In Latin, Levitas, the title of Linda Craddock’s exhibition at Edmonton’s Bugera Matheson Gallery from March 1 to March 14, means levity or lightness. It’s a fitting title: Craddock’s paintings feature human figures, their identities obscure, who float over mountains, down streets, and through misty, vague terrain that seems more metaphorical space than literal place. Craddock, who has a Master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Calgary, is interested in dreams that transcend the bounds of gravity. She has also been thinking about spirituality and death as people in her family pass on. At some point, as she reflected back on her life, she recalled the old open-chair gondola that carried people up Sulphur Mountain in Banff National Park. “I drew a female form being mechanically lifted but decided to erase the wires that held the chair, and then I erased the chair, as there was no need to depict the device itself,” she says. “She ascended, unrestrained.” Craddock, who grew up in Vegreville, Alta., and now lives in Calgary, researched the series in Banff, poring over historic photographs and revisiting places she knew in her youth. Each of her 21 paintings took weeks of planning. First, she chose a location. Then she waited for someone to appear in her mind’s eye. Often it was a member of her family – her mother, her aunt, her grandmother. Sometimes it was a stranger. And, at times, it was Craddock herself. One painting, Couple Passing Mt. Rundle, shows a man and a woman floating toward each other, one heading up, the other down. They are almost close enough to touch, but they might simply pass, remaining strangers. The painting speaks to the happenstance of fate, missed connections and things that might have been. More Images ►
– Portia Priegert

Many of us have stories about bears. It might be the tourists you saw foolishly feeding a bear by the side of a highway. Or that ominous growl down a ravine that sounded like it was coming from a 300-pound biker. Or that night out camping when you heard an animal rummaging around the picnic table and the hairs at the back of your neck stood up. Bears are a part of Canadian identity, not just a source of campfire tales but symbols of things we hold dear, like the beauty of wild places, even though many bear populations are struggling in the wake of human encroachment, ecosystem degradation and climate change. So little wonder then, that the Canada House Gallery in Banff has put together a show of bear paintings by four artists that supports a good cause – WildSmart, a Bow Valley non-profit group that educates locals about how to reduce negative interactions with wildlife to sustain animal populations. “We really want to share our love of bears,” says gallery owner Barbara Pelham. “We thought it would be a nice way to celebrate them.” The show, titled Bear, runs March 1 to March 12 and features work by Edmonton artist Robert Lemay, West Coast artists Richard Cole and Susie Cipolla, and Sarah Martin, who lives in Barrie, Ont. They take different approaches. Lemay paints covers of popular magazines like National Geographic that feature bears, while Cole, primarily a landscape artist, depicts the animals with naturalistic realism. Cippola’s work is more impressionistic, with its interest in light and loose brushwork. Martin uses mixed media, incorporating painting and vintage photographs to create more stylized images. More Images ►

A retrospective survey by Brenda Francis Pelkey, one of Canada’s leading photo-based artists, is a lesson in contemporary art history. Just consider her materials: starting with black-and-white silver-based prints on paper in the 1980s, she moved into saturated, shiny Cibachromes in the 90s. Paper gave way to aluminum in the Naughts. And now, she uses inkjet on bonded aluminum. Her latest pictures float on the walls with no frames – the display standard for contemporary, large-format photography today. That particular form of display can be read as a symptom of photography’s struggle with its tenuous grasp on its own materiality, which goes some way to explain why photo-based work, in the late 20th century and beyond, became the medium of choice for critical artistic practice. But of course, it’s the indexical nature of the photographic image that really accounts for its hold on critical discourse, and it’s what drew Francis Pelkey to the camera. Unlike painting or writing, the photograph is a mechanical reproduction: its subject was actually there. The exhibition, on view until April 15 at the College Art Galleries at the University of Saskatchewan, where Pelkey taught for a decade before moving to the University of Windsor, opens with her early documentary work. The Foundry series (1987-1989), is full of tropes: black and white, exposed film rebate (a sign of the means of production), real light, real people (the proletariat): reality! And even though she went on in subsequent work to question the truth-claims of the tradition, she never really left it. Francis Pelkey’s entire oeuvre should be considered as documentary. More ►
– Marcus Miller 

When we witness excellent artistry or craftsmanship, it can leave us astonished. We shake our heads in amazement and conclude that perhaps it is not brains that live in the fingertips of craftspeople but tiny gods. Yet as craft theorist Glenn Adamson wrote in 2010, skill is useless in its own right. It is best, he said, “when it gets people talking and puts things on the move.” To say that Margaret Nazon’s beadwork moves is an understatement. Her freeform creations, on view at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife until May, pull heaven and earth together. Nazon became fascinated with astronomy after seeing NASA images on the Internet. She has been making beaded imagery based on outer space since 2009 – spectacular nebulas, auroras and constellations, influenced by images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Each piece involves thousands of beads stitched onto black velvet or another fabric, often so layered the work becomes three-dimensional. The result is luxuriant: outer space as a shimmering, velvet-lined jewelry box. In Milky Way Spiral Galaxy, ladders of yellow, pink and grey beads spin out and away from a circular section of caribou bone. Gas, clusters and dust-clouds are rendered in a kind of pointillism, as sprays of single translucent beads. When viewed from a distance, Tarantula Nebula stretches its legs and feelers into the far corners of the composition. Up close, its structure is revealed as a densely woven lattice. Both views delight the eye. More ►
– Sarah Swan

Part shrine, part cabinet of curiosities, part celebration of all things trans, an exhibition at the University of Victoria’s downtown Legacy Art Gallery focuses on a community that has faced prejudice and violence. Building on initiatives within contemporary art that interrogate institutional archives and unearth alternative visions, this transgender history – or, hirstory, as it’s sometimes called in gender-neutral terms – is a milestone. The show, which continues to March 29, is titled Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. It’s the latest version of an ongoing project curated by American artist Chris Vargas, who was inspired by A History of the World in 100 Objects, a joint project of the BBC and the British Museum, and The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects. Vargas is the founder of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art, an imaginary institution that coalesces for temporary events, while remaining perennially under construction. The 99 objects – an eventual goal – seek to illuminate the stories of this marginalized group. This is the museum’s first foray into Canada, following earlier projects in Los Angeles and Seattle. This time, Vargas curated art and archival material from UVic’s Transgender Archives, a remarkable collection that includes everything from books and newspaper clippings to photographs and paintings. According to Aaron Devore, the university’s chair of transgender studies, it’s the world’s largest archive of materials related to trans, gender non-binary and two-spirit people. If its shelves were set out end-to-end, they would be as long as a football field. More ►
– Portia Priegert

Calgary artist Walter May’s retrospective, Look Again, invites visitors to do just that with a rare glimpse of some 50 individual works and series from his quirky and prolific practice. The University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries has mounted a wide-ranging show that includes sculptures, drawings and photographs from the 1970s onward by May, a longtime instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design. Using discarded objects and salvaged materials, May creates sculptures in varying scale that accentuate or play with balance, movement, weight, constraint, precision or growth. Things like wooden beams, tree branches, metal sheets, wooden canes and tool handles are assembled into poetic fusions of the natural and the manufactured. Many sculptures in the show, on view until April 28, incorporate warped lumber rendered dysfunctional for any utilitarian purpose, but transformed in ways that evoke new meaning or tell a story. May’s early drawings – often in juxtaposition with the actual source material, often sticks, but also a bear claw and a squirrel tail – demonstrate the persistence of his ongoing preoccupation. For instance, a 1978 work, Sinuous Curve and Golden Rectangle, features a pencil drawing of a curved bamboo stick tied with a length of elastic band to create a bow-like form. The model it is based on is suspended over the drawing. The tension and implied movement created by such hybrids is echoed throughout the exhibition. More ►
– Lissa Robinson

“This is really an excellent exhibition!” This one short sentence is repeated every time my thoughts turn to Songs of Pythagoras, Peter von Tiesenhausen’s impressive survey-style show at the Art Gallery of Alberta. On view in Edmonton until May 6, it excels not only because of the rich works on display, but also because of the way the show is installed. With only a few hiccups, I was taken through a darkened landscape of salvaged materials, rudimentary objects large and small, and videos with moody, dissonant sound. The artist’s enormous effort is evident throughout. Axes are definitely a favourite instrument, as are hammers, rusty nails, a pair of metal cutters and battered sheets of plywood. There’s evidence too of the hot scorch of fire, making for a kind of a Sturm und Drang art practice involving the Germanic concept of blood, sweat and tears. Von Tiesenhausen is one of Alberta’s most physically engaged artists, an opportunity afforded by his commitment to working in often-distant places with minimal technology. More ►
– Mary-Beth Laviolette

Winnipeg-based artist Ufuk Gueray’s interest in Kazimir Malevich dates back to his high school years. He recalls hating Malevich’s Head of a Peasant when he first saw a reproduction as a teenager. But 20 years later, Gueray, who is of Turkish descent and grew up in Germany, is thinking again about the Russian Suprematist painter. “There are painterly moments in many of Malevich’s works that just look ugly, like clumsy smudges and accidental smears that could have been fixed,” says Gueray, an instructor at the University of Manitoba. “But instead, he chose to leave them, or didn’t notice, or didn’t think twice about it. I like them as evidence, as traces of a hurried desire to see an image materialize on a surface, and to be the first one to make this picture before someone else has the idea. Painting is a messy job, and maybe we’re just getting too used to seeing things in a pristine digital sphere.” Gueray’s show, Carrés et Paysans / Peasants and Squares, at Winnipeg’s La Maison des artistes visuels francophones from March 1 to April 14, is inspired by Malevich’s return to figuration after years of making pioneering abstract art. Malevich has become Gueray’s “personal guide for how to overcome boredom, nihilism and artist’s block in the studio.” Gueray has a Master’s degree in fine arts from the Glasgow School of Art and a BFA from Montreal’s Concordia University. He has shown his work in Canada, Germany and Britain. In 2014, he received an honourable mention in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. He was interviewed by Winnipeg artist and writer Cliff Eyland. More ►

Maggie Boyd has a clever exhibition concept. Her show, at Vancouver’s Franc Gallery until Feb. 23, is called Grapes. Each of her 22 earthenware vessels is titled as a numbered grape. Yet every work is deeply singular. Placed together they become a loose agglomeration, but never quite a bunch. Boyd uses humour and irreverent visual puns as she decants humanity’s troubles into the age-old form of the vase, pulling from many ceramic traditions to critique history, gender relations and contemporary dystopia. There’s a wry quality to her content, to be sure, but these sour grapes are rendered palatable by her playfulness. In Grape 2, for instance, the vase offers a front page from the so-called Times, with a banner headline that reads “Typhoon.” Below are images of wind-whipped trees, a staple of the wild-weather stories dominating the news as climate change tightens its global grip. Sticking out of the vase are fronds of desiccated greenery that etch a similar arc as the trees. I find myself thinking of the images of U.S. President Donald Trump on a windy day, his long comb-over forming that same arc. Typhoons and buffoons, mutual blowhards creating disaster? Perhaps I’m venturing too far down a whimsical branch. But then on the same shelf, consider another piece, Grape 3. It looks like a rock, though it’s actually flatter, more a slab positioned atop an elegant base. Is it a sly reference to the newsmakers or the news consumers? Given Boyd’s propensity to use mirrors, encouraging viewers to look back at themselves, it might be both. Touché. More ►
– Portia Priegert

Edmonton artist aAron munson is no stranger to depression. His project, One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression, reveals an artist finely tuned to the vagaries that can make life seem unbearable. In this – as with his latest project, Isachsen – he is following in his father’s footsteps. Munson is haunted by the struggles of his father, who, as a 19-year-old, spent a year at the Isachsen weather station on Ellef Ringnes Island in Nunavut. Isachsen has the worst weather in Canada, rating 99 out of 100 on the Climate Severity Index. It’s so far north that you look south to see the Northern Lights. And it’s dark 24 hours a day for three months each winter. Here, with the wind howling in his ears, his father kept a diary. “I have no ambition to do anything, sleep in fits and starts, don’t give a damn about living,” he wrote in 1975. Curious about the scar on his father’s psyche, munson visited the abandoned station with a guide in 2016, spending a week shooting photographs and video, and recording a wind so disturbing he wore noise-cancelling headphones to maintain his equilibrium. His stunning backlit photographs form the core of the Isachsen exhibition, on view until Feb. 17 at dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton. Additional works by Alberta artists Dara Humniski, Gary James Joynes and David Hoffos round out the show into an immersive installation, giving it full power as an extended metaphor for depression. More ►
– Anne Pratt

