The first work I encounter in Truck Gallery’s latest exhibition, At Variance, is a kitschy assemblage of glass bulbs and dime-store furniture. I am intrigued, as I quickly scan the paintings and installation pieces that comprise the show, but I decide to resist reading any artist statement or literature provided. The collected, reconfigured materials, the subtle and subdued paintings and the immaculate floor installation all share some conceptual thread. It isn’t apparent immediately, but I’m in for some art detective work and particularly for the great reward of the “a ha” moment, or more so in my case, the “knew it all along” moment. What is the primary motive then, shared by these three diverse female artists?

I turn my attention to the paintings by Christine Cheung, a Calgarian and recipient of the 2008 Alberta Lieutenant Governor General's Emerging Artist Award. In the first canvas, a river of purples and reds cuts a swath through what looks like a jungle scene, where a red-cloaked figure wades into, or passes through, the waters. Another exists along the shoreline. Next, a muted Naples Yellow and grey landscape with sketched-in fields, is inhabited by even more nondescript characters. The third, a more abstracted painting, with vivid colours, drips orange and teal swatches. The larger-scale painting, The Circle Game (2008), with its brightly coloured purple, recalls Peter Doig’s basketball court, but here, white-scarved figures huddle in the centre of the court, locking arms. Other ghost-like forms make their way into the scene, as other figures in these paintings appear to drift between the place they inhabit and the media that refuses to develop them.

Marcy Adzich’s floor and wall-mounted sculptures, amassed of various furniture, miniature landscapes and seemingly nostalgic objects, which are at once celebratory (silver balloons), or lamenting (plastic flowers), present the viewer with the challenge of unpacking the assemblage and locating its meaning. The first piece that confronts the viewer upon entrance into Truck’s main space is Adzich’s hollowed-out sculpture, which appears to be a mould of a balloon grown over with green moss. Balloons, flowers and silver chalices adorn the central table; a mournful place, overcome by the natural world, reasserting itself over the false flowers at the base of the sculpture. Yet, the train-set scenery of the green atop the miniature hill is itself a kind of fakery, crowned with a lost set of golden antlers. Another sculpture protrudes from the wall as a large horn-shape of earth, with tiny trees. All of the sculptures unfurl from furniture bases, spray-painted in gaudy colours, and varying displays of gift-wrapping or random ornamentation. One free-standing shelf has a pustule of earth protruding from the cavity in its back and is covered with a wood-slat roof. It is held aloft by a bunch of motionless silver balloons.

Beth Howe’s large floor installation, Bow River Topograph (2008), consists of eight by 10 rows of pure white packages of printer paper with the path of a river cut through the pages, giving the impression of natural erosion. Each package contains orange paper at its centre, allowing the eye to travel through the white terrain via a bright and twisting colour line.

I finally give up the ghost and look at the literature. Naturally, I was right all along. The artists each reference the notion of place as it pertains to space and the potential for the accumulation of stuff to create a narrative for the landscapes that inhabit the show. For Adzich, the mass-marketing of holiday display items, which become useless after the holiday’s date, roadside memorials to unknown victims and cheap bargain goods creates a strange place for the collision of human-created spaces and naturally decaying places. Cheung’s paintings Jakarta Gendlea (I Have Never Been to Japan) (2008) and The Circle Game (2008), each painted while the artist was in residence in Indonesia, contemplate the historical and political regimes of place, existing in constant limbo, and ultimately determined through identity and subjective views. Howe’s topographic minimalism abstracts the form of the Bow River and transforms it into a place and space we desire.