"The News from Here: The 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art," Art Gallery of Alberta, January 26 to May 5, 2013

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"Herbacentrice"

Jennifer Wanner, "Herbacentrice," 2010-2012, stop-motion animation, running time: 6:02 min., dimensions variable.

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"The Despair Wallpaper"

Donna White, "The Despair Wallpaper," 2012, digitally printed adhesive-backed PVC vinyl, 11’ x 33’.

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"The Despair Wallpaper"

Donna White, "The Despair Wallpaper," 2012, digitally printed adhesive-backed PVC vinyl, 11’ x 33’.

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"06:21"

Laura St. Pierre, "06:21," 2012, inkjet on self-adhesive polypropylene, 94.5" x 275.5".

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Justin Desforges

"Wave Interference"

Robyn Moody, "Wave Interference," 2012. Courtesy of Robyn Moody. Photo credit: J. Guzzo Desforges.

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"RCA, king!"

Chris Cran, "RCA, king!," 2012. Courtesy of Trepanier Baer Gallery, Calgary and Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto.

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"The Wood and Wave Each Other Know"

Jason de Haan & Miruna Dragan, "The Wood and Wave Each Other Know," 2011. Production still. Courtesy the artists and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

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"Pipe Dreams"

Bruno Canadien, "Pipe Dreams," from the Freedom Fighter Series, 2011. Photo Credit: John Dean.

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"Ascension"

Alysha Creighton, "Ascension," 2011. Production still. Courtesy of the artist.

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"Magnetic Reconnection"

Kyle Armstrong, "Magnetic Reconnection," 2012. Production still. Courtesy of the artist.

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"Jack & Jill Room (morning)"

Kristopher Karklin, "Jack & Jill Room (morning)," from the series camp life, 2011. Inkjet print. Courtesy of Skew Gallery, Calgary

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The News from Here: The 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art

Art Gallery of Alberta

January 26 to May 5, 2013

By Katherine Ylitalo

A glimpse of red at the entrance to the Art Gallery of Alberta beckons from Edmonton’s Churchill Square. Luxe, by Laura Vickerson, is a sumptuous damask intervention within the curvilinear metallic sheath of the gallery and the first of 48 works visitors encounter at the province’s eighth biennial of contemporary art. Catherine Crowston, the gallery’s director and a key figure almost since the biennial started in 1996, invited Nancy Tousley, an award-winning critic, writer and independent curator, to curate this latest version, a snapshot of current activity in the province’s visual arts scene. As an insider for more than 30 years, Tousley has reframed Alberta’s cultural community, developing a model of post-regional practice that proposes the province’s artists are not working within a region, a term that implies distance from a dominant center – as they were certainly regarded in the late 1960s – but rather, within a specific place, and, concurrently, within an increasingly interconnected world.

The curatorial process started some 18 months ago with a call to artists that yielded 164 portfolios. From these, Tousley made 62 studio visits and selected 36 artists (including four collaborative pairs). Her approach was generous, encouraging artists to experiment, stretch and create new work. The result is an exhibition of mostly new pieces. Some are in development, like Terrance Houle’s trailer and stills announcing the upcoming video, isstahpikssi – Ghost. Others are envisioned as part of a larger project, like Pamela Norrish’s humble but scintillating Outfit for the Afterlife. Still others signal experimentation with technique and form, such as veteran Chris Cran’s foray into hand-painted cast polyurethane.

The artists aren’t a group of the usual suspects. Only six have exhibited in previous biennials, and many had not met before. Their work takes a range of forms – painting, printmaking, photography, animation, sculpture, installation, video and film. Whether emerging or senior, almost all demonstrate high skill levels, both in concept and technique. Most work is multi-layered, often in unexpected and disarming ways. For example, the random pattern that underlies the elegant aerial weaving by Mackenzie Frère is generated by an online record of lightning strikes. Many artists fold a measure of homage into their work. Jennifer Wanner, for instance, nods to early underwater work by 20^th century filmmaker Jean Painlevé with the anthropomorphic choreography of her deceptively gentle generation of genetically modified plant forms that reveal their dark side in the stop-motion animation, Herbacentrice.

