ARTFUL ALLIANCE
124 St. galleries celebrate female artists
Gallery owners Angela Bugera, Rachel Bouchard and Heather Hamel couldn’t help but notice something as they tried to energize the 124 Street exhibition spaces surrounding them. There’d been an open invite down the street, but let’s face it, everyone needs a 36-hour day these days, right? Even Bear Claw Gallery, owned by Bugera’s sister, was tied up.
“In the end,” Bugera said, “Heather, Rachel and I were the only ones at the table. We said, ‘Let’s just do something together since we’re the ones pushing for collaboration.’”
So the three gallery owners are planning an event involving all women.
“The Manor Cafe has become our meeting spot — lovely neighbourhood cafe, glass of wine, some dinner. We remarked, isn’t it interesting we’re three women gallerists? Three women art professionals?”
And so it was Bugera — who runs Bugera Matheson Gallery — came up with a show sparked by this coincidence: a three-gallery celebration of female artists.
Featuring dozens of artists local and otherwise, the Women - Art Compelled - Mind – Originations exhibition will run simultaneously through Aug. 25 at Bugera Matheson, Bouchard’s Front Gallery and Hamel’s Scott Gallery.
Opening night is Wednesday and it goes 5 p.m.–8 p.m., no charge as always.
Each of them has different reasons for working together, but Bugera said she was motivated by “a little bit of frustration there was not an eagerness to collaborate and co-operate. Because that’s really the way for people to get to know who we are again.”
“The Gallery District has lost a lot of cache, and I have a long history of knowing the history around here. All the gallery (location) moves in the last few years, the art walks (around the city) and the ways artists are marketing these days …
“We’d better band together and have a voice otherwise we’re just going to be forgotten.”
She adds, “And as uncomfortable as it is, there is still a difference in the way we’re approaching business (as women). And it harkens all the way back to me being a woman in business and asking, ‘ Well where are we now?’ We’re the owners, we do have some say but the conversation’s not over yet.”
Bugera has been running underfoot in Edmonton galleries since she was 12, when her firecracker mother Agnes Bugera opened Bear Claw Gallery in 1975. She’s since retired and lives in Kelowna.
Her daughter notes, “She started it because she wasn’t getting the recognition she deserved, working at the Bay in the jewelry department, not getting the recognition or the money as a buyer, but out there doing the work.
“When she started Gallery on Whyte in 1985, it was very maledominated. She wasn’t always taken seriously. I do recall times when she was asked to be careful about what she said. She not only ignored that advice, but said something deliberately off colour to give everybody a bit of a poke.”
Partially, this is Angela Bugera’s poke, and in her space she focuses on three artists — Wendy Skog, Karen Yurkovich and Alex PeckWhyte — at three different stages in their careers. “They were all raised in Edmonton, all went through the University of Alberta BFA program at different times. Wendy went the earliest. Karen is my age, we actually went to school together. And Alex is the newbie, graduated in 2007.”
Bugera notes some of her artists — 17 out of her 37 artists are women — were wary of joining a “women’s art show.”
“Those conversations may have to come out at the opening,” Bugera says with a smile, but notes, “Alex, the youngest, put it a wonderful way: that she’s never felt inequality but that it’s been the women in her life and the women in her profession who have most pushed her forward.”
Bugera thinks it’s a revolutionary time. “When I was a kid, looking through those magazines, and it was Gloria Steinem and women’s lib, all those powerful women — you better believe that empowered me. And it’s happening again.
“I lived a life like that. Young women now can’t help but be empowered and impressed with the women who are speaking out.
“The ambivalence everyone is feeling about this show, maybe a year or two from now, maybe five years … Why are you afraid of being ‘pigeonholed’ (as a woman)? That, for me, says we’re not done yet.”
Each gallery is taking its own approach, naturally. Scott is having a group show with numerous artists, including a longer list of guest artists from the community not normally represented by them, including staff.
The roomy Front, meanwhile, has the work of a dozen women on display, including a beautiful series by Verna Vogel of beautiful abstracts. Bouchard’s statement says of her artists’ work: “Articulating what they need to say through a profound investigation that is unique to each of them, the exhibition reveals terrible secrets, hidden pasts, the love of nature, and community — paralleled by an exploration of peripheral senses.
“Whether social constructs had a significant influence on the awareness, or the process by which these women became artists, there is no question that the message that Women in Art (what the show at Front is titled ) brings is one of women promoting women.”
Over at Scott, Hamel brings it back to what motivated her. “We were just, ‘How do we come together once in a while to bring people to the gallery district, show them something a little different?’ We’re women gallery owners and most of the time we’re doing this solo. We’re looking at the women artists here and seeing if there are things we share in common.
“It’s not to isolate,” she says. “It’s not in opposition to anybody, it’s seeing where the commonalities are, and gender can be a commonality. But it’s not to bring down anybody.”
If this experiment goes well, we can expect more such teaming up.
Says Hamel, “I think the main emphasis for me is coming together to see what we can do together as galleries, outside of Gallery Walk.
“This is different — more, what is this? How do we do this? It developed organically.
“We went back and forth, and it worked out quite nicely.”