Naturalisms

Holly de Moissac

June 8- 29, 2019

Naturalisms is a depiction of the imaginary transformation that occurs when materials shift from “natural” to “manmade”. In this mystical (and previously undocumented) state, real-synthetic-green-materials, hardware, minerals, bone, and processed trees combine into alchemic hybrids that reflect on the very essence of “natural”—whatever that means. Originally taking the form of an artist’s book, Naturalisms tells a story of human engagement with the global ecology that is impacted by the insatiable desire to both aestheticize and master natural resources.

Holly de Moissac is an Edmonton-based visual artist and Master of Fine Art candidate in Printmaking at the University of Alberta. When she’s not making a marginal art income, Holly can be found at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the Arts, where she supports developmentally disabled artists in the printmaking studio.

How to Build A Wall
performances by Stacey Cann

May 17, 18, & 19, 2019

Walls can both protect and isolate. This work is about protection, withdrawal, and vulnerability. How to Build a Wall uses humour and absurdity to confront real issues of protection, frailty, isolation, failure, and building barriers.

Stacey Cann is an Edmonton based artist who uses performance and installation to confront the daily realities of her life. Her performances often use absurdity and humour to explore her experiences of street harassment, working, and social isolation. Stacey has shown her work throughout Canada and the United States.

Splendid String

Cynthia Fuhrer

February 23 - March 16, 2019

Artist Statement

No man is an island, we do not exist in isolation. We are not separate from the natural world, but are a part of it. Connected to it. I believe that God is present in all life, all beings, all creatures. As such, all life must be respected and cared for, as one would honor God. Life is God, God is life. My work examines the relationship between humans and the natural world and a spiritual connection to its inhabitants (animals) through large scale figurative paintings. Human elements (figures, carpets, wallpaper, graffiti) are juxtaposed in a natural setting with mythical animals. The subjects are presented as a formally composed portrait, directing their gaze acknowledging and confronting the viewer. These themes are explored in typical Canadian landscapes with iconic Canadian animals. Elements of beauty and peaceful coexistence and suggestions of biological technologies provide hope for the future.

LIMINAL SPACE | | AWASITIPAHASKAN

Marina Hulzenga

June 2 - 30, 2018

LIMINAL SPACE: The space of a threshold from one domain to another.

AWASITIPAHASKAN: ‘Across the border line’ in the Indigenous language of Cree.

By unfolding and deconstructing the map, this exhibition pays witness to the border spaces of Alberta’s 141 First Nation Reserves. At the edges of these reserves an expanse of liminal space lies, manifesting itself through various physical, social and emotional experiences. With this collection of maps, a new territory of conversation is created.

Photo credit: Miriam van Eck.

View Marina Hulzenga's work online at http://www.marinahulzenga.com/

Against the Patriarchy: Tools for the Revolution
Stephanie Jonsson

April 21 - May 12, 2018

Artist Statement

“For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.” - Audre Lorde, 1979

Through this body of work, I am attempting to dismantle the Master’s house without the use of the Master’s tools. These sculptures are a set of metaphorical feminist tools with which to smash the patriarchy. I am digging deep to find the areas within myself that uphold systematic herteronormative white male privilege. While using traditionally female dominated arenas of life (domesticity as a revolutionary act), I am reclaiming craft as a viable voice of dissent. In this, I grapple with my Modernist artistic upbringing and its agenda to negate craft and ornament. This body of work is a response to this patriarchal world and its histories, seen through the lens of Craftivism, which aims to create wider conversations about uncomfortable social issues. 

For more information on the artist, please visit http://stephaniejonsson.com/

Regarding Mary
Marlena Wyman

March 10 - April 7, 2018

Regarding Mary is inspired by the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, interpreted in representations of her as mother, through materials that speak of women’s work, and through her “found Mary” explorations.

In her former work as an archivist, Wyman found that one of the significant gaps in archival collections and in mainstream history is that of women’s stories, especially early prairie women. As an artist, she advocates for their rightful place in history, and encourages women to deposit their own and their foremothers’ records in archives.

View more about Regarding Mary and Marlena Wyman on her website and blog.

Contemporary Relics
Dominika Koziak

February 10 - March 3, 2018

Contemporary Relics takes a look at the transcendence of idolization in today's media and pop culture into the realm of religion. Dominik's paintings reference icons and relics of Catholicism, with re-imaginations that              challenge the boundaries of devotion and obsession.

    View Dominik Koziak's website here

HOME:
A Group Show Curated by The Green Room (IFSSA)

May 23 - July 4, 2017

As children of immigrants who are living on Treaty Six territory, what does home mean to us? As Muslims living in North America, what does belonging look like, especially given the recent political climate? As people of colour living in a time of immense fear mongering, what does it mean to build a home and community amongst friends and strangers?

