BELCOURT, WILLANS RECOGNIZED WITH PRESTIGIOUS CITY ARTS AWARDS
Two of Edmonton’s great annual awards have been granted for visual arts and book authorship.
Fresh from his win of the $65,000 Griffin Prize — Canada’s biggest poetry award — Billy-Ray Belcourt of Driftpile Cree Nation has taken the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize for his poetry anthology, This Wound is a World. Along with the award comes a $10,000 cheque, sponsored by Audreys Books and the Edmonton Arts Council.
Belcourt is a 2016 Rhodes Scholar currently studying in the Department of English and Film Studies at University of Alberta. The book is his first collection of poems.
This year’s jury stated, “This Wound is a World comes as a punch to the gut, a cold shower, a knife to the temple. Each poem is a bracing call to attention. All of the jurors described the experience of reading these poems in physical terms — we could feel in our very bodies that Billy-Ray Belcourt is doing something original and vitally important.”
On the shortlist were Norma Dunning ’s Annie Muktuk and other stories, and Lisa Martin’s beautiful Believing is not the same as Being Saved.
The winner of the seventh annual Eldon & Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize, meanwhile, is haunting still life painter Gillian Willans, nominated and represented by the lovely Scott Gallery on 124 Street. This also comes with a $10,000 bonus with assistance from Visual Arts Alberta and EAC.
Willans’ beautifully lit paintings of nostalgic home settings are both familiar and questioning.
“My aim is to have the spaces reflect the middle-class ideals and gender roles of the people who should be present, not unlike the 17th century Dutch genre painting I openly reference. I am interested in suggesting the value systems found in gender, family, privacy, intimacy, comfort and luxury, while encouraging the viewer to think about the domestic spaces of past and present relevant to his or her daily life,” Willans said.
The two shortlisted artists for the prize are Isla Burns and Blaine Campbell, who were awarded $1,000 apiece. The six previous winners are Arlene Wasylynchuk, Paul Freeman, Brenda Draney, Julian Forrest, Gary James Joynes and Sean Caulfield.
There’s something coy about the fact Found Festival is almost hidden away in Old Strathcona. Put on by Common Ground Arts Society and in its seventh year, the July 5-8 festival specializes in bringing art, theatre and music into the community and unusual found spaces not typically used as venues.
Like The Works, the fest’s core has moved this year, explains artistic director Beth Dart.
“We’ve moved the festival grounds to Backstage Theatre Alley, so between the Fringe building and the Strathcona Street Car terminal.
“We also moved two weeks later than we have been in the past, so we’re happening the same weekend as Art Walk this year. While strolling Whyte Ave looking at visual art, people can pop by the Found Festival beer garden, see some free music, and find out what Found is about.”
Found Festival’s events run from free, pay-what-you-can to about $15 for some of the theatre events. The full lineup is at commongroundarts.ca/found/ and includes comedians exploring their mental health issues in I’m Listening, a queer poetry reading called Identity Alchemy, and an Old Strathcona murder mystery called Off ’d on Whyte.
“All the festival performances are world premieres this year,” Dart notes. “Whiskey Business, taking place in Strathcona Spirits (10122 81 Ave.), is a brand new escape act. When it opens at Found Festival, it will be the first time in the world this underwater escape has been performed in front of an audience.
“Nasipewin is a sound art performance using field recordings of the river valley. Going down the hill to the river — Nasipewin’s rough translation — captures how the sounds of the valley have changed since colonization. Nasipewin is Jordan Koe’s artistic debut. The audience will actually go down the hill toward the river to witness a sound performance in and among the current soundscape of the river valley.
“We’re technically still on the hunt for the perfect venue for Meet Me Under the Gnarly Tree by Harley Morison, because the perfect tree that was intended to be the backdrop of the performance was chopped down. Which pretty perfectly sums up what makes Found Festival such an exciting part of the Edmonton community: festival artists are often honouring spaces we pass by daily without much thought, and Found Festival asks us to engage with spaces around Old Strathcona in ways we rarely do.
“We’re also partnering with The Next Act to take over their walls for the month of July with artwork from Lauren Crazybull, who is the newest McLuhan House artist in residence.
“This festival pushes local artists to connect with space and community in new ways, which really pushes these projects beyond what we see inside conventional venues.”
Because of impending renovations to the Muttart Conservatory, the current show by the Sculptors’ Association of Alberta will be its last planned exhibition under the pyramids for a year or two, says president Ellie Shuster.
I went to the opening Tuesday and it was a lot of fun wandering through the various ecosystem pavilions, sniffing around for the crafty and folk-art sculptures of flamingos, pharaohs, classic Star Trek characters and — you know it — Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
A couple dozen sculptors are involved, including Ritchie Velthuis, who’s currently working on a top-secret project destined to be one of Edmonton’s destination pieces of public art, eh.
More on that soon, but in the meantime this show, Out of This World, runs through Sept. 5, included with admission to the bio-pyramids. It’s also a fine chance to visit one of Edmonton’s greatest public paintings, Alex Janvier’s four-sided mural from 1976.
Finally, local punk act No Problem’s album release of Let God Sort-em Out is Friday night at 9910. Lead singer Graeme MacKinnon talks about the process.
“The third album is always an undertaking. Most punk bands don’t even get to three, and when they do they have added saxophones or mandolins or the help of a shaman. We decided the best thing to do was to break away from our DIY style of recording and hit a proper studio. In July/ August of 2017 we got together with our longtime friend Nik Kozub and recorded at the Audio Department right here in Edmonton. I’m glad we did because the space and Kozub’s technical know-how really pushed us to create something unique with more atmosphere. Something a bit more complex and challenging, where guitars and sounds could strangely hang around the corners of a runaway rhythm section.
“I think the current state of the world really pushed the lyrical content. It’s been a few years of madness — anger, mass shootings, police abuse, madmen careening the world into oblivion, high rents, truth and reconciliation and understanding our nation’s traumatic past … really a crazy time for the planet and the theme of people finding their place in a damaged world really started to creep in.
“That being said, throughout so much destruction and impending doom I still think there is hope and it’s going to come from within the community. Grassroots, DIY folk making art, music and film is the best therapy, a way for people to escape the madness and make sense of it all and realize that change comes in time. Everything comes in cycles and we just need to ride this one out.”
The band is joined by Languid and Sister Suzie, doors at 9 p.m., tickets $15. This’ll be a wild one, wear your lightest armour.