Archive for the ‘The Local Scene’ Category
17 June 2010
Sights To See As Seen In See
9 June 2010
Sights To See: list of works
Village Near Futamigaura, Tsuchiya Koitsu
Mt. Fuji Seen From Tagonura, Evening, Kawase Hasui
Geisha and Cherry Tree, Tsuchiya Koitsu
Sunset at Tomonotsu, Inland Sea, Tsuchiya Koitsu
Harvesting, Shiro Kasamatsu
Fall on the North Saskatchewan, David Shkolny
Foreword, Winter Morning, SK, Terry Fenton
Powerscourt Hosta, Nola Cassady
River Valley View, Nola Cassady
Powerscourt Blue in Green, Nola Cassady
Garden Reflection, Ryan McCourt
Jardin d'Amour, Ryan McCourt
Even in Arcadia, Ryan McCourt
The River City, Ryan McCourt
Dreamland, Ryan McCourt
Nature of the Scrapyard, Rob Willms
Alley Detritus, Rob Willms
Spring Sprouting, Gwen Bailey
Forest - Under, Jodie Harpe-Lesperance
31 May 2010
Sights to See @ Common Sense
"Harvesting", Shiro Kasamatsu, 1953, woodblock print.
Starting Saturday June 19, 2010, Common Sense presents Sights To See: Selections from the Cassady McCourt Collection, an exhibition of landscape prints, drawings, painting, photography, and sculpture, owned by Edmonton artists Nola Cassady and Ryan McCourt.
Sights to See features a diverse selection of abstract and representational explorations of landscape by well-known local, Canadian, and international artists, including Gwen Bailey, Nola Cassady, Terry Fenton, Jodie Harpe-Lesperance, Kawase Hasui, Shiro Kasamatsu, Tsuchiya Koitsu, Ryan McCourt, David Shkolny, and Rob Willms. These artworks span generations and continents, from 1930s Japan to Canada in the 21st century. Each work selected, in addition to being artistically outstanding, serves also as a personal landmark in the private lives of their makers and their owners.
Sights To See: Selections from the Cassady McCourt Collection opens with a public reception at 1 – 4 pm on Saturday, June 19, 2010, and the exhibition runs until July 19.
Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.
17 May 2010
On Edmonton’s Notoriously Crappy Art Writers
[Via Boston, Franklin Einspruch]
“Edmonton, where the modernist triumph still reverberates, has produced critics who are doing everything in their power to silence it. It’s not enough to call these people postmodernists. They are, but they haven’t moved on in the way that post would imply. (Most of the artists I know who don’t identify with modernism are nonetheless not working to cause problems for anyone else’s genre. I also know people who read from the deconstructionist canon and claim, no more or less, to have gotten something out of it. Those postmodernists are my friends. I’m talking about academic postmodernists, who trained on capital-T Theory and abide by it.) It would be more accurate to call them antimodernists….
One of these antimodernists is Amy Fung, who reviewed an exhibition at Harcourt House Gallery by Mitchel Smith and Sheila Luck, entitled “Retro-Active.” Her review, passed along by one of my Edmontonian friends, is ripe for a good old-fashioned fisking—it’s that bad, all the way through.
Crappy Edmonton weekly.
Even if we allow for differences in taste, the essay is a flimsy chain of intellectually dishonest claims made in bad faith by a critic with retaliation on her mind.
She liked the art well enough, but she can’t stand the community around it.”
…
“Fung has a tin ear for the English language and she evinces all the failings of a tendentious education. I have pointed this out to her before, but I could say the same of a lot of writers. Particular to the Edmontonian antimodernists is the attitude that debate with modernists is impossible, and therefore their work should not be seen and their opinions should not be heard.”
[Via Montreal, Kirsten McCrea]
Crappy Edmonton weekly.
“I don’t write much here, but I had to respond to this: “Art Gallery of Alberta VS. Independent Galleries.” It’s an awful article.”
“Latitude 53 and Harcourt House are great, but neither gallery is street-level. I would love to see commercial store fronts in the downtown core and in other parts of the city…”
6 May 2010
May 20 is ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’
Although the Seattle cartoonist has since had second thoughts, Molly Norris originally proclaimed the day as a tongue-in-cheek response to threats which led to Comedy Central’s craven censorship of South Park’s latest episode featuring the Muslim super hero. Canada’s Comedy Network is not even permitted to re-air the censored episode, or put it on their website (never mind the artists’ originally intended uncensored version).
The Lady Zog and North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop artists.