Marie Khouri’s exhibition, Bronze, explores her experiences growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. On view at Vancouver’s Equinox Gallery until Feb. 22, the show juxtaposes spheres in various states of disintegration with her signature curvilinear abstract forms, telling a story of regeneration and rebirth. Khouri’s Vessel and Sphere series encompass notions of loss and destruction through the act of making. She uses a lost-wax casting process, sculpting wax models and rupturing them with a torch, thus using an act of destruction to create. The hollowed vessels evoke the shattered buildings of Beirut, which Khouri left as a teenager after war broke out in the 1970s. Her beautiful objects, unable to become whole, are laden with a sense of melancholy. Standing in opposition to these pieces are three abstract sculptures. Polished to a mirror finish, they gleam under the gallery lights. At first glance, Abstract 1, Abstract 2 and Toi et Moi, all from 2017, seem like outliers compared to the delicate tactility of her Vessel and Sphere series. However, a distinct thread weaves these bodies of work together. In manipulating bronze, Khouri is grappling and coming to terms with personal loss. These works are not simply examinations of bronze as a medium, but representations of the cycle of decay and growth. More ►
– Helen Wong

An uncomfortable and foreboding silence greets viewers walking into What Flies Above at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg until Feb. 17. The show, which comes as technological innovations rouse unsettled feelings about rapidly advancing mechanical bodies, features new work by Winnipeg artists Erika Lincoln and Reva Stone. They have researched separately for two years, exploring their own questions and discoveries about unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones. Both artists are long-time innovators in digital practice who connect the possibilities of technology to topics of ownership, spectacle and the natural world. Stone’s meditative and initially calming video, Alphabet, leads viewers into the exhibition with its sky-blue silence. The names of countries that have participated in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles float on and off the screen, allowing the show’s subject to emerge as the video progresses. Lincoln’s Strike Release: Sun Models-NGGH flashes subtly on a wall to its left. A natural yet unnerving companion to Stone’s work, it digitizes a list of air strikes in Syria, arousing curiosity about the rest of the exhibition. More ►
– Stacey Abramson

“Resist superficial readings of the photographs,” cautions Adrienne Fast, interim curator of the Kamloops Art Gallery, as she leads visitors through Re Present: Photography of South Asia, on view until March 31. Photography in the 19th and early 20th centuries developed along two parallel paths in India. On one, the British colonial government used it to create propaganda and to catalogue various groups and castes. An innocuous-looking photo of Mount Everest by British government photographer Samuel Bourne, taken in the late 1800s, required dozens of porters to haul masses of equipment over difficult terrain. “Think about the social dance, the structures of power that were in place to make this photo,” Fast says. The other path was enthusiastically taken by a wide spectrum of social classes and castes. Photo studios became social spaces where people who wouldn’t normally mingle came together, donned costumes and performed in front of the camera. Techniques of over-painting created striking, hyper-realistic images. Part of the exhibition features contemporary South Asian and Indo-Canadian artists who work with archival photos, updating and changing them, inserting the present into the past, confounding memory and encouraging viewers to question the validity of photographic records. The depth and breadth of Re Present, both in the number of works and the complexity of the issues it interrogates – colonialism, racism, migration and immigration, to name a few – demands much of viewers committed to looking deeply. I rest on a bench and watch a video by the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective loop over and over. The subtle movements layered onto an archival photo bloom across the screen and for a moment I let my mind rest. It’s a lot to take in. More Images ►
– Lorna Tureski

Wyn Geleynse offers something often absent from contemporary art – humour. Take Just …, a multimedia installation that’s part of Geleynse’s exhibition, Slackwire and Other Situations, at Calgary’s TrépanierBaer Gallery from Jan. 31 to Feb. 24. A rear-projected video loop features a hapless middle-aged man, a character Geleynse often adopts, struggling to spit out children’s wooden blocks. “You can hear him gagging and choking, and then all of a sudden, there’s a block,” says Geleynse. “And he just goes through this over and over and over again. You can see he’s perspiring. He’s in a lot of discomfort. He tries to relax a little bit, but it just keeps coming. It’s like a bad case of hiccups.” In front of the video is a jumbled pile of real blocks that add to the effect. “It’s not a seamless illusion,” says Geleynse. “I think people fill in the gap between the video and the real thing.” The lettered blocks spell no words but it’s easy to read the piece as a reflection on the inability to communicate, a condition that reportedly afflicts some men. Geleynse, who speaks quickly and fluidly about his work, has been active in multimedia art for more than three decades. He was born in the Netherlands, but moved to London, Ont., with his parents as a child in 1953, eventually becoming part of the city’s lively art scene, where he was influenced by Murray Favro and the late Greg Curnoe. More ►
– Portia Priegert

The cleverly titled Rereading Room, an installation by Vancouver artist Alexandra Bischoff, is a centerpiece for Beginning with the Seventies: Glut, which celebrates art, archives and activism as they pertain to the women’s movement. On view at UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until April 8, Bischoff’s work consists of some 100 books assembled on shelves lined along a wall, covers facing outward. Viewers browsing the collection are transported back to the 1970s, when women awakened to the pervasive sexism around them aided by books such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Our Bodies, Ourselves, which takes a frank look at women’s health and sexuality. Bischoff based her archive on an early inventory list from the Vancouver Women’s Bookstore, a downtown fixture from 1973 to 1996. Additionally, 13 female artists and activists are occupying the installation, here in its second iteration, giving the work a performative dimension. At various times, they sit at the installation’s table or on the couch, reading and writing reflections that will be archived later. Visitors are welcome to join in. The Rereading Room underscores the importance of feminist texts and the once-pervasive network of independent women’s bookstores across Canada, both for the wider community and for artists. The Vancouver bookstore was the first, and like the others, created a space for women to gather, engage in dialogue and offer mutual support. More ►
– Janet Nicol

Art, according to French philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss, lies halfway between science and myth. Regina artist Sylvia Ziemann’s solo exhibition of paintings and ink drawings, Accidental Utopia, at the Art Gallery of Regina until Feb. 23, inhabits this interstitial space more than most. A key image is Traumdeutung, in which a vermilion bunnyman is stretched out flat on an exam table. A blue bubble filled with icons – a mushroom, a life preserver, a burning building, a string of leaping frogs – spurts from his forehead. Traumdeutung, or dream interpretation, is the book in which Sigmund Freud advances his theory of the unconscious. Painting and drawing are also a kind of interpretation that can reduce dreams and other unknowable things to representational form, making it possible to apprehend them at a glance, to holistically understand them. Lined up on one wall are intestines, lungs, a heart and a torso. Their bold black volumes dissolve on close inspection into inked lines as thin and meandering as hairs. The outlines of these body parts are stuffed with jumbled words and symbolic images that fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One drawing contains a story titled “how I developed a wind phobia and how blue became my favourite colour,” about two balloons snatched from the narrator in childhood, while others are banded with lists of evocative words and phrases. The body is imagined as a receptacle brimming with thoughts, feelings, memories and dreams. More ►
– Sandee Moore

From a distance, they look like hard edge paintings; five large pieces affixed to canvas and hung on the wall. Another lies on the floor. Close inspection reveals something else. They’re not paintings but weavings and the weaving is imperfect, even sloppy. Artist Brent Wadden, who has a BFA in painting from NSCAD University in Halifax and now splits his time between Vancouver and Berlin, wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’m an untrained weaver,” says the internationally exhibited artist. “Someone who is traditionally trained would do things a lot differently. At this point, I like and accept all the mistakes.” Wadden calls his work woven paintings. His latest exhibition, Two Scores, at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery until March 25, probes the relationship between the spontaneity of painting and the mechanics of weaving. Traditional weaving produces a uniform pattern. There’s a rigidity imposed by the process of interlocking threads. Wadden fights this by taking a casual approach to the craft, making things up on the fly, often without preliminary sketches. He listens to music when he weaves. He even watches videos. When he runs out of one colour, he tags on another. Score 1 (Salt Spring), the exhibition’s centrepiece, is a breathtakingly monumental series of horizontal stripes that fills an entire wall. Some stripes are uneven, a product of both poor tension and the process of stretching the finished piece onto canvas. “Compositionally, the mistakes in the weaving are important,” Walden says. “They’re part of it.” More ►
– John Thomson

Vancouver-based artist Mark Ollinger describes his work as Nordic or Celtic knots that merge with graffiti. He typically executes them in aerosol paint on a flat wood panel, although he plays with the illusion of 3D space. Ollinger bases each piece on a different word that he turns into an unbroken line and then interweaves into a larger pattern. The word influences the shape of the final piece, which he first draws by hand and then recreates digitally, distorting it to create an optical illusion. In Timing, for instance, the original word is “she.” Squint and you will see a rectilinear “s” on the left side and a lower case “e” on the right. In the middle, acting almost like a hinge, is the “h.” Why that word? “Relationship stuff,” he responds. Ollinger, who was born in 1988 and grew up in Calgary, is self-trained and has been active in the graffiti community. After high school, he freelanced in illustration and design, worked in a silkscreen shop for a year, and designed his own fashion line, Duality Clothing, which was popular with skateboarders. Now focused on making art, he is emerging into the gallery system this month with two shows. One, Unconventional Constructions, is at Kimoto Gallery in Vancouver with two other artists, Jon Saw and Andre Serin. The other is a solo show, Lines Drawn, at Herringer Kiss Gallery in Calgary. Both are on view until Jan. 27. More Images ►
– Portia Priegert

If winter’s chill is getting you down, Vancouver artist Krista Johnson may have just the antidote. Her paintings, whether a mass of tangled flowers or a quiet pond, are potent reminders of summer’s warm abundance. She focuses on quiet moments in daily life and is interested in how paying attention to her surroundings puts her in a contemplative space and fuels her energy. “I am curious about how these fleeting moments can have such a strong impact,” she says. Johnson’s work has ties to her childhood. She grew up in a house with a yard but now lives in an apartment, so enjoys getting out to parks and gardens with her children. “I’m always trying to find nature within the city,” she says. Her show, The Places Between, at Vancouver’s Ian Tan Gallery until Jan. 31, features 12 paintings of things she has seen while out walking or riding her bike. She snaps a photo and then paints using four-by-six-inch prints as references so she can capture the setting and mood without getting distracted by every leaf or petal. Johnson worked as a designer and illustrator after graduating from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2000 with a degree in communication design. But in 2015, she decided to focus on painting because she was tired of feeling envious of people who were making their own art. She interviewed several artists to find out how they got started, set up a website and decided “to see how it goes.” How is it going? “It’s been great,” she says. “I’ve been really fortunate to sell whatever I paint.” More Images ►
– Portia Priegert

It’s the sort of crushing news that pushes you to your physical and emotional limits. Four years ago, Toronto-based artist Teva Harrison, then only 37, was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. By the time doctors figured out why she was in pain, the disease had spread to her bones and was both terminal and incurable. At first, she didn’t want to talk to anyone. But eventually she began discussing painful childhood memories with a psychiatrist on her oncology team. Back home, feeling raw, she began to draw, making dark, primitive comics. “Then I’d feel a bit of peace,” she says. “Once the story was outside of my head, I could let go a little.” Eventually, she started drawing about life with cancer. “It’s the unspoken that is most frightening,” says Harrison. “Shining a light on my experiences takes some of the power away from the bogeyman that is my cancer.” Her drawings hit a chord with friends, and she posted them online. Within a month, The Walrus contacted her, asking to post them on the magazine’s website. Soon after that, a publisher reached out, telling Harrison she had the makings of a book. By 2016, Harrison had compiled her drawings, along with short companion texts, into a graphic novel, In-Between Days: A Memoir about Living with Cancer. It won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s literary award and a Joe Shuster Award, given for Canadian comics. Then, late last year, her first major solo exhibition, In-Between Days, featuring 40 drawings, opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. More ►
– Portia Priegert

It’s obvious that Caroline Stanley’s nature paintings are based on photographs. Her imagery is realistic, of course, but it’s also her close-up focus, and how she contrasts foregrounds with sharply defined edges – often leaves or tree trunks – and more distant elements with a soft or blurry focus. Clearly, Stanley, part of Winter Salon, a large group show at Calgary’s Gibson Fine Art until Jan. 20, has a facility for capturing detail with her brush. But she’s quick to acknowledge that imaginative or conceptual art does not come easily, recalling her struggles at the Alberta College of Art and Design when instructors tried to push her out of her comfort zone. “Rainbows and animals are just who I am,” she says. Stanley graduated in 2007 and began painting portraits of dogs after posting a note at a local dog park saying she was looking for subjects and there was no obligation to buy. They proved popular and led to commissions. She says she has painted some 400 dogs and has an 18-month waiting list. She starts by asking people to fill out questionnaires about their dogs and also tries to meet her four-legged subjects so she can match her palette to their personality. She juggles those commissions with nature paintings, which are also popular. Her process starts when she heads out for a walk with her camera. She shoots hundreds of images, often without looking too closely at the composition, hoping to capture something fresh and unexpected. When she gets home, she chooses one that interests her visually. Some of her best-selling paintings look upward under different trees, showing a canopy of branches juxtaposed against the sky. More ►
– Portia Priegert

