Saving the World from Boredom

April 12 – May 31, 2013
Helen Christou Gallery

Curator: Bianca Elke, Museum Studies Intern
Works from the Galt Museum & Archives, Faculty of Fine Arts Theatre and Dramatic Arts Costume Collection and the U of L Art Collection

In conjunction with Historic Lethbridge Festival
May 3 – 10, 2013

During the 1960s, an inspiring and visible counterculture was born. Referring to themselves as hippies, this movement triggered dramatic cultural changes due to the rejection of conventional social norms from the 1940s and ‘50s as well as opposition to powerful institutions. The youth wanted to become more involved in decision making and were determined to speak up about social issues, such as supporting the civil rights movement and objecting to the war in Vietnam. This was an era when new forms of political activism appeared that included “love-ins” and other peaceful protests as well as harsh responses from government and police.

Along with taking a stand on political issues, people were exploring unconventional personal appearance, music, art, drugs and sexual liberation. New forms of music and festivals like Woodstock played a key role in spreading the counter cultural ideas and spirit. Communal living and other alternatives to Capitalist social structures were explored. Artists were moving away from traditional high art forms, such as painting and sculpture, and began producing a profusion of prints and other types of multiples. Influenced by the changes in society, artists drew their inspiration from Life magazine and other aspects of popular culture and embraced unexpected materials, performances and chance. The work shown in this exhibition contain elements of Pop Art, Fluxus, Postmodern and Abstract Expressionist art, movements that were all going on simultaneously during the 1960s.

Bianca Elke
Museum Studies Intern

Glorious and Free

March 1 – April 5, 2013
Helen Christou Gallery

Curator: David Smith, Museum Studies Intern
Works from the U of L Art Collection

Objects for this exhibition were selected on the basis of their distinctly Canadian visual aesthetics. Each work of Canadiana evokes a sense of place within the viewer. National identity is complicated and problematic to define as it is constructed from multiple sources including language, history, music, food, media and symbols. Relations between France, Britain, the United States and the Aborigional Peoples are ones that have historically formed and continue to shape current Canadian culture. As an intricate and delicate device it would take a thick instruction manual to comprehend in all its complexity.

Representing Canadian national identity through imagery is a difficult task because of the nation’s intermittently contentious history. The pieces of iconography included in this exhibition are highly charged works infused with politics and ideology. In some cases, decades have passed between the creation of the work and the present exhibition, but the works remain powerful images nonetheless.

An exploration of Canadiana in art would not be complete without a consideration of the landscape. The rugged terrain has been a significant factor influencing Canadian identity. Harsh winters threaten survival and act as a collective obstacle which has brought Canadians together while the dramatic landscape from coast to coast is something on which we continue to capitalize through the tourism industry.

It may be difficult to define what Canadian identity is, but it is not difficult to explain the way we market our identity to tourists. One need only look at a standard Canadian gift shop to see the wildlife shirts, bottles of maple syrup, plastic totem poles and postcards of Mounties to understand that the lighthearted approach to representing Canadian culture is a position that is occupied with great pride.

- David Smith
Museum Studies Intern

Tracing the Elusive Past of the Chinarians

January 10 – February 22, 2013
Helen Christou Gallery
Reception: January 10, 4 – 6pm

Curator: Josephine Mills

Works from the Collection of Lana Gabor
Courtesy of Museum of Chinarian Art & Artifact (MOCAA)

Current research focuses on synthesizing available evidence of different kinds, to try to find the answer to one of the oldest and most exciting questions of all time: Where do Chinarians come from? The roots of Chinarian culture may be traced to the little-known, but documented, history of the Huns (Xiongnu): a tribe of nomads that emerged from ancient Tongwancheng and whose descendents are said to be Hungarians and Turks.

In 1993, the discovery of relics inside the caves of Tongwancheng (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3) led to much speculation about the origin of the Chinarians, as it was the only documented settlement ever found. Previously, the elusive Chinarians were identified as primarily nomadic. The reason for the abandonment of Tongwancheng has been theorized by several scholars but with little conclusive evidence.
 

