Wim DeIvoye Studio

Cloaca No. 5 by Wim Delvoye

Amidst the harlequinade of music, comedy, film and kids in really tight pants, the modest visual arts component of this year’s Sled Island may fall under the average festivalgoer’s radar. Greatly expanded from last year’s poster exhibition, anyone who plans to attend the festival but give the exhibitions a miss does so at their own peril. The exhibits include an impressive collection of paintings, lenticular prints, sculptures and even a machine that does its best to produce a close facsimile of human feces.

This year’s visual arts programming is the powderkeg wreckage left behind last year after festival directors Zak Pashak and Shawn Petsche sent a drunken e-mail to their painter friend, Wil Murray. As the plan expanded, famous-in-the-right-circles curator Wayne Baerwaldt was also brought in to assist with organizing the exhibitions. “I got a tipsy e-mail from Shawn and Zak Pashak last year in the middle of the festival, because I couldn’t make it last year,” says Murray. “I did a show with Shawn in Montreal and, yeah, they sent me this e-mail saying, ‘Holy shit, we need an arts component next year, and we want you to have a show.’ And they did that, and of course I said yes, because I can’t say no to Zak for some reason.”

Murray has his hand in two shows at this year’s festival. The first is a lenticular printing exhibition, Grreeden (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art and Design), which he set up with his shutterbug friend Justin Evans. Lenticular printing uses a double convex lens to print images with the illusion of depth or movement, like those Spider-Man trading cards you had as a kid where Doctor Octopus would get punched in the face when you twisted it in the light. Essentially, Evans has made lenticular prints of Murray’s paintings, and they’ve set the two side by side. There is, however, no punching.

“Justin is a longtime friend of mine, and in Vancouver about 10 years ago, he kind of explained to me lenticular printing. He did an exhibition down at the design fair of lenticular prints,” says Murray. “One night down at a bar — I still have the napkin it was drawn on — he explained lenticular printing to me and told me about a long-term project he would like to do involving my painting. Right now he’s working with a hybrid camera, and the eventual plan is to get him photographing my paintings as they’re made and using that as the source material. At this show, they'll still be separate.”

The second show Murray is involved in is a painting exhibition called Thick and Thin (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, ACAD) that he is also curating. The exhibition examines the current state of regional Calgarian visual arts and rejects what might be called, to a casual observer, a “Prairie style.”

“I struggle with notions of mass appeal, because painting is a difficult medium for a festival with a lot of shows,” says Murray. “It’s kind of a longer look, and there isn’t any specific kind of performance, but what winds up being the show in a lot of ways is the opening. So it’s going to be a big party. Chris Millar will be deejaying, and I really think it’ll get people out. Wayne [Baerwaldt] has a whole bunch of international art coming as well, so if nothing else, people can go see the “shit machine” (Cloaca No. 5 by Wim Devoye) at the Glenbow. It’ll knock their socks off, and they’ll have a great story to tell afterward.”

“We’ve got a lot of pretty amazing artwork coming to Calgary for the festival,” says Pashak. “I’m a big fan of checking out galleries during a music festival. It’s just kind of a nice way to break up the day. It gets kind of over-saturated with music sometimes.”

For a full list of Sled Island visual art events, venues and dates, visit www.sledisland.com.