Let's Get One Thing Out of the Way First

Culturally sensitive eyes in my little province of the world were, this past weekend, turned expectantly towards the opening of its greatest-to-date monument to the visual arts. The every aspiration of Edmontonian culturati found glorious expression in the grand reopening of the Art Gallery of Alberta on January 29th, January 30th, or January 31th (depending on whether you dropped $500 on a gala dinner plate; cut the proverbial ribbons with upsized chrome scissors; or settled to be one of 350 people/hour getting in for the low, low price of printing out a digital form). Relentlessly branding the place for months on end, AGA marketers have been stocking shelves, delivering press copy, and selling every square inch of the new building’s plaque-able surface to civic boosters – entities regional, national and corporation-al.

In any event, self-styled supporters of the arts have largely embraced not just the new building but the schtick that accompanies it as well. I spoke with one longtime participant in the gallery's endeavours who believes wholeheartedly that the AGA's new building exemplifies charter donor John Poole's exhortation to "build it right and cut no corners." Although I would not wish to dampen such sincere enthusiasm (I recognize the benefits of having a new and improved regional gallery), for myself I cannot so heartily affirm Randall Stout’s scrawling building as a sign that Edmonton has finally arrived among the world’s most refined and cosmopolitan cities. Because I’m paying close attention to it, and because sustained attention begets appreciation, and because practiced appreciation develops taste, I recognize significant flaws in the new building.

There has been enough muckraking of dissenters that I feel I must first state the obvious: criticality does not a hater make. I for one always try to put honest words to my thoughts and to pay as little mind to popular opinion or political tactic as possible. I understand that my opinion is contrary to many of those most closely involved in this city’s culture scene, but who in principle would disagree that diverse opinions only have a chance at becoming dialogue (and who doesn't value dialogue?) when they are allowed to butt one against another?

Mere contrariness becomes no one; even so, I really can’t get behind calling the loopy parts of the structure “the Borealis”, as Stout and Co. are said to do. I’ve been privy to all sorts of trash talk about the place and I’ve heard it referred to by tradesmen as “the Borealis” exactly once and sarcastically, at that. It is little wonder that such a high-minded tag hasn’t caught on, not least since the stainless steel loop-de-loop doesn’t look remotely like the northern lights. “Plane Crash”, a regular-joe reference that I’ve heard numerous times already, could stick but even I hope it doesn’t. I’m looking for a more endearing term that is attentive to the primary visual quality (the gestalt) of Alberta’s premier visual arts centre: incongruity. For lack of the perfect moniker, I’ll just refer to the New Building hereon in as the “Newb”.

I grant that upon first approach the New Building is impressive, albeit in the same value-free way that we might understand when someone says a painting is ‘interesting’, and inasmuch as whatever impression it does leave is indelible. In daylight, obdurate-cast facets of glass repel rather than attract, but under a night sky the glassy façade glows in a pleasantly inviting manner. Inside or out, night time is when the Newb is at its best – disjointed silver cockles soften into aqueous moieties and awkwardly canting steel erectors recede when interior illuminations overtake the sun's. Stout’s lighting designer earns a respectable grade by redeeming the exterior from 24-hour frigidity.

And yet, as I feared in the months leading up to this opening weekend when all that was possible was to peek into the construction over its street-side hoarding, the place is disorientingly scale-less. Walking up to the Newb yields unreliable information about how many stories tall it may be, or about what it might feel like on the inside. With the visible entrances made of tall, all-glass gates; perplexing aperatures into a patio in the upper reaches; and little to no indication of how the Newb's loops structurally grip the ground, the human-scale information that we generally take for granted when navigating through our urban architecture is almost entirely absent.

There is one consistency to be found in the New Building: disorienting perspectival cues. Enter the atrium and even those most reliable of all human scale indicators, other people, appear diminished and at a distance – as though seen through a convex lens. Beside the PULL sign on the doors there should be an additional warning: “Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear”. The polished natural concrete floor is the only immediate proof that one has not stepped into some sort of veneered vortex. The lowest ceiling available to hook your visual pitons into is about 30 feet up. At a glance silver and white metals rake across the upper reaches, not wisping ephemerally as cirrus clouds but looming heavily like the bottom of an airliner at that fraught instant before it touches down. Of all the dramatic effects that it would be possible to achieve when designing an experimental building, I’d be willing to bet that vertigo is not any architect’s most desirable. (Except for a rollercoaster architect.)

Even the primary light feature that beckons one in from the cold turns out upon inspection to induce a dizziness of its own. A Plexiglas column of frosted blue light juts from the concrete like some retro-futuristic spatial distortion weapon. It shares a quality specific to black light in that it doesn’t stop wavering long enough to for the eye to settle comfortably upon it. Think of how blue Christmas lights seem to be simultaneously right in front of you and impossibly distant, then imagine a 30 foot tall electric blue bulb and you may be able to appreciate the dimensional shifts it causes. Never even mind how difficult it is to focus on the names of the New Building’s donors printed in black vinyl on the surface.

I've already written elsewhere of unconvincing surface treatments throughout. The zinc cladding looks believable until you're within 6 feet, the lobes of stainless sheet steel only appear seamless and smooth from six hundred feet distant. Obviously, inside the Newb you are brought within those parameters, and compounding the sense that every visible surface is only a membrane are unconvincing junctions between disparate materials. Patches of fir lath do not nicely complement rolled and burnished steel; tempered glass does not join with concrete in any easy way. It is my experience that solid, discrete, believable junctures are crucial, imperative really, to achieving unity with disparate materials. Weakly designed, or weakly constructed? I suspect some combination of each. A bit of scuttlebutt from the Artist/Industry event: winging stainless swoops as well finished as on one of Gehry's buildings would've required another $20,000,000.

That there are customized views from the second and third floors onto Sir Winston Churchill Square, and of City Hall in particular, is one of Randall Stout's most leaned-upon justifications for a 60 foot high glass atrium. In order to catch a cohesive glimpse of the city beyond a viewer must either accept a composite fly's-eye view by willfully ignoring the geometric oddity of the broad steel window casings, or shuffle forward and back and all around then tilt his head just-so. Other than in the vestibule, there may not be a single pane of atrium glass that stands square and plumb. I have heard dozens of people resort to defending the incongruities of the AGA’s New Building by saying, “at least it’s not square”. But it is so far out of square that I don't think the Newb catalyzes its architectural environment effectively, not within city limits. To lay it on a bit thicker: it is a colossal cubist head so emphatically narcissistic that the rest of the Square is rendered moot in its presence.