 
This revolutionary discovery inspired Gabor Elizalde’s film Tracing Chinaria, an epic historical drama set against the spectacular backdrop of the Steppes. The movie tells the tale of the mythic figure Ki Nai as she makes her way through the Steppes after being left by her husband. The plotline twists around the Chinarians’ mysterious desertion of the Tongwancheng caves. Elizalde is rumored to have spent one year wandering the vast Steppes to gain knowledge for Tracing Chinaria.
 

Many of the props used in Tracing Chinaria are reproductions of the relics found in the caves of Tongwancheng. On display is an array of photographic film stills, movie props and memorabilia from Elizalde’s film, from the private collection of his distant niece Lana Gabor, courtesy of the Museum of Chinarian Art and Artifacts (MOCAA). Accompanying this exhibition is an original Chinarian dance (musical composition by Ivan Tucakov, choreography and performance by MOCAA’s Lana Gabor), presented for the first time at the opening reception.

Museum of Chinarian Art & Artifacts (MOCAA)

I am delighted to have the opportunity to partner with the Museum of Chinarian Art and Artifacts (MOCAA) and present this exciting exhibition about the relatively unknown Chinarian culture.  It has been a pleasure working with Lana Gabor on developing the first presentation about the Chinarians in Lethbridge. I am sure few have heard of this culture and will have many questions. Hopefully this exhibition will help support further research and develop a broadening of knowledge about these people.  For those seeking more information, MOCAA is the primary site for information, although there could well be hitherto misidentified artifacts in other museum collections.  I am sure that Lana Gabor and the experts at MOCAA will welcome any questions and further discussion.

Josephine Mills
Director/Curator, U of L Art Gallery

Caring for the Collection

October 26 – December 21, 2012
Helen Christou Gallery
Reception: November 1, 4 – 6 pm
Conservation Demonstrations: Mondays, 1:30 – 2:30 pm

Curated by Juliet Graham, Miranda Grol & Kirsten Christopherson

UofL Art Gallery Registrar, and experienced conservator, Juliet Graham curates an exhibition with her former assistant, Miranda Grol, who is now head of collections in Fort McLeod, and current Museum Studies Intern, Kirsten Christopherson. The exhibition will include work from the U of L Collection which has received conservation treatment as well as in-depth text, photographs, and video which gives audiences a sense of the behind-the-scenes activities of collections care and lets them know the importance of this work for our cultural heritage. Graham will be demonstrating various conservation techniques in the Helen Christou Gallery on Mondays during the exhibition run from 1:30 – 2:30 pm.

Hourglass

A Public Performance by Chun Hua Catherine Dong
October 22, 2012
10 – 5 pm, Helen Christou Gallery

Presented as part of the M:ST 6 Performative Art Festival and the University of Lethbridge’s Complex Social Change Series.
Artist Statement:

Hourglass is a rice‐based performance that explores “deterritorialization” and “disessentialization” in the Taken‐for‐Granted world.

The action of constantly painting white rice to black is a metaphor of the hourglass. Sand in an hourglass cannot flow without rotation, just as power cannot shift without struggle. Too much power concentrated on one side is a main factor causing disharmony, confusion and dislocation, embodied on the social turbulence that we see and feel in our daily lives. In fact, power doesn’t bring growth unless we understand the essence of sharing power. The process of social transformation does not have to involve violence, and the political gesture doesn’t have to be radical. In fact, it can be done through a more peaceful way, a meditative way or meditation.

The gesture of painting white rice to black is a political gesture. This performance provides an opportunity for participants to meditate on our situation while working together on a mutual goal: reconfigure the established centralized power in order to create an equal, fair and balanced world.

