RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW
Every two years, the Alberta Biennial presents a thought-provoking account of the output of the province’s artists. We talk to six local artists whose work is featured in the exhibitions in Edmonton and Banff.
The 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art was informed by a question: Whom is a biennial for? After seeing many of the artists meet for the first time at the exhibition opening of the 2015 Alberta Biennial, curators Peta Rake and Kristy Trinier began forming a response. “I really believe that a biennial, while it is for the public, is for the artists as well,” says Rake, the curator of the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
So after considering some 300 submissions, conducting 75 studio visits from Fort McMurray to Lethbridge, Rake and Trinier selected 24 artists and invited them to Banff a year before the exhibition. The fourday symposium featured discussions with international curators Lorenzo Fusi, currently at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and Kendal Henry, curator of New York City’s Percent for Art public art program. It also resulted in “incredible conversations, and a lot of the exhibition themes were cemented on that weekend,” Rake says.
The get-together also established new connections between Alberta artists that will persist past Sept. 10 when the two exhibits—one at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton and the other, beginning Saturday, June 17, at the Walter Phillips Gallery—close. “In this instance, they’ve made a little bit of a world around it,” says Wil Murray, whose work is part of the Banff exhibition. “That inevitably creates something really nice, that will continue past this, and will continue past geography.”
As Calgarians, we sit between the two exhibitions, but local artists are well-represented in the Biennial. More than two-thirds of the artists were either born here or are based in the city, including the six artists on the following pages.
There was a second question that was much discussed (and left largely unsettled) at that Banff symposium: What is a biennial? But if the answer remains elusive, Rake at least offers the following insight: “This is not a survey of all art across the province,” she says, “but it’s very specifically a conversation with 24 artists at this one time in this present moment.”