Nicholas de Grandmaison: Recent Acquisitions

May 2 – June 27, 2013
Main Gallery
Reception: May 2, 6 – 8 pm
Extended viewing hours: Saturdays 10 am – 5 pm

Information concerning the de Grandmaison Oral History Project.

Curator: Josephine Mills

Drawn from the 67 artworks donated by BMO Financial Group, this exhibition features 28 pastel portraits that provide a range of the Aboriginal subjects represented in the gift. The works demonstrate de Grandmaison’s deep respect for the people whom he painted and his exceptional skill at capturing the individual character of his sitters. The exhibition will include a resource area focused on a newly launched oral history project. The U of L Art Gallery and the University Archives are partnering to gather stories on the artist and on the subjects of his paintings. These oral histories will be added to the existing research holdings of archival material on the artist and will help provide context for future audiences attending exhibitions of his works. Information on the oral history project will be provided and people can contact the research team if they wish to participate.

Check the U of L Art Gallery’s website — ulag.ca – for details on a planned informal series of presentations “Conversations about Nicholas de Grandmaison”. These will occur on select Thursday evenings throughout the exhibition. As well, the gallery has extended hours for the run of the exhibition and is open every Saturday along with being open until 8:30 pm on Thursdays in addition to the regular 9 am – 4:30 weekday hours.

Closing Reception & Hoop Dance Performance
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Main Gallery

The closing reception featured a hoop dance performance as well as information about the U of L Art Gallery’s ongoing Nicholas de Grandmaison Oral History Project. Through this project we are collecting stories from First Nations people about their relatives portrayed in de Grandmaison’s work. The art gallery hopes to bring past and present generations together by discovering the story behind the subjects in the portraits. The hoop dance performance showed that First Nations’ cultures are still as proud and strong as they were when de Grandmaison first captured his visual documentation of the subjects.

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

Cereal Gen (Food Series)

Main Gallery
Curator: Josephine Mills and Jane Edmundson

Planned in conjunction with Liberal Education course
Artists: Lyndal Osborne and Alex Moon (and works from the Collection)

Cereal Gen is the second exhibition in the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s Food series that runs June through December 2011. With three exhibitions and a public-site project, the series addresses social and cultural issues related to food production, supply and consumption. Green Thumb opened the series and featured works from the U of L Art Collection that explore gardens and greenery both in terms of pastoral imagery and political implications.  Consisting of detailed installations that play with the forms and technology from scientific laboratories, Cereal Gen includes recent work by two Alberta artists and focuses on social and economic issues related to seed production and farming.  Between October 1st through 6th, look for DodoLab’s project The Important Things to Know About Eating and Drinking In Lethbridge which will be appearing in several sites around campus.  The Food series will conclude with The Lion’s Share, a new installation by Rita McKeough in which she playfully explores our relationship to eating animals.

Given the essential role that food plays in our lives as sustenance and as part of social and economic systems, it has been a common subject for artists to explore in their work. With the major changes in recent decades in the application of scientific processes and the relationship between individuals and corporations involved with food production and distribution, there have been heated debate and volumes of research on this aspect of food.  Artists have engaged with this timely and important topic in many ways. Some take the role of activist and clearly critique genetic modification or the corporatization of agricultural production. Others, like the two artists in this exhibition, explore the fascinating imagery, complex emotions, and confident assertions of authority and certainty posed by corporations and scientific discourses that emerge within, and are part of, these debates.

The title for this exhibition, Cereal Gen, is a play on words that references the subject of the works on display: “serial gen” is short for serial number generating software. In Alex Moon’s Uni-Farm project, a repurposed old dot matrix printer takes corporate branding to a new level and creates the seeds for his fictional corporation in the pattern of their logo. Moon cleverly questions the dominant assumption that technical progress intrinsically equals improvement in our health and well-being by using found objects, including old Macintosh computers, as the basis for the new-fangled devices and processes being promoted by Uni-Farm. Once the latest and greatest in technical advances, these devices and the surrounding climate of “progress at all cost” leads the employees of Uni-Farm, and the people of this fictional world to the precipice of worldwide food shortage. Moon further creates an awareness of the limitations on being current, let alone predicting the future, by using design elements straight out of a science fiction film. The colours, fonts for the text, and logo of Uni-Farm are all ordinary looking and thereby emphasize the ‘fiction’ part of science fiction.