Twenty-five years ago historian and curator Maria Tippett published By a Lady: Celebrating Three Centuries of Art by Canadian Women. At the time, there was criticism of the book’s title. The problem was with the phrase “by a lady” which some considered demeaning. Given the contents between the covers and what Tippett achieved with this broad 1992 survey, the title seemed to me a pretty minor matter. You could argue over the selection of artists featured (if you knew anything about the topic) or the book’s attention to gender and issues of identity, but not its timely arrival. Taking another stab at the topic is Undaunted: Canadian Women Painters of the 19th Century. An exhibition rather than a book, this show, on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton until March 25, reveals there’s still much recovery work to be done. Even with its smaller roster of artists, there were surprises. Some on display, of course, are well documented, such as Emily Carr and Francis Anne Hopkins, who painted scenes of the fur trade, as well as successful portraitist Florence Carlyle and wildflower artist (and much more) Annora Brown. But others aroused questions. How many works by the artist still survive today? And what do we really know about their practice? The Irish-born Sara Mary Blake comes to mind here with her folk art like depictions of early ranching in southern Alberta. More ►
– Mary-Beth Laviolette

You don’t need a tank to breach the world’s longest undefended border, the 8,891 kilometres separating Canada and the United States. Indeed, as thousands of refugee claimants have shown over the last year in Manitoba, Quebec and elsewhere, you can simply walk across. Calgary-based photographer Andreas Rutkauskas captures that notion in a solo exhibition on view until Feb. 16 at the Canadian Photography Institute, a branch of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His exhibition includes 44 colour images, collectively titled Borderline and projected sequentially on a wall measuring approximately 13 feet by 11 feet. Other walls offer six black-and-white photographs of cutlines, the 20-foot-wide corridors cleared through forests along the border, along with several maps to help locate images. Rutkauskas, a photography instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, has remained true to his eternal search for “bucolic landscapes” by crafting images during a three-year period that are devoid of people and vehicles. “I’m a landscape photographer through and through,” says Rutkauskas, who grew up in Winnipeg. This means scenes of a seemingly depopulated border, often with small, dilapidated or abandoned border stations. Flimsy rusting fences, a felled tree or other makeshift barriers prevent cross-border traffic in remote areas, from the Yukon-Alaska divide, to points along the 49th parallel and on to the forested New Brunswick-Maine border. More ►
– Paul Gessell

Billed as a transcontinental journey through the country’s alpine vistas, Stone and Sky: Canada’s Mountain Landscape, invites the public to see these massive landforms through the eyes of some of our greatest artists. The exhibition at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., also allows viewers to sense the transitions in artistic perception against the permanence of the surrounding mountains. The show, on view until Feb. 26, includes many approaches to landscape, both historical and contemporary. But what stands out more than anything is the iconic, near mythological power of the land itself. Are we shaped by the places we live, or vice versa? The mountain landscape – lakes, forests, rivers and towering peaks – it’s all here in this thoroughly Canadian show. Included are early paintings by European artists who first made contact with the misty forests and mountains, such as Charles John Collings, F.M. Bell-Smith and Robert Ford Gagen, as well as Lucius O’Brien, who was born in a village near Ontario’s Lake Simcoe. The echoes between works are fascinating. Montreal photographer William Notman’s albumen photographs of the railway construction that would open Western Canada, when contrasted with Edward Burtynsky’s 2012 chromogenic photo of Mount Edziza Provincial Park, build rapport on photography’s role in a changing landscape. Another example is Toni Onley’s serene Japanese-influenced watercolours, which complement a beatific and serene mountain image by Takao Tanabe. More ►
– John K. Grande

Surreal, dream-like, spiritual and shrewdly insightful are descriptions that come to mind when viewing work by Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona. All these qualities are evident in A For Sure World at the Marion Scott Gallery, Ashoona’s first major solo exhibition in Vancouver in more than a decade. Although the show was to end Nov. 25, many of its 35 works on paper are being held over until at least Jan. 6. Ashoona, like her late cousin, Annie Pootoogook, makes drawings that can be amusing but pointed, even tragic, commentaries on life in the North. The piece from which the show takes its name is like something out of a comic book, with the words, “a for sure world” drawn in coloured pencil. Between the large letters are hands holding cheques, as well as several globes, a signature symbol for Ashoona. Playing cards cascade down from the top – a nod, perhaps, to the capricious impact of business on Inuit art. A closer look reveals that Ashoona plays little tricks where the address of the cheque writer is normally placed. On one she writes, “check book not drawing books,” as if admonishing herself. Other blank cheques are reconfigured with teasing words and one offers an inside joke about her gallerist. More ►
– Beverly Cramp

Searching for something good to read this holiday season? We decided to reach out to the community – our readers, our writers, artists that we’ve covered over the years and people who work at galleries – for suggestions. We’ve gathered an eclectic list of titles: Some hot off the press and some old favourites, some top sellers and some that will be harder to find, whether in Canada or further afield. Naughty or nice, you’re welcome to check out this list. If you have other suggestions, please add them in the comments section at the end of the story, so this collective gift can keep on giving. And so, without further ado … Reader Shayla Perreault, a Vancouver artist who works at the Contemporary Art Gallery, was the first to send in her suggestions. She reads a lot and says her favourite is a 2006 book, The Yellow House, by British art critic Martin Gayford. Perreault says his account of the nine weeks Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin spent as roommates in Arles in 1888 is a page-turner. “It’s easy to get wrapped up in Vincent’s dreams and hope they turn out, at least for a time,” she says. “Gayford makes a topic we may think we know about feel fresh and exciting.” In Winnipeg, artist and writer Cliff Eyland recommends After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus. This 2017 biography of Acker, an American writer, performance artist and all-round bohemian, was based on archival research and conversations with Acker’s friends two decades after her death. “Fascinating stuff,” says Eyland. “I’m studying it, really.” More ►

Another Toronto art auction season, another batch of speculation about the heights Lawren Harris will scale. And we’re not talking about the peaks with which he sought painterly – and later spiritual – communion. This fall, the likeliest candidate was Mountains East of Maligne Lake, a mid-sized work Harris completed in 1925, just before he hit his true heights. It was offered by the Heffel auction house with a conservative estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million. Some expected the work to catapult higher, given the $11.2 million paid a year ago for the much larger Mountain Forms, the sale that set a new record for the most expensive Canadian work sold at auction. But Mountains East of Maligne Lake performed at par, selling for $3 million. It was one of eight Harris paintings up for grabs at Heffel – Morin Island, Eclipse Sound, North Baffin Island, Arctic Painting XXXVI, 1930, sold for almost $1.3 million and Cathedral Mountain from Yoho Valley, Mountain Sketch LXXXVI at $931,250. Meanwhile, Waddington’s recorded solid sales for Group of Seven works and Consignor sold a 1911 watercolour by Emily Carr, European Street Scene, for $276,000. Another development was a first sale by a new venture, BYDealers.com, founded by Quebec art dealers Louis Lacerte and Yves Laroche with CEO Marc-Antoine Longpré. One highlight was Serge Lemoyne’s Le Masque, 1975. Signed on the verso by Ken Dryden, it sold for $240,000. For more details and images, read Alberta art dealer Doug Maclean’s report on the fall sales here.

Acclaimed Vancouver architect John Patkau knows steel. It’s a key element in the buildings he designs – the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver and the University of Manitoba’s Art Lab in Winnipeg, among others. With Cut / Drawn, on view at Vancouver’s Gallery Jones until Jan. 20, Patkau has transformed a utilitarian alloy, industrial steel plate, into six remarkable sculptures. “I’ve always viewed architecture as an art form no different from sculpture,” says Patkau. “Architecture is more complex in that you’re dealing with a whole bunch of other issues, but for me the objective is similar. They both have a formal ambition. In architecture, form comes first and material is instrumental in achieving that. About 10 years ago, I began to think about reversing that priority, thinking about material first and then form. When you do some things to steel, what does it become?” Experimentation revealed that when scored with multiple cuts and then pulled apart by a crane, a steel plate changes from a flat sheet to a curved form in less than a minute. It’s hard to believe Patkau’s graceful, undulating forms started life as squares, circles or triangles. Weathering Steel, for instance, took 20,000 pounds of linear force as it was reshaped. Patkau shied away from computer-aided design or simulations, letting the material itself dictate the result. “This method allows for a much more complex, subtle, harmonic form than applying an idea to the material. It’s a dialogue. Steel and I are talking to each other and this is the consensus we’ve been able to come to.” More ►
– John Thomson

Regina artist Debbie Wozniak-Bonk painted woodland scenes for years before turning her attention to abandoned farmhouses and grain elevators. The struggle to make such well-trodden subjects feel fresh stretched her as an artist and allowed her to reflect on her own story of growing up on a family farm that has succumbed, like countless others, to the wave of industrial farming that’s destroying the material history of an earlier era of Saskatchewan agriculture. Her show, Light Within, at Regina’s Assiniboia Gallery until Dec. 8, has a strong narrative sensibility and a magical, yet somewhat naïve quality. Executed in a series of thin glazes, her paintings glow with an almost ethereal light but also make one think of drawings made with coloured pencils. “My style is a little bit like a fairy tale,” says Wozniak-Bonk. “It’s a little bit off, a little bit unsettling.”  There’s a sense of nostalgia, but she also acknowledges feeling anger. Some images show a burning farmhouse. Painting the flames, she says, was “quite therapeutic.” She often uses a palette with colours from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, recalling how her father would talk about that era as the best years for farming. “You could have a small farm and make a living and provide for your family and not be too hard on the environment,” she says. Things started to shift in the ’80s as more people moved to cities, and family farms were consolidated into massive parcels that could be harvested efficiently with high-tech mega-combines. The old wooden grain elevators started to disappear too, replaced by structures that resemble factories. Wozniak-Bonk honours their passing in The Best Years of Farming 1, which shows a derelict elevator, weathered yet rosy, positioned full frontal in the picture plane in an oddly flat perspective. Standing before a field of canola, under an impossibly blue prairie sky, nary a cloud in sight, it becomes a surreal vision of an agrarian past. More ►
– Portia Priegert

Their clothes are often ragged, their beards wild and bushy. But most unforgettable are the eyes; they shine with optimism, daring and a disquieting intensity. These are the fortune hunters, the men who headed west to the 1848 California Gold Rush. Their images were captured by various photographers in daguerreotypes, a new photographic process at the time. Those amazingly preserved images now appear in a rogues’ gallery of a book called Gold and Silver, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name, on view until April 2 at the National Gallery of Canada. The book was authored by Luce Lebart, director of the Canadian Photography Institute, a branch of the gallery. The exhibition also includes a few Klondike Gold Rush photos taken half a century later in Yukon. The California daguerreotypes were part of a donation of 11,000 images and objects to the photography institute in 2016 from the Archives of Modern Conflict, a London-based organization that maintains a vast lens-based collection. Gold and Silver is just one of many recent books on the market (or soon to be) that focus on the art of photography, both historical and contemporary. Another gem, of doorstop proportions, is titled Notman: A Visionary Photographer. It tells the story of William Notman, the Scottish immigrant who opened a photography studio in Montreal in 1856 and became Canada’s first internationally known photographer, creating dazzling portraits of Montreal’s rich elite. The Notman firm also sent photographers west to capture turn-of-the-century images of a small, dusty town called Calgary and sweeping vistas of the Banff area. More ►
– Paul Gessell

Mary Schäffer – adventurer, writer, painter, photographer – is captured by historian Colleen Skidmore in her book, Searching for Mary Schäffer: Women Wilderness Photography. Part of a recent spate of books that preserve the stories of women artists, it tells how Schäffer, born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, defied convention by making four-month horseback excursions north of Banff, accompanied by a female companion and guides, in the summers of 1907 and 1908. One of the first white women to visit the area, she painted stunning watercolours of the alpine flora and took remarkable photographs of Indigenous families. She published accounts of her travels, best exemplified by her 1911 book Old Indian Trails, a hit in North America and Britain. It was even reviewed in the New York Times, and favourably so. Schäffer travelled widely to give public lectures and show her slides, and her work appeared in magazines in London and New York. In 1908, she visited Japan and photographed the Ainu people on Hokkaido, part of the growing genre of women’s travel writing that emerged as international transportation improved. By 1912, Schäffer’s adventures were subsiding. One of the book’s final images is an elegant portrait of Schäffer, a dog at her feet, sitting beside a large fireplace in her Banff home, Tarry-a-while, where she lived until her death in 1937. Skidmore’s book, published by the University of Alberta Press, is academic in tone, but engaging nonetheless. It deservedly fits Schäffer into a historical narrative mostly populated by men. Meanwhile, another history of a Canadian artist who defied gender stereotypes – Mary Riter Hamilton – was also published this year. An early war artist, she grew up on a Manitoba homestead, and endured hardship and danger to paint the battlefields of France and Belgium in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. More ►
– Steven Ross Smith

