3 CRATES / 1 ARTIST / 16 ARTWORKS / 50 RUNNING FEET
Available: September 2011 to August 2012

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery

Ron Kostyniuk’s innovative approach to the visual arts has won him critical acclaim both in Canada and abroad. Informed by the natural and applied sciences as well as philosophy, Kostyniuk is an artist who is truly dedicated to working with the Neo-Constructivist/Neo-Structuralist style. His work is based on the principles of Constructivism – the early 20th century Russian avant-garde movement – that was concerned with space, time, colour, and the relationships between geometric shapes.

Born in 1941 in Wakaw, Saskatchewan, he attended the University of Saskatchewan and graduated in 1963 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts (Biology) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Education. Subsequently, he continued his academic studies in the United States at the University of Wisconsin, where in 1970 he received a Master’s Degree in Science and a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts the following year. In 1971, Kostyniuk joined the University of Calgary’s teaching faculty in the Department of Art in the area of sculpture.

"Saskatchewan Road Map Series - Falling Icon," Ronald Kostyniuk

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery

Tina Martel is a mixed media artist whose work ranges from painting, drawing, photography, video and installation. The installation and creation of evolve happened in the highly public space of Sir Winston Churchill Square during the 2010 International Works Festival in Edmonton. During a two-week period, Martel, with the assistance of her team, layered 1,800 sheets of hand made paper over five Smart cars to produce full size paper casts. The public was allowed full access as the piece was created and encouraged to establish a dialogue with the artist. It provided the opportunity to actually speak to the artist and ask: What are you doing?

evolve presented the idea that although environmentally and culturally we remain fragile, visually illustrated by the use of paper as a casting material, the smart cars served as iconic representation for the idea that we are taking steps to reduce, reuse and recycle. The casts no longer exist but the documentation of the process and the final pieces created have been printed large-scale to allow the viewer to experience some of the immersive process that the exhibition provided.

Tina Martel, evolve, detail 2010

2 CRATES/ 2 ARTISTS/ 23 ARTWORKS/ 70 RUNNING FEET
Available: September 2010 – August 2011

Curated by Lynn LeCorre-Dallaire of The Prairie Art Gallery
This exhibition is curated from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and The Prairie Art Gallery permanent collection.

The Prairie Art Gallery recognizes Evy McBryan and Euphemia (Betty) McNaught for their artistic achievements and significant contributions to arts and culture in the Peace region. These matriarchs have been the driving force behind the development of visual arts in the Peace Region. Their legacy defines an art community rich with creativity, art mentorship, and community spirit through art clubs, organizations and art advocacy.

Evy McBryan and Euphemia McNaught both were awarded the Alberta Achievement Award in 1976 and 1977 respectively for their artistic contributions. They both advocated for art in the Peace Region. Evy McBryan served on the Provincial Board of Culture and the Visual Arts Board in the 1960s and became the Arts and Crafts coordinator for the City of Grande Prairie from 1964-1974. She was appointed to the Alberta Foundation for the Arts in 1973, where she organized the Peace Region Arts Council and established school exhibition programs. In 1978 she served on The Prairie Art Gallery board. Throughout her career she organized many art exhibits and art festivals in the Region.

Betty McNaught inspired everyone to be an artist through her teaching and mentorship. She taught art locally through the Grande Prairie Art Club and the Beaverlodge Art Club formed in the 1970s. She ran a school for the mentally challenged students in Grande Prairie as well as teaching art programs through the University of Alberta extension programs in rural Northern Alberta communities. In 1982, Euphemia McNaught was the first recipient of the Sir Fredrich Houltain Art Award for excellence in the arts. She was a prolific artist until she died in 2002.

Of all their achievements, they are most recognized for their Alaska Highway series. Over a period of a few years, they documented over 100 artworks on the building of the Alaska Highway. During World War II, both artists were granted permission from the government to record the progress of opening an access route to Alaska. The U.S. Army set up camps from Dawson Creek throughout the Northern B.C. wilderness. From 1942-1944, they made several trips to visually record the Peace Country before and after the highway altered the landscape. As naturalists and environmentalists, Evy McBryan and Betty McNaught were an inspiration to developing artists in the Peace Region.

