Western Canada's art magazine since 2002
12 September 2017 Vol 2 No 19 ISSN 2561-3316 © 2017
From the Editor
Portia Priegert
The crunch of leaves underfoot reminds us that autumn is fast approaching. While this seasonal shift can be bittersweet, it’s also a lively back-to-business time in the art world as galleries launch important new shows. So much so, it’s been difficult to narrow our focus, and in this issue, we’ve expanded by one our usual offering of “five things” to check out across the West.
Fall, of course, is when students return to school, which can also evoke nostalgia. I still feel an impulse to buy new notebooks at this time of year – the feeling of possibility offered by a blank page is enticing, even if we messed up the last one in every way imaginable. Of course, notebooks have a way of filling. Mine never stay tidy for long – I’m happily writing or sketching, and then, oops, a first doodle and then another, or perhaps a shopping list, or someone’s telephone number, and soon I’m looking at a familiar visual cacophony. I marvel at people who can maintain an orderly page.
Thus, I found Murray Whyte’s essay on artist studios, the lead article in this issue, particularly fascinating. Reflecting on the work of Joseph Hartman, who has photographed some 120 studios across Canada, Whyte observes that these spaces come to reflect the personalities of their occupants. My studios, like my notebooks, quickly become cluttered. Looking at Hartman’s images, I found kindred spirits, but also some who maintain an eerie order. Their notebooks are probably tidy too.
Hartman's images are memorials, in a way, to artists and the production of art, as well as the public's long fascination with the creative process. As I thought about this issue of Galleries West Digital, I realized it also includes other stories that reflect, however tangentially, on memory and memorials: remarkable drawings of the brain by a Spanish neuroscientist; a new public art project in Regina that reminds us of a discriminatory law of the past; and a Winnipeg show that critiques a colonialist monument, a timely topic in light of the ongoing dispute over the Edward Cornwallis statue in Halifax.
Oh, and that sixth thing? On Friday I picked up the phone and called Ronald Burnett, the president of Vancouver's Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He answered his own phone and was happy to chat about the university’s new $123-million campus. It’s his blank-page moment – before students make the pristine building their own, spilling paint, challenging rules, asking awkward questions and developing as artists, irrepressibly, through it all. Their notebooks, whether paper or digital, will come to mirror their personalities, and like the countless generations of artists before them, they will go on to produce work that reflects their world, with all its messy wonders, its joys and contradictions.
Until next time,
CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Beverly Cramp, Edwin Janzen, Marcus Miller, Murray Whyte
