Carl White (Sept. 8-21): Poetry, mythology and art collide in his angelic-satanic juxtapositions, with realist faces on surrealist backgrounds. The Calgary mixed-media artist has many techniques including encaustic, using a molten beeswax and paint mix originally used by ancient Greek sailors.
David Wilson (Oct. 6-19): Vancouver’s not big enough for this resident whose paintings of New York streets protrude with energy in his filmic details, from wet concrete to yellow cabs to apartment windows that invite voyeurs.
Catherine McAvity (Oct. 27-Nov. 9): McAvity’s landscapes of Western Canada’s lakes pop with the colours she mixes for a natural effect.
Leonard Cohen (Nov. 17-Dec. 1): Leading up to his highly anticipated concert, Cohen’s collection of drawings and sketches from Granville Fine Art Gallery in Vancouver are simple, yet reflective of the mysticism and spirituality found in his songs and poems.
Barbara Amos and Peter Deacon (Feb. 16-Mar. 2): Ever see paintings that you’re not quite sure which side is up? With Amos’s landscapes, it doesn’t matter; her fragmented landscapes can be viewed any way. That’s not true of Deacon’s photo-transfers on copper plates, which he buries for weeks at a time to for depth and a shade of green unique to rusted copper.
Janice Mason Steeves and Scott Pattinson (Mar. 9-22): Two of Guelph, Ont.’s biggest names, the artists aren’t shy about putting bright colours into chaotic arrangements. Steeves’s modus operandi is scratching cold wax into colour patterns, while Pattinson’s bright colours and violent arrangements tread graffiti-style art.
Scott Plear (Apr. 6-19): Using the Colour Field technique, that originated with 1950s New York artists, Plear applies vibrant colours and overlapping shapes to gain an emotional reaction from his viewers.
Gisa Mayer (May 4-17): The German artist’s love of the Rockies tumbles into her landscapes cherishing the jagged peaks and monochromatic colours that maintain the massive depth.
Part of Misled by Nature at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Misled by Nature (Sept. 15-Jan. 6): There are vast similarities between art made during the Baroque era and what’s featured in this exhibit. This collection of new works explores those similarities to show there is no expiry date on great artistic techniques.
Beautiful Monsters: Beasts and Fantastic Creatures in Early European Prints (Oct. 13-Mar. 3): Renaissance and Baroque-era artists of Western Europe portrayed a battle of good and evil in their etchings, woodcarvings and engravings. See 30 historic artists’ visions of demons and beasts, the grotesque and disfigured, which were remarkably popular between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Imprint: Contemporary Art from the AGA (Oct. 13-Jan. 6): In its third instalment, the Special Collections Gallery dedicated to displaying eight local artists juxtaposes the Beautiful Monsters exhibition by comparing historic work with contemporary art.
Edo: Arts of Japan’s Last Shogun Age (Nov. 3-Feb. 10): Explore life and customs in Japan’s Edo period — the people’s classes, their occupations and even hair and wardrobe fashions — along with Samurai armour and tools, textiles and paintings.
Paul Freeman: It’s Only Natural (Nov. 3-Feb. 10): Paul Freeman’s two stag sculptures will tilt viewers’ heads ever-sideways when they see how he’s reconfigured life-sized horses with antlers sprouting from all over their bodies to explore mutation and hybridity.
Art by Alan Bédard, part of the Twelve Days of Christmas at the Daffodil Gallery.
Miles Constable (Sept. 5-22): Don’t get hung up on the meaning of abstract paintings when it’s all about the physical expression of an artist, like Miles Constable, who experiments with texture, shape and white space.
Tracey Kuffner (September): A Duchess, Alta., farmer, Kuffner often uses felt from her own sheep’s wool to create functional art, such as scarves and bags. This time, however, it’s to create animals and natural scenes on canvases.
