From the Editor

Western Canada's art magazine since 2002

26 September 2017  Vol 2 No 20  ISSN 2561-3316  © 2017

From the Editor

I love to break up my work routine. And while I no longer get early-morning calls telling me to pack a bag and head off to the latest crisis, as I did when I was a journalist, the open road still beckons. These days, I'm more tied to my home base in Victoria, so the chance to visit Calgary last week was a welcome change. After catching an early morning flight, I popped into 13 galleries with Tom Tait, the magazine's publisher. The next two days were spent at an arts writing symposium organized by Contemporary Calgary.

Observant readers will notice this issue of Galleries West Digital is somewhat Calgary-centric. Our cover story, by Karen Quinn, looks at Calgary artist Sandra Sawatzky's epic project, the Black Gold Tapestry, to be displayed at the Glenbow Museum starting Oct. 7. An embroidered history of oil inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, it is 220 feet long and took Sawatzky nine years to complete. Elsewhere in these pages, I write about the extratextual exhibition at Contemporary Calgary, which also includes a brief update on the gallery's ongoing relocation saga.

While in Calgary, I saw plenty of interesting art, including abstract paintings by Mark Mullin, whose show at the Paul Kuhn Gallery is also featured in this issue. Other favourites included a retrospective by the late Joane Cardinal-Schubert at the Nickle Galleries, our next cover story. And there's a fascinating show at the Esker Foundation by Mary Anne Barkhouse, who juxtaposes animal sculptures with ornate Louis XIV furnishings to explore ideas around Indigeneity, colonialism and the environment. I'm hoping we can write soon about her work.

It was also good to check out shows we have written about in previous issues  – Ideas for a Wall at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Diane Landry at VivianeArt and Oksana Kryzhanivska at Herringer Kiss. At the latter gallery, I also enjoyed the well-worked surfaces of Curtis Cutshaw's paintings. I'm a sucker for texture, which probably explains why Yechel Gagnon's gouged and scraped plywood pieces caught my eye at Newzones. There's too little space here to mention everything, of course. All I can do is to encourage you to get out on your own gallery hop.

Now, it's time to get back to work. Spending four days on the road was great, but a mountain of emails awaits. I bet if you stretched them out end-to-end, they'd reach all the way to Calgary.

Until next time,

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE: Stacey Abramson, Agnieszka Matejko, Karen Quinn