Lyndal Osborne’s installation also takes the form of a fictional laboratory, but not one where things are going as terribly wrong as Uni-Farm’s.  The size, colour and detail of Endless Forms Most Beautiful immediately grabs one’s attention and demands closer inspection.  Up close, the work is equally visually compelling with the combination of organic and inorganic materials to create massive versions of seedpods. Osborne describes herself as an “archaeologist seeking and retrieving discarded fragments of the urban environment and the dried out remains of natures’ seasons.” Although beautiful, as the name states, the mixing of items to create the seedpods, their strong colours, and their gigantic size disrupts the fascination with scientific imagery and disturbs an uncritical acceptance of the prevalence of genetically modified food.

Cereal Gen continues in the Helen Christou Gallery with more work by Moon as well as works from the U of L Art Collection.  The Art Gallery would like to thank Bruce McKay for proposing the initial idea for the Food series. The exhibitions have been planned in conjunction with the Liberal Education Program which is currently offering a course titled “Food: A Critical Examination,” taught by McKay. As well, during this semester the new U of L Centre for Culture and Community will be presenting a speaker’s series on campus that will engage further with ideas and issues related to the social and political aspects of food.

Josephine Mills

Director/Curator

Artist Statement

In my piece, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, the setting is a laboratory and the nine forms represent enlarged seedpods in the process of genetically modification. In GMO science three main techniques are employed for implanting genes into the seed cell – developing tumors, electricity, or a gene gun. In this imagined lab my forms reference these processes through the shape of the seedpod (with growths on the form), the materials used (pierced by electrical capacitors) and scientific equipment (pipets injecting DNA).

Many of the seedpods are created from actual seeds. In some cases the forms are seductive and beautiful. This represents the intellectual arguments used by the chemical companies to expand their research through the patenting of seeds (11 billion to date), gradually gaining corporate control of food production. There is also an element of the grotesque in other seedpods, suggesting a darker side to the shrinking of seed biodiversity. This hints at hidden dangers. Some genetically altered seed contains a terminator gene that ensues its infertility and lack of ability to reproduce. Could this government – patented suicide gene pollutes all crops around the world? What impact does this have on third world countries that no longer control the productivity of their own food?

The fictional laboratory created contains a small selection of heritage seeds (original, unaltered) that are set to one side. They exist as a miniaturized version of our past, something that is not available any more .The glass flasks and plastic tubing represent both an aspect of this genetic modification process and, more importantly, the interconnections we humans have with the plant world. I wish, as co-inhabitants of this earth we might agree to negotiate more checks in how far we go in our manipulation of the planet.

Lyndal Osborne

A Little History on the Prairies

Main Gallery
Curator: Josephine Mills

Reception: January 13, 4-6 pm

Featuring the recent acquisition of selections from the “Nanton series” by Geoffrey James, this exhibition will focus on artist’s depictions of land use on the prairies. Works from the U of L Collection, such as A.Y. Jackson’s sketches near Pincher Creek and Margaret Shelton’s watercolours, will provide an historical context. Accompanied by a major publication.

Curatorial Statement

In recent years, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery has moved beyond simply housing a major art collection and become a centre for investigating collecting in the contemporary context. This exhibition, A Little History on the Prairies, arose from that combination of the reputation of the University’s art collection and the many ways that the Art Gallery has been addressing collecting in exhibitions, publications, conservation projects, and supporting research. The idea for this specific exhibition started when Jim Coutts offered to donate a suite of prints from Geoffrey James’ “Nanton Project.” The renowned Toronto-based photographer shot the images on Mr. Coutts’ family homestead and I jumped at the chance to acquire these works. We already have a selection from James’ series that he did of Lethbridge in the 1990s and the regional connection with the “Nanton Project” was a perfect fit with the strong holding of landscape work in the University collection.

