November 27, 2009 | 1:30 - 3:30 PM
Illingworth Kerr Gallery | Room S312 | ACAD
Featuring Nancy Campbell, Rob Froese, Travis Ogle, Heather Kai Smith, Tanya Tagaq
MAKING IT CONTEMPORARY is a series of informal panel discussions co-sponsored by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the IKG, ACAD Academic Executive Visiting Artists Committee and ArtCity. Recent participants during Alberta Art Days 2009 included Jeanie Riddle, Numa Dallaire, Florian Koehl, Anna von Gwinner, and Neil Minuk.
Moderated by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director/Curator, Exhibitions, ACAD.
Free to all.
Creative cultural producers spend an inexorable amount of time revisiting loss and acknowledging it in art and design as a way of coming to terms with the present. Cultural producers engage dominant cultural paradigms that are open to investigation and critical questioning. Alberta’s dominant cultural paradigm is focused on a revisiting and preserving of traditional Western culture often taking precedence over the many other competing interests. Nostalgia and sentimentality associated with Western culture often appears to dominate the living culture of urban and rural areas while the language of cutting edge art forms is often marginalized or ignored.
Revisioning the cultural past, however, is a way of acknowledging the things we may have lost without even knowing it. Artists and designers working in various media dig deep and return to a broad range of activities that revisit myriad forms of loss. Activities can include the restaging of traditional tribal ceremonies and the remaking of Aboriginal artifacts, the preservation of early-20th century modernist buildings, traditional raku techniques that push the limits of modernist esthetics, and a revisioning of Inuit art that shifts attention from the traditional myths and legends to the chronicles of contemporary daily life.
In each case there are shades of difference between paying homage to the original, traditional ideas, ways and forms in art or design and to producing “cover art”. Is one a form of simple nostalgia and the other an unenviable rootlessness? What meanings and values are at stake in each form? Is one a parody and the latter a mere pastiche, as cultural critic Frederic Jameson would assert? Which approaches to dreaming and creating more critically acceptable than others in Canadian art and design circles and why? The discussion covers the artistic extremes of high and low tech media, integrating examples of handicrafts with cutting-edge digital imaging and audio art. These are a few of the media and questions to be addressed during a series of informal panel discussions designed for ACAD students, faculty, staff and general audiences.
November 27th MAKING IT CONTEMPORARY panelists include:
Nancy Campbell is an independent curator of Contemporary and Inuit Art who lives and works in Toronto. She has held positions in public art institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario, The University of Guelph, and The Power Plant, Toronto. Campbell has written major catalogue essays on contemporary and Inuit art and contributes to journals nationally and internationally. She has served on many Boards related to the visual arts and is currently serving as Co-Chair of the Art Committee for the Canadian Art Foundation. Campbell’s recent work involves in-depth research on the art of the contemporary Inuit. Her Inuit exhibitions and lectures have toured nationally and internationally and secured her as a leading researcher in this area.
Rob Froese
Rob Froese is a visual artist and studio potter raised in Moose Jaw, Sask. He received his undergraduate art training at the University of Saskatchewan (B.A 1987) and the University of Regina (B.F.A 1994). After moving to Japan in 1995, he maintained a studio practice in Shizuoka City until 2004, holding 20 solo exhibitions of his tableware and vase forms throughout the country. He maintains a close relationship with colleagues and galleries in Japan, returning frequently to work and exhibit there. He is considered a national treasure in Japan but remains little known in Canada. Since returning to Canada, he has participated in creative residencies at The Banff Centre and Medalta International Artist in Residency (Medicine Hat) as well as spending a year as Moose Jaw Artist in Residence. He has led workshops in Mexico, Japan and Canada including Red Deer College Series and Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus. His interest lies in the ways that natural characteristics of materials (especially clay) influence the form and function of a piece. His work reminds one of the simplicity of Japanese forms and the intricacy of calligraphic brushwork.
Travis Ogle is a wood carver, rancher and a descendent of Hin Hotewin (a member of Chief Sitting Bull’s tribe), and William Hall Ogle. He grew up on the Ogle ranch and works the ranch with his parents, William and Shirley Ogle, and his brother, Brian Ogle. At an early age he became interested in arts and crafts, tooling a picture of a buffalo hunter in leather as a 4H project. Since 1984 he has been sculpting in canyon cedar and cottonwood, using a chain saw and other instruments to carve statues of wildlife, signage for the Wood Mountain Stampede and the faces of Lakota Indians. He also makes detailed replicas of Sioux war clubs, bows, arrows and sheaths using traditional materials.
She Was Pleased, 2008
Pencil and crayon on paper
Heather Kai Smith is an emerging artist and recent grad from the Alberta College of Art + Design's Drawing Program. After recently returning from a summer-fall residency in San Francisco, Heather continues to investigate the medium of drawing. Her current work seeks to manifest indirect nostalgia through images of ephemeral culture. Emphasizing youth cultural movements and passages of throwaway imagery within forms of mass media, Smith's most current interest is in the production of ‘zines and small self-published bookworks. This form allows Smith to situate herself within a broader historical context of subcultural activity from the 1950's forward. Products of 1980's countercultural groups greatly inform the process of making and distributing independent ‘zines, containing elements of confrontational, non-conventional and sometimes counterproductive methods of delivering visual information.
Photo by Nadia Kwadibens
Tanya Tagaq is an artist and contemporary throat singer based in Yellowknife, NWT. She has performed around the world, bringing a particular power and impact to traditional Inuk throat singing that is unprecedented. While studying painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design she began singing along to traditional throat songs on cassette tapes but gradually, over time, altered the sound of her throat singing to accommodate something more expansive and experimental. Tagaq has recorded with Bjork, Kronos Quartet, Juan Hernandez, Michael Red and others.
For more information contact Jennifer McVeigh at 403 284 7633 jennifer.mcveigh@acad.ca
