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A guide to the best exhibitions and events in the visual arts
The Fertile Void is an ongoing series of interventions on golf courses that I have been doing since 2003. For the latest work, a fairway of the Banff Springs Golf Club was visited by a cloud-like mass of pentagonal balloons. The video documentation presents an ethereal encounter with this impenetrable yet massless form. It’s interesting for me to walk on the fabricated landscape of the golf course but be surrounded by real mountains: they begin to look like they’re collaged from postcards. The images that I build on top of the constructed site then somehow seem believable, and even natural. It’s the perfect site for transformative acts that reveal the patterns that connect us through the trajectory of past and future.
Miruna Dragan is a Romanian-American artist based in Calgary. Her series The Fertile Void is on view alongside the work of the collective Noxious Sector from July 9 to August 5 at TRUCK, 815-1st St. S.W., Calgary.
A new tongue-in-cheek conceptual project has the artist developing a “custom environmental wellness fragrance” to offset the destabilizing effect of ongoing gallery renovations on the Southern Alberta Art Gallery’s staff and patrons. Cal Lane’s remarkable domestic/ utilitarian/ornamental hybrid sculptures follow in “Sweet Crude.” Until June 20/June 25 to Sept. 5. 324–5th St. S., Lethbridge.
Temporality’s nuanced intersection with geography in the overstimulated 21st-century world is the theme of the 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by this magazine’s own Richard Rhodes. Until Aug. 29. Art Gallery of Alberta, 2 Sir Winston Churchill Sq., Edmonton.
The Toronto artist’s long-standing interest in collecting and display practices underlies Le jardin du sommeil, an orderly “garden” of century-old cribs and cradles that adds up to a fascinating, poignant meditation on childhood and shared experience. Until Aug. 22. Prairie Art Gallery, 9839–103rd Ave., Grande Prairie.
Works by the Sydney, Australia–based Souliere ingeniously translate First Nations design elements into the language of utilitarian objects. To Aug. 1. New Gallery, 100–7th Ave. S.W., Calgary.
Saint John, now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands and largely a nature preserve, is home to 400 wild donkeys originally brought to the island by Danish colonials in the 18th century for use on the sugar plantations. They struck me as interesting characters for thinking about this colonial past, something about which Danes today have little awareness. The video piece Looking for Donkeys, like the other works in this show, is about going abroad and returning home to familiar surroundings, and also about moving back and forth in time to consider history and how it intersects with ongoing debates about national self-understanding.
Nanna Debois Buhl is a Danish artist. Her solo show “Looking for Donkeys” is on view March 13 to April 25 at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 324–5th Ave. S., Lethbridge.
International notables such as Sam Taylor-Wood, Matthew Barney and Catherine Opie interrogate the issues of gender, spectacle and identity embedded in jock culture in a show subtitled ”Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports.” Opens Apr. 30. Art Gallery of Calgary, 117–8th Ave. S.W.
Masterson draws on her personal “ideology of the carnival” to create a window display of dangling eyeballs that leaves passersby simultaneously entertained and unsettlingly ”observed.” To March 29. TRUCK, 815–1st St. S.W., Calgary.
Following a highly auspicious undergraduate career, the Toronto artist makes her Western Canadian debut with “The Fifth World: An Introduction,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that serve as a gateway to a cyber-inspired “alternative universe of the imagination” that is both fantastical and cautionary. April 1 to 28. Skew Gallery, 1615–10th Ave. S.W., Calgary.
In “Who I Think I Am,” a new series of text-based paintings, the Vancouver conceptualist continues to question the forces of authority that legitimize current art by telling the life story of the Montreal-born California artist Jack Goldstein, who similarly tested the limits of both the market and the critical community. Opens May 15. Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre.
For The End, my collaborator, Davíd Thór Jónsson, and I performed a mainly instrumental country-and-western piece of our own composition on guitars, piano, bass and drums in different outdoor locations in Banff, Alberta, in the middle of winter. It became a five-screen video installation, with the different scenes spread around the room, surrounding the viewer. The work was intended to be like an acoustic experiment: a combination of the three-dimensional sound of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and country music, set in the epic, romantic landscapes of the Rocky Mountains. When this piece was shown last summer at Iceland’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I thought it was good that people could pop in and be immersed in these vast, cold landscapes in the midst of the claustrophobic heat of the Italian summer.
Ragnar Kjartansson is an Icelandic artist. His video installation The End opens at the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery on Jan. 23.
The acclaimed duo’s largest sound installation to date, The Murder of Crows, a three-part work that references a 1799 Goya etching, makes its North American debut alongside Storm Room, a new piece created for the opening of the recently renovated Art Gallery of Alberta. From Jan. 31. 2 Sir Winston Churchill Sq., Edmonton.
In a pair of textile installations, Wells wittily questions how humans portray the natural world, noting that our representations of animals tend to occupy an uncertain status somewhere between toy and scientific specimen. To Jan. 8. Le Petit Trianon Gallery, 104–5th St. S., Lethbridge.
The well-known pinhole photographer has incorporated painted elements into a set of new works based on imagery gathered during her travels within Canada and abroad. Through Jan. 16. Newzones Gallery, 730–11th Ave. S.W., Calgary.
“Since 1977 I have periodically subjected my work to a purge, obliterating or overpainting prior art. It is a cleansing process that challenges me to break free from my past. Sometime in the early 1980s I started rummaging through thrift stores in search of abandoned ‘amateur’ paintings that were similarly in need of ‘conversion’: you could call it the ‘Salvation (Army) paradigm.’ At Stride Gallery I will exhibit a selection of these resurrected, ‘corrected’ works. I’ve always balanced my interests in making art, curating, writing and other special projects. That balance has now tipped in favour of my own art.”
Jeffrey Spalding is an artist and curator. His show “Third Quarter Correction” is at Stride Gallery until Oct. 10, 1004 Macleod Tr. S.E., Calgary.
Full talks and tours schedule, Douglas Coupland conversation info, and magazine launch details posted for free day of activities
Applications due May 9 for $55,000 in prizes
Free art tours for high-school students to take place in April and May
New writers on contemporary art encouraged to apply by June 1
Dates already set for next year’s Toronto festival
Applications for this $7,000 student award are due April 6
Event to feature a conversation with Douglas Coupland, gallery tours, a magazine launch and more
Films on Shary Boyle, Elmgreen & Dragset, Michel de Broin and Jon Gnarr set to open the festival on March 22
Opening-night celebration and art-industry talks highlight fifth year of fair
Don’t miss the North American premieres of films on Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, happening February 23
The 85-year-old artist Arnaud Maggs nudged out Fred Herzog and Alain Paiement as winner of the second annual Scotiabank Photography Award, announced last night in Toronto. This $50,000 win follows the opening of a major Maggs survey at the National Gallery of Canada.
As one of the primary exhibitions for Contact 2012, “Public: Collective Identity | Occupied Spaces” is ambitious. Charlene K. Lau observes that the two-venue show mirrors the fractures of contemporary life: public and private, visible and invisible, place and non-place.
In this review, writer and artist Joni Murphy considers Abbas Akhavan’s current solo show in Montreal, which activates a variety of themes—war and art, destruction and nation building, human and animal—with a distinctively light touch.
Melding William Morris-style ornamentation with more contemporary concerns, artist Luke Painter detours around dry academicism for something more vibrant and visceral. Mariam Nader reviews his current Toronto show at LE Gallery, finding depth in decoration.
Frieze opened its first New York edition last week with some surprising highlights: sculptures that were free for public viewing outside the big commercial tent. Canadian Art art director Barbara Solowan was there, and brought back this slideshow.