I immediately began planning an exhibition focused around this new donation and intended to draw on our extensive range of landscape work with a specific focus on land use on the prairies. John Will’s playfully misspelled reference to the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic provided the perfect title and opening point. The exhibition underwent a major change when Mr. Coutts decided to donate far more than the suite of photographs and offered us a substantial portion of his art collection. Covering decades of collecting and imagery of the region, this donation is a major addition not only to the University’s collection, but also to the way that we address the connection between private and public collecting, how objects acquire meaning through addition to collections, and how these objects resonate with the collections that house them. A Little History on the Prairies features Mr. Coutts’ gift along with the Will painting and works by A.Y. Jackson already in the University collection to add to the context of these new acquisitions. Whether or not the layers involved with building collections are visible, I hope that viewers engage with the variety of views of our regional landscape and take away a small part of the contemplation possible from enjoying a prairie vista.

Josephine Mills
Director/Curator

Statement

When collectors are honest with themselves, they admit that there is neither rhyme nor reason to what they do. In fact they seldom think of themselves as collectors. From time to time they acquire paintings that appeal to them. When they have a few art works they start to think – what is all this about? It is only in retrospect that they manage to identify themes that prompted them to acquire in the first place – this is certainly my experience.

There is a German expression “heimweh,” which translates as “home pain”. It is more than home-sickness – it is the profound and lasting longing in the stranger to be home – a feeling that over the years gave much substance to works of art and song.

Part of the landscape you know as a youth travels with you – and part of you always remains in your home landscape. That was my experience of south-west Alberta – especially the Porcupine Hills. Fortunately I have now been able to return here.

The works that I’ve collected along the way usually reflect my “home pain”. One day I lunched with a collector friend in Toronto who said, “There is a painting at the Godard Gallery you should see.” I went to see it, liked it (it fact was haunted by it) and eventually bought it.

When I got the painting home I looked on the back of the canvas and saw the title – “Sanfois West of Nanton” by Barbara Ballachey. It was Timber Ridge in the Porcupine Hills — a scene I had seen a hundred times! It is a fine painting but it was the “home pain” that captured me.

I was fortunate to grow up in the 1950’s in Nanton, Alberta with a mentor dedicated to art. Dorothy Dowhan culturally adopted me, and from the age of 12 dragged me along to art shows and concerts in Calgary. Those evening events were often held at the Coste House, a Calgary centre for graphic and performing arts. Later she gave me a small 1958 painting of West Dover, Nova Scotia by John Cook. Soon, armed with that one possession and numerous mental images from years of having looked and looked, I slowly and hesitantly began to acquire art on my own.

I began to meet western artists like Joe Fafard and Janet Mitchell. Janet and I became friends. After acquiring several of her works, I talked her into letting me be her agent, because she found it impossible to set prices on her works – which were getting better and better, while she was selling them for less and less. I soon found myself befriending a number of Canadian dealers who educated and coached me on Canadian art history.

As Janet shared her ideas about art, I began looking at landscape differently and so many of the pieces I collected over the following 50 years were done by Prairie artists, struggling to capture space and light and the wonderful detail of the Canadian Prairies.

Janet’s landscapes were sometimes called squiggles on a board – but were in fact highly imaginative and she got the prairies exactly right.

Business and politics would keep me travelling for decades. But along the way I made a wonderful discovery. Virtually every village in the world has at least one person drawing, painting, carving – sometimes you have to look hard, but they are there. While travelling I often visited them and began collecting works by local blacksmiths, carpenters, painters, sketchers and sculptors. And in recent years I’ve come home to discover first-class artists in Nanton, Cayley, Fort Macleod, High River and Claresholm.

So there it is. My “artistic mission” has been a modest but deeply satisfying one: just poking around, meeting some wonderful people and occasionally acquiring artworks I liked. The theme of place clearly seemed to arise again and again in works I acquired, as I tried to deal with the “home pain” I felt. As a near-neighbor of U of L I suspect my “home-pain” will be a little less intense now, knowing that these works will be right “at home” here in the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