Fortunately, excellent gallery spaces easily compensate for their shell, which is adequate in the way that the hermit crab’s chosen home is so long as it is big enough to retreat into. (Interestingly, after writing this I saw the Globe and Mail quote the AGA’s chief curator likening the relationship of the building’s interior and exterior to those of a conch shell.) The gallery spaces are generally voluminous but of a decent variety to accommodate the various arrangements specific to the needs of nearly any imaginable exhibit: intimate or blockbuster, classical or contemporary. Truly excellent lighting and environmental systems enhance the possibility of presenting truly world-class exhibitions. As a museum for exhibiting art the Newb is a notable improvement over the slowly-failing Brutalist building that preceded it; as a space for human occupancy, the first shell was the more homey.

But note that art is not among the first things to confront a visitor to the Art Gallery of Alberta in its New Building. Whatever art one might find is a long ways in, past the blue-lit spire, ZINC the restaurant, Ernest C. Manning Hall, Shop AGA, the white hottub sculpture that is the front desk, and art is not visible from any site line even 40 steps in. Except for the possibility of showing art made of impervious materials (steel sculpture, say) there is no remedy as the vast atrium is an environment insufficiently controlled to protect the more fragile arts from mould and degradation.

It is not only the AGA's facade and surrounds that have changed. The easily intuited www.artgalleryalberta.ca has now been recast as www.youraga.ca and “Your AGA” adverts have cropped up as far afield as Medicine Hat, AB. A dubious five-colour acronym logo that reads ASIA as naturally as it does AGA replaces the much classier black and red full-name version. To his staff, Executive Director Gilles Hebert recently described The Art Gallery of Alberta as “a new organization”; and certainly, any institution that throws so many resources into re-branding itself twice in three years (its staff having grown at least 150% in the same period and primarily in marketing/development) cannot simultaneously retain a clear sense of its longer history. Traces of what the Edmonton Art Gallery (EAG) had been good at/good for over the years has been regrettably displaced, and all but forgotten.

My cynicism is admittedly tempered by certain statistics – by various measures the Newb is a popularly acclaimed hit. It has been solidly sold out. The gala VIP event filled up long in advance of its privileged first night; the Artist/Industry party was over capacity; somewhere in the range of 10,000 timed tickets for the two or three days following the ribbon-cutting ceremony were claimed online in about 24 hours; membership sales are at an all-time high; and wedding receptions are booked solid through 2011. It was immensely encouraging to see so many people milling around an art gallery over the weekend, and even the first day of paid admissions seemed significantly busier than I was anticipating.

Glorious details not unlike these have been released to the press on a weekly basis for months on end prior to Saturday the 30th, and for its part the press has been glad to report as fact anything AGA spokespeople declared as such. In a TV interview the mayor quixotically spoke to hypothetical complaints by people who might say the Newb is only more urban blight and by perturbed hockey fans who might feel that their true culture has been co-opted and tax dollars funnelled into the Newb instead of a New Arena: he said they could dislike the New Building if they wished but that they could not, must not, deny it its place as a necessary symbol of Edmonton’s pre-eminence. The press agrees, it would seem, for there has been hardly a whit of journalistic pressure applied since the moment Randall Stout was acclaimed.

This is surely the most propitious opportunity we'll ever have have to critically consider the Art Gallery of Alberta's contribution to architecture in Edmonton. At least until another 50 years have passed and more moneyed civic champions of the arts bequeath the AGA sums for its New New Building. Like it or not, the Newb is what we'll be stuck with, for the remainder of my lifetime anyhow. What we 'must' do is get critiques of its architecture-ality out of the way now so we can start considering the art that it will house.

Survival of the Twittist

Seduced by Spruce

Touching Wood (Revised)

[Via SEE Magazine]

Wood Forms: Sculpture by Cesar Alvarez
Opening at Common Sense Gallery (10546-115th St.) on Jan. 15.

For most, seizing the opportunity to dust off a hobby and make it your life focus isn’t really in the cards. This was certainly true for local sculptor Cesar Alvarez — until 1998, art was a side project, something he tinkered around with in his off time from being a journeyman carpenter and father of three.

“I’d wanted to be an artist my whole life,” he says. “Even as a little boy, I’d be scraping wood on cement or chewing it into shapes. When I moved here from Chile in 1974, the circumstances didn’t allow me to go through with it. I had a family to support.” He worked instead as a carpenter until his youngest was old enough to be self-sufficient. “Then I went back to school. And now I am an artist,” he says.

As a graduate from the University of Alberta’s MFA program Alvarez has shown his work in various galleries around Edmonton to considerable praise. Although he paints and uses metal in some of his pieces, his preferred medium is wood. “I try not to get caught up in the preciousness of the material because that limits you,” he says. “None of my pieces are high brow and I mostly use spruce because it is easy to find and inexpensive. It’s more liberating that way.”

The tactile qualities of wood are as important to Alvarez as the overall concept of the sculpture. He subsequently puts a great deal of time and effort into carefully sanding and waxing each piece. “People sense things differently,” he says. “Some people touch from above, others from beneath. By smoothing the entire piece, everyone gets the same sensation no matter where they touch. At one show, people were hiding their hands at their sides and sneaking touches here and there. I was, like, ‘please, touch!’”

Alvarez will be showing five sculptures at Common Sense Gallery. Three of his works are a follow-up to a series of steel sculptures he completed for his MFA, including “Queen’s Beddings,” which recently caught the eye of New York art critic Piri Halasz. “I see this imaginary cube and I fill the cube with all the elements in my head. Instead of bursting outward, the forms draw you inside,” he says. The remaining pieces are from another series. [This paragraph has been edited for accuracy.]

Although he is passionate about art, Alvarez says he can’t take himself with the same seriousness. “I don’t pull all these grand theories into my work,” he says. “I see an image in my mind and I make it. If it changes halfway through, so be it. I don’t know why we are always forced to explain our reasons. I know the nature of the wood and I know the images I want to create. So I create them.”

[Images from top to bottom: Prince's Napery, King's Closet, Queen's Beddings; by César Alvarez.]

