33rd edition of popular arts festival gets a new look
The Works Art and Design Festival moves away from its traditional centre this year
Moving between the Works Art & Design Festival’s two dozen venues, you’re likely to notice something new about the city.
This year in its typical curiousoctopus way, the festival includes five permanent landmarks on its checklist map of stop-and-look stations — namely the Capital Boulevard Legacy Public Art Project, part of the Works’ Places series which runs all year under the open sky.
Running along 108 Street between the fest’s new, wide-open core on the legislature grounds and MacEwan University to the north, the most alluring of the five works is Sandra Bromley’s stone sandwich Sentinel, which layers a thick slice of rock from each of the 13 provinces and territories into a beautiful, tough-looking stack. Like her giant cube of welded weapons, Conflict, Sentinel has a simple message and focus: namely the power of numbers and sticking together despite our differences. It’s a great addition to our evolving urban reality.
Themed Paradigm for 2018, a number of shifts have certainly hit the 33rd annual Works like a storm. The most noticeable is its central hub dislocation to just north of the legislature. While this pulled headquarters is out into the open and away from some of the core’s iconic architecture, there’s a charming countryfair openness to the nucleus now, while at the same time the fountains are great fun, full of kids screaming and laughing. Overall, things feel less compressed and more inviting than in front of city hall, and the music plays into every evening through July 3.
You might want to grab your broadsheet map and follow along here (hopefully out of the wind), as we go through a few of this year’s highlights. I hit all but three of the venues, so here’s what stuck out the most. First up, Emmanuel Osahir’s giant box with a thoughtful centre looks at how someone new to Canada went through various
phases of awareness, realizing our country has its issues, too. His meditative space, In Search of Eden, is at a terrific James Turrell scale and includes a hanging wall garden amid photos of nature and homeless encampments. Quite powerful.
Yong Fei Guan’s recycledmaterial lions live nearby, and are fragile compared to the stone creatures from which they’re modelled — continuing this theme of displacement as the Harbin Gate currently sits in storage during the same LRT construction that pushed the Works to this new location.
Set for Unrealized Production (Poolhall), by Sandi Hartling, is also worth a stop in the core, tucked away between the vendors and the food trucks. Pink neon on the wall reads the ambiguous “just cause” and accompanying audio tells stories over a functioning pool table. Playing a game is encouraged.
Festival regular Kasie Campbell’s sculptural textiles made with her mother Ginette Lund before she died are also not to be missed, these nostalgic and strangely proportioned bags of flesh reminding us all of what we are, seen from a distance.
All of the venues are worth a visit, though some stick out more than others. Over at Rigoletto’s Cafe (10305 100 Ave.), you can almost feel the morning mist in Doris Charest’s pleasant landscape paintings. At Hotel Mac, meanwhile, Brian McArthur’s porcelain sculptures nicely complement Leo Arcand’s traditional stone work up at Matrix Hotel (10640 100 Ave.).
Over at Visual Arts Alberta CARFAC Project Space (10215 112 St.), the AFA Travelling Exhibition has its first stop here before moving around the province. It’s a show mixing art and history surrounding our local LGBTQ+ culture, including well-wishing from then-mayor Jan Reimer at our first Pride Festival. Across the hall, Harcourt House’s In Search of the Human Essence has a number of great works, including by Allen Ball, Ritchie Velthuis and Julian Forrest.
At another of our artist-runcentres, SNAP Gallery (10123 121 St.), Micheline Durocher’s Home and Garden has some of the most striking photographs of this year’s art buffet as she replaces her head with various objects, including flower bushes and a halved watermelon — worth the walk over.
The best of the hugged-intoThe-Works exhibits, however, is once again at Alberta Craft Gallery (10186 101 St.), where a show of staggering talent and imagination lives downstairs, including giant ceramic heads by Koi Neng Liew and a jaw-dropping cellphone holder/worship station by Aaron Nelson. Gorgeous.
To the northeast on 118 Avenue, Nina Haggery Centre’s collaborative show is wonderful, pairing art by the Nina Collective with staff work in fantastic coincidences of theme and method. Note the wall of fleshiness and the firefighting corner, especially — and of course art star Paul Freeman’s latest beautiful monstrosity. The show Encore was renamed from Cross Contamination as everyone noticed there was an accidental disease theme running though show titles — but the work’s infected my head for sure.
My absolute favourite piece of the festival is within a survey of Rommel Tingzon’s paintings, Portraits of the Philippines, at Manulife Place. This group of personal scenes is beautifully composed and painted, and though classically presented, is slyly modern and political. The most haunting of them is Carabao on the Beach, a young man leading an ox along, staring with his face turned out to the ocean and other possibilities.
Never mind art, if looking to the unknown isn’t what life’s about, I’m not sure what is.
And one last show that confronts our changing zeitgeist directly is at the Enterprise Square Atrium, 10230 Jasper Ave., simply titled Climate Change — though it’s not just about the weather. Between a wonderful latch hook of a hurricane by Vladimira Fillion-Wacknere to a crisp textile piece reading Time’s Up and titled #metoo, the work here is some of the most on-the-nose and precisely now in a festival that specializes in being just that — a lot of hard work, but definitely worth it.