Jim Coutts

Promising Objects

Main Gallery
Curator: Josephine Mills
Opening reception: November 5, 2010 4-6PM

The University of Lethbridge Art Gallery has changed considerably in recent years. Some of these changes are visible, such as the floor-to-ceiling renovation of the main gallery or the new look to our website and posters, while much of the transformation happens behind the scenes, such as updating our policies and procedures or shifting our reporting structure within the university. From my job as both Director and Curator of the Art Gallery, I balance working on the larger vision for the goals of the gallery with planning our exhibitions and programs. It is not important that visitors to the gallery see the connection between the events and the vision, but what does matter is that the exhibitions and other activities bring that vision to life and then inform the next phase of creating the goals and plans.
On first seeing Alison MacTaggart’s work, I recognized the beautiful fit between her interests, use of materials, and response to how visitors experience exhibition space and my own goals for the U of L Art Gallery. MacTaggart focuses on the relationships involved with communication – the artist communicating with the viewer, the personal relationship one has to objects meant to facilitate communication, and the possibilities as well as frustrations with language. Her works invite touch, raise questions, and encourage discussion. MacTaggart’s combination of addressing the ideas involved with communication while also encouraging dialogue resonates with the potential of the Art Gallery to be a forum for the exchange of ideas, a place of contemplation, and a site that supports interdisciplinary discussion.

Josephine Mills
Director/Curator

                              

                         

Artist Statement

Promising Objects is an exhibition that explores the dialogic relationship the viewer has to an artwork and the parallels between language and art. The works for the exhibition also correspond with my interest in inventors and artists and their respective quests to devise solutions to problems and ideas.

To guide the early stages of the work, I decided on three parameters derived directly from The Guide to Patents from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office . Each artwork or solution to my proposal to explore language and the dialogic must demonstrate novelty, utility and ingenuity. To demonstrate novelty, each artwork must be “new” in some way. It could be an improvement on a previous artwork or the first such object in the world. With regards to utility each artwork must “work” or have a “useful” function. For example, the artwork could be an apparatus or it could be a process or a method that invites participation. Who says art can’t be useful? To demonstrate ingenuity each artwork must be a development that would not have been obvious beforehand and it would elicit a “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that” reaction from other experts or artists in the field—a challenge indeed, to say the least.

The resulting works are embodied solutions to my proposed idea. They make “vibratory” references to harmony and discordance, pitch, tone, amplification, elastic potential energy, and other forces and effects. They promise an encounter between the viewer(s) and the artwork, the viewer and his or herself, and the viewer and the artist by way of the artwork.

-Alison MacTaggart

Biography

Alison MacTaggart is a Vancouver-based artist whose conceptually inspired installation work bridges the disciplines of sculpture, drawing and writing. She completed her MFA in 2006 and has received awards and grants from the BC Arts Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. She currently teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC.

Snap, Crackle, Pop

Curated by Josephine Mills
Main Gallery
Reception: January 15, 4-6 PM

Snap, Crackle, Pop brings together a sample of new directions by artists in Southern Alberta who are exploring the themes and iconography in popular culture. This exhibition is not meant to be an exhaustive survey, but rather a snapshot of this activity. The focus on Southern Alberta is also more of a starting point, given that half of the featured artists are residents of the area while the others started this work while living in Calgary or Lethbridge, but have since moved to other places.

There are some common themes that connect the works in this exhibition: disaster, machismo, and Canadiana appear in different combinations and forms. The first two fit with the temperament of our time. The huge scale of the financial crisis, global warming, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan produce an anxiety that is too big to address directly while pervading contemporary experience. In the same way that mass media addresses these issues through metaphors of aliens, vampires and werewolves, fashion, and super heroes, the artists in this exhibition are also looking to more playful and humorous ways of exploring catastrophe, war and anxiety. Instead of tornadoes or floods, a giant squid and angry trees attack the trailers in Len Komanac’s sculpture, while Christopher Moore’s hot pink flocking and cute shapes used within camouflage transform the aggressive nature of military weapons and uniforms.

These artists also assert the local in various ways and bring in a Canadian perspective that is often missing from mass media forms. Shanell Papp uses cozy fabrics (familiar to Canadians during cold winters) to soften the presence of large blood pools sewn for the gallery floor. Jason Mathis brings our characteristic self-deprecating sensibility to his portraits of friends dressed in a Batman costume, while Lisa Brawn compares the various options of macho in Canadian and American manly men in her woodcut portraits. Dave and Jenn draw on the quintessentially Canadian imagery of the Group of Seven in their colourful, layered landscapes. Seen together, the works in this exhibition display the eclectic range of approaches by artists of this region to explore the experience of popular culture and everyday life.