The HOME exhibit is a showcase of photographs that depict the meaning of belonging, family, and rootedness to fifteen Muslim youth in Edmonton.

More information and a listing of Conversation Series events tied to HOME can be found here.

Visit The Green Room (IFSSA) online at http://www.thegreenroomyeg.ca

WILD FOLK
Hilary Mussell

February 4 - March 11, 2017

Sculptural works by Hilary Mussell. View Mussell's sculptures on her site at http://www.hilarymussell.com/#!sculpture/c1zuo

Built to Last
Carly Greene

December 3, 2016 - January 21, 2017

Installation artist Carly Greene explores memory and shelter in the Bleeding Heart Art Space.

Visit Carly Greene online at http://www.carlygreene.com

Open Walls 2

October 29 - November 19

Everyone gets space in this annual group show open to artists from backgrounds and skill levels.

Our walls. Your art.

A NEW BEGINNING
Brandon Atkinson

SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 22

Drawings that blend Atkinson's tattoo-inspired style and stories from his Indigenous traditions.

(This show was part of the Kaleido Family Arts Festival.)

What Bernice Sees
Bernice Caligiuri

May 21 - July 2, 2016

Bernice Caligiuri is an multi-disciplinary self-taught artist and long-term resident of the Parkdale Community. Her work spans decades and nearly every conceivable medium, from poetry to painting; photography to sculpture; furniture making to crochet to cross-stitch landscape painting.

Visit Alberta Avenue and you’re likely catch Bernice sharing coffee at the Carrot or reading poems at an open mic. She may be wandering the Kaleido Festival grounds in her trademark purple jumpsuit and matching purple hair. She might walk up to you to hand you a photograph she’s taken. A photograph of you.

What Bernice Sees presents dozens of previously unseen works by Bernice Caligiuri, curated to reflect the sheer volume and variety of Bernice’s creative output over decades. The Bleeding Heart Art Space will be transformed into menagerie of creative explorations, with new discoveries in every corner. In addition to 2 dimensional visual works and sculptural pieces, a large bookshelf will house forty photo albums packed with snapshots Bernice has taken of the Alberta Avenue arts revitalization.

Printed copies of Bernice’s poems will be available to read, with a live reading from Bernice at the show’s opening. 

Come and let What Bernice Sees change the way you see.

Sweet Jesus
Borys Tarasenko

MARCH 19 - APRIL 30, 2016

Come to Jesus

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.” ­ Mahatma Gandhi

My name is Borys Tarasenko. At the time of my birth my dad was parish priest at Sts. Borys and Hlib Church in Redwater, Alberta, so it is no great mystery how my name was chosen. I go to church at least once every week. Sometimes more than once a week. It has been this way always. Hours a week I am surrounded by Byzantine iconography, a very specific visual system establishing the Christian narrative and the individuals important to the Catholic Church. I have been an altar boy, a priest helper or “palamar”, a youth group member, a pincher of parish perogies, a choir member, a church janitor, and a cantor. Figuratively and literally I have grown up very close to the Church. However, few who are close to me would call me a spiritual person. My formal education led me away from a Catholic understanding of the universe and my principles have grown to be different from those of my Church. But the rituals I grew up with are my rituals today, and I continue to attend church.

With SWEET JESUS, I am attempting to articulate the beauty and incongruity of my own spiritual life and play with what I feel is at the heart of the New Testament. SWEET JESUS is a series of site­specific temporary murals in the Bleeding Heart Art Space, and an amplification of my colouring book, the original springboard for this content. Prayer is not always oral. Colouring has an unmistakable meditative quality, and iconography is viewed as prayer. In this way, the audience is invited to colour and complete SWEET JESUS with their own offering of visual prayer.

About the Artist

Borys Tarasenko is a Canadian artist and illustrator based in Edmonton, Alberta. A BFA Art & Design grad from University of Alberta with a focus in Painting, Borys now works in a variety of media to examine spirituality, human consumption, and cultural identity. This past year Borys released SWEET JESUS: A Colouring Book, a collection of illustrations acting as an eccentric supplement to the lore of Jesus Christ. Borys, a church cantor and son of a Ukrainian Catholic priest, further investigates a complicated and incongruous spiritual life with the interactive, site-specific solo exhibition SWEET JESUS.

Ni wapataenan (We see)

February 7 - March 5, 2016
92nd Street and 118 Ave

Ni wapataenan is Michif for “we see” (Michif is a traditional language of the Metis people).

The We See project seeks to participate in the process of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous people as laid out by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In particular, this project hopes to further reconciliation in Edmonton neighbourhoods and communities by creating opportunities for engagement and response through art, listening, conversation, and interactive educational activities. 

We See aims to engage the stories of our shared history in this land. When we are able to see ourselves and our place in the stories of the relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples, and see how those stories intersect with the stories of our own lives, then we can begin to imagine a new story together--one where each of us can take action to acknowledge truth, and pursue healing, justice, reconciliation and change so that the future does not look the past. Our hope is that new ways of seeing will lead to new ways of thinking and acting.