Jan 15 2010 @ Common Sense: Wood Forms

Starting January 15, Common Sense presents Wood Forms: Sculptures by César Alvarez. A recent graduate of the University of Alberta’s acclaimed sculpture MFA program, Alvarez has caught the eye of critics both at home and abroad with his recent work. Veteran New York art critic Piri Halasz called “Queen’s Beddings”, one of Alvarez’s latest works, the “most exciting new sculpture” she had seen on her recent Edmonton survey:

“Made of stained, waxed, & exquisitely pale wood, its surface was so sensuous that it made me want to caress it. The shape was also exciting: something of a table with what seemed a mostly flat top, but with all manner of startling new things going on below.... Born in Chile, he migrated to Canada at the age of 24, taught himself carpentry and passed the provincial licensing exams to become a journeyman carpenter and cabinet maker. Later, he turned to art, and enrolled in [Professor Peter] Hide’s program at the University of Alberta, but “Queen’s Beddings” clearly demonstrates the importance of his earlier experience in wood-working. Alvarez, too, is one of [the Edmonton Contemporary Artist Society’s] newer members, and the work he is showing... has no equal in New York.

-Piri Halasz, From the Mayor’s Doorstep, Oct. 2009

Wood Forms: Sculptures by César Alvarez opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, January 15, 2010, with the artist in attendance, and runs until February 28.

Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.

Art Of The Helmet

[Via SEE Magazine]

Edmonton artist Ryan McCourt makes some pretty fancy things
to put on your head (Published December 10, 2009 by Mari Sasano in Arts Feature)

Portrait Helmets
Common Sense Gallery, 10546 115 St.
By appointment, until December 20th.

These aren’t your usual helmets, folks. Not the hockey variety, and certainly not football. These helmets are art.

“The first helmet I made, the Elvish King, started out as an abstract sculpture. I was using a piece of brass in the shape of a face, cut in half.”

Ryan McCourt is best known for making massive steel sculptures. He has taken part in four exhibitions and has commissions for large, outdoor public art. But with “Portrait Helmets,” he turns to a smaller, literally more human scale: wearable art, in the form of brass helmets.

Each helmet is created as a character, such as the Helm of the Grieving Gardener, the Helm of the Critic, or the Helm of the African Queen. Working on this scale means that McCourt is able to add more detail into each piece, but ultimately it isn’t much different than his larger work.

“The large works, those are made of steel,” he says.

“There’s a general shape vocabulary in steel, with pipes and round shapes. Whereas in brass, the range of shapes you could start with are much broader. There are some of the same structural things, but also you can also have dishes and bows and decorative stuff, and menageries of animals.”

And then of course , there are other advantages, many decorative elements are available pre-made, in the form of brass ornaments.

“With the Helm of the Gorgon, I knew I needed a bunch of snakes. It’s hard to find brass snakes, so I had to improvise using long-necked birds. So I shopped all the Goodwills to buy them up. I started to get recognized at the Value Village, too. They’re quite kitschy.”

The bird butts were recycled into Lisa Simpson-like hair spikes for the African Queen.

McCourt sees each object as a projection of a character, but at the same time, they have the possibility of transforming the wearer.

“I suppose it’s imaginative,” McCourt says.

“In reality, they are pretty uncomfortable, but in each piece there is the idea of transformation. A lot of people call them masks. And they are a kind of disguise.

“Many have face pieces, and they take on a theatrical role. The African Queen, for example, is based on traditional masks used for ceremonies.”

McCourt connects his work to a larger cultural tradition.

“I think it’s very rich, culturally. At a sculptural level, each helmet stands in for the head. The personality is in the head wear. It’s a riddle, you pick out the details to tell the story. And it’s a personal thing, everyone sees something different.”

He even has a helmet for me.

“The Helm of the Critic has a globe, a ring of keys and a flower on the brow. And there are magnifying lenses where the eyes are, so you can see all the fine details, drawer pulls as hair, and a moving chin piece so it can talk.”

It’s a perfect likeness, metaphorically speaking.

Helmet-Cam

"The... brass helms recall McCourt’s earlier interest in the modeled-steel portrait head, an ancient artistic preoccupation; these are a light-hearted/-touched try at encasing in brass the personalities of their subjects. Their final forms were only arrived at after much putting on and taking off – constituent parts on helmet and helmet on head."

-Rob Willms

Ryan McCourt's Portrait Helmets runs until December 20 at Common Sense.

Friday Night Reminder

Ryan McCourt’s Portrait Helmets opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, November 20, with the artist in attendance, and runs until December 20.

Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.

From Piri's Perspective

(Via An Appropriate Distance)

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP
by Piri Halasz

NO. 86: 15 OCTOBER 2009....REPORT FROM THE WEST....

"In all, the ECAS show displayed work by 40 different artists, including some from Calgary, Saskatchewan and Thunder Bay, Ontario . I regret that I don’t have space to comment on all 40, but I did want to at least mention the names of 11 artists whom I can’t deal with in more detail. All helped with their ECAS membership dues to bring me to Alberta, and for that, I thank them. The range of media and subject matter in their contributions was indeed impressive. They are: Mark Bellows, Douglas Bentham, Ann Clarke, Dick Der, Michèle Drouin, Bruce Dunbar, Edward Epp, Bernard Hippel, Kara Nina Maehler, Shawn Serfas, and Katherine Sicotte.

...

The show included six very appealing representational paintings, all landscapes and nature studies: by Hendrik Bres, Nola Cassady, Brenda Kim Christiansen, James Davies, Gerald Faulder and Hilary Prince.

...

At ECAS, however, most of the youthful excitement centered around the sculpture on display. Peter Hide was the catalyst here, not only with his own large, magnificent mild-and-cast steel “Sleepwalker,” but also through the enthusiasm he has instilled in a handful of his former students from the University of Alberta, in particular Linda Maines, Bianca Khan, Rob Willms, Andrew French and César Alvarez. I suppose I should also include Ryan McCourt, for he too studied with Hide, but his contribution to the ECAS show was at cross-purposes with its main thrust. Theatrically titled, “The Eminence of Intuition,” it consisted of a life-size, very skillfully made and very realistic steel centaur, armed with a spear decorated with a banner and carrying a shield with a Medusa head on it. McCourt himself seems to be a kind man. When he arrived at my hotel to drive me to his North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop, I asked him to help me find a store that would sell me a battery for my aged Timex. He did. At the Workshop, he has also installed a veritable shrine in honor of Greenberg’s 100^th birthday, with copies of all Greenberg’s books. McCourt’s centaur appears to have been a great hit with schoolchildren, and was featured in the Edmonton Journal. Such observers may have missed the attitude animating the sculpture, an attitude characterized by the artist himself as “in your face.” I, on the other hand, was acutely aware of this aggressive attitude – maybe because I see so much of it in New York. True, I haven’t seen any centaurs in the Big Apple, but the in-your-face attitude is like with me in every museum show of contemporary art in New York, and in 99.9 percent of New York’s gallery exhibitions. I don’t have to come to Edmonton to find it.