Josephine Mills
Director/Curator,
University of Lethbridge Art Gallery

Lisa Brawn

I have been experimenting with primarily figurative, portrait genre woodcuts for almost twenty years since being introduced to the medium by the printmakers at ACAD. Recently, I have been working with salvaged century-old rough Douglas Fir beams from the restoration of the Alberta Block, and from the dismantling of grain elevators. This wood is interesting not only in its history, but also in that it is oddly shaped and ornery. It has holes, knots, gouges and protruding rusty nails and is unlike the traditional flawless and smooth woodcut material that I also work with such as cherry or walnut. I don’t make prints from the woodcuts, but prefer the blocks themselves.

To find suitably rustic and rugged subjects for this wood, I have been referencing popular culture personas and archetypes from 1920s silent film cowboys to 1970s tough guys for my recent series ¿Quién es más macho? Then I started thinking about Canadian icons, Leonard Cohen, Don Cherry, David Suzuki: Who is more macho, Bobby Hull or Stompin’ Tom? Then cross-border comparisons, Rex Murphy or Hunter S.Thompson? A ¿Quién es más macha? series evolved, with Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, Margaret Atwood, Nana Mouskouri, then a cross-gender series: Patty Hearst or Bob Dylan? The Patty Hearst woodcuts sparked an interest in researching cults, and specifically their leaders, Reverend Moon, Jim Jones, Maria Devi Christos, and so on. A trip to Coney Island inspired a series of sideshow portraits, and a recent trip to Havana renewed my long-standing love of propaganda. I am endlessly interested in and fascinated by the subject of celebrity and am acutely nostalgic about the popular culture I consumed voraciously as a kid in the 70s and 80s.

For the past nine years, a major component of my art practice has been finding and developing alternative venues out of which to operate art societies, art salons and interdisciplinary project spaces: Sugarmobile – in a 1935 silver trailer, Sugar Gallery – in a 300 sq ft. office in the Grain Exchange, Sugar Estate Art Salon and Museum of Oddities (with Milo Dlouhy and Angela Inglis) in a 1905 warehouse in downtown Calgary, and Portrait Estate (with Milo Dlouhy) in a 100 sq ft. former space for an ATM at Art Central. I currently operate Museo Poco, a diminutive display window gallery on 17th Avenue in Calgary, a new artmobile in a 1962 Airstream Bambi, and the Sugar Shack Winter Art Salon with Angie Inglis and Jane Grace in a turn-of-the-century cottage in NW Calgary. My future plans include facilitating artmobile convoys which would initially make appearances in Alberta and, hopefully, gain momentum for a cross-Canada Artmobile expedition.

Dave and Jenn

“Dave and Jenn” are our adventuring not so alter-Alter Egos, they are the shadows of us walking through a world where the landscape is the main protagonist, a place created by our shared and over-saturated minds.

The world of Dave and Jenn is real and it is not. Make-believe, Technology, real time, Science, the Internet, the Art world, history and hearsay: it all makes its way into our inner world. And in turn these things will eventually escape into the outside again.
Our work is about inner landscapes, predominately the one the two of us share, as well as the mythology that arises from this.

Our practice is one of co-authourship and so we have chosen to lose our individual identities in favour of a team moniker. We like landscape art, and we are focusing on the mutation of our subject and genre. We look to the history of painting to find our position on the map, using the what we find as a means to move on and in our own direction. We often make paintings that are double-sided, paintings that split apart and infect the space around them with their own reality. We wonder what the world would look like if our imaginations rebelled and the things in our minds became very real and autonomous.

David Foy and Jennifer Saleik both received their Fine Art Diplomas in 2003 from Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton. In 2004 they formed as the team Dave and Jenn. Together they went on to earn their BFAs with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 2006. That same year their work was selected as a semi-finalist for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Their work has been collected by such institutions as the Royal Bank of Canada and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. They were recently included in Carte Blanche 2: Painting, published by Magenta House Publishing. David and Jennifer currently live and work in Calgary, Alberta where they are represented by Skew Gallery

Len Komanac

Born in a lean-to and raised by wolves in the Alps, Len was introduced to art through cave paintings and some old comic books he found in a haunted house. When he assumed human form (i.e.: adulthood) he left his underworld tribe and made the long journey across the Atlantic ice shelf to Canada. Along this journey he learned English from vampire polar bears and learned the mysterious ways of pop art from the ghost of Andy Warhol.