This may sound a little over the top, but 2017 is a banner year for books about Canadian fine craft and design. Of course, when talking about books, what I’m referring to is more accurately described as exhibition catalogues. But big deal. These publications can contain as much good reading, photography and design as a standard book. And this year, five notable publications stand out, all with something pleasurable to look at and read. First off is a bilingual publication, Canadian Craft Biennial, produced by the Art Gallery of Burlington and Craft Ontario. It scores high for how it covers the content of its main exhibition, Can Craft? Craft Can! Sure, the exhibition title is a tad corny, but how fortunate to be presented with images of each work along with nine essays that examine different aspects of Canadian contemporary craft. Sandra Alfoldy, a leading historian in Canadian craft, considers three key transformations in the handmade between Canada’s 1967 centennial and the 150th anniversary this year. Critic and artist Amy Gogarty explores the theme of sustainability by highlighting some works in the exhibition. And individual artists, including Karen Cantine, Beth Biggs, Cheryl Wilson Smith and the phenomenal jacquard weaver Ruth Scheuing, are given longer essay-style treatments. More ►
– Mary-Beth Laviolette

SakKijâjuk is a word in the Labrador dialect of Inuktitut meaning “to be visible.” It’s also, fittingly, the name of a touring exhibition that lavishly introduces – “makes visible” – Inuit art from the region known by Indigenous people as Nunatsiavut. This unique collection of sculptures, photographs, fur fashions and more will be shown at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, starting May 26. Can’t get to Winnipeg? Then buy the accompanying, stylish coffee table book SakKijâjuk: Art and Craft from Nunatsiavut. The author, Heather Igloliorte, an important voice in Inuit art these days, is an art history professor at Concordia University in Montreal. The book, a joint project of The Rooms in St. John’s, N.L., and Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, is just one of the many extraordinary illustrated books on Indigenous art published this year in Canada. SakKijâjuk is not about stereotypical Inuit art. Instead, there are ghoulish night-time photographs by Jennie Williams, surreal oil paintings by Mark Igloliorte, classy silver work by Michael Massie and fire-engine red sealskin fashions by Maria Merkuratsuk. Another Goose Lane book about breakthrough Inuit art, this one on the drawings of the late Annie Pootoogook, is to be published early in 2018. The book and an ongoing exhibition at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., are both called Cutting Ice, a term the McMichael says implies “something that matters or has consequence.” More ►
– Paul Gessell

Scandinavia’s impact on Canada’s national design sensibility is traced in True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Jan. 21. Organized by the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, the show assembles a striking collection of objects from museums, private collections and thrift stores to advance the proposition that Scandinavian design meshed uniquely with Canada’s ambition to embrace modernity and define its national character, particularly as the 1967 centennial approached. Curators Rachel Gotlieb and Michael Prokopow organize the show chronologically, locating the origin of Scandinavian influence in the early 20th century, when highly skilled artisans from Sweden and Denmark relocated to Canada. At this time, quality handmade goods were primarily the purview of urban elites, as evidenced by Carl Paul Petersen’s elegant silver tableware. Scandinavian influence entered a more populist phase after the Second World War, when rising incomes and expanding suburbs created fresh demands for household goods. Government-sponsored exhibitions and lifestyle magazines actively promoted these designs to the broader Canadian public. Presented as a softer, more organic and nature-inspired version of modernity, Scandinavian design was seen as sympathetic to the Canadian psyche because of its use of natural materials, which are plentiful in Canada, and because of social, geographic and climactic similarities between the two regions. More ►
– Amy Gogarty

Imagine a world where past and future seamlessly coexist: a world where not only our parents and grandparents, but an endless line of ancestors as well as future generations, are an ever-present part of our lives – not eerie or ghostly presences, but a caring, loving community that fills us with a sense belonging. This is the worldview embraced by Faye HeavyShield in Calling Stones (Conversations), on view at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton until Feb. 19. HeavyShield, a Kainai-Blood artist, took inspiration for this exhibition from the southern Alberta landscape near her home in Stand Off, as well as the many trips her family took to the Majorville Medicine Wheel (Iniskim Umaapi). She documented these pilgrimages over many years, taking photos of her son, daughter and grandson; solitary figures silhouetted against this sacred site on a hill overlooking the Bow River east of Calgary. The site, in use for thousands of years, is a place where offerings of sage, sweetgrass, willow and tobacco are still made and where spiritual activities continue to link the past and the future. The four installations and single video that comprise HeavyShield’s show are as spare as the prairie landscape, and give the gallery a sense of contemplative silence. As viewers wander through nearly empty rooms, delicate installations composed of feather-light elements come into focus. For example, many voices one story; one voice many stories is an airy column composed of small paper figures – people walking, children playing in the grass or doing cartwheels. Suspended, they sway in air currents created as visitors move past. On the floor is a spot-lit circle covered with laser print transfers of prairie grass. Inattentive viewers could dismiss this work as technically simplistic, but they would be missing its intensity of feeling and conceptual richness. More ►
– Agnieszka Matejko

International art star Takashi Murakami will have his first Canadian retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery next year. The Japanese artist’s show, The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, features 55 works, including a new sculpture and two multi-panel paintings created especially for Vancouver. It explores the influence of traditional Japanese painting and Buddhist folklore on Murakami’s art as well as  his engagement with media culture and globalization. Murakami, born in 1962, has been named one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” and is active in a wide range of artistic undertakings, from curating and collecting art to projects that nurture young artists. The show is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and curated by Michael Darling. It is on view from Feb. 3 to May 6.

In other news:

• The Manitoba Craft Council and the Manitoba Craft Museum and Library have officially opened their shared space, the C2 Centre for Craft.
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year is back at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, starting Dec. 8, after a one-year hiatus.
• The TD Bank Group recently announced the appointment of Stuart Keeler as its senior art curator.
• The Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada will co-present a major exhibition about humanity’s impact on the Earth next fall.
• Ryan Doherty is stepping down as the director and curator of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Alta., after 10 years.

A show that opens today at Masters Gallery in Calgary gives art lovers a rare opportunity to view two dozen little-seen paintings by Tom Thomson, an iconic artist who continues to fascinate Canadians 100 years after his death in Ontario’s Algonquin Park. Gallery owner Ryan Green says one of the show’s highlights is an oil sketch Thomson did in 1917 on a slat he pulled from a shipping crate when he ran out of his regular panels. Titled Winter Scene, it shows a snowy creek and trees with a hill in the distance. “It’s a really beautiful painting,” says Green. Another work done at the same time on a board from the crate is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The works in the show, mostly owned by Calgarians, depict scenes in and around Algonquin Park, where Thomson loved to paint. “Thomson’s creativity was unstoppable,” says Green. “He was so sincere about making art. He had to do it … He loved what he was doing.” Like most of Thomson’s oeuvre, the paintings in the show are modest in size – but not in value. Green notes the sales record for a Thomson sketch, as the artist’s small plein air paintings on wooden panels are known, is $2.8 million. That’s what Early Spring, Canoe Lake, a work from 1917, the year of Thomson’s death, fetched at auction in 2009. More ►
– Portia Priegert

Saskatoon artist Kelly Goerzen has loved the outdoors since she was a child. Back then, she would paint wildflowers and pore over nature paintings by Ernest Lindner. At high school, she took art classes with landscape painter Reta Cowley, who continued to mentor her after she graduated. Goerzen studied biology at the University of Saskatchewan and worked for a time as a fisheries biologist, painting when she could. After starting a family, she decided to devote herself to art full time. For many years, that meant painting watercolours en plein air. “I used to joke it was an excuse to go out and sit in the country,” says Goerzen. She began using acrylics a decade ago when life circumstances tied her closer to home, often working from her own photographs, including urban scenes. But watercolour techniques continued to inform her acrylics. Her show at Art Placement in Saskatoon, Familiar and Unfamiliar, on view until Nov. 30, includes Boundary Bog Shoreline, an atmospheric scene from Prince Albert National Park, north of Saskatoon, one of her favourite painting destinations. Her work here has a watery feel, and not simply because the image shows a small lake ringed by stunted black spruce. Goerzen says she pushes the surface transparency by using multiple thin layers of paint. “I want the paintings to be magical in some way,” she says. “I want to express the place because it’s intrigued me for some reason.” More Images ►
– Portia Priegert

Sylvia Tait, a senior West Coast modernist linked to the Group of Seven’s Arthur Lismer from her student days, is having a major survey at the Burnaby Art Gallery. On the heels of her recent painting show at Vancouver’s Bau-Xi Gallery, it presents a surprisingly multidisciplinary artist. Tait is known for her colourful palette and intricately patterned abstract paintings. What we learn from the Burnaby exhibition, on view until Jan. 7, is the variety of other media she has explored, particularly drawing and printmaking, but also illustration, design and sculpture. Tait grew up in Montreal and studied piano as a child, but her passion was painting and drawing. She enrolled at the School of Art and Design at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts when Lismer taught there. Other instructors were Marian Scott, Gordon Webber and Eldon Grier, who had worked as an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Fellow students included Claude Tousignant and Guido Molinari. Tait graduated in 1953 at the top of her class. Her drawings from this period reveal a loose, lyrical style. More ►
– Beverly Cramp

Gordon Smith’s fifth exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Black Paintings, on view until Feb. 4, marks a full-circle return to the days of his youth. In Pachino 43, for instance, Smith paints on tarpaulin from the kitbag he used when he was a Second World War intelligence officer drawing maps from photographs. He landed on Sicily’s Pachino Penisula as part of Operation Husky, the launch of the Allied campaign in Italy, a test and precursor to D-Day, and was shot in the leg on July 20, 1943 in the Sicilian town of Leonforte. Smith is known for his West Coast forest interiors and landscapes, and like Claude Monet, in his later work at Giverny, has moved from a mix of figuration and abstraction to a more abstract, process-oriented style, even as he refers to scenes he has experienced. Painting remains a daily ritual, even at 98, and his recent paintings, which he calls Entanglements, are a sometimes chaotic, sometimes beautiful admixture of surface effects and suggested scenes. The Black Paintings are an altogether different initiative. Begun in 1990, and continuing to this day, they recall the experience of war Smith shared with young friends from the Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg, from training in England to the war in Sicily. Though dark, even brooding at times, the work affirms one of the most vivid periods in Smith’s life. An earlier series of Black Paintings were lost or stolen but he returned to the theme, developing the sense of darkness and immeasurable, infinite space. Tanu (1995) captures that darkness, and though named after a village on Haida Gwaii, could equally recall Smith’s wartime experiences in Sicily. More ►
– John K. Grande

On one side of the long gallery is Nick Cave’s gaudily decorated, life-sized mannequin, topped by a mouth-like gramophone horn. This kitschy sculpture, imported from Chicago, appears to be in a shouting match across the room with a primeval, over-sized, open-mouthed cedar mask created by the late West Coast Indigenous artist Beau Dick. Clearly, the curators behind the National Gallery of Canada’s fourth Canadian Biennial, on view until March 18, want to imply that Sound Suit, born of the concerns of a gay, black American man, is conversing with Bookwus Ghost Mask, an object rooted in ancient West Coast Kwakwaka’wakw culture. Both works are meant for use in performances. Both are excellent additions to the gallery’s collection. But what exactly are the two works shouting at one another? Sometimes art-based conversations are more than a little forced. For the first time, the biennial is exhibiting international acquisitions from the last few years alongside recent domestic purchases and donations. The goal is to see how Canadian contemporary art converses with foreign works. Since the gallery’s temporary exhibition spaces are filled this year with Canadiana to mark the country’s 150th anniversary, this was a chance to exhibit some international pieces. However, one could argue just as convincingly that, in this special year, the focus should have stayed resolutely on Canadian works. More ►
– Paul Gessell