What I really enjoyed was the various ways Hide’s other proteges are gradually working their ways toward independent expression within a truly modernist frame of reference. Willms is still perhaps the closest to Hide’s idiom – yet the shape of his tall & slender “Sleight of Stature” resembled more his own tall, lean body shape. Made of welded & rusted steel, this sculpture had a graceful, swaying motion, and the combination surface appearance of rust and a greenish patina almost made it glow. Also impressive was the impishly-titled steel “I’d Rather Be Canoodling” by Maines. Small and low-slung, it had a fluid, horizontal motion. Maines explained to me that Hide encourages his students to take inspiration from their daily lives. Maines, whose day job is as an operating-room nurse, incorporates pillow-like shapes into some of her sculpture, and collections of metal strips resembling medical instruments into others. Khan’s background includes architecture, and from it she had taken glass bricks. “Bicuspid,” her sculpture in the ECAS show, combined a long, low-slung steel cart with 8 large glass bricks, for an intriguing combination of shapes and textures. French’s sculpture at ECAS was small and not striking, but at the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop I saw two large pieces that he was working on, one green and one yellow, both characterized by massive blocky shapes and decidedly promising.

The most exciting new sculpture on view at ECAS was “Queen’s Beddings” by César Alvarez. Made of stained, waxed, & exquisitely pale wood, its surface was so sensuous that it made me want to caress it. The shape was also exciting: something of a table with what seemed a mostly flat top, but with all manner of startling new things going on below. Like more than a few other members of ECAS, Alvarez came to it –and to art in general--relatively late in life. Born in Chile, he migrated to Canada at the age of 24, taught himself carpentry and passed the provincial licensing exams to become a journeyman carpenter and cabinet maker. Later, he turned to art, and enrolled in Hide’s program at the University of Alberta, but “Queen’s Beddings” clearly demonstrates the importance of his earlier experience in wood-working. Alvarez, too, is one of ECAS’s newer members, and the work he is showing again has no equal in New York. True, Willard Boepple also works in wood, and sometimes with a comparably sensuous finish, but his sculptures are more graceful and (by comparison) more surrealistic, while Alvarez displays a sturdier, more workmanlike sensibility – two strong personalities, contrasting outlooks on life & art. As far as that goes, New York also has no equal to Hide, nor to such up-and-comers as Willms, Maines, etc. I’m not saying this happy situation in Edmonton will last forever, but then who among us will? For myself, I just intend to keep going as long as I can, if only because it’s so boring not to. And, for the time being, I emerged from my visit feeling happy that I’d gone and gratified to see so much good new work being done"

Click here to read the full column...

Sculptor of Renown Showing Until Nov. 14

Heads Up @ Common Sense November 20th

Starting November 20, 2009, Common Sense presents Ryan McCourt’s Portrait Helmets, an exhibition of eleven recent brass sculptures by the award-winning Edmonton artist.

Taking the form of ornate metal headwear, McCourt’s Portrait Helmets draw their inspiration from a variety of mythical, cultural, archetypal, and personal sources. While these sculptures make clear reference to the high-art forms of aristocratic armour from antiquity, the materials and methods of the sculptures’ construction are paradoxically modern and ‘low-brow’: cheap, decorative brass elements and other metallic trinkets from thrift stores and flea markets are improvisationally assembled by McCourt using household plumbing solder.

In the Renaissance, royal helms were far more than protective equipment for the battlefield. Most often worn at court ceremonies, and in parades, pageants, and jousting tournaments, they proclaimed the rulers’ strength and power. Elaborately decorated with imagery from history, mythology, or the bible, they symbolically presented emperors and kings as the new Caesar, the equal of Hercules, or the defender of the faith. Etched or engraved images of saints, or the virgin and child, asserted that rulers enjoyed divine protection. Much more costly than portraits by the leading painters of the day, such pieces of royal armor were dazzling works of wearable sculpture that affirmed their owners’ right to rule. In myth, magical powers of strength, invulnerability, and even invisibility were often inherent to the helmet itself, and were imparted to any wearer. Related to the traditional function of the mask, by donning these helms, one hides their real identity, while taking on a new ‘alter-ego’. As most of McCourt’s helmets are actually wearable, viewers of the show will have the opportunity to take on a new imagined identity, be it African queen, assassin, or another.

This is the first time most of these sculptures have been publicly exhibited, save one. The Helmet of Laocoön, featured in the 2009 Wearable Art Awards in Port Moody BC, won First Prize in their international Headdress competition.

Ryan McCourt’s Portrait Helmets opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, November 20, with the artist in attendance, and runs until December 20.

Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.

"Finding the Beauty in Frailty"

Painter's exhibit lays bare the 'impermanence of the body'

By Janice Ryan, Edmonton Journal

VISUAL ARTS PREVIEW

DEAN SMALE: INNER SENSE

Where: common sense Gallery, 10546 115th st.

When: View by appointment until Nov. 6; call 780-482-2685

Growing old is the great human equalizer. Regardless of education, social status or wealth, there is no escaping the fact that as time passes, the body ages. Dean Smale has always been interested in the paradox of life; the idea that things are not always as they seem. His work is largely driven by curiosity about our existence.

Inner Sense, Smale's latest exhibition of paintings and drawings (showing at Common Sense Gallery), explores the relationship between the physical body and the mind, and deals with the transformation imposed by the aging process. "As I've been getting older," says Smale, 45, "it has become more apparent to me the impermanence of the body."

Four years ago, Smale created a series of lively portraits, each painting a psychedelic swirl of bright colour. Focusing on the faces of his subjects--all friends and family --he stripped their heads of hair and let the myriad of colours express their personalities and inner character on canvas. Anatomically correct and precise in detail, they offered a celebratory peek into the subject's life.

The new work is more intense, darker in colour and mood. The portraits are approached from a scientific and pragmatic point of view:How does the body function? How are we going to fall apart?

Psychological portraiture is not a photo-realistic presentation of a person. "The work is charged and goes deeper than just their appearance. You are getting to know this person's life; it makes you think about what their experiences have been."

Smale's father, Al, stands proudly in Noble and Serious Human Action, clad only in a pair of white underwear. He is the familiar, quintessential dad, standing in the kitchen in search of his first cup of early-morning coffee. His face and body show the wear and tear of life; features somewhat asymmetrical, with their imperfections and idiosyncrasies, but nonetheless real.

