MURALIST DRAWS BUZZ AT NEXTFEST FISH GRIWKOWSKY
Varscona walls getting the Jill Stanton treatment
It’s a sunny day in what used to be kind of a nowhere alley between the Varscona Theatre and Whyte Avenue.
Suddenly, a flock of noisy kids rounds the playhouse’s corner, pulling out phone cameras to capture poses in front of a dynamic, on-the-go mural.
“That’s been happening all week,” Edmonton muralist Jill Stanton says with a smile, noting it’s probably a good sign people are showing off the art in progress.
The two-walled effort was commissioned by NextFest, the city’s multidisciplinary celebration of young and emerging artists, running Thursday through June 10 around town. The as-yetuntitled Varscona mural is the festival’s fourth annual mentorstudent mural project. Stanton is lead artist and intermedia artist Breanna Barrington is Stanton’s “mentee” on the work.
While Stanton is behind the overall design, which will be shaded and graded before it’s done, “I wanted to incorporate her in some way. I’ve got a poster motif, so I left her a place for three paintings within these frames on the south side. She’s got free rein, then I’ll pull elements from this side and make everything cohesive.”
Last year — on the west side of the same theatre — saw the creation of a beautiful work by Luke Ramsay and Wei Li, a finalist in RBC’s 2017 national painting competition. Stanton is pulling a fried egg from that mural onto this one, noting it’s “a little wink. He put it in last year because it was so hot, and it’s hot again now!”
The 3,200-square-foot mural — 36.5 metres by 5.1 metres on the east side, another 24 metres around the south — is rife with such symbolism. Along the wall, you might feel an echo of the painting that used to be in the Next Act of the Varscona’s seats seen from backstage. Other theatre props abound, including a cello, top hat and bottle.
When she first arrived, a vent on the wall had smoke stains from an earlier fire — Stanton painted a fire blasting out of it, and people have responded to the sense of history.
“There’s a homeless man named Whisky who comes by every morning and waters the flowers in the neighbourhood — he’s such a nice man, so I put a watering can for him.
“I want to incorporate elements of the community. All of this is mostly improvised as to where things are going in the space. It’s a lot of running up a ladder and realizing you’ve put a chalk line in the wrong place.”
Indeed, the wall even has a painting of said ladder with a can of paint on top.
Stanton is excited about being near the Cleon Peterson mural down the street on the side of El Cortez and Have Mercy — shrugging off the idea murals should all be done by locals. “So does that mean I can’t go to other cities and do work? It’s such a stupid argument. I hope I can go wherever I want and do a mural.”
That doesn’t seem to be a problem. In the last year or so she’s painted 16 walls around Canada — including in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg and Saskatoon.
While she’s done a number of inside jobs in Edmonton — including the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Manning Hall — this is her first outdoor permanent mural in her hometown.
“I think it’s about time,” she laughs, eager to do more, covered in paint to prove it.
A very momentous birthday: studio-embracing artist-run centre Harcourt House is hosting its 30th annual members exhibition and open house party, opening noon Saturday. The show, In Search of the Human Essence, explores the human condition at the beginning of this troubled 21st century, and serves as a fundraiser for the gallery — 30 per cent of any work sold going to support educational programming and exhibitions. The art will be up through July 14, including as one of the venues allied with the Works Art and Design Festival.
The show is curated by Ruta Nichol and Jacek Malec — the gallery up on the bright third floor at 10215 112 St. A full list of the 50-plus participating artists is at harcourthouse.ab.ca.
SPOILERS AHEAD. A few nerf herders have asked for my thoughts on Solo: A Star Wars Story — the least necessary Star Wars film since The Force Awakens.
While the story certainly suffers from posing numerous questions for which longtime fans already knew answers — will young Chewbacca survive the space train heist and so on — there was enough charm and fun scenery to say the film was well worth it.
Alden Ehrenreich definitely has the chops to be the central character in his own movie playing young Solo, and given that these stories are set in a galaxy with inconceivable technology and, you know, actual magic, I’ve decided the smuggler simply gets a face-change at some point as a deserter and outlaw before that fateful meeting with Ben Kenobi in the cantina, solving the Harrison Ford not-in-the-room problem.
Donald Glover utterly shines as Lando Calrissian, meanwhile, and the supporting cast — from Emilia Clarke to Paul Bettany — and especially Phoebe WallerBridge as the droids-rights activist L3-37 — played my emotions like a Vulcan lute. Yeah I did.
Noteworthy yet almost invisible is Anthony Daniels’ role as a slave named Tak on Kessel — continuing the C-3PO actor’s perfect attendance through all 10 feature films.
With the just-announced Boba Fett movie to be directed by Logan’s James Mangold, the slightly shaky modern Star Wars juggernaut has a chance to stabilize itself by taking cues from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Where in many narrative ways Civil War led to Ragnarok led to Infinity War, wouldn’t it be great if the Solo episode continued its story through the Boba Fett film? That narrative hot potato could then be passed to the one a lot of fans really want: Ewan McGregor back as Obi-Wan in a film or three.
Of course, it’s telling none of the films since the troubled prequels have attempted anything massively new — note Solo’s last shot of the dice to remind us of Star Wars and The Last Jedi, never mind the reappearance of Maul, of all people to make the cut. But by my count there have only been three Star Wars movies without at least one major indefensible bed-soiling — Star Wars, Empire and Rogue One — and Solo just squeaks onto that list, even if it’s not really in the same league.