Vancouver artist Camrose Ducote works intuitively, layering spackle, gel and paint on paper. She’ll wipe bits of the surface away, add more, and continue the process until she is happy with the result.  “I never know where I’m starting and where I’m ending,” she says. “That’s what’s exciting for me. I just follow my nose.” Ducote, whose show, New Work, runs until Nov. 25 at Vancouver’s Elissa Cristall Gallery, says her abstraction is influenced by the big skies and empty spaces of her childhood in Colorado. She writes  in her artist statement that she feels she’s pursuing some elusive ultimate truth, making it hard to discuss her work in a definitive way, particularly as abstraction relies so much on sense impressions. But she says her themes – as well as her process – relate to transformation and the transient nature of life. “The work shows that structure eventually decays and what is left is a visceral quality, alluding to the idea that all is in transition – a seeping out from, a splitting up between, a breaking away from – all serving to remind one of the nature of life in its cycle of birth, decay, death and metamorphosis.” Her iconography has come to include recognizable elements, including squares that might indicate portals or even shields, and spirals that suggest tornados of energy. Ducote, who worked as a sculpture technician at Emily Carr University until her retirement two years ago, has lived in Vancouver since 1977, when she moved north with her ex-husband. She began as a textile artist, making sculptural pieces out of fabric. Over the years, her work became flatter, although it continues to express her interest in objects within space. Ducote is also represented by Calgary’s Wallace Galleries and SOPA Fine Arts in Kelowna. More Images ►

– Portia Priegert

Artistic research and process-driven work take shape in a powerful group exhibition at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg. Shards, the latest in a wave of exhibitions making rich connections to the history of making in Indigenous culture, connects four local artists with ceramics used by women thousands of years ago. KC Adams, Jaime Black, Lita Fontaine and Wabiska Maengun (Niki Little) worked with independent curator Jenny Western and Kevin Brownlee, the curator of archaeology at the Manitoba Museum, in partnership with the Manitoba Craft Council. Western says the focus was to connect original female makers – the word shards refers to the relics of their pots – with contemporary Indigenous artists, trying “to place that once-held knowledge of ceramic production back into their hands.” The title of the exhibition, which continues until Dec. 2, was each artist’s starting point. Over two years, the four women connected with shards of historical pottery from both the Manitoba Museum and the University of Winnipeg’s anthropology collections, eventually creating new works that honour the stories and power in the original pots. The project realizes the artistic potential of deep cultural investigations into the narratives held by historical objects. Clay’s tactility is central to many works in the show, raising questions about how touch can hold memories and create new ones, and how hands from the past can teach hands of the future. More ►

– Stacey Abramson

A carefully constructed and flattering self-image is hardly the invention of Facebook – portraits showing the subject’s status and success are seen throughout art history. Wealthy Egyptians immortalized themselves in tombs dating back to 1400 BC. In medieval times, donors were painted next to Christ, sometimes at a similar scale. Perhaps the main innovation of social media is the impression that everyone is always having fun, not to mention the ability to instantly gauge status based on the number of clicks. Campbell Wallace’s exhibition, The Third Face, at the Scott Gallery in Edmonton until Nov. 10, demonstrates a quintessential anti-social media aesthetic. His paintings are like peepholes into people’s private life, depicting them not as they wish to be seen, but as they actually are. Wallace’s unusual way of finding his subjects helps explain the stark impartiality of his gaze. A defining moment came when he discovered a stash of photographs hidden in a dresser he’d bought in a thrift store. This collection became immortalized in his meticulous oil paintings. Armed with a detachment and objectivity he had never thought possible, he began to search for more snapshots in trash bins, second-hand stores and, more recently, on the Internet. More ►

– Agnieszka Matejko

A mounted policeman charges through a crowd and another man’s face stretches into a grimace as he leaps out of the way. Nearby, a father grasps his baby tightly as he glances back anxiously. But in the corner of the photograph, is that a woman grinning? This disconcerting image introduces the Museum of Vancouver’s latest show, City on Edge: A Century of Vancouver Activism, on view until Feb. 18. The photo was taken Aug. 8, 1971 during the Gastown riot, when club-wielding city police clashed with a peaceful demonstration by marijuana activists. City on Edge includes 650 photographs from the Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers that document marches, blockades, demonstrations, strikes and occupations from the early 1900s to the present day. The dramatic – and enlarged – images capture transformative moments when citizens stood up for a cause or exploded in anger, augmented by recorded audio of crowds, drumbeats, horn blasts and protest songs. The show considers a variety of issues and causes – the environment, labour relations, Indigenous rights and various social justice concerns – and features iconic events like Occupy Vancouver, the Clayoquot Sound anti-logging protest, and last year’s demonstrations against the Kinder Morgan pipeline. More ►

– Beverly Cramp

Wil Murray shadow-boxes with painting and photography in The Onlyes Power is No Power, on display in London until Jan. 2. His installation extends the viewing experience, taking advantage of the unusual space and experimental focus of Vitrine, a long, shallow window gallery. Murray painted black acrylic brushstrokes on the windows that enclose and frame his work. They cast shadows into the display space while echoing the process he used to create his five large photographic prints. These works, shaped by their own inherent brushstrokes, are handsome graphic objects with a baroque sense of overlapping histories, techniques and aesthetics. More ►

– Katherine Ylitalo

Vancouver Island painter Sara Robichaud has moved from the abstract to include recognizable domestic objects in her paintings, but not without a certain anxiety. She jokes that it feels like she’s cheating on abstraction as she discusses her fascination with antique lamps, dishes and other home furnishings. “I’m addicted to outlining, tracing their shadows, appreciating their formal beauty,” she says. In one painting, milky when wet, included in her solo show at Vancouver’s Gallery Jones until Nov. 18, a vintage hand-held blow dryer is nestled into a disembodied sink. In another, pressed and curled, the cord of a curling iron winds across the metal frame of an ironing board, an image so ethereal it almost evokes an icon. But just as the tenderness of a lover’s touch remains encoded in the body, the lessons of abstraction lurk in Robichaud’s paintings, prone to surface at unexpected moments. Unapologetic: Romantic Notions of a Modern Woman, the painting from which her show draws its title, features an antique tea trolley that she and her young daughter use for parties. Much of the canvas is left raw. Into this void, Robichaud has introduced a pencil tracing of the trolley’s shadow. A pale expanse of monochromatic pink occupies the base and right side of the canvas. An undulating form atop the trolley could be an abstract element, but also evokes the pattern from an antique china bowl. A creeping pool of paint that traces the bowl’s shadow resembles sparkling pink lemonade. Robichaud describes a final element, a hard-edged fluorescent yellow triangle with no real-life referent, as a nod back to abstraction. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Allan Harding MacKay’s take on landscape is contemporary; it feels intimate, relying on proximity, as opposed to the wide view, and on odd croppings that suggest a tilted angle rather than perfect perspective. His imagistic sensibility tends slightly toward abstraction. In the seven pieces grouped as Boreal Series at the Willock and Sax Gallery until Oct. 29, MacKay renders photo-based, over-painted views of the environment he inhabits and observes – mountains, skies and trees – in and around Banff. With the computer, he compresses his photos into a square format and prints them on inkjet paper as monoprints. Then, after splattering wax over the surface, he layers colours with thin oil washes, charcoal, chalk and oil pastels. The effect draws attention to both the image and the surface. More ►

– Steven Ross Smith

Mary Anne Barkhouse’s exhibition, Le rêve aux loups (The Dream of Wolves) at Calgary’s Esker Foundation until Dec. 22, examines environmental concerns and Indigenous culture through the visual iconography of boreal forest animals, including beaver, owl, wolf and coyote. The exhibition, organized by guest curator Jennifer Rudder, is the largest survey of Barkhouse’s work to date, and follows an earlier version at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto. It brings together work from major museum collections, along with three new pieces that respond to the horrific legacy of Canada’s residential school system. Prominent in all the works is the clash between the natural world and the “civilized” European elite. Barkhouse was born in 1961 in Vancouver and belongs to the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl First Nation. Descended from a family of traditional Northwest Coast carvers that includes internationally recognized artists Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin and Charlie James, her practice incorporates exquisite sculptures of animals in wood, bronze, porcelain and glass that are juxtaposed against an elegant array of Baroque-style furniture and decor. At the entrance is Empire, where a lynx, hare, frog and weasel lounge on luxurious velvet and silk cushions nestled amongst a careful arrangement of tree branches. With treaties in dispute and continued human expansion onto the land, as Rudder notes in her exhibition essay, this work, along with Barkhouse’s other sculptural installations, are eloquent reminders of the consequences of Canada’s colonial history and the need for respectful cohabitation. More ►

– Lissa Robinson

Each generation of artists strives to carve out new meaning, to take from the past, make it more relevant and leave a distinct mark on the world. Nowhere is this reinvention more difficult than in painting. So much has been done. What new can be achieved? An ambitious show that includes 70 works by 31 artists, Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Jan.1, tackles that question by surveying two approaches that have emerged since the 1970s. One group, corralled under the general heading of “conceptual painting” focuses on the primacy of ideas, or as noted in one of the show’s didactic panels, “art as idea as painting.” The other group, dubbed “performative painting,” is based on work that values actions and materials over ideas. The notion here is that doing and making is what largely defines a painting. More ►

– Beverly Cramp

Growing up in Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant First Nation, Cree artist and curator Gerald McMaster was spellbound by the Lone Ranger but had no interest in the masked cowboy’s “Indian” sidekick Tonto. “As a boy, I only knew good from bad: Cowboy good, Indian bad,” says McMaster. Such is the power of Western movie stereotypes. They’re with us still. McMaster relates the anecdote in a catalogue essay for a sprawling art exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts about Western movies. The exhibition, Once Upon a Time … The Western, traces the history and aesthetics of cowboy films, unmasking them as the myth that became “reality” and the impact they still have on “pressing concerns of today,” such as racism, misogyny and gun violence. Although Donald Trump is not mentioned by name, the exhibition encourages visitors to contemplate characters like the brawling, womanizing, politically incorrect U.S. president as a stereotype lifted straight from the Western. More ►

– Paul Gessell

When Denis Longchamps, chief curator at the Art Gallery of Burlington, was editing the now-defunct Cahiers métiers d’art/Craft Journal, he came to recognize that Canada’s vastness made it nearly impossible to develop a national craft dialogue. The first Canadian Craft Biennial, designed to coincide with Canada’s 150th anniversary, grew out of his commitment to nurture and develop such a discussion. Longchamps harnessed the expertise of Emma Quin, then the CEO of Craft Ontario, as well as the Canadian Craft Federation and other partners, to produce an event encompassing four exhibitions, two residencies, a ceramics workshop, three community projects and a two-day symposium, all designed to raise public awareness of the role craft plays in Canada’s economy and culture. To ensure national representation, the biennial established advisory committees of craft professionals across the country. The resulting exhibition, Can Craft? Craft Can!, comprising new pieces by 64 artists working in wood, ceramics, metal, fibre and glass, is on view at the Art Gallery of Burlington, west of Toronto, through Oct. 29. More ►

– Amy Gogarty

Junichiro Iwase became fascinated by the Zen Buddhist idea of nothingness – the point of transcendence – and wondered how to represent it in art. He settled on the idea of creating an air bubble within a plastic cylinder filled with coloured water. Everything except the bubble, he says, is part of the work’s support structure, not the actual art. Iwase’s show, Mu: Beyond Duality, is on view at Art Beatus in Vancouver until Nov. 10. As Iwase understands it, mu reflects the artificiality inherent in the binary opposites we use to understand our world, recognizing there is no absolute right or wrong, good or bad. Both polarities depend on context, where and when something happened, for instance, as well as the histories involved. Some of Iwase’s works are built using a plastic frame that resembles a wall-mounted clock. The clocks don’t tell time, of course – they always reflect the present moment. More ►

– Portia Priegert

After years of mainly producing mixed-media collages, Angela Grossmann picked up her paint tubes and brushes recently and returned to her original medium. The startling figurative paintings she made are on view in Mistressworks at Vancouver’s Franc Gallery until Oct. 23. “Going back and having this relationship with squeezing out some colour – it was so immediate, so fast and so exciting that it wasn’t about making a picture,” says Grossmann. “It was about expressing form and colour.” Pressing paint, some of it left over from her school days, directly onto paper, vellum and Mylar, she worked so fast that a tube’s metal edge marked one of her images, Lemon. She left the marks, which look like pencil lines outlining the kneeling woman. “That’s when I thought, I’m going to stick with this,” says Grossmann. Her next work was Ultra Marine, quickly followed by Tangerine, the latter with a figure that appears in mid-leap, arms flung straight back and head stretched forward. The right leg is bent, the left propels the body forward. More ►

– Beverly Cramp

It’s early evening and we’re riding a bus from Banff, out onto darker roads. Environmental sounds fade up, blue and white lights flash on the ceiling, an Indigenous song drums in, and the narrative begins. We’re told that we’re in a national park on Treaty 7 land that’s been inhabited for thousands of years; spliced in are geological nuggets about the mountains. This is Illuminations: Human / Nature, the layered “deep time travel” narrative extravaganza that’s been in development for over a year, a collaboration between artist, photographer and former Banff Centre facilitator, Sarah Fuller, and Moment Factory, a Montreal-based high-tech multimedia producer. It is conceptual, archival and site-specific, designed to be immersive and participatory. We exit the bus at Lake Minnewanka, a dammed lake and tourist attraction northeast of Banff. It’s night now and there are 100 of us. In smaller groups, we’re directed into a blue cloud of rock-show smoke where bluer starlight sparkles on trees and on our faces and bodies. It is briefly magical. More ►

