dress is a show-stopping red tulle, satin and sequined formal gown that beautifully occupies its space in the gallery. Unfortunately, the ceramics are dwarfed by it and could have been better presented in their own space.

The Nickle’s large space combined with the small number of participants encouraged a few artists to include too much of their work. This undermines a sense of coherent direction at a time when they are presenting themselves as a finished product of their studies. Otherwise, there is generally a nice flow between works both in terms of concept and media.

I was initially drawn counter-clockwise through the gallery space by the layered, scumbled surfaces of Byron Rich’s abstract paintings and prints, referencing the floor plans of traditional cathedrals as an example of man-made environments that attempt to control those who occupy them. Jane Poole’s Lady’s Mantle strikingly calls attention to the negative spaces around her subject matter by reversing the figure-ground relationship in the wood panel cut-out painting. Shannon Deobald’s Study of Place conjures reverent objects from the remains of natural materials manipulated by humans, such as log cuts, by casting them in bronze and displaying them on pedestals. Ivan Ostapenko’s rows of disposable coffee cups, titled Moments of Clarity, and Megan Prost’s Recomposed (one day at a time) recycled paper pentagrams create diary-like references to daily rituals that define and structure an existence. Other engaging works include Nazanin Erfantalab Evini’s Grandmother’s Memories and Lauren Grace Simms’s String Drawing. Where Evini’s balls of yarn, strung across her painting like a weft ready for a weaving, are folkloric, Simms builds a series of connected sculptural drawings within her wall-mounted white cubes. The yarns cleverly cross boundaries between string as material, and string as a line in space.

It’s unfortunate that the tone of the show’s description is so condescending, as one is consistently surprised by the quality of the works — these are, ostensibly, newly trained professionals being presented to their contemporaries. While there are some works that seem ill-conceived or poorly executed, the class of ’08 is headed in some interesting directions.