Omniscient, a nude female, stands two metres high by 1.2 metres wide, the skin fluid as it maps out her body. "The nude figure is so powerful, outside of the idealized figure that we are constantly being given by the media. I'm interested in just who we are."

The oil paintings are finished with a glazing technique, laborious and time-consuming, but dramatic in effect, producing a highly reflective, glossy surface. Omniscient took Smale 1-1/2 years to complete. The work is highly rendered, almost clinical in approach, strands of hair and creases of skin detailed to reveal the subject.

Looking into the figure's eyes one might feel compelled to pause for introspective reflection: yes, the clock is ticking.

"The work is amazing," says Common Sense gallery owner Ryan Mc-Court. "You don't often see this level of technique. It's very hard work."

Indeed Smale, a full-time visual communications instructor at Medicine Hat College, has the technical precision of an Old Venetian master, each brush stroke meticulously laid down to capture an eyelid or a fold of skin.

His pen-and-ink drawings, complete with medical terms, are equally thorough; an anatomical investigation into the body, an inquiry into the inner workings of the ear, an eye or the kidneys.

© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

[Images from top to bottom: Ode to Edo (2006), Remnant from The Unknown Masterpiece (2007), detail of Vanitas (2005), detail of Vanitas, detail of Law of the Land (2009). All works by Dean Smale.]

A Closer Look at Inner Sense

Images from top to bottom: Vanitas (2005), detail of Vanitas; Law of the Land (2009), detail of Law of the Land; Macro/Micro (2009), detail of Macro/Micro; Noble and Serious Human Action (2005), detail of Noble and Serious Human Action. All works by Dean Smale.

"I like your saint," the old man remarked, addressing Porbus. "I would give you ten golden crowns for her over and above the price the Queen is paying; but as for putting a spoke in that wheel,—the devil take it!"

"It is good then?"

"Hey! hey!" said the old man; "good, say you?—Yes and no. Your good woman is not badly done, but she is not alive. You artists fancy that when a figure is correctly drawn, and everything in its place according to the rules of anatomy, there is nothing more to be done. You make up the flesh tints beforehand on your palettes according to your formulae, and fill in the outlines with due care that one side of the face shall be darker than the other; and because you look from time to time at a naked woman who stands on the platform before you, you fondly imagine that you have copied nature, think yourselves to be painters, believe that you have wrested His secret from God. Pshaw! You may know your syntax thoroughly and make no blunders in your grammar, but it takes that and something more to make a great poet. Look at your saint, Porbus! At a first glance she is admirable; look at her again, and you see at once that she is glued to the background, and that you could not walk round her. She is a silhouette that turns but one side of her face to all beholders, a figure cut out of canvas, an image with no power to move nor change her position. I feel as if there were no air between that arm and the background, no space, no sense of distance in your canvas. The perspective is perfectly correct, the strength of the coloring is accurately diminished with the distance; but, in spite of these praiseworthy efforts, I could never bring myself to believe that the warm breath of life comes and goes in that beautiful body. It seems to me that if I laid my hand on the firm, rounded throat, it would be cold as marble to the touch. No, my friend, the blood does not flow beneath that ivory skin, the tide of life does not flush those delicate fibres, the purple veins that trace a network beneath the transparent amber of her brow and breast. Here the pulse seems to beat, there it is motionless, life and death are at strife in every detail; here you see a woman, there a statue, there again a corpse. Your creation is incomplete. You had only power to breathe a portion of your soul into your beloved work. The fire of Prometheus died out again and again in your hands; many a spot in your picture has not been touched by the divine flame."

"But how is it, dear master?" Porbus asked respectfully, while the young man with difficulty repressed his strong desire to beat the critic.

"Ah!" said the old man, "it is this! You have halted between two manners. You have hesitated between drawing and color, between the dogged attention to detail, the stiff precision of the German masters and the dazzling glow, the joyous exuberance of Italian painters. You have set yourself to imitate Hans Holbein and Titian, Albrecht Durer and Paul Veronese in a single picture. A magnificent ambition truly, but what has come of it? Your work has neither the severe charm of a dry execution nor the magical illusion of Italian chiaroscuro. Titian's rich golden coloring poured into Albrecht Durer's austere outlines has shattered them, like molten bronze bursting through the mold that is not strong enough to hold it. In other places the outlines have held firm, imprisoning and obscuring the magnificent, glowing flood of Venetian color. The drawing of the face is not perfect, the coloring is not perfect; traces of that unlucky indecision are to be seen everywhere. Unless you felt strong enough to fuse the two opposed manners in the fire of your own genius, you should have cast in your lot boldly with the one or the other, and so have obtained the unity which simulates one of the conditions of life itself. Your work is only true in the centres; your outlines are false, they project nothing, there is no hint of anything behind them. There is truth here," said the old man, pointing to the breast of the Saint, "and again here," he went on, indicating the rounded shoulder. "But there," once more returning to the column of the throat, "everything is false. Let us go no further into detail, you would be disheartened."

The old man sat down on a stool, and remained a while without speaking, with his face buried in his hands.

"Yet I studied that throat from the life, dear master," Porbus began; "it happens sometimes, for our misfortune, that real effects in nature look improbable when transferred to canvas—"

"The aim of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. You are not a servile copyist, but a poet!" cried the old man sharply, cutting Porbus short with an imperious gesture. "Otherwise a sculptor might make a plaster cast of a living woman and save himself all further trouble. Well, try to make a cast of your mistress's hand, and set up the thing before you. You will see a monstrosity, a dead mass, bearing no resemblance to the living hand; you would be compelled to have recourse to the chisel of a sculptor who, without making an exact copy, would represent for you its movement and its life. We must detect the spirit, the informing soul in the appearances of things and beings. Effects! What are effects but the accidents of life, not life itself? A hand, since I have taken that example, is not only a part of a body, it is the expression and extension of a thought that must be grasped and rendered. Neither painter nor poet nor sculptor may separate the effect from the cause, which are inevitably contained the one in the other. There begins the real struggle! Many a painter achieves success instinctively, unconscious of the task that is set before art. You draw a woman, yet you do not see her! Not so do you succeed in wresting Nature's secrets from her! You are reproducing mechanically the model that you copied in your master's studio. You do not penetrate far enough into the inmost secrets of the mystery of form; you do not seek with love enough and perseverance enough after the form that baffles and eludes you. Beauty is a thing severe and unapproachable, never to be won by a languid lover. You must lie in wait for her coming and take her unawares, press her hard and clasp her in a tight embrace, and force her to yield. Form is a Proteus more intangible and more manifold than the Proteus of the legend; compelled, only after long wrestling, to stand forth manifest in his true aspect. Some of you are satisfied with the first shape, or at most by the second or the third that appears. Not thus wrestle the victors, the unvanquished painters who never suffer themselves to be deluded by all those treacherous shadow-shapes; they persevere till Nature at the last stands bare to their gaze, and her very soul is revealed.