Artist Biography

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a performance artist, born in China, living in Canada. She graduated from Emily Carr University Arts & Design and is currently pursuing her MFA at Concordia University with support of SSHRC, Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts Fellowship and BC Arts Council Scholarship. Dong is interested in blurring boundaries between personal and political, between private and public, between art and life, between performance and everyday practice. Her current research interests focus on how a practice of contemporary performance art addresses the everyday performance of identity, and how strategic, essentialized performance of identity redefines the interconnected concepts of public and private self, gender, and power.

Rural Readymade

August 31 – October 19, 2012
Helen Christou Gallery
Reception: September 13, 4 – 6 pm
Curator’s Talk & Tour: September 13, 4:30 pm

Curated by Shauna McCabe
Organized by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown

Rural Readymade brings together work by a selection of contemporary artists who start from the same impulse–to explore the found and the familiar in their lived environments, imbuing ordinary objects and elements of everyday life with new meaning. Reconciling their experiences within primarily rural contexts, each work offers insight into the evolution of the contemporary “readymade,” underscoring an enduring tension between what is, and what is not, art.

An idea originating in the work of Marcel Duchamp in 1915, the readymade modified mass produced, manufactured objects–a bottle rack, a comb, a shovel–repositioned by the artist to subvert aesthetic assumptions and the unconscious reliance on the visual. “All in all,” Duchamp suggested, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Each of the artists here has adapted such urban precedents to rural purposes, often exploring the readymade within a broader creative engagement with environmental issues, public space, and social practice. The result is a range of works that reposition landscapes and architectures, popular culture and everyday forms – entry points that highlight the mutability of interpretation and meaning.

Responding to everyday surroundings where the use and adaptation of found materials are deeply engrained in daily life, the work of these artists playfully and adeptly blurs registers–between the mundane and aesthetic, natural and handmade, low-tech and no-tech, DIY and folk cultures. The collective vernacular that emerges in Rural Readymade is one that speaks of an agile and persistent drive towards the creative reimagination of art and everyday life.

Link to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Dreams & Nightmares

July 20 – August 24, 2012
Helen Christou Gallery
Curator: Jane Edmundson
Works from the UofL Art Collection.

This exhibition features works from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection that explore the spectrum of light and dark that ranges through our dreams and nightmares. The artworks selected recall nighttime narratives that are common to many of us: flying through clouds, encountering strange and terrifying creatures, dark shadows, hyper-real colours, abstracted landscapes, and being caught in states of vulnerability. Artists featured include Fred Hagan, Bart Pragnell, Robert Young, Vicky Marshall, Frederick Brown, John Hartman, and Les Levine.

Recent Acquisitions

June 8 – July 13, 2012
Curator: Jane Edmundson
Works from the U of L Art Collection.

The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery houses one of the most significant art collections in Canada. Numbering over 13,000 objects, the holdings include works from Canada, America and Europe, span the 19th and 20th centuries, and continue to grow with 21st century additions. The collection’s major strength is its diversity, which not only represents a wide range of geographic locations, but also the full spectrum of media, artistic movements, genres and approaches. Initiated at the earliest stages of the University’s development to help facilitate the liberal education of students on campus, the collection stands as the backbone of the Art Gallery’s exhibition programming, with rotating collection displays accompanied by contemporary exhibitions in various Gallery spaces and public site installations throughout campus. The art collection continues to grow today through the generous gifts of artists and art collectors and focused, grant-funded purchases. In recent years, efforts have been made to strengthen the holdings of artworks of specific movements or genres that were formerly underrepresented within the collection.

Recent Acquisitions features a selection of works from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection that have been acquired over the past three years. These works were chosen for their historic, conceptual and geographical links to Lethbridge. Artists Chai Duncan and Len Komanac both have ties to our campus community; Duncan worked as a Technician in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Komanac is an alumnus of the BFA program. Carl Granzow was one of the earliest instructors in Visual Arts at the University, and animated campus for over 30 years with his vision for the Papokan Sculpture Park and Gushul Studio Residency Program before his untimely passing in 2009. Prairie artists Joe Fafard, Don Proch and Russell Yuristy are associated with the Regina Clay movement, which sought to depict everyday objects and scenes from rural life with humour, colour, and quirkiness. George Hunter’s photographs of mining operations in Lethbridge and urban life in burgeoning, post-war Albertan towns have documentary merit while also being beautifully composed and visually compelling. Finally, Calgary painter and printmaker John Will is one of the artists that the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery has committed to collecting in-depth; the collection holds over 120 works by Will, spanning over 45 years of his self-deprecating, neurotic and expressive art practice.