Evy McBryan and Betty McNaught are considered true Peace Region artists, as they have both lived in the region most of their lives. They dedicated their time and talents to painting the region, both historically and geographically, in which they were both so fond of. As their leadership and passion continue to inspire Peace Region communities, The Prairie Art Gallery honors these matriarchs by providing an exhibition featuring a diverse collection of their works.

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery
Travelling Exhibition (TREX) program

Pearls/oysters are derived from oceans, which are an integral part of the eco environment. Our relationship to the world’s oceans was ambivalent during the nationalistic economic development of the last century and remains ambivalent during globalization today. Human beings are both part of the natural world and manipulators of it. This constant push and pull tension is an increasingly involved and complicated relationship. On one hand these pearls are cultural commodities valued globally. On the other hand they represent an ecosystem, increasingly exhausted by the amount of toxicity in the human footprint.

As viewers encounter these images they see the pearls on a body of a woman/man, which romanticizes the nature of the pearl and its qualities as a fetish. The lusty commodity (the pearl) operates both as subject and object in relation to the body: connect/disconnect, love/hate, receive/ reject. James Ridgeway observes that rights to use of continental oceans are being divided up and distributed out as fish farms, fishing and mineral rights. In the United States, the ocean is slowly being privatized, justified by the economic need for oil drilling and the political interest of “national security.”

In the progression of strategic uses in Capitalism, in place of round pearls, mechanical holes extract substance from the body/pearl image to the point of near erasure of presence. The interchanged holes and the pearls erase and exhaust the naive relationship. What we have left is a ghost identity of an unrecognizable trace. This tension is at the core of continued struggles that consumers have in everyday life. The shift of the metaphor of the pearl and the body may become increasingly alarming as viewers recognize symbols of pieces from the ancient warfare game, Xiangqi or Chinese chess, reserved in the final images.

The contact point of pearls and skin symbolizes a foreshadowing image of nature against nurture. The work provides moments for individual and collective reflection. It will also hold the potential for action; however we relate to globalization – as long-term social or cultural success or failure, or as source of global/ecological imbalance – reflection and action will begin with a constructive dialogue.

2 CRATES / 1 ARTIST / 17 ARTWORKS / 60 RUNNING FEET
(5 to 6 Small encaustic paintings in each frame)

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery

100 little paintings and their names tell a story from three Alberta places. Drawn from the details of the place and season, there’s bound to be at least one painting that speaks to anyone looking at the show.

Nicole Bauberger sets up on site to paint in encaustic, a form of painting with beeswax. She then paints 100 small encaustic paintings of dresses in about 10 days, each inspired by some small thing she notices about being in that particular time and place. She welcomes stories and suggestions from the general public as she paints, so that she can try to capture the worries, dreams, flavours and materials of that particular human landscape. This show is selected from her three Albertan 100 Dresses projects: Grande Prairie, in November of 2008; Calgary, in March of 2009; and St. Albert, in October of 2009.

100 Dresses for Alberta. Artist: Nicole Bauberger. “Grande Prairie-exhaust Dress Drifting Away”

3 CRATES / 1 ARTIST / 25 DRAWINGS / 60 RUNNING FEET

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery

Shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story — up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground,” he said, “and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”1

Adrian Stimson, “Bison #1”

Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist, just after the turn of the century determined to estimate the number of bison in North America pre-contact; he undertook a rigorous process of mathematics, logic and comparisons to domestic animals living on the plains. “Seton figured there were 75million buffalo in North America before the white man arrived”2

This group of 25 drawings are both realistic representations and imagined petroglyph styled stories of the great bison saga of North America. The realistic representations come from photos of bison that Adrian has taken over the years, the petroglyph styled drawings come from his research into historical petroglyphs that have been reimagined, or the creation of contemporary mythologies.

This series of drawings seeks to demonstrate both the discipline of drawing and the layered meanings in drawn stories. The historical slaughter of the bison was a part of the decimation of First Nations in the Americas, a deliberate and brutal attempt to destroy not only the bison but also the people who relied on the bison for sustenance. Yet both have survived and live to relate their ongoing story.

Adrian’s desire in creating this series is to honour the memory of the bison and its resilience. To study and promote its return to the territories it once dominated. The history of the bison is analogous to his Blackfoot being, and for Adrian, in our time, the bison remain a source of inspiration, imagination and life.