"In this manner worked Rafael," said the old man, taking off his cap to express his reverence for the King of Art. "His transcendent greatness came of the intimate sense that, in him, seems as if it would shatter external form. Form in his figures (as with us) is a symbol, a means of communicating sensations, ideas, the vast imaginings of a poet. Every face is a whole world. The subject of the portrait appeared for him bathed in the light of a divine vision; it was revealed by an inner voice, the finger of God laid bare the sources of expression in the past of a whole life.

"You clothe your women in fair raiment of flesh, in gracious veiling of hair; but where is the blood, the source of passion and of calm, the cause of the particular effect? Why, this brown Egyptian of yours, my good Porbus, is a colorless creature! These figures that you set before us are painted bloodless fantoms; and you call that painting, you call that art!

"Because you have made something more like a woman than a house, you think that you have set your fingers on the goal; you are quite proud that you need not to write currus venustus or pulcher homo beside your figures, as early painters were wont to do and you fancy that you have done wonders. Ah! my good friend, there is still something more to learn, and you will use up a great deal of chalk and cover many a canvas before you will learn it. Yes, truly, a woman carries her head in just such a way, so she holds her garments gathered into her hand; her eyes grow dreamy and soft with that expression of meek sweetness, and even so the quivering shadow of the lashes hovers upon her cheeks. It is all there, and yet it is not there. What is lacking? A nothing, but that nothing is everything.

"There you have the semblance of life, but you do not express its fullness and effluence, that indescribable something, perhaps the soul itself, that envelopes the outlines of the body like a haze; that flower of life, in short, that Titian and Rafael caught. Your utmost achievement hitherto has only brought you to the starting-point. You might now perhaps begin to do excellent work, but you grow weary all too soon; and the crowd admires, and those who know smile.

[Text: Excerpt from The Unknown Masterpiece, By Honoré De Balzac.]

Inside Dean Smale's Inner Sense

Dean Smale: Inner Sense on until November 6 at Common Sense.

See Arts News, Post on Blog

[Via SEE Magazine]

Dean Smale on Inner Sense:

“Science has somewhat removed the idea of faith and we are getting to know more about the universe metaphysically,” says Smale. “That has made us more curious about the concepts of death and our own mythologies around it. It is the curiosity of what there may be beyond death, if anything.”

“There are going to be some drawings that investigate aspects of science and human anatomy,” Smale says. “There is a painting of a brain with its optic nerves and eyes still connected beside a still life. That painting is stemming from my avid interest in Neo-Platonism; during the Renaissance, there is this idea that perspectives were largely the vanishing point ... the energy where God has transmitted back and forward energy. And I’m not trying to express any interest in God; I’m just trying to show interest in the mythologies and ideologies that humans create when trying to explain the unexplainable.

“I think it’s more personalized on some level,” he continues. “I think one thing about my work is that it does grab people’s attention. It’s not a pretty picture, you know; it’s communicating something deeper. Whether the people like the image or dislike the image, it will grab their attention and have them think about what is happening. My work is definitely not on the level of decorative ... It’s not created to decorate people’s homes. Although, I think they are beautiful.”

Dean Smale: Inner Sense opens October 10, 7 pm at 10546 - 115 street, Edmonton.

It Is What It Is

As I've noted before on studiosavant, and as we know from so much political history, for any worthwhile endeavour to survive and thrive it must be able to squash dissenting opinions. I'm kidding... projects of all sorts must, of course, be able to assimilate feedback of all sorts. I'll freely admit that my opinion of the AGA expansion currently underway does not conform to the positivist spin and publicity that the institution wishes to (needs to, really) promulgate. And yet, I want as much as any other arts advocate in the province for the Art Gallery of Alberta to succeed and excel as a true hub of the region's visual arts activity. My criticism should be taken as that of a patron - constructive comments from someone who works in support of the project. I trust that my tone here will be sufficiently measured to ensure remarks deemed negative cannot also be considered disloyal or treasonous to the gallery's endeavour.

The building is not coming down at this point, and although I don't have high regard for it as architecture, it is what we arts-interested citizens will soon have to work with/in. There are, undoubtedly, a number of very definite improvements upon the old building; not the least of which is a vapour barrier on the pre-existing cast-concrete walls and foundation. Somehow that nifty little northern-climate-specific feature got cut during construction of Don Bittorf's 1968 EAG building - go figure. There is more gallery square-footage in the new one, not to mention ceiling height; the lights and climate envelope will surely be a huge leap in functionality and reliability; there have been reasonable concessions to the advantageous display of indoor and outdoor sculpture; and the building's preparatory facilities are on the whole undeniably improved. The new galleries may not make video-art look any better, but paintings and sculptures will be, in my opinion, much better-exhibited there.

The EAG/AGA, for better or worse over the decades, has been a cultural locus occupying a crucial streetcorner in the heart of Edmonton. Bittorf's building was unfortunately dwarfed early on (1972, I think) by the Provincial Law Courts building (which can be seen looming in the above photo). Stout's building has taken back the gallery's rightful place on the square. Except for the slight northerly angling of Jasper Avenue as it heads east, downtown is essentially a grid in all three axes, and approaches to the core have until now been just as rectilinear (I've never entered downtown from the sky, it's true, but I have come up from the LRT/PedWay). From at least one direction, coming back from the east on 103rd Avenue, the new building's loopy parts provide a welcoming cumulous contour where before existed only more strict verticality.

Overall, I sufficiently dislike the most prominent feature of Randall Stout's building (the glass and steel) that even the soundest of improvements in the new structure are at risk of losing my respectful attention. The loopy parts flow in some places wide and others narrow, very like the North Saskatchewan River - here and there exactly like it. Such massive steel curves demand perfect flow but in effect look and feel rather arbitrary. The actual river banks push in or out only as absolutely and necessarily dictated by myriad striving forces of nature. The loopy parts may carry a two-dimensional mapping of the river back into a discrete structurally supportable spatial configuration, but are not by orientation or relationship (or even material necessity) constrained to be exactly the shape they are. They have little to do with the stably stacked blocks of the galleries rendering their orientation affected and relationships contrived: incongruous to the intended evocation of nature's loose but perfect order.

