The upcoming Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, to be held at the Art Gallery of Alberta in 2013, will be guest curated by award-winning critic and independent curator Nancy Tousley. Of the seven Edmonton-based artists included in the exhibition, four have connections with the Department of Art and Design: Alysha Creighton, Maria Whiteman, Sherri Chaba, and Gabrielle Paré.
Maria Whiteman, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Alberta, is represented by her video installation Touching. The work examines the primacy of touch in the encounter between humans and animals within the environment - and discourse - of natural history museums. For the past decade, Whiteman's practice has addressed the relationship between the human and non-human worlds, and how "we conceptualize, visualize and narrate our relationships to and understanding" of those worlds.
Alysha Creighton is currently in her final year of the MFA program in Drawing and Intermedia. Her video work, Ascension, "explores a poetics of the body, a language of gesture, a space beyond words." Her practice is "concerned with materiality and embodied encounter," and investigates how bodily identity has become mediated by our experience of digital technologies.
Sherri Chaba is a Drawing and Intermedia alumnus who received her MFA in 2007. A longtime rural Albertan, her practice revolves around the possibilities of a "post petroleum centered society" with a view towards sustainability. Her drawings, sculptures and installations "often merge historical artifacts with industrial materials" as they negotiate the competing values of politics, ethics, history, the economy, society and the environment. Her work for the Biennial challenges viewers to reflect on social and environmental issues that impact us locally but are also relevant nationally and internationally.
Gabrielle Paré graduated from the department with her BFA in 2011. That same year she collaborated with artist Daria Hirny on murals commissioned for the university's Chemistry Building. For the Biennial, Paré is contributing three photo-etching/chine collé prints from her recent series, depicting ephemeral scenes of imminent violence. Capturing the intersection of reason and the irrational, she is "exploring the way lived experiences transcend the body. It is in this transcendence that a person is the most open and vulnerable." Paré will be attending a printmaking residency in Berlin in 2013.
The exhibition also includes the work of a number of former graduate and undergraduate alumni who have since left Edmonton. Jewel Shaw, currently of Red Deer, is an MFA printmaking alumnus from 2008, and Laura St. Pierre, currently of Grande Prairie, graduated from the BFA program with distinction in fall 2003.
Since its inception in 1996, the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art has presented works by over 130 contemporary Alberta artists. The upcoming exhibition, entitled The News from Here, will explore the theme of post-regionalism in the context of Alberta art. According to guest-curator Nancy Tousley, Alberta artists, working in the second decade of the 21st century, are forming their identities around the places they choose to live, work and travel - the idea of a single, dominant centre is no longer applicable as it is distant and divorced from their daily lives. They are now, more than ever, aware of the larger art world in which they participate. In this exhibition, the physical, societal and cultural geography of Alberta is felt in the works of art, both in the foreground and background of imagery, subject matter, content and critical issues. Rather than a defensive regionalism, one finds in their work an acceptance and consideration of place.
Links:
36 artists from 9 Alberta communities; the AGA announces the artists to be featured in the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art
Seven Locals Picked for Biennial
Maria Whiteman's Official Website