1 Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear internet – http://www.powells.com/biblio/0-9780674023291-0

2 Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book, Swallow Press Ohio University Press 1989 pg.29

Curated by Todd Schaber of The Prairie Art Gallery

Eric Cameron: A Conceptual Approach. Artist Eric Cameron, “Gregory’s Licorice”

Dare to imagine! Try to conceive of a kind of art that is an exercise in controlled unpredictability. Such is the work of Eric Cameron. His Thick Paintings are produced by laboriously applying coat after coat of gesso to objects that become transformed beyond recognition in the process. As he continues to add more coats, the Thick Paintings continue to be transformed in ways that continue to take him by surprise. Any semblance of resolution is fleeting and impermanent.  It is doubtful if the work can ever truly be said to be “finished”, though inevitably the artist’s work on it will, one day, come to an end.

Cameron’s earlier Process Paintings were produced by applying paint through grids of Sellotape, (an English equivalent to Scotch Tape). Regular checkerboards might be anticipated, but the tape could never be made to run precisely straight, so all the irregularities creep in, creating a more dynamic visual structure. These works reveal some kinship with both Minimalism and Op Art, which were prevalent at the time they were made. Between Process Painting and Thick Paintings, Cameron made some simple videotapes that manipulate the video process in a variety of ways.

Eric Cameron was born and educated in England but has lived most of his life in Canada. Currently, he is a professor of art at the University of Calgary. He has published extensively and his work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally.

This Exhibit provides a glimpse into the art Eric Cameron has produced in the course of a long and intriguing career. It includes six of his smaller Thick Paintings, two Process Paintings and a short videotape.

Sport and art are both forms of expression that can be shared between cultures and can link different countries together, such as the Olympics and the Arctic Winter Games. Sports inspire passion, discipline, perseverance, skill and talent, as does art.

The selection of work chosen represent a variety of artistic style and media from drawing to painting, printmaking and photography to sculpture. The selection of sports also varies in form and skill from football to volleyball, skiing to skating, hockey to golf, as well as the track and field sports. To complete the range of sport genres and to complement the Arctic Winter Games an interactive mural was commissioned by local mural painter Tim Heimdal. Tim focused on the Inuit game ‘The Blanket Toss’ in which he captured the northern setting, the culture, and the sense of community as each member takes turns participating in the sport. The mood is delightful and playful which captures the essence of what sports and art should bring to us all.

This exhibition will become one of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ Travelling Exhibitions program in the fall of 2010.

Curated by Todd Schaber and Missy Finlay with the Prairie Art Gallery

Many of us wish to understand what exists mere inches below the earth’s surface. This exhibit asks the question: ‘What lies beneath?’ by exploring various artists’ representations of the substrata. From underground mines to root structures, What Lies Beneath investigates the wonder positioned just below our feet. This exhibition is bound to ignite further passion to maintain and care for the earth, both above and beneath its surface.

"Tea Leaf Series #6" by Les Pinter from the exhibition What Lies Beneath

Curated by Todd Schaber with the Prairie Art Gallery and Catherine Hamel with the University of Calgary

Without End has two areas of exploration. The first area examines the tools of architectural representation. The second area studies its subject, embodied politics through the experience of marginalized groups and their creative appropriation of space. The final works proposed will remain in flux for as long as possible, revealing their process and by doing so, the artists hope to express
how critical it is to study the evolution and development of an idea or question. In this project, drawing is a tool that has both allowed a diverse group to explore
social issues, and then share that knowledge with a wider audience. This exhibit occupies large canvas spaces, upon which all of the contributing artists have worked in collaboration, developing ideas and questions as a collective.

Without End is the communal work of Calgary artists/architectural graduate students: Kristofer Kelly, Ryan Paliproda, Carmen Hull, Jordan Allen, Kate Anderson, and Katie Pearce. Included will be six large canvases with the largest being 5 feet high by 10 feet wide and three small canvases. Each canvas will be started by the artists and finished by the groups in the receiving venues, allowing the viewers to interactively appropriate space within the exhibit. The canvases will travel unframed and ready to hang like quilts at each venue.

"Economy" from the exhibition Without End

Gender, 2009. From the exhibit Without End.