– Steven Ross Smith

A glowing orb is surrounded by undulating teal waves in Kenneth Lavallee’s printed banner, Creation Story, which is draped outside the Winnipeg Art Gallery, near the main entrance. After passing one of Kent Monkman’s Urban Rez paintings in the main lobby, visitors are greeted by a massive limestone staircase that leads up to the main galleries and the exhibition, Insurgence / Resurgence, on view until April 1. To ascend the stairs and enter the show, they must tread on a gold-foiled Plains Cree script by Joi T. Arcand. Titled don’t speak English, the opaque yet articulate statement creates a threshold for a show that takes over much of the gallery’s space. This is the revolution in Canadian art, and it has been building for some time. The gallery’s largest-ever exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art brings together the work of 29 artists from across the country. The show’s title dictates what to expect – Indigenous art in Canada has become a tidal wave of empowerment that is shifting the critical lens nationally. Curators Jaimie Isaac and Julie Nagam have thoughtfully brought together a cross-section of what they see as the most impressive and potent examples. More ►

– Stacey Abramson

Kapwani Kiwanga is interested in Africa’s transition from colonial rule and has spent many hours searching for archival imagery of different independence celebrations. The images, she has discovered, share one common feature – floral arrangements that range from elaborate bouquets to simple boutonnières. For instance, Habib Bourguiba,the former leader of Tunisia, sported a boutonnière in his lapel when he spoke to a crowd celebrating independence in 1956, an event preserved in the grainy black-and-white footage of a British newsreel. Kiwanga, who was born in Hamilton, Ont., and is now based in Paris, takes these images to a florist, asking that they be recreated as closely as possible. The arrangements are then displayed in galleries, where they are left to wilt. Her show, Flowers for Africa, is on view until Oct. 14 at the Or Gallery,  a Vancouver artist-run centre. It’s the first exhibition to recreate all nine works in the series. Kiwanga, who exhibits internationally and has a degree in anthropology and comparative religion from McGill University in Montreal, eventually hopes to include all 54 countries in Africa. More Images ►

A wag might quip that, as a medium for art exhibitions, text has an image problem. White walls, black words. Or, sometimes, black walls, white words. However it is done, text-based work in a gallery can feel very minimalist and very familiar, like the pages of a book writ large. Of course, there are other common tropes: altered books, words styled into 3-D objects, and text combined with images in various permutations and combinations. It can feel like déjà vu, all over again. So you have to admire Contemporary Calgary’s courage in launching extratextual, a group survey show about art and text, on view until Jan. 21, along with myriad outreach activities, including a recent two-day symposium. A heady mix of international and domestic curators, academics, writers and artists, the symposium had a title that echoes the challenge – Never the Same: What (else) can arts writing do?  More ►

– Portia Priegert

When it comes to nourishing her artistic vision, no distance is too far to travel for Toronto-based artist Yael Brotman. Her show, Waterfront, on view at Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg until Oct. 21, is a collection of pieces that resulted from residencies around the globe, from Haida Gwaii to Australia and Scotland, and back again. Brotman’s work walks the tightrope ledge of landmasses that make contact with bodies of water. Her articulate interpretations of architectural impositions like bridges, rollercoasters and telephone poles remind us of the connections between human touch and the natural world. In one piece, she clatters paper-wrapped geometric rods out of smooth cylinders; in another, colour jolts the ends of an organic bend, taking the works back and forth between the constructed and the natural. More ►

– Stacey Abramson 

Mark Mullin has chosen a great title – Sticks and Stones – for his latest show at the Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary. And there are sticks, so to speak: stubby linear marks that contrast with smoky washes, globular shapes and other painterly gestures. In making animals, for instance, fallen “sticks” are jumbled in the middle of the canvas like the remnants of a collapsed building. Overhead, thin layers of brown paint drizzle downward like a series of frayed sheer curtains; warmer yellow hues dominate below. At the left, two large maroon silhouettes photo-bomb the scene, awkwardly intruding much the way people poke their heads into a doorway to interrupt a meeting. These rounded forms echo the shadows created in hand puppetry, an activity Mullin did as a boy with his father. Flat and still, these forms might well be the titular stones. Mullin describes this new body of work as less polished than his earlier efforts. The change, he explains, is related to his decision a year ago to try painting on paper. He found he was working in a “clunky, brutish manner” and was exhilarated by the results. So much so that he’s included some works on paper in the show, which continues until Oct. 7. Their mood seems to have carried over to his subsequent paintings on canvas. While the visual language is still recognizably his, he says it’s like a different dialect, one that occupies “a stage of playful awkwardness.” Mullin, who grew up in Edmonton, teaches at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary. He emerged quickly after earning his MFA at Montreal’s Concordia University in 1999. In 2004, he was a finalist in the RBC New Canadian Painting Competition. Later this year, he’ll be in a show of works on paper at the Beers gallery in London. More ►

– Portia Priegert

It’s back to school with a difference at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, as students start classes this week at the new $123-million campus. And probably no one is more thrilled than the university’s president, Ronald Burnett, who has spent recent days chatting with students, staff and faculty members as they get acquainted with their new 290,000 square-foot home. “Day after day we’ve been meeting with different groups … and it’s been great,” says Burnett. “I’m really impressed with everyone’s work. In general, our staff and faculty and students have been really involved and excited. It’s an exciting building.” Opened last week by Premier John Horgan, the building is equipped with plenty of cutting-edge technology, including networked virtual reality systems, a digital animation studio, and a motion-capture and visualization lab. Located in the Flats district east of downtown, it also boasts LEED Gold certification, sky-lit atriums and various exhibition spaces. The library is filled with natural light and studios have large north-facing windows. The building’s exterior features panels of coloured glass that refer to colours in Emily Carr’s paintings. One of Burnett’s favourite spots is the theatre. “It’s an intimate 400-seater that has surround sound and 3-D projection and it’s a wonderful place for lectures and performances,” he says. While the building is beautiful, Burnett also points proudly to the size of the new facility. “Its volume really makes a statement about the importance of the arts and humanities to B.C. and to Canada,” he says. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Fresh and uninhibited, Michelle Nguyen’s paintings offer up a steamer trunk of magical, loosely articulated narratives within distorted pictorial space. Rife with possibilities, these are complex mash-ups a Jungian psychologist would love. On view at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver until Sept. 23, they are packed with odd characters that seem utterly themselves. Brides in various states of undress cavort with pink flamingos in one painting. In another, humanoid monsters with four eyes or two mouths lurk in a decidedly macabre crowd. Nguyen includes painterly moments that call to mind other artists and movements. The loosely painted nudes tossed in at the bottom of Jelly Jamboree, her most recent work, seem to offer a naturalistic reading of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, for instance, while the buxom women in Six Sisters romp though tropical flora that Henri Rousseau might have painted had he been a Fauve. Yet her paintings, while uneven at times, rarely feel derivative. More than anything, the viewer is destabilized, relegated to an almost incidental role, or perhaps, simply disregarded. Indeed, we do not gaze at these paintings, as much as step tentatively into them, psychologically, at least. More ►

– Portia Priegert

A walk inside the belly of a whale-spaceship hybrid? A woman’s breast that lights up as you approach? Motorized flipbooks that create the illusion of a waterfall? Your inner nerd will get a workout at Beakerhead, a Calgary festival that mashes together art, science and engineering in wildly creative ways. The annual event, which runs Sept. 13 to Sept. 17, includes all sorts of technical wizardry, but perhaps none more playful than gigantic inflatable sculptures made from polyester by Bee Kingdom Glass. Part sci-fi and part childlike wonderment, both The Fabulist, a four-storey high “space ambassador” that brings together myriad Canadiana, including moose antlers and a beaver tail, and The Saturnian, complete with a narwhal tusk and rocket thrusters, will be on view outside Calgary’s science centre, Telus Spark. “Both of the sculptures are very cute,” says Bee Kingdom’s Phillip Bandura. “But we hope people will look at the different ideas, what we put into the sculptures, and create a story around it.” His usual fare is small-scale work made from glass in the collaborative Calgary studio he shares with Ryan Fairweather. But Beakerhead engineers helped the dynamic duo solve challenges around things like tensile strength, wind currents and public safety. Bandura says artists appreciate such technical help, while engineers enjoy working on creative projects. “The whole idea of Beakerhead actually really closes a very interesting social gap in between the arts and other industries in the city,” he says. Several Calgary galleries are participating in Beakerhead, displaying art that crosses into technological realms. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Xiao Han role-plays: she fictionalizes history. Her work is seductive and imaginative, but addresses trauma. She is the actor in photographic genre scenes that work as film stills for movies that haven’t been made. Her art direction is plush and nostalgic, replete with studied bric-a-brac and antediluvian fashion. While her beautiful Proustian memories combine with official history to affect her viewers, they never allow for settled conclusions. Instead, they produce what former German chancellor Helmut Kohl once voiced as his aspiration for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. He said Germans don’t need a denkmal, a monument; what they need is a denkpause, a thinking break. Han’s latest work is a new twist on public memorials, and comes as a coy rebuff to the horsey heroics of 19th century commemorations: photographs, dress-up, performance. Her memorial pays tribute to Yee Clun, a restaurateur and prominent member of Regina’s Chinese community who, in 1924, challenged a racist law that effectively prohibited Asian men from hiring white women. Three of Han’s images, commissioned by the Lost Stories Project at Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, with funding from Canada 150, are now permanently installed in Regina’s downtown Art Park. Although modest in budget and scale, her project points to a more integrated approach to the production of public art. More ►

– Marcus Miller

The boat, a floating place that travels from port to port in an infinite sea, is a metaphor the French philosopher Michel Foucault used to describe heterotopia, a Greek word that means “other place” – one where people outside the norm can find shelter. “In civilizations without boats,” he wrote, “dreams dry up.” For Travis McEwen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota with an MFA from Montreal’s Concordia University, Foucault’s words are not abstract concepts but lived experience. McEwen, who describes himself as queer, grew up in Red Deer, Alta., where he experienced ostracism and isolation. His show, The Arch: Plans for a Heterotopic Space Opera, on view at dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton until Oct. 14, creates an alternative futuristic world where “otherness” is both welcomed and embraced. McEwen’s myriad small to mid-sized paintings – 66 in all – are individual works, but collectively form a seamless installation: a landscape inspired by science fiction with a continuous horizon line that encircles the viewer. Most paintings feature structures in the shape of rainbows or abandoned construction walls that hover ghost-like above vast, deserted spaces. These scenes, partly inspired by his visit to southern Turkey, diverge from the subdued ochres of the Taurus Mountains, projecting tropical garden hues that both beckon and repel. More ►

– Agnieszka Matjeko

Sometimes the question of what to do with colonialist monuments is simply answered: remove them. Unlike the Edward Cornwallis statue in Halifax, however, Montreal’s Hochelaga Rock is a colonialist memorial to Indigenous peoples, rather a trickier matter, and one that Hannah Claus, a Montreal-based artist of Kanien’kehá:ka heritage, addresses in her exhibition at Winnipeg’s aceartinc. The memorial in question – a great boulder on the McGill University campus – was erected in 1925. Its commemorative plaque reads: “Near here was the site of the fortified town of Hochelaga visited by Jacques Cartier in 1535, abandoned before 1600. It contained 50 large houses, each lodging several families who subsisted by cultivation and fishing.” Whoever these people were, they seem to have vanished between Cartier’s visit and Champlain’s in 1608. The word hochelaga is foreign to the Indigenous communities around Montreal; but on a visit to Edmonton, a Dene elder told Claus it is Dene for “where many nations gather” and that Dene traders once travelled to Montreal. The so-called St. Lawrence Iroquoians, Claus surmised, were probably Dene occupying a temporary settlement. The show, on view until Sept. 15, examines this mystery in three series of works. More ►

– Edwin Janzen

One of the last century’s great scientists, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, known as the father of modern neuroscience, yearned as a boy to be an artist. Later in life, the Spaniard made remarkable pencil and ink drawings of the brain’s mysterious inner workings, a creative undertaking that helped lead him to the groundbreaking discoveries for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1906. More than 80 of Cajal’s 3,000 anatomical drawings, work that’s reminiscent of the great Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci, are on view until Dec. 3 in the The Beautiful Brain at UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. It’s the first North American exhibition of Cajal’s work and may leave visitors wondering why Cajal, who lived from 1852 to 1934, isn’t better known outside scientific circles, where his work is still used for educational and illustrative purposes. One of Cajal’s images, the pyramidal neuron of the cerebral cortex, a 1904 ink-and-pencil drawing on paper, has such spindly lines it could be mistaken for a vegetable root. Indeed, many of his drawings have a botanical quality and are often described as tree-like. The scientist himself used such metaphors in his writing. For example, he described the brain’s gray matter as a “flower garden” and once asked “are there any trees more elegant and luxurious than the Purkinje cell from the cerebellum?” More ►