As an ardent believer in the necessity of free expression, especially in the face of religious intolerance, I’d like to observe the day in an appropriate manner at Common Sense. The neighbourhood Muslims, of which there are many, have never taken much notice of the gallery before, so I doubt they’d go out of their way to do so on that particular day. After all, folks who take scriptural injunctions against graven images seriously are rarely interested in art galleries.
On the other hand, what are we gonna do? Hang an exhibition of crappy drawings for activism’s sake? As an ardent believer in the necessity of art galleries that put aesthetics ahead of politics, I can’t do that.
So… suggestions?
25 April 2010
Retro-Active @ Harcourt House
New Paintings by
Mitchel Smith & Sheila Luck
Curated by Peter Hide
This show has been titled Retro-Active to underline the dual nature of the show, in that it’s the work of two fine artists, Mitchel Smith and Sheila Luck – husband and wife as it happens; but, and much more specifically, the nature of the show.
Retro is of course a fashionable word for art that looks back to a previous time, but I hasten to add that the art they have in the show is not made out of a desire to cling to the past; that would be merely reactionary. To my mind Mitchel and Sheila’s art looks back to the painting of the 50’s and 60’s in order to build their paintings on a solid foundation.
The idea of looking back to go forward is not new in art; the achievements of the Renaissance are based on the rediscovery of classical art after 2000 years of neglect. Closer to our time is the rebirth of painting in the hands of the Impressionists who looked back to Goya and Velazquez to escape from the prevailing pall of academic salon painting in 19th century France. In both cases the products of this revisiting produced art that was genuinely new and of its time, but without self consciously trying to be so. (The looking back of Post Modernism by contrast seems to be a self conscious process with its claims of irony which only go to reinforce a sense of weakness and insecurity in the work.)
Sheila Luck’s “Alpha” for instance has echoes of Motherwell and Still in its drawing and layout but the colour feeling is entirely different. The painting offers a set of new relationships; an intelligent misunderstanding of what Motherwell and Still were about to which Harold Bloom applied the word “misprision”. In this context the word retroactive becomes meaningful in the sense that what comes after Motherwell and Still affects how we see this work with hindsight as it were through the eyes of Sheila.
The same argument can be applied to Mitchel Smith’s very fine “Scroll“, but in his case it’s harder to pin down a specific artist as a forebear; there is a more general feel of the brief high modernist phase of painting as instanced by Barnett Newman, Ken Noland, Morris Louis and early Jules Olitski, but somehow subtly changed. To draw from this period represents a special challenge in that its severe and hieratic reductionism leaves little room for manoeuvre; most serious painters chose to draw back from the brink as it were into a re-complication of painting.
Mitchel and Sheila have worked together sharing the same studio for many years and because of this I feel they have evolved together to their mutual benefit.
Peter Hide, March 2010
12 April 2010
When Art Imitates Life
VIA ANDREAS MORSE
FOR METRO EDMONTON
Edmonton artist Nola Cassady stopped in a room on the fifth floor of the Lois Hole Hospital for Women and stared at one of her babies.
The post-natal recovery unit doesn’t open its doors to the public until May 16, but Cassady got a sneak peek at her creations over the weekend.
Artist Nola Cassady shows off one of her pieces entitled Sunday Afternoon, which is now on display permanently in one of the patient rooms at the Lois Hole Hospital for Women (photo: Andreas Morse/Metro Edmonton).
Cassady is more than eight months pregnant with her first child, but as she visits room after room in the hospital’s post-natal ward, she already feels a sense of maternal pride over the 20 pieces of pastel-on-paper still-life art decorating the now-empty patient rooms.
Cassady accepted a commission to do 20 pieces of art in two-and-a-half months for the hospital, thinking it would be tight but she’d be able to get it done. A week later, she got the big news.
“For me, the work at this hospital is a documentation of my first trimester of my first pregnancy,” she said.
Susan Pointe was the art consultant responsible for bringing artists to the hospital’s committee for selection. She put out a call to local artists, commercial galleries and curators and received over 200 responses.
“It was a big acquisition project,” Pointe said. “We reviewed a lot of artists’ work and made decisions based on what we felt would be appropriate in a hospital context. We were very preoccupied about how the staff and the patients would perceive the work.”
Although Cassady won’t be having her firstborn at the Lois Hole Hospital for Women — her due date is six days before the unit officially opens to the public — the artist said she’s honoured to have been a part of decorating the hospital’s walls.
“I’m from a family of gardeners and when I first moved into my house, my first gift was a Lois Hole gardening book,” Cassady said. “To be attached to this, to her name at all, is really quite an honour.”