Even now, less than two months before handover, not everything is completed (the building's lights aren't in or powered, for example) so some concerns cannot yet be converted to criticism. Issues of scale are of utmost concern in architecture; in one way or another, unless a structure has been designed for the sole use of flora, fauna or extraterrestrials, achieving proper human scale envelopes or outweighs every other goal. From across the street, unable to see over the hoarding fence how the building touches ground or even what size the doors will be, I sense that the structure is just too big. There have been little figures rappelling and manlifting all over the building for the last few years, but they've always seemed engaged in indistinct tasks at a great distance away - like those little human-like scribbles that architectural renderings rely upon to determine proper scale. My sense that the place is simply too large for me, that it will repel me from its from steps rather than invite me in the door, is one of the things I won't know until I can walk in the front door with the gallery's other patrons.

I worry too that the weightlessness evident in renderings of the place has been thwarted by installation of very darkly tinted glazing. At the moment, with the interior unlit, those loops give little or no indication of extending within the glass atrium and appear in places like elephantine earlobes and skinflaps. Because the lighting is of such importance to the final effect, I must withhold final judgement on the entirety until I can look at it in many seasonal situations, from within and without. That a building's exterior cannot be judged without the lights on seems a tiny bit absurd, though, does it not?

I made no notes at architect Randall Stout's lecture presentation of his brand-spanking new AGA building Saturday afternoon (September 19th), but with a change of tense they might've been along these lines:

From where I sat I could see barely a handful stand up at Randall Stout's invitation as he called out some of the different roles, classes really, of people involved in construction of the building: trades and contractors, suppliers, engineers and architects, owners and board members. Only one tradesman stood up, as far as I could tell. Stout began his lecture by sorting architectural experience into symbolic and affective tiers, and after showing a few slides of architecture that he admired symbolically and affectively, explained how he and his team had striven to deliver both in equal measure. The loopy part of the building symbolizes the river valley, the cuboids symbolize the gridded nature of city streets, while in knit relationship they say with one voice, "Edmonton". One set of slides made it evident that a map view of the North Saskatchewan Rivervalley was the actual source of the loopy part's specific 'geometries'. An oblique reference was made to recent comments from certain city councillors about how much or little they liked the design - Stout welcomed the so-called controversy. One major design influence had to do with 'continuous space', although that wasn't the term Stout used and I confess I cannot recall the name of the architect he was citing. Slides of the new building's cross sections and flow plans and pedestrian access and viewing angles were mildly interesting, but I had the feeling they were rather more useful for selling the project - raising sponsorship - than as authentic working plans. I was personally pleased that he strayed no further into the Northern Lights trope than mentioning that his office had resorted to using "Borealis" as a petname for the loopy part - - Aurora Borealis is a highly tenuous metaphor, and the loopy part is also high and attenuated, so, granted, maybe I should cut some slack. The technicalities of design and fabrication and installation would have been too much to outline in an hour and a half presentation, but he did lay out the reciprocating order of model building and 3D digital rendering, while a couple of neat details emerged in slides of the prefab steelwork and some uniquely articulating brackets. One thing he skimmed over, discovered in an online edition of Modern Steel, has to do with limiting heat transfer in and out of the building via the steel girders: one-inch thick blocks of oak were used between interior and exterior brackets to insulate either side. Stout made special note of Edmonton's ironworkers' hardiness, willing and able to work outdoors, up high, at -30° celcius. The zinc siding has been patinated to take on different casts in different light conditions; the loopy parts are white on their undersides and ball-burnished stainless-steel skyside, also designed to reflect different light conditions. Whether he even realized it, this is pure sales pitch - there may not be anything that does not change colour with the sky's change in light. I do kinda like the white underbelly, though, if only because it reminds me of dolphins and bomber planes. Stout promised that the building had been designed with ever only the most serious consideration of Edmonton's near-arctic climate - he described how the glassed-in loopy part, thanks to its white belly, would glow with light when it was dark outside (although he could offer no photographic proof as the lights have not been installed as of yet); and he hinted at a snow-specific feature of the building that could not be revealed without ruining the surprise. Let the record show that I'm guessing it will in some way monumentalize the windrows that snowplows build out of brown-sugar snow in our city streets, and which, after enough thaws and freezes, look like glacier-strewn boulder feeds. The lecture closed on a speculative note - among the many different associations one might make with the loopy parts, the mobius-strip is evidently eminent: being symbolic of infinity. But for this last somewhat extravagant claim, Randall Stout spoke clearly and carefully, if not quite eloquently, about the project and its aims. Although I can't say he glossed the venture, he was unfailingly on-message about the symbolic and affective value of the building to this province and its capital city. And, I wonder, what was left, deliberately or not, unsaid? A short question period closed the event.

Asked, answered questions: "What is the projected lifespan of the building? Based on mechanically attached exterior materials (zinc and stainless steel): 50-100 years. Where is the matching LRT entrance feature? It was an ornamental concept that was not a part of the formal proposal but that, as an idea, should be considered"a gift to the city fathers" [to which the audience responded with applause]. Are there more walls for hanging paintings in the new building? Yes, the galleries are larger but still classical (square) in design. How will children like your gallery? Well, they will marvel at the light wells and swoopy bits - and we put sinks in the studios so they can wash their grimy fingers. How will the building be heated? Instead of forced air there is a system of infloor heating that will keep people warm where they stand; and there are half a dozen different kinds of glazing designed to mitigate the varying conditions caused by the sun shining through the windows. Will the city's new architecture continue to be square? Maybe not, but maybe, yes. Why does the third floor gallery hang over the street? By doing so it announces the building as an art gallery and it reaches out to the city's heart: City Hall."

Belying Mayor Stephen Mandel's recent comments, the press on the new building has been dismayingly free of controversy. The closest to hard journalism has come from the Journal's Elizabeth Withey in an interview with Randall Stout timed, I'm sure, to generate interest in advance of his Winspear Hall lecture. The closest to editorial criticism came four years ago from Lisa Rochon at the Globe and Mail (the G&M's paywall forces a link that you'll have to scroll 3/4's of the way down to find). Deeper research into the history of rebuilding the EAG/AGA was provided by Shafraaz Kaba in a backissue of Canadian Architect magazine. Check out these two aesthetic takes on the building as it was being built. Other than that, very few questions have been asked of either the architect or the gallery administration, and next to nothing has been reported in the media that wasn't part of a controlled release.