– Beverly Cramp

cSPACE King Edward in Calgary is billed as an arts incubator. But that’s not quite right – it’s more of an arts utopia. The classically proportioned 1912 sandstone building, a former school where boys in tweed knickerbockers once studied Greek, is now a community-focused, multi-purpose arts centre. The King Edward School’s first principal was William Aberhart, later Alberta’s seventh premier, and the building has served many functions over the years, including the training of military cadets during the First World War. Closed by the school board in 2001, it languished until cSPACE bought the property for $8 million in 2012 and undertook a thoughtful restoration budgeted at almost $26 million. Funding came from municipal, provincial and federal governments as well as private donations and the sale of a portion of the land to developers. Less attractive additions were demolished, and there are now two beautiful wings. One is in the original sandstone building, and the other, in a new glass-plated addition, includes a 125-seat theatre and a conference room with spectacular mountain views. Four high-ceilinged hallways serve as spaces to display art. The first exhibition, I Am Western, on view until Oct. 1, includes work by leading Alberta and Saskatchewan artists who explore the loss of traditional connections with the land in a region that has become an urban and industrial powerhouse. Highlights of the show include John Freeman’s photograph of a family farmstead rotting in front of what might best be described as gigantic “Frankenfarms.” Paintings in drab brown by Rosanna Marmont depict animals behind wire fences and men in cowboy hats pushing shopping carts, dreary stuff indeed. Lyndal Osborne and Sherri Chaba offer a fascinating installation of feathers, tobacco tins, hand-made tools, embroidery hoops, rifle butts and animal pelts that evoke an abandoned homestead. There’s also a photo by Kris Weinmann of a simple wooden chair placed in front of a dilapidated barn that’s close to collapse. More ►

– Karen Quinn

Walls: Topical in contemporary times, of course, but also historically important, whether for protection, conquest or peaceful delineation between good neighbours. Tourists flock to them (think of China’s Great Wall or Hadrian’s Wall in Britain) and artists appropriate them (think Banksy and Swoon). But the ante is upped when it comes to political barriers such as the Berlin Wall, Israel’s “apartheid wall” in the West Bank, or Trump’s proposed barrier with Mexico. It’s this latest controversy, courtesy of the U.S. president, that’s the focus of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery’s threefold exhibition – a gallery show featuring international artists as well as public art and an online project. Curated by Lorenzo Fusi, and on view in Calgary until Sept. 16, the gallery exhibition, #ideasforawall, comprises artistic proposals for alternative walls between Mexico and the United States. Invited participants include art world luminaries Richard Wilson, Tania Bruguera, Lucy and Jorge Orta, plus Canadians Mark Clintberg, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens. The projects bridge a range of media, including drawing, sculpture, text and lens-based work. Clearly, many approaches are helpful when contemplating how to overcome cultural divisiveness. Wilson’s Proposed United States Border with Mexico features a 20-foot-high concrete wall, almost like Trump’s “beautiful” vision. But instead of rising vertically, this superstructure plunges earthward, save the top 20 inches: a witty and playful trip. More ►

– Dick Averns

More than anything, Anne Meggitt’s paintings, with all their leafy canopies, sun-dappled wildflowers and tangled underbrush, are about seeing. Her hand is subtle and loose: she places the right mark in the right place, the colours precise though generally within a limited tonal range that keeps the eye in motion, restless and scanning. “I only need to do each thing once,” she says. “I try immediately to have it exactly right.” Her paintings, at Victoria’s Martin Batchelor Gallery until Sept. 28, are largely forest views on Vancouver Island. They feel familiar. It’s easy to think you saw that small fir next to a favourite camping spot, or perhaps those six dead trees, their skeletal trunks gleaming through the brush, along a trail you’ve hiked. These are the humble spots passed on the way to the grand view, trees and bushes scanned quickly, like faces in a crowd, never consciously committed to memory, yet somehow there, nevertheless. Meggitt calls herself a “compulsive mixer” and her delicious greens, carefully blended from multiple colours, evoke the rich possibilities of foliage. Those with an aching hint of ochre drift to late summer, while the acid of a leaf gleaming in a beam of sunlight seems too sharp until you step back and it pops into place, resolving with the rest of the canvas. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Wei Li’s colourful and complicated paintings are impressionistic abstracts, full of motion and confident brush marks. But there’s something substantial and illustrative about them too. They look real world – just not our particular planet. With bulbous tubers, rounded corrugations and a definite, if crowded, feeling of life, you could interpret the 11 oils and acrylics in Curious Things, on view at Edmonton’s Harcourt House until Sept. 22, as landscapes, vibrant dissection trays or even figurative portraits – yearbook poses straight from another dimension. Li admits she sometimes sees faces in the paintings as she works. There’s surely at least one pair of mismatched eyes and lips in the unframed canvas, Diptych (Left), which hangs beside the show’s title. And while she uses the word landscapes to describe her newer work, she concedes the human linkage remains. “I still think I deal with people, with emotions and feelings. Because I’m concerned with how people feel, the starting point is from our bodies, from inside. And all mixed together. Different perspectives, all happening at the same time.” Li emigrated in 2010 from Chengdu in south-central China, a city some 15 times as populous as Edmonton. “That’s where pandas come from,” she says with a laugh. Throughout the show, the tension of overcrowding is palpable. Thickly painted elements seem to cry out as they’re squished together. Some paintings feel dark and toxic. Others look almost edible. More ►

– Fish Griwkowsky 

Weird Woman, a group exhibition at Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary, evokes a romantic, defiant and otherworldly feel. Curated by Calgary artist Sondra Meszaros, it features five Canadian and American artists who use a range of methods, including video, collage, assemblage, drawing and digital print. Disrupting clichéd notions of female intuition, aesthetic, currency and rebellion, these artists use meaningful motifs to explore the relationships between nature, production and what Meszaros calls wilful or wayward ways of representing women. An unsettling yet enchanting mood prevails, owing to the sparseness of the exhibition, on view until Sept. 9, and the rules governing each artist’s aesthetics and processes. Within each work, the material and the inspirational converge into entanglements of conflicting forces. More ►

– Lissa Robinson

A little girl, about six years old, skips around Clem T. GoFur in the Lake Country Art Gallery in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. “Wow, he’s BIG,” she says, “and those boots!” Those boots, indeed, but look up! Clem, mascot at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alta., is all shiny, cartoon new; the ceiling tile has been removed to accommodate his hat. Clem’s saucy, recumbent pose dictates the path of movement into Scott August’s exhibition, Furbish: Remnant Themes of Post-Amusement, on view until Aug. 27. I swerve past the boots and follow a wall of photos: here is the iconic peach hut in Penticton, the whale waterslide from Old MacDonald’s Farm in West Kelowna, and a newspaper clipping about Peter Soehn, creator of curvy statuary and the subject of August’s installation. The bottom of each photo curls away from the wall, evoking fragility, a temporary existence. Childhood memories. Nostalgia in bloom, next is the full-wall image of a decrepit billboard advertising Old MacDonald’s Farm, and here’s where it gets all lovely and tricky. To view the 17-foot-long collage, one is backed against the raw, two-by-four frame supporting Clem. It’s a disconcerting peek behind the magic, rubbing shoulders with the pretense of it, all while enjoying the beauty of it too. More ►

– Lorna Tureski

Making contemporary art accessible to large public audiences is always challenging. Work by artists in contemporary galleries may leave viewers feeling ignorant, separated from histories they do not know and unsure how to read complex work. “The meaning of contemporary art isn’t supposed to reveal itself immediately,” says Jenifer Papararo, the executive director of Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. “Sometimes, that’s just too great a deterrent.” Luckily, galleries are finding ways to bring high-calibre contemporary art to audiences in more approachable ways. The latest example is Stages: Drawing the Curtain, which runs Aug. 18 to Sept. 4 in various venues around Winnipeg. Plug In invited nine artists – Winnipeg’s Erica Eyres and Divya Mehra, Vancouver’s Ron Tran and Krista Belle Stewart, and Toronto’s Abbas Akhavan and Kara Hamilton, as well as three international artists – to create sculptures and performances that bring new life and meanings to public sites, from parks to empty buildings. The aim, as the event’s title suggests, is to consider the stage – “its function as a platform, its meaning as a point of attention and its physical design.” Featuring everything from an eight-foot-high illuminated Om sign hauled around town by flatbed truck to performances by drag queens and a vibrantly painted urban tunnel, Stages allows happenstance encounters, but also offers guided tours, promising two different but engaging experiences. More ►

– Stacey Abramson

The sexy bra and panties crafted by Nunavut artist Nala Peter would have been perfect for a young Brigitte Bardot, France’s most celebrated sex kitten, except for one thing: The ironic unmentionables are made of sealskin and the movie star turned animal rights activist only gets intimate with live baby seals. Bardot also wouldn’t be caught dead in Nicole Camphaug’s stylish sealskin stilettos, potent examples of the art, craft and fashion being produced these days by a new generation of Inuit artists who are far more political, mischievous and adventuresome than their soapstone-carving forebears. The sealskin fashions and many other examples of unorthodox Inuit art are part of the travelling exhibition Floe Edge: Contemporary Art and Collaborations from Nunavut, on view at Urban Shaman in Winnipeg from Sept. 8 to Oct. 14. The show opened last year at Axe Néo-7, a gallery in Gatineau, Que., near Ottawa, then toured to Canada House in London before landing in Winnipeg. It was curated by Kathleen Nicholls from the Iqaluit-based Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association. Floe edge refers to the springtime ecosystem, when the dark, open waters of the Arctic Ocean meet chunks, or floes, of frozen sea ice along the shore. The floes move with the tide, melt with changing temperatures and serve as a metaphor for the work of the artists, who often seesaw between creative pursuits and other jobs. More ►

– Paul Gessell

Jim Holyoak and Matt Shane are doing things backwards. They will hold their “opening” reception Aug. 25 at the end of their show at Open Space, the Victoria artist-run centre. Then two days later, they will take down their massive drawing installation, Forestrial Brain, and roll it into a storage tube. This is no small feat. The duo, friends since art school, have covered the gallery’s 14-foot-high walls with white paper, carefully cutting around doors and passageways. They are spending their six-week exhibition slot drawing through some 135 linear feet, an undertaking almost as physically demanding as the eight-day hike that inspired it, an arduous 47-mile slog on the notoriously difficult West Coast Trail through Pacific Rim National Park, along the southwest edge of Vancouver Island. They hiked the trail before starting work at Open Space, making notes and drawings, soaking up the energy of forest and ocean, and gathering stories from fellow travellers. They display pages from their sketchbooks in the stairwell up to the gallery, a place where the show’s title is drawn as if covered with hairy tree lichens, signalling the tone of the show, a kind of hobbit-informed natural history, or as Shane puts it: the blurry in-between of science and fantasy. “We’re looking at the forest as a mysterious place,” he says. “We’re looking at the mythologies that surround the forest and the whole spectrum of belief systems about forests.” Clearly, then, Forestrial Brain is no mere travelogue or documentary, though it does refer to their backpacking trip. Rich in varied marks, from misty ink washes that evoke the dank undergrowth of the coastal rainforest to a finely drafted dead sea lion they discovered on a beach, the installation also explores the idea of the forest as an enmeshed and interconnected organism, one where human presence is evoked minimally through a chain of ladders and walkways that snail, soddenly, over steep terrain, amid lush ferns and strange fungi. More ►

– Portia Priegert

The National Gallery of Canada’s “paternalism” in promoting its vision of Canadian art in the West receives a pointed critique in a new book about the history of public art galleries in Western Canada. Author Anne Whitelaw, an art historian at Concordia University in Montreal, says the recent move by the National Gallery to operate satellite spaces within the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Winnipeg Art Gallery is the latest incarnation of programs in the 1900s that offered fine arts programming to nascent galleries in the West. “Both as a service to smaller arts organizations and attempts to educate the Canadian public about art, these exhibition programs appear to share a certain paternalism – a concern over the qualities of exhibitions organized by smaller galleries and faith in the ability of the national institution to bring excellence to the regions,” Whitelaw writes in her epilogue to Spaces and Places for Art: Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912-1990. Whitelaw points to current debates in arts communities in Winnipeg and Edmonton, where some decry what they see as the failure of public galleries to sufficiently support and present work by local artists. She notes that shows such as the Disasters of War and Los Caprichos by Francisco de Goya, an initial 2010 show provided by the National Gallery in its dedicated space within the Edmonton gallery, boost museum attendance but are of “little benefit to raising the profile of local artists.” More ►