- Jane Edmundson

The 1960s

April 13 – June 1, 2012
Curated by Allison Spencer & David Smith, Museum Studies Interns
Helen Christou Gallery

At the onset of the 1960s, the Pop art movement was already in full swing. In the 1950s, artists began to draw inspiration from popular culture. Objects of mass production became of interest to artists who sought to elevate these ordinary objects to the status of fine art through bringing them into the gallery. The artworks produced in this era mark the beginning of a closure of the gap between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, where the difference between the two is nearly indistinguishable. Artists like Roy Lichtenstein began appropriating images derived from comic book sources into his paintings, sculptures and prints. Others like Andy Warhol utilized imagery that was circulated by the mass media, and also found inspiration in the objects churned out in mass production by factories such as Campbell’s soup. The processes of mechanization were important and sometimes, as in the case with Warhol’s silkscreening methods, reenacted in the process of artistic production. The Pop art movement has been viewed by historians as a reaction against the elitist attitude within contemporary art galleries that often presented art which was inaccessible to much of the public. Today, Pop art is one of the most visually distinctive artistic movements and has reentered the sphere of mass production. Posters can be readily purchased featuring works by many different artists working in the Pop art style. In this way, the movement has come full circle, by re-inserting itself back into popular culture. Pop art turned the conventions of the art world upside down and contributed to the emergence of the subsequent movement called Postmodernism.
The 1960s is a two-part exhibition; the second part can be seen in the Main Gallery space (W600). The selection of work in the Main Gallery is devoted to a different movement of art that was beginning to take shape in the 1960s, known as Minimalism.

- Allison Spencer & David Smith, Museum Studies Interns

Concertino

March 2 – April 6, 2012
Curator: Jane Edmundson
Helen Christou Gallery

Music is one of humanity’s earliest and most innate manifestations of the creative impulse. The structured juxtaposition of sound and silence mimics our speech, while managing to communicate deeper emotions and ideas than we may be able to enunciate with words alone. Instruments carved from bone to produce controlled sounds have been found at prehistorical archeological sites, and clay tablets containing notations of songwriting have been dated to 1400 BCE. Representations of musical acts and instruments in visual art are present in the paintings found in Egyptian tombs, illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, Italian Renaissance frescoes, and the collages of Cubist artists such as Braque and Picasso. This bond between music and art illustrates the impulse to document the temporal nature of music; to freeze the fleeting experience of hearing a melody and being momentarily transfixed by its sounds and the feelings they invoke.

Concertino presents a selection of works from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection that explore the desire to record the ephemeral nature of music into a fixed, concrete image, and representations of musical instruments (both functional, as in the case of the Slit Gong Drum from the Middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, and conceptual, demonstrated by Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Drum Set). The orchestra drawings of Raoul Dufy and Gen-Paul capture the frenzy of activity that often accompanies live symphonic performances, while Illingworth Kerr’s images of a steel drum band document his cultural experiences on the island of St. Lucia in the 1960s. Robert Rauschenberg’s famed pop collage treatment of the Talking Head’s seminal album ‘Speaking In Tongues’ renders the music album as a prized art object, and demonstrates the co-operative relationship between rock bands and the artists that design cover art, promotional posters, and collectible T-shirts. Representations of the body responding to music are also visible in Billy McCarroll’s abstracted Dance, Andre Derain’s Figures in a Landscape, and Bart Pragnell’s charming illustration of nude revelers, dancing to far-off music that the viewer is left to conjure in their own mind, or hum under their breath.

- Jane Edmundson, Assistant Curator, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery