Crowsnest Pass influences new SAAG exhibits
The rocks, the scarred mountain, the tragic history: the Crowsnest Pass can be an awe-inspiring place.
Three Canadian artists are sharing their responses and reflections in new exhibitions, opening tonight at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. While one show probes into the eons of pre-human history, the other contemplates merchandising the valley’s legends and stories to aliens from another galaxy.
In “A Slow Light,” Alberta-trained artist Tyler Los-Jones used once commonly seen materials — burmis wood, carbon-based chains, slabs of rock and coal — and transforms them into eye-catching objects.
His stated goal is “to generate experiences for wayfinding, disorienting and re-orienting our sense of time and space in a complicated present.”
His close-up photography shows refected lights and objects in the Pass area in a new way.
Los-Jones based some of his ideas on his explorations two years ago, during an artist’s residency at the Gushel Studio in Blairmore. Some of his previous works are part of permanent collections at the Banff Centre, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the federal government.
Quebec-based artists Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens are more recent guests at the Gushel Studio — formerly a pioneering Pass photographer’s studio. They began to exhibit their current show “The Golden USB: The Trade Catalogue of Everything” several years ago — but they’re determined to localize it as it travels the country.
Their concept springs from a “Golden Record” sent into deep space decades ago, offering any intelligent being who found it a sample of the music and language and ideas of that time. Vastly expanded and updated to represent today’s technology, their on-view sampler represents a digital catalogue of everything the world’s businesspeople might be willing to sell to an other-worldly civilization — if the price is right.
Their series of videos, multidimensional items and smaller objects illustrates what could be sold.
Capitalizing on the legacy of the Crowsnest, an entrepreneur could create some kinds of mementoes or merchandise that aliens might want. “If it is true we have forgotten how to imagine anything beyond the horizon of capitalism, then the logic of late capitalism has successfully aestheticized and commodities history in its own right,” they suggest.
Historic objects may be seen to have no intrinsic value of their own.
It that’s the case, SAAG spokesperson Corley Torsk is inviting visitors to bring and leave small objects they value little, which may be of some interest to aliens!
“We move around a lot,” says Ibghy, having taken this show to four previous locations — where they also researched and included items of local importance. Their next stop is the gallery at Simon Fraser University.
The two shows open to the public at 8 p.m. today, with a no-charge artists’ reception. They’ll remain on view until Feb. 4.