I can think of all kinds of things I would ask, and feel entitled to know as an Albertan and an artist. Minus the rhetorical or leading questions that might under other conditions (like me not working for the AGA) rightfully belong in a blog (and edited for sensitive information, believe it or not), let's list some.

Unasked, unanswered questions: Who are the legal owners of the building? To whom or what was the previous building dedicated to? How does the new building acknowledge that history? What or to whom will the new building be dedicated to? Why did the gallery especially need a new building over a retrofit renovation? Besides retaining some 60% of existing concrete walls and foundation, how does the design of the new building acknowledge the style and history of its predecessor? Which of the competition proposals carried the popular vote? If he did not carry what was thought to be a deciding vote by EAG membership, how did Stout come to be hired? What was the initial projected budget for the building? How many times were new higher figures announced, and in what increments? What is the actual final budget for building it? What factors account for the extreme overage? What cutbacks/compromises had to be realized to keep the project at its final budget? Given the higher cost, why were any compromises necessary at all? How were these cutbacks prioritized? How did a previous board member's architectural firm get the job of managing the project? Other than the main contractor Ledcor, what other businesses landed contracts for the building? Do any of these businesses have personal/close ties to the AGA's board members? What is the projected annual budget to upkeep, program, and staff the building? Is that annual budget expected to rise or fall significantly over the next 5 to 10 years? Does that number include the costs associated with the permanent collection housed at the Collection Storage Facility (CSF)? Is the CSF considered a permanent solution to the storage and conservation of the AGA's permanent collection? Does the annual budget account for renewed programs of collecting artwork? What will happen with the Enterprise Square gallery after the AGA vacates it? What criticisms of the building have you become aware of that may be resolved in future projects, or laid to rest otherwise? What deficiencies have you have already learned of? What measures of energy efficiency have been taken? How have the building's carbon and water 'footprints' been reduced?

Wow. Whew. That's about a half-hour's brainstorm, and I'm not even a journalist. Now what? To be honest, in this final push towards opening day I don't anticipate any answers. But I hope I can keep my job.

Inner Sense @ Common Sense

Common Sense is privileged to host the latest exhibition of new work by Dean Smale: Inner Sense. The exhibition is open, free to the public, from October 10th to November 6th, 2009. All are welcome to view the art and meet Dean Smale at a special public reception, with the artist in attendance at Common Sense on Saturday, October 10th from 7 to 11 pm.

Dean Smale earned a MFA Degree from the University of Calgary and currently is a full-time instructor at Medicine Hat College in its Visual Communications program. He has also instructed visual arts at College of the Rockies, Eastern Oregon University, and Red Deer College. In his professional practice, he has been an artist lecturer at various educational institutes and galleries. He has won various awards, exhibits frequently (solo and group exhibitions), has been published, and his work is in collections in the US and Canada. In 1996-97, he worked as a practicing artist in London England and in 1998 he participated in the Susan Kasen-Summers Workshop in Bantam, Connecticut, U.S. CBC National Television published a documentary on his work for their Artspots Series in 2005.

Modern Times' Many Faces

Via the Edmonton Journal

By Janice Ryan, Freelance

Edmonton Contemporary Artists' Society 17th-Annual Exhibition
Where: Peter Robertson Gallery, 10183 112th St.
When: Until Sept. 25

Hot debate continues to swirl around the topic of modernism....

Canvases alive with colour and texture hang alongside photographs chosen for their composition and qualities of light and hue. Sculptures in welded steel and wood dot the landscape of the spacious Peter Robertson Gallery.

Modernism embraces both abstract and representational images.... "This is visually important art," says Russell Bingham, a founding member of the society.... Bingham is excited about the quality of this year's exhibition.... Bingham's photo, Back Alley, Whyte Avenue, illustrates his preference for straight photography that focuses on colour and design....

Over the years, the exhibition has attracted national and international artists. This year, the work of Vancouver Island painter Edward Epp and sculptor Douglas Bentham of Saskatoon are displayed, as well as abstract paintings by Walter Darby Bannard (Miami), John Link (Michigan) and John Griefen (New York City)....

Ryan McCourt's steel sculpture, The Eminence of Intuition, greets you eye to eye at the entrance--an intense-faced centaur of grand proportions wielding a spear in one hand and a shield-bearing mask in the other. The piece is aptly named; as the young artist suggests: "When viewing art, your intuition is the most important thing. It forms the personal experience you get from the work."

This is art for the sake of art "It is exciting for me to put a new sculpture in the exhibit," says Peter Hide, an internationally renowned sculptor and a founding member of ECAS.

"This is a show we are in control of. We are our own masters, and don't have to ask anyone if we can do it."

Edmonton's Newest Public Art

The Belgravia Community Arts Park at 73rd ave and 115th street, on the former site of Edmonton's old City Arts Centre, just received its latest installation this afternoon: The Abduction of Liberty, by Ryan McCourt; now in the collection of The City of Edmonton.

Viewing 'Angles'

Tonight is the opening reception for Christopher Berry: Angles

7pm - 10pm

The Fine Arts Building Gallery
1-1 Fine Arts Building
University of Alberta
112 Street and 89 Avenue

This exhibition is Berry's final visual presentation for the degree of Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Sculpture.

Christopher Berry: Angles can be viewed from September 1 - 26, 2009.

AND... art?

Since Andrew French's Show came down, there's been nothing on the Common Sense gallery walls, except the shadows. As noted, our next exhibition will open in just over one month and, as our game of twenty questions has uncovered, will feature figurative work by a painter formerly from Edmonton, who did his graduate work in Calgary, and now teaches at Medicine Hat College, by the name of Dean Smale.
In the meantime, with Piri Halasz possibly making a studio visit, perhaps we NESW'ers might want to use the emply gallery space to better display some of our own works for her perusal? Mind the floors, gents...

ECAS presents!

A (free) lecture by:
Piri Halasz

Come to hear New York art critic Piri Halasz, who has been keeping a weather eye for praiseworthy art and artists for more than 40 years. In addition to her long-running bi-monthly column (in print and e-form), "From the Mayor's Doorstep", Ms. Halasz' "Memoir of Creativity: Abstract Painting, Politics, and the Media 1956-2008" is even now hot off the presses.

6:30pm, Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
FAB 2-20, University of Alberta
(112th Street and 89th Avenue)

At the behest of the painters and sculptors of the Edmonton Contemporary Artists' Society, Piri Halasz is visiting to see and judge for herself how fares the art of we few remaining new modernists.