Len later attended the University of Lethbridge, graduating with a Fine Arts degree after failing out of Math, Geology, Pre-Med, Psychology , Sociology , Physical Education, Business Administration and even Drama. Making all sorts of art is like a wonderful buffet for him, just not as edible.

Jason Mathis

I have maintained a diligent studio practice of both art production and observation. I believe in the Duchampian ideal that no artwork can exist without an audience, and by extension, that the audience plays a contributing role in the creation of the artwork. With that, when I am looking at art, I try to note the minute details that pull me in as much as the overall effect of the work. I wonder if other people are enthralled with the same moments within a piece as am I, or if I’m overlooking the beauty of other specific parts to the whole. I’m always curious as to what I’m looking at and then, more importantly, why? My studio practice builds on this exercise of looking and I ask myself the same series of questions when working – Why that brushstroke? Why that colour? – with the hopes of creating works that have multiple layers of interest within them, regardless of materials, technique, or subject matter.

The ‘Ersatz Bats’ portraits were created over a period of about six months. Set in a colour field format surrounded by a white border, I wanted to depict personal characters from my life all wearing an ill-fitting, thrift store bought, Halloween costume Batman suit. The signature of the ‘suitor’ would be painted on the surface of each panel, pushing the question of authorship. Much in the same way that art can’t exists without an audience, how can a portrait exist without the sitter? They are as much a part of the artistic process as the artist. This is why I am using influences in my life as subjects. They’re the ones to blame.

Christopher Moore

Christopher Moore is a Montréal-based artist, designer, and educator whose cross-disciplinary practice ranges from print publication to sculpture and media installation. His creative research currently focuses on satire as a progressive form of social critique, utilizing performance and absurdist humour to engage media-savvy public audiences. Snap, Crackle, Pop is the first major presentation of the Cuddle Commandos and Passive Passive Pink bodies of work in western Canada.

Christopher Moore studied illustration at the Ontario College of Art, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1999. For the past ten years, he has taught at a number of institutions across Canada, including NSCAD University, the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, and the University of Lethbridge. Moore currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in Design & Computation Arts at Concordia University, and is a member of the Hexagram Research Institute.

Shanell Papp

Shanell B. Papp grew up primarily in Lethbridge, Alberta. She began her studies at the University of Lethbridge 2001 and graduated with her BFA in 2006. Papp works with various media Photography, Video, Sculpture and Textiles. Papp’s sculptural and textile work is often made from remnant, discarded, perishable and “non-art” materials. Her work is informed by her interests in the 19th century, the history of science, human anatomy and crime. In the show Papp has two works Blood pools and Bone Book. Blood Pools was influenced by Papp’s interest in crime scene photography in which the deceased appears be sleeping and Bone Book Papp was interested in making a life sized replica of an anatomy book. In 2008, she left Lethbridge, to pursue graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, She will graduate in the fall of 2010.

Snap, Crackle, Pop:
Christopher Moore

Helen Christou Gallery
Reception: January 15, 4-6 PM in Main gallery

CHRISTOPHER MOORE is a Montréal-based artist, designer, and educator whose cross-disciplinary practice ranges from print publication to sculpture and media installation. His creative research currently focuses on satire as a progressive form of social critique, utilizing performance and absurdist humour to engage media-savvy public audiences. Snap, Crackle, Pop is the first major presentation of the Cuddle Commandos and Passive Passive Pink bodies of work in western Canada.

Christopher Moore studied illustration at the Ontario College of Art, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1999. For the past ten years, he has taught at a number of institutions across Canada, including NSCAD University, the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, and the University of Lethbridge. Moore currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in Design & Computation Arts at Concordia University, and is a member of the Hexagram Research Institute.

Recruiting for Cuddle Commandos!

Artist Christopher Moore will be enlisting recruits to the Cuddle Commandos Jan. 11-15 between the hours of 11:00-12:00 and 1:00-2:00 outside the HCG. These performance interventions are part of the Snap, Crackle, Pop exhibition, opening on Jan. 15 at 4:00, where he will also be conducting interviews. Click here to watch documentation of these performance interventions.

