The Works’ last weekend
Eight stops worth the walk as art and design festival winds down.
The Works Art & Design Festival When: through Tuesday Where: Churchill Square and 25 other sites Info: theworks.ab.ca Between 26 sites and one flat bike tire, it took me a couple of days to explore this year’s Works Art & Design Festival.
Spread out from 118th Avenue to the University of Alberta, tumbling through so many venues brings on that annual sensory overload, especially at group shows like the one at Harcourt House, where every submitting member was guaranteed art on the logjammed wall.
Following this year’s Works theme of human energy was everything from kinetic nakedness in the Big Tent on Churchill Square to an echoing blues overload on the mainstage to a hand-powered furnituremaking competition, which ended up supplying permanent benches to the Living Bridge project northwest of the old Remand Centre downtown.
More a hoarder’s shoebox of photos than a single snapshot of Edmonton, the festival’s most engaging work was ridiculously tipped toward female artists, from Betty-Jo McCarville’s Storytelling Bicycles to emerging illustration superstars like Jill Stanton and Genevieve Simms.
While most of the art was representative or basic abstract, occasional concepts poked through.
The ceramic work was particularly compelling in 2013, starting with a “man, how do they even do that?”
What follows is a quick guide of eight stops worth the walk, especially to give those calves a good stretch.
I’ll even put them in a walkable order for you.
1. Site 22, Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts (9225 118th Ave.): Isabelle Shen is a pretty rare emerging artist at age 90, but her first-ever show is absolutely worth the trip. Her pathos, tragedy and extremely expressive brushwork make sense coming from a longtime acupuncturist, and though sticking to classical Chinese archetypes of mountain scenes, deer, etc., her watercolours have a detectable hand behind them. One of the great surprises of The Works.
2. Site 19, Latitude 53 (10248 106th St.): Josh Holinaty is arguably Edmonton’s strongest illustrator, an abstract cartoonist with a wicked grasp of weird. He’s currently working on a huge project for Owl Magazine personifying germs, but his gallery of straight, sitdown realistic portraiture of local artists brings us back to Art 101 basics. Move in really close to his pencils and you can still feel the imaginary armies living in that hand. Megan Dickie’s giant objects in Flips Folly is also worth playing with, delightfully punchable!
3. Site 17, Alberta Craft Council Gallery (10186 106th St.): Both floors are rich with seriously amazing ceramic and glassware by trinomials. Kai Georg Scholefield’s alien wall daggers with glass brains (you honestly have to see them), Ryan March Fairweather’s Worry Dolls (beautiful ceramic tubes which appear to be frozen in the moment of being shot) and Phillip Murray Bandura’s subtle reference to Return of the Jedi are all tremendous craftsmanship.
As is Timothy Belliveau’s work here, but we’ll get to him …
4. Site 10, Enterprise Square (10230 Jasper Ave.): With prints dating back to the 1600s, it hardly seems fair the University of Alberta’s Size Matters is part of The Works, but it’s not a competition. Still, go — this is the best show in the city right now, a phenomenal collection of vintage and modern prints. Check out the linework in Tomoyo Uchida’s Nest #12, Karen Dugas’s Caravaggio-summoning photography and the usual obsessive-science wonder of Lyndal Osborne’s work. Michiko Suzuki’s Sonka’s Tent will have your head buzzing with ideas about what you should you print on fabric, probably your pet.
Then, outside the gallery, terrifyingly beautiful portraits of life in Palestine by Heather Spears, including surgery on a young child hit by gunfire. Just humbling and numbing.
5. Site 8, Commerce Place (10155 102nd St.): The Everything on Sale project is actually really hard to find, it’s so successfully a parody. It’s disguised as a store on the east main floor, and you can indeed buy things here, including broken toys repackaged by Adrien Koleric and Robert Harpin, white T-shirts with fortune-cookie labels by McCarville and Grace Law and a twin mattress for $650 — “warrantee is void if subject to romance or rest” — by Cara Seccafien and Morgan Malenka. You almost feel like you should be in trouble laughing out loud at this stuff within a mall. The volunteer even acted like a bored security guard when I went!
6. Site 12, Hotel Macdonald (10065 100th St.): Told you we’d get back to Belliveau. Go see his gorgeous glass squids at the entry to Confederation Lounge and tell me you don’t want one.
7. Site 1, Churchill Square: Her first foray into found-object installation work, Brenda Draney’s Provisions is best visited at night on Churchill Square when it’s dark and no one’s around. A series of campground tents illuminated from inside and entry-barred by intentionally oversized locks, she’s already discussing ideas of homelessness and outsider culture, under the shadow of City Hall. A recording has a young man noting all anyone talks about is Hobbema’s failures, listing its glories. I might have dropped the audio and left more mystery, but the intentions are clear and it’s strong, wrapped in the nostalgia of camping.
Even for the idea of putting carnival rides on Churchill Square, BGL’s big merrygo-round made of construction barricades and shopping carts deserves a look, and the expression on kids’ faces as they ride around on the manpowered mechanism is a treat, whether or not they know they’re spinning on a piece of conceptual art commenting on life on the streets. While you’re at it, hop on a Storytelling Bicycle, then see which logos you can draw from memory in a tent to the north. And any hour spent in Terrance Houle’s No Rhyme or Reason Big Tent is well spent.
8. Site 2, City Hall: Some of the best morsels of the whole buffet. Riding a common river of fantasy creatures and geography, the four artists (Allyson McIntyre, Hilary Mussell, Lisa Rezansoff and Genevieve Simms) all have a creepy-beautiful ability to twist the familiar into coveted objects. Mussell’s explosion of emotive owls, Parliament III, and Simms’s colourful walking narratives are especially worth seeking out. A great place to end our little tour and head to Curry N Hurry or Punky Potato and stuff those calories back inside.