After taking a break to raise two children, now seven and three, Calgary artist Marcia Harris is back with a show  at the Elevation Contemporary Art Gallery in Canmore, Alta., that presents a series of landscapes, often with added geometric elements such as diamonds and triangles. Peyto, for instance, is based on a photograph of Peyto Lake in Banff National Park. Its vantage point is high, overlooking lake and mountains, but suspended in middle ground is the outline of a diamond. Harris is interested in the concept of beauty as it pertains to nature. “The architect in this natural world has designed a perfect image within the landscape,” she says. She enjoys the awkwardness that occurs when organic forms and precise geometry are juxtaposed and plays with how they both interrupt and complement each other. The show’s title, The In Between, refers to that tension. “I appreciate how the shapes and lines either settle in or appear to stand out,” she says. “There is a dichotomy between the reality and the uncertainties.” The show, which runs until Aug. 17, also includes paintings of suburban houses. Harris has done previous work about the destruction of B.C. forests by the mountain pine beetle and the collapse of bee colonies. Her work is in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

A small exhibition tucked into a back gallery at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria looks at the once-thriving business of studio portraiture – with an unusual twist. The images are by Japanese-Canadian photographers from the Vancouver Island village of Cumberland in the early 1900s. Mirror With Memory, on view until Sept. 4, shows a diverse range of residents sitting or standing in classic studio style in their best clothes. Six copies of a photo measuring five inches by seven inches cost up to $6 at a time when local miners earned $4 a day. But many of the Japanese, who had come to Canada seeking prosperity, thought it a good investment. “The serious and dignified demeanor of the subjects of these photographs, and the appearance of being in full control of their destiny, if only for the moment of the flash of the camera, is the reassuring image that was sent to parents and relatives back home in Japan,” Grace Eiko Thomson writes in a book about Japanese-Canadian photography. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Looking at Blake Chorley’s landscape photography is like stepping back in time. While it seems everyone is now posting quickie phone shots to Instagram, Chorley is carving a niche with painstaking labour over black-and-white images that not only use analog technology but reach further back to the old wet-plate processes of the 1800s. His approach evolved out of a need to be more thoughtful and focus on producing a few excellent images rather than the myriad so-so shots that digital photography enables. In essence, he says, he wanted to savour the landscape rather than focus on conquering a goal. “The slowing down really allowed me to start seeing all those other views that were along the way to the destination,” he says. “So that gave me motivation to try and slow down even further.” Chorley, who grew up in Toronto and moved West to do a Master’s degree at the University of Calgary, enjoys the outdoors. So he decided to focus on what he calls “pristine views” of wilderness scenes, primarily in the Rockies. Ten of those images are showing at the Christine Klassen Gallery in Calgary until Aug. 19. More ►

– Portia Priegert

Although we now consider canoes to be recreational vehicles, they have an age-old history that begins with the First Nations. Constructed from natural materials such as birch bark, canoes were a vital form of transportation as they were much faster than hiking through brush and clambering over rocks. They were quickly adopted by European explorers as far back as Samuel de Champlain, who arrived near what is Tadoussac, Que., in 1603, and also played a vital role in the subsequent fur trade and colonization of Canada. Thus, Romancing the Canoe, on view at the Glenbow in Calgary until Sept. 10, is timely, both as a summer show and as yet another marker of Canada’s 150th anniversary. Curator Roger Boulet pulled works – mostly paintings, though the show includes a vintage birch-bark canoe “in wonderful condition” – from the Glenbow’s storage vaults, and borrowed other pieces from private collections in Calgary, along with some from other institutional collections. He chose a roughly chronological approach, but structured the exhibition around a handful of key themes. “It’s kind of intuitive,” he says of his curatorial approach. “It’s not all kind of rational and calculated. You go with what’s there. You have a couple of ideas and you see what’s possible.” Early Europeans were impressed by how easy it was to manoeuvre canoes. “They marvelled at the design, speed and versatility,” says Boulet. The canoe became the vehicle of choice for fur traders who plied waterways into the interior of the continent. Frances Anne Hopkins, who traveled by canoe in the mid-1800s through the Great Lakes with her husband, Edward, a Hudson’s Bay Company official, is known for her paintings of voyageurs. Canoe Party Around a Campfire, painted in 1870, shows men using light from a torch to inspect an upturned canoe for damage that might need repair. More ►

Winnipeg’s Katherine Boyer is one of three artists picked by the Canada Council for the Arts for a 60th anniversary project about “the future of art.” Boyer, a Métis, will spend a few weeks in December beading in the council’s downtown Ottawa gallery, Âjagemô. Yes, the council calls beading “the future of art.” Indeed, young Indigenous artists increasingly find it “cool” to bead, says independent Aboriginal curator Alexandra Nahwegahbow. Beadwork, like other Indigenous art, is playing an increasingly important role in Canadian art history. The National Gallery of Canada opened its new Canadian and Indigenous galleries this summer, placing scores of pre-contact to contemporary Indigenous works, including beading, alongside “settler” art to offer a more inclusive historical account. In conjunction with this recasting, gallery director Marc Mayer produced a coffee table book, Art in Canada, to introduce various genres and eras and to talk of things to come. This being the country’s sesquicentennial, the book contains large colour images of 150 iconic works, including William Kurelek’s Manitoba Party and Joyce Wieland’s Reason Over Passion. But also included is a 2013 beadwork by Aboriginal artist Nadia Myre titled For those who cannot speak: The land, the water, the animals and the future generations. There is also a late 19th-century bag beaded by an unknown Métis or Cree artist from the West. More ►

– Paul Gessell

Australian artist Gordon Bennett’s exhibition, a powerful attack on systemic racism, is called Be Polite. It is anything but. The late artist, of Indigenous and Anglo-Celtic ancestry, expressed his disgust through wit and anger in a variety of styles and media. His largely unseen works on paper, on view at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery until Sept. 24, are a foundation of his practice, precursors to the larger conceptual paintings for which he has attracted the most attention. His 30 notepad drawings are the most compelling work in the show. Early in his career, Bennett travelled the continent documenting his observations in text and pictures while working as a telephone lineman. These drawings in gouache, ink and ballpoint pen criticize white paternalism and sanctimonious condescension. Drops of blood that morph into racist slang are a common element. In Seeing is Believing, a TV newscast reports on drunks and bums while a giant eye sheds tears of blood. The tears turn into letters of the alphabet – “a” for abo, “b” for boong, “c” for coon; all derogatory terms for Australia’s Indigenous people. Other works are not so subtle. Wall of Death depicts two people who have been lynched. Their spurting blood again turns into letters of the alphabet. More ►

– John Thomson

To say that Sonny Assu and Brendan Tang grew up in culturally diverse and difficult situations is an understatement. Raised in North Delta, in B.C.’s Lower Mainland, Assu believed he was one of the suburban white kids he played with until he was eight years old and discovered his Kwakwaka’wakw heritage. Tang was born in Ireland of Trinidian parents, studied in the United States and Canada, and now is a naturalized Canadian citizen. It should be no surprise then, that much of their work grapples with clashing cultures and ethnicities: Assu with his Indigenous roots and the impact of colonization; Tang with mash-ups of contemporary culture and art history through ceramics that bridge divisions between art and craft. The two recently collaborated to explore youth culture at The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, B.C. Their exhibition, Ready Player Two, on display until Sept. 3, focuses on places where Assu and Tang found sanctuary in their teens – the basement den, the kitchen, the arcade. The first gallery is a large installation with a kitchen theme that includes one of Assu’s cereal boxes, Lucky Beads, a spoof on General Mills’ Lucky Charms breakfast cereal. Hanging on the wall is one of his interventions, a painting from a yard sale or thrift shop with added Indigenous imagery – in this case a stylized ovoid shape. More ►

– Beverly Cramp

A show called Saskatchewan Maritime Museum? It has to be a joke, right? Well, Todd Gronsdahl is kidding – and he isn’t. Of course, landlocked Saskatchewan has no sea, but Gronsdahl has created three fanciful stories about misadventures on regional waterways for an exhibition that, in the words of curator Leah Taylor, challenges “truth, fiction and the construction of historical narratives.” While plenty of recent exhibitions have interrogated different aspects of archives and museological practices, Saskatchewan Martime Museum, on view until Aug. 19 at the University of Saskatchewan’s Kenderdine Gallery, extrapolates local lore using irony and absurdity. With tongue-in-cheek humour worthy of a CBC comedy sketch, Gronsdahl confronts viewers with a completely fictional personage, Charles Gaspar, reputed to have invented insulation made from cattails and lip balm from sturgeon cartilage. It’s a play on a Prairie stereotype – the eccentric DIY entrepreneur, a character who seems to share some affinities with Gronsdahl himself. “The more I make this stuff, the more I find I am willing to be that eccentric character myself,” says Gronsdahl, who grew up in Saskatoon. “In real life, there are social boundaries where you have to act like a sane person. But when I make art, I get to take this part of me that maybe is just sort of out there and I can express it through my work rather than just being an eccentric myself.” More ►

– Portia Priegert

Works by three Canadian artists are on an idyll in the Greek isles until Aug. 20 as part of an exhibition, Open Horizons, organized by a Calgary curator to mark both Canada’s 150th anniversary and 75 years of diplomacy between Greece and Canada. The artists – Calgary’s Ron Moppett, Saskatoon’s Allyson Glenn and Vancouver’s Colleen Heslin – push the boundaries and hierarchies of art, says independent curator Caterina Pizanias, who organized the show for the Cultural Foundation of Tinos, an island popular with Greek artists and intellectuals. “In visually innovative ways, they speak of and depict the physical vastness of the Canadian landscape,” says Pizanias. “They favour covering the canvas, at times extending the works onto the floor, creating powerful installation works that tell stories of a world in a state of flux.” These are works, says Pizanias, that can withstand the challenges of the Aegean Sea – its endless blue horizon and relentless light and, above all, the myriad stories buried in its depths and washed up on its shores. More ►

Helen Mackie has always been interested in biology and nature – a fascination that she translated into myriad prints throughout her 40-year career as an artist. Her solo show, Pressed, at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary until July 28, features carefully observed images of the ordinary  things around her: Blossoms and berries, chickadees and hummingbirds, deer and horses, all culled from what curator Christine Sowiak calls “a life really well lived.” Mackie came to the opening last month to view the show of 196 prints curated from a gift earlier this year of one print from every edition she has ever created – some 350 in all. Sowiak recalls Mackie, now frail and in her early 90s, saying over and over: “It’s all just the little things.” But amassed over 40 years, Mackie’s little things add up to a rich collection of etchings and woodblock prints that Sowiak found deeply moving: “I’m surprised at the very personal emotional reaction I have to this whole project.” More ►

Karin Bubaš presents large-scale photographs of California desert flora in Hidden Valley, on view at the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver until Aug. 5. Bubaš, long interested in colour manipulation within analog photography, is known for surreal landscapes that both suggest and withhold narratives. She has explored painterly tints in previous work, including colour gels that shift hues and smoke bombs dispersed across landscapes. Much of the work in this show was shot over the last two years on LomoChrome Purple, a colour negative film much like Kodak’s Aerochrome, a now-discontinued infrared film developed for aerial cartography and surveillance, and LomoChrome Turquoise, another similar film. Bubaš is known for staging costumed female figures in park-like settings to create images that refer to art cinema and vintage Hollywood movies. She graduated in 1998 from what is now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris and the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver. Her work is in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Glenbow in Calgary. More images ►

Alberta artist Paddy Lamb studied history at Trinity College in Dublin as a young man, and his love of the past  has never left him. Now, a lifetime later, he is showing All Bones and Broken Treasures, poetic semi-abstract work that evokes the land and its stories. These latest pieces, on view at Edmonton’s Front Gallery until July 15, combine expressive drawing and painting with objects he has found out walking – animal skulls, bits of rusted farm machinery and the like. For his sombre installation, Rapture of the Deserted, for instance, Lamb uses old pallets, painted black and topped by two weathered fence posts. Behind are three charcoal drawings of bits of machinery he picked up here and there. The work’s religious overtones can’t be ignored. The pallets are stacked to resemble an altar. And, of course, triptychs have a long history in Christian art, although they typically feature golden icons replete with the promise of a wondrous afterlife. Lamb, who moved to Canada in 1985, says he was thinking about early settlers when he made the piece. “The formal traditions that they left behind in Europe probably would have included altarpieces and churches and things like that, and they would have been deprived of that in a way, but also forced to rely very heavily on pieces of equipment that were their livelihood, really. So I was just merging the two, in a way.” More ►

– Portia Priegert