Casa’s Project Space features seven exhibits
Casa has a new feel throughout the building.
Seven new exhibits opened this past weekend, with the launch of the new Casa Project Space for local emerging artists.
The project space is a gallery case outside of the main gallery which allows young and emerging artists in the community to display specific instalments, with a small honorarium for the artists.
“We are excited to launch the new Casa Project Space and we have given over one of the display cases for emerging and young artists to do specific instalments,” says Darcy Logan, curator and gallery services manager at Casa. “Our first artist featured is Arianna Richardson with Hobby Shop where she deals with themes of hyper-consumerism, recycling, the trash that is part of this capitalist society we are living in. She takes these objects and then uses her artifice to make them into interesting objects."
The main gallery on the main floor is shared between two local artists, Karla Mather-Cocks and Karen Campbell, who bring contrasting perspectives into their exhibitions.
Mather-Cocks’ instalment, called Sins & Insecurities, is a suite of photographs with woven structured baskets and a confessional in the centre of the gallery. The ethos of the exhibit stems from the tension she feels in her life, an artist, a mother, all of these extremes that she has always held to and the resulting feelings of guilt.
Campbell, a longtime member of the local art community, is showing her exhibit called Lilac Shadow where she has created this suite of large formalist, abstract drawings in coloured pencils on paper, dealing with themes of illness and convalescence. The labour-intensive drawings involves layers and strategic placement of form.
Outside of the main gallery, a part of Leila Armstrong’s Backyard Wilderness exhibit, is on display where people are able to see photos from her PhD thesis where she captured animals in urban backyards to explore the relationship between humans and wildlife. Also outside the main gallery is the Ophelia Studies by Alicia Barbieri and McKenzie Bond-Holloway where they have restaged the famous paintings of “The Death of Ophelia” from Hamlet and recontextualized them using photographs.
On the upper floor of Casa, a display of Blackfoot spirituality paintings hangs above the main stairs by John Chief Calf who brought some of his students’ work along with him.
“Nitsokowaiksi is by John Chief Calf, who was the FNMI teaching liaison for School District 51,” says Logan. “He does his own work which is based on Blackfoot spirituality but he also invited students that he had worked with in the school district to think about themes of reconciliation and those have been put in the showcase at the top of the stairs. Everyone has shown reconciliation in different ways and it is very personal.”
Also along the upper floor hallway is Valleys and Views in Wax by Tanya Melnyk. She is responding to the themes of landscape using encaustic, which is a process where pigment is added to beeswax and then heated up and quickly applied to the surface.
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