We See has chosen to highlight the lived experiences of missing and murdered indigenous women and their families through an interactive, participatory outdoor public art installation incorporating red dresses and an empty tipi frame. Metis artist Jamie Black’s work with red dresses has made them a way of making the nearly 1200 missing and murdered indigenous women of this country present and visible as mothers, sisters, friends, daughters and as part of the fabric of our communities

On Sunday, February 7, at 2 PM, this installation opened in the field at 118th Ave and 92nd street.

This project has been inspired by the REDress project originated by Jaime Black in Winnipeg. 

We are so grateful for her work, and her encouragement of related projects which have taken shape across the country. 

Find out more about her original project at http://www.theredressproject.org

kâ-katawasisicik iskwêwak
Lana Whiskeyjack

January 30 - March 5, 2016

kâ-katawasisicik iskwêwak is pronounced [kaa kut tuh wus SIS (sit) tsik ISS kway wuck] and means "beautiful women", "women who are beautiful".

Artist Statement

My art springs from gratitude - a powerful teaching and practice of my grandmothers. I create to honour them; to continue the work they left to challenge me; and to express that which fear attempts to silence. The beauty of my grandmothers stems from their freakish strength and courage. I am eternally grateful to carry the blood of these strong nehiyaw iskwewak (Cree Women). When I create, I connect to spirit, not just mine and those I came from, but also to those who bless me with their presence and guidance.

Each work of art communicates the iskotew (fire) that lives within the centre of my iskwew (woman) being. The place that my passion, determination, and Cree humour reside. Colour and form sing that which my words cannot express, each sending their waves of energy to communicate the light that defies the darkness. I create to transform the darkness of being from oppressed/colonized/assimilated people into the dream of all our grandmothers and grandfathers – to live a good life - miyopimâtisiwin.

Art is language that carries spirit. I want to speak my truth. To educate, to create dialogue, and to share good medicine.

ay ay mistahi – thank you with great respect

About the Artist

ayisîyiniw ôta asiskiy I am human being from this earth.

Lana Whiskeyjack is a multidisciplinary treaty Indian artist from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, Treaty Six Territory, Alberta. Among her early influences and teachers were her mother's and grandmother's gifts in the traditional arts (beadwork, moose hair tufting, fish scale, moccasin making, quilting, and sewing). At 10 years old, her mother's gift of a book of Pablo Picasso’s etchings changed her life, the simple and expressive lines influenced her to draw on everything she could.

After graduating high school, the young single mom moved to Red Deer to attain her Art & Design diploma, then moved with her two children to Edmonton to work at the Royal Alberta Museum, after a few years she returned to school to fill her hunger for sculpting at the University of Alberta. She fell crazy in love with a brilliant Cree man and joined him in an adventure that included moving across the country to Ottawa, attaining B.A. (Honours) and M.A (Canadian Studies) degrees. The story continues with doctorate degree at University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills in iyiniw pimâtisiwin kiskeyihtamowin (Indigenous Studies).

Guided by her grandmothers advice, “Go to school, travel, and see as much as you can. Then return home to share what you learned, but do not forget where you came from.”, Lana returned home to work at the first Indigenous owned and operated educational institution in Canada, UnBQ. Prior to 1970, UnBQ operated as Blue Quills Indian Residential School, where two generations of her maternal family attended.

Lana’s research, writing, and art explores the paradoxes of what it means to be nehiyaw (Cree) and iskwew (woman) in a Western culture and society and how she and other Indigenous women are reclaiming, re-gathering, and remembering their ancestral medicine (sacredness and power)

Her art is passionate and expressive, born from the deep roots of her culture, history, and ancestors. With emotionally charged expression, Lana art ranges from dry wit to soul-full colourful creations. Through the examination of sometimes difficult subjects, her art reflects the intrinsic beauty of her interconnections with the earth, environment and living beings. She invites you to join her on the next chapter of her adventure.

View Lana Whiskeyjack's website at lanawhiskeyjack.ca

Waiting Room: A Sound and Video Installation
Alysha Creighton

November 21, 2015 - January 15, 2015

Alysha Creighton’s new multimedia work Waiting Room poses the river as a site of healing, source of life and liminal place. This two part installation addresses both the interior and exterior spaces of the gallery through video, sound and interactive technologies.

A large-scale site-specific video projection illuminates the exterior of the gallery. The imagery of running water interjects in the dark, mid-winter cityscape of busy 118th Avenue. The projection runs through the night, bringing light and motion to the street.

Inside the gallery an immersive soundscape envelops viewers with the sounds of rushing water. Viewers are invited into a contemplative space where they may interact with the soundscape exploring the tension between sound and silence.

