Jan. 01, 2008 - Issue #637: Best of 2007

Pop and privacy made this year not suck

This year has just whistled by and edges into vanishing. The boom reached a plateau this fall, but artists are still struggling to meet their living costs while maintaining a practice. We lost another crop of talent, with several committed people departing or planning to depart for cities with a lower cost of living or with enough ambient culture to justify the higher price tag. The old AGA is gone and its new home is over a year away from completion (although the temporary space is quite awesome, and its programming has looked great in it). Longtime arts champion Michael Phair opted to leave municipal politics and ArtsHab still faces eviction in 2009.

Of course, things aren’t all bad: the Cultural Capital thing doled out some grants and at least had people talking about our collective arts agenda, the inaugural Exposure made plenty of room to celebrate visual arts and the established galleries and art institutions reached out to each other and worked together on events and shows. There are high hopes for the newest venue, the ARTery, and the U of A MFA printmaking program keeps popping out stellar artists. And the food at openings is getting better all the time.

In the wake of a heavy year and at the dawn of a hopeful one, and in the spirit of the season, here are the 10 art moments that unreservedly gave me joy in 2007. In no particular order. Blair Brennan, Sacra Privata (SNAP)

The Edmonton-based artist completed hundreds of mixed media paperworks in a near-daily diaristic practice over the course of almost a decade. SNAP’s smallish gallery cube was the ideal space to immerse oneself in Brennan’s loopy adventures in drawing, incorporating all kinds of markmaking techniques, collage and found materials or snatches of conversation or text. Arranged chronologically in grids, floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, Brennan’s works fossilized the evolution of his motifs and ideas. They were also funny, touching and sharp. Brennan donated the majority of them to SNAP for fundraising. Most are gone, but some may still be available.

MAKE IT NOT SUCKs

Sheri Barclay’s spirited series of artbomb get-togethers have been informative all year. Targeting sites that were usually unforgivably ugly and depressingly circled around a pit in some stage of construction (with the exception of the indoor version at Latitude 53), a shifting group of local artists would blow in during the off-hours and transform the place with pre-made paper mural components, stencils and other materials. The pieces themselves are usually down in a matter of days or weeks, but Make it Not Suck survives to strike another day.

Monika Niwelinska, Tsunami series (FAB Gallery)

An international student from Poland, Niwelinska was only in town for a couple years to earn her MFA Printmaking. The strongest work from her thesis show was the wrenching Tsunami series, based on images of the horrific natural disaster that befell East Asia on Boxing Day, 2004. A Canadian couple was swept away by the ocean, but their camera had remained rolling, capturing the eerie wave as it appeared in the distance, moved towards the shore, broke over the land and retreated. Niwelinska had discovered the pictures reprinted in a battered café magazine whose text was in a language she didn’t understand, but using them as source material, she stripped them of colour and deeply etched the swelling horizon on print after stunning print on paper the colour of buttery cream, showing the progression and gradual emptying of the landscape as the wave withdrew into the sea, invoking the frailty of memory and the traces people leave on each other as they live and die.

Coke Dump at Candy Mountain (Latitude53)

The group Candy Mountain show was engaging, but Mindy Yan Miller’s crowning touch to her component, a sculptural mountain of Coca-Cola cans linking consumption and aspiration, was particularly satisfying—at the opening, she had the crowd bathe the piece in pop, emptying the frothing contents of dozens of cans onto her mountain from a stepladder until it flowed over the cans like a cascade in the Rockies and pooled at the bottom. Part madcap foodfight fun, part corporate disobedience.

Sheri Chaba, “Atrophic Utopia” (FAB Gallery)

The final piece in Chaba’s MFA Drawing and Intermedia show at FAB was an installation of delicately twisted wire that invited the viewer to come in and explore. It was too beautiful for words, and I can only hope Chaba will have another chance to show the piece soon.

POP ART: love, loss, and the everyday/Kurt Schwitters: Collage Eye (AGA)

There’s a huge gap between seeing a piece reproduced in an art history book or a poster and being able to experience it in a gallery setting. Edmontonians were able to see works by Man Ray, Warhol and many other big-name artists and get context on key movements in 20th century art. Each of these shows informed the other, and worked well together in the new AGA space.

Andrea Pinheiro, Shelter series (FAB GALLERY)

Now that she’s finished her MFA Printmaking, Pinheiro is leaving Edmonton for Vancouver. We can’t begrudge her, and not just because she’s promised to return from time to time—her fantastic body of work deals largely with the invisible effects of chemical and nuclear contamination and the threat we’re putting ourselves and our world under. This is work that deserves to be seen, and her Shelter series in particular raised the issues without compromising investigation or beauty.

The 1950s Ford Show, guest curated by Anthony Easton (AGA)

Easton asked 100 illustrators and artists of all stripes, from communities near and far, and across different stages of their careers, to realize Ed Ruscha’s conceptualist piece asking people to draw a ’50s Ford from memory. The incredibly individualized results show the staggering variety of interpretation of the concepts of “drawing” and “memory.” It’s up until Jan 6, and worth a lingering look.

Shannon Collis, Temporary Geography (Harcourt House)

Collis’s innovative layering of techniques and materials—she prints in vivid nuggets of colour on paper and wax—were impressively wrought, simultaneously folkloric and alien, and scaled for an intimate encounter. The wax lent the works a quality that is reminiscent of skin, and the images themselves were illustration-like, precise and almost diagram-ish.

Monica Pitre, Of Night And Light And Half Light (FAB Gallery)

The labour and intent in Pitre’s MFA Printmaking show works were incredible. It was an aesthetically satisfying exhibition that was unapologetic in what it chose to reveal and what would remain enigmatic and puzzling. Pitre created two strong sets of alternate realms that contrasted the sensual world with the cerebral one, with some overlap in bridge pieces that united the two ends of the spectrum. V

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