To Mark on Surface

Dana Claxton

3 Channel Video Installation
Reception: November 6, 4-6 PM
Main Gallery

How we render ourselves to exist and to leave a marking of who we are is an ancient practice in many cultures. This new work records the ancient site of Writing on Stone and brings those renderings into the gallery space. I have placed these drawings side by side with the drawings by Nicolas de Grandmaison. I have attempted to show two ways of rendering and marking on surface. One is in stone and nature, the other on paper. One is considered tribal and the other is considered western. Although, I don’t look at either being different from each other, to me they are both makings and renderings.

The tribal work was made by Plains people or perhaps Star People and ancient people. The western work recorded people from ancient cultures of the Plains area. I worked with both de Grandmaison’s finished and unfinished work as so many of his lines are like the lines of the ancient works from Writing on Stone. I have shown both his finished and unfinished works, as well as details of his line and form, and edited this into the lines and forms of Writing on Stone. I have attempted to meld and collapse two seemingly different approaches to rendering existence and essentially tried to make them as one. Regardless of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, cultural practice or anything else that creates divisions – this new work combines video art and the Lakota worldview that everything is related “mitakuye oyasin” – all my relations, everything is related.
The form and lines that have been placed upon the stone are magnificent. The lines move and dance even. The work is alive. And similar to de Grandmaison’s pastels, his lines and form are alive and passionate.

Dana Claxton

Dana Claxton works in film, video, photography, multi channel installation, performance, curation, aboriginal broadcasting and pedagogy. She work has been exhibited internationally and held in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada. She has received numerous awards including the VIVA Award and the Eiteljorg Fellowship. Currently she is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University and her artwork has been selected for the 17th Biennale of Sydney 2010.

The main intent of her practice has been to seek justice for aboriginal people through the arts and share the possibilities of spirit in the gallery, the class and on the screen. Of Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux descent, she was born in Yorkton Saskatchewan and lives in Vancouver.

Unlikely Concerts

Tor Lukasik-Foss

U of L Centre for the Arts Atrium
Bring a Song to the Atrium

‘Unlikely Concerts’ is the title of an ongoing series of site specific performance installations by Tiny Bill Cody, the pseudonym of visual artist and performer Tor Lukasik-Foss. These installations are designed to re-configure the relationship between the performer and audience, and the ways in which public spaces are used.

Launch PROJECT SITE

Please contact Jane Edmundson for more details.

Event page on Facebook

More information:
www.myspace.com/tinybillcody
www.tinybillcody.com

Ground

Land Matters series
Artists: Allyson Clay, Patricia Deadman, and M.N. Hutchinson
Curator: Josephine Mills

Main Gallery

reception: Nov. 7, 4 – 6 pm

Ground is the final component in the Land Matters series. With this trio of exhibitions, my goal was to present some of the diverse approaches to the rich area of contemporary representation of landscape. The series began last summer with Location, which presented work from the 1980s and 1990s drawn from the University of Lethbridge Art Collection. This was a key period for the development of critical landscape practices in Canada during which artists developed attention to landscape as a means of addressing the connection between space and socially produced identity.
The three artists in Ground – Allyson Clay, Patricia Deadman and M.N. Hutchinson – all work from a foundation of in-depth research and then produce stunningly beautiful final photographs. Deadman starts with images of landscapes that are laden with historical and social meaning, formal gardens in Paris and the ‘wilderness’ in Banff National Park, and then works that imagery into patterns from aboriginal sources, such as wampum belts, pottery and blanket designs. Hutchinson explores landscapes that relate to his family history. Using classically composed images of urban and rural scenes in Norway, Sweden and Southern Alberta taken with his panoramic camera, Hutchinson works the scenes into playful, compelling final works. Recently Clay has been using the imagery of books out of place, such as underwater or sailing through the air, to explore the relationship between the ethereal and the material. This series builds on her earlier work addressing concepts of self and space, some of which were included in Location. By bringing new work by these three artists together, I hope that the result is an exhibition that is a pleasure to view but which also inspires engagement with the complexity of the ideas involved in these works.