The exhibition’s overall strength resides in the thoughtful way Tousley has constructed and installed the work as a proposition of interlocking and overlapping themes, offering a singularly satisfying experience. Viewers might find themselves surprised by changes in scale as they move like Alice in Wonderland between things that make them feel giant (Emily Luce’s The Cardiff/Miller House) or, as in Sarah Fuller’s Experiment in Landscape, No. 1, that draw them into a small world on an iPad. They can survey a vast landscape from a fire tower that is also a sound box for a handmade cello in Jason de Haan and Miruna Dragan’s The Wood and Wave Each Other Know. Some works are built on discernible patterns, while others consider mortality and possibly transformation. Alysha Creighton’s video, Ascension, is screened above viewers in the main atrium, while Eric Cameron offers a grid of dipped Remembrance Day poppies in Thanatos II, and Faye HeavyShield, a plate of wafers in Currency. Viewers can also take home a recipe for horseradish and apple tea improvised by Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton while urban foraging. Certainly, the works in the show span a wide spectrum: They are energetic, animated, evocative, thought provoking and hypnotic. Almost all are good and some half-dozen are stellar.

Laura St. Pierre, who showed earlier photographs at the gallery in 2010, achieves remarkable technical resolution and clarity of expression in the staged photograph, 06.21. The setting is an urban outskirt poised between development and neglect at the magical moment between night and day on Midsummer’s Eve. It could be anywhere, but St. Pierre claimed a site in Grande Prairie as the stage for her fictive drama. Automatic grow lights shine in makeshift utility-pipe greenhouses. They illuminate overgrown, trapped tomato plants that continue to grow although the gardener seems to have fled. The work is smart. St. Pierre addresses issues of urban life with wit and demonstrates she is aware of the larger context of contemporary art practice.

St. Pierre’s panorama exemplifies some points in Tousley’s discussion of a post-regional ethos. In the catalogue essay, Tousley expands on the exhibition’s title. “The From Here puts the focus on the resonances of place, as well as the politics of being located (placed), a central issue of human geography,” she writes. “And it takes the position that whether or not it is immediately apparent in a given artwork, place is a significant factor in the making of art and art is a significant factor in the shaping of place.”

Meanwhile, Noel Bégin envelops the viewer in an interactive projection, A Decombinant Diapositive Verisimilitude Leaning Precarious Against the Verdance. Some 22 slide projectors cast different images on a 10-foot-high wall. The resulting collage constructs a fictive urban backyard at night. A close look reveals that the garden’s flowers, akin to the lavish, idealized bouquets of 16^th and 17^th century Dutch still lifes, could never bloom at the same time. Bégin’s enchanted garden conflates the summer barbecue season through the blooming times of violets, lilacs, delphiniums and lamb’s ears. As visitors walk through the room, they cross paths with projections, erasing elements from the montage and revealing others – whether a bicycle partially hidden by a bush or a woman on the ground. Viewers become players in the construction and deconstruction of the scene, while, in the background, the testy projector’s mechanical squeal repeats itself.

Other highlights include Robyn Moody’s Wave Interference, a mesmerizing cascade of undulating fluorescent lights that causes an organ to drone. New Jersey, a grid of 50 terse abstractions, testifies to Richard Brown being at the top of his game as a painter. Wild Life, a short animation by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby in the film program, is beautifully told and wonderfully rendered. The short film, Magnetic Reconnection, by Kyle Armstrong, is a haunting juxtaposition of the northern lights and gritty disintegrating structures. Donna White achieves stunning results, bringing poetic ideas to life through meticulous photographic processes. With the sinuous grace of William Morris patterns, images of lead weights become a pattern of tears in Despair Wallpaper.

DaveandJenn, the duo of David Foy and Jennifer Saleik, make a superlative push. Their installation, TheBindingLine, incorporates the fanciful narrative of a parallel universe and layers of miniature illustrations embedded in a thick slab of transparent resin. As if a portal opened between their imaginary world and our physical one, the incredibly detailed resin object is a burden on the back of a life-size, double-headed, bearlike, skeletal creature in tow behind a mysterious cloaked figure. Its sculptural presence is electrifying.

Is this biennial a fitting snapshot of what goes on in Alberta? Whether or not viewers can fathom the argument for a post-regional condition, they certainly should feel the pull of an engaging web of interlaced ideas and experiences. Perhaps the exhibition’s success is due, in part, to a shift in how Albertans look at themselves. I only hope Albertans, too, are developing as a post-regional audience.