Alysha Creighton is a visual artist working in drawing, video, installation, and performance-based practice. She holds an MFA in Drawing and Intermedia from the University of Alberta. She has exhibited extensively within Edmonton as well as across Canada and the United States. She is a drawing instructor at the Univeristy of Alberta and a lead artist at the Nina Haggerty Centre for the arts. 

www.alyshacreighton.com

OPEN WALLS: Works from Community

OCTOBER 24 - NOVEMBER 14, 2015

OPEN WALLS is a grand experiment in community creativity. We have opened up our space for the public to submit a work of art which we will display, and if they want, sell. There are very few limits, and very many wonderful pieces to take in.

Early test results are positive.

Forgotten Places
Riley Tenove

September 5 - October 22, 2015

"These works concerning Edmonton are a reflection on mental states and the urban environment ... my personal interest seems to stem from a desire to remember forlorn areas of towns and the unique ideas they conjure in me. Each painting in this series is meant to depict the beauty of the forgettable and their novelty ... This series focuses on the under-appreciated areas of town with a sense of transience in order to emphasize that subtle influence a place has on our daily lives". - Riley Tenove

Riley Tenove is an Edmonton based artist who holds a Diploma in Fine Arts from MacEwan University.  Find him online at http://rileytenove.space

The Battle of Barking Creek
Rob Harpin

June 20 - July 2015

The Battle of Barking Creek was the first time one of the most beautiful aeroplane designs showcased its prowess and ability over the skies of Europe. Three days into World War II, Supermarine Spitfires shot down two fellow British aeroplanes killing one pilot and chalking up the first British airman casualty of the war. This exhibit explores the Spitfires elegant design and a deadly mistake. 

Bridge Songs: Perfict

June 13, 2015 

Art, music and language that deals with perfection, perfectionism, failure and utopian ideals. 

Presented at St. Faith’s Anglican church.

www.bridgesongs.ca

The First Metaphor
Poetry By Kelly Shepherd
Linocuts By Alison Kubbos

April 19 - May 30, 2015

"The First Metaphor is a collaborative gallery show made up of 14 linocut images by Valemount BC visual artist Alison Kubbos, paired with 14 poems by Edmonton writer Kelly Shepherd. These pairings, or “stations,” are meant to explore and blur the lines between the conscious and the unconscious, and particularly between the human and other-than-human worlds. Hidden (perhaps not too deeply) within the 14 stations are mythical, ecological, and religious images and themes." (from the Edmonton Poetry Festival website)

Life2
Curated by Mark Power

March 28 - April 11, 2015

"Life2 selected seven parolees, each vetted for their determination to make a change for the better, and paired them with seven of Edmonton's most talented photographers."

Get more info on this exhibit at giveofyourself.com

Inner Core
Marcie Rohr

Saturday January 10 & Sunday January 11 

"It’s that time of year again. Frozen wind chapped cheeks, running to various places of warmth, away from the cold. A time when we are so subject to the whims of Mother Earth, we find ourselves aching for a warmer day—or for somewhere else, no matter where. My work reflects the angst I feel as these cold winds blow; driving me inwards to seek shelter, and in the same instant driving my very blood towards vital organs. It’s in winter that I truly wonder what is at my core. I draw from Indigenous themes of the Medicine Wheel as I ponder all I have to learn about the ways of these cold winds: how they can act as agents of change to shift and sculpt what is at my core. My work reflects concepts of winter from various vantage points: historical, Indigenous, aerial, philosophical, non-western, and traditional. In relation to my travels, it reflects the mercilessness of all the climates I have faced, in far flung corners of the globe, freeing me from the illusion that Canadian winter is always the highest ground for self-pity. Through INNER CORE I seek to ask the viewer to consider what aspects of their subconscious person are exposed and sculpted by the harsh winter winds." - Marcie Rohr, 2015

Blue Christmas
Featuring glass by Keith Walker

December 6-21, 2014

Longest Night Liturgy on December 21 at 4 PM

Our first installation in our new home on Alberta Avenue, Blue Christmas will create a space for shared grief during the holidays–a time of difficult joy for those who have suffered loss at this time of year. 

Get details here.

Bridge Songs: Dear Edmonton,

June 14 | St. Faith's Anglican Church

#JusticeYEG

November 15 & 16, 2013 (Part Of The #JusticeYEG Conference)

See photos from this exhibit Read a full reflection on the gallery here.

Bridge Songs: Heartbreak

June, 2013 | St Faith's Anglican Church

This year's annual event focussed on Heartbreak. Our gallery featured works by Grace Law, Alexis Marie Chute and others.

Let's Begin

November, 2012 | The Studio

A group show exploring beginnings, endings and the season of Advent. Featuring works by Jessica Culling, Alexis Marie Chute, Little Miss Justice, Keith Walker and Lori Anne Youngman.