Saeed Hojjati (October): See how the shadows fall over the Mediterranean buildings, how the window curtains wave and how the people’s clothing crease with their movements, and ask yourself, “How did he paint that from memory?”
Igor Postash (November): Postash’s caricatures of everyday people being seduced has characteristics of both realism and surrealism, reflecting his humour. Another reflection: His signature is somewhere different every time.
The Twelve Days of Christmas (December): Stretch the holiday season with this second annual 124th Street tradition, wherein the gallery walls display several different artists every day for 12 days leading up to Christmas, with live music in the gallery and prize draws.
Bernadette McCormack (March): Her thick black outlines and bright acrylic palettes put a stained-glass look on landscapes, totem poles and Beatles’ songs interpretations.
Frances Alty-Arscott (April): Frances Alty-Arscott captures autumn in watercolour and acrylic paintings, playing with photographic depth and natural qualities, such as water reflections. You might recognize some of the scenes, stolen from Edmonton.
Featured at the Harcourt House Artist Run Centre.
Around the Sun (Sept. 13-Oct. 13): Travel photojournalist Dan Hudson explores time and memory with a video that time-lapses a single scene of looking outside a residential window for a year, that’s juxtaposed by a soundtrack of newscasts from the same 12 months.
My Darling Deviants (Sept. 13-Oct. 13): Marcia Pitch plays with toys, by dismembering them, swapping their body
parts and mounting them on walls and tables for all to see. The discomfort you feel is not unlike her anxiety in large crowds, she says.
Nests (Oct. 18-Nov. 24): See the fragility of birds’ nests up-close when artist-in-residence Sydney Lancaster’s installations of enlarged nests run along the stairwell and outside the gallery. Meanwhile, the main gallery will feature artist’s interpretations of nests in the form of drawings and sculptures.
IcarusCar (Oct. 18-Nov. 24): Let artists Evann Siebens and Keith Doyle fulfill your fantasy of a flying car with a documentary-style film about the quest to design a car with wings. It’s based on a 1949 car design called Aerocar One, but set in rural southern Alberta.
Marie de Sousa (Dec. 6-Jan. 18): De Sousa’s sculptures, made from her father and brother’s old clothing, are shredded and then fed through sausage tubing long enough to be contorted into three-dimensional images. Hungry yet?
Corey Jennifer Hardeman: Rooted (Dec. 6-Jan. 18): How well do we understand most species, let alone our own? Hardeman’s oil paintings focus on the finest details of different wildlife in an attempt to better understand these animals and, in turn, herself.
Student Showcase (Jan. 24-Mar. 1): For many of these fourth- and fifth-year University of Alberta and Grant MacEwan University art and design students, it’s their first opportunities to get in a commercial gallery and show off their best work yet.
Steve deBruyn (Mar. 7-Apr. 12): The intersection between art and skateboarding goes beyond graphics on decks. DeBruyn’s beautifully painted skate ramps are built from found material and, as he proves inside, totally functional, man.
Laura O’Connor: Little Fears (Mar. 7-Apr. 12): Things O’Connor fears: Having a detached retina, facing clowns and hoarding. Ways that she interprets them: Cute, lighthearted characters made with fibre.
Megan Dickie presents an exhibit that you can really get your hands on at Latitude 53.
Aimée Henny Brown: How the West Was Won (Sept. 28-Nov. 3): Brown’s combination of Morse code messages, Western pulp fiction covers and miniature landscapes explore myths and tropes of the Wild West, with all of its antiquities and adventure, not to mention her personal childhood fantasy of being a cowboy.
Circumstances with Some Earth and Sky (Sept. 28-Nov. 3): Executive director Todd Janes wonders if the public will think Kent Tate’s work doesn’t belongs in the gallery. Why? “It’s really pretty.” But multiple soothing, romantic video loops of industrial and natural sites sound like Latitude to us.
Chuck Samuels: Before Photography (Jan. 11-Feb. 9): The son of a very technical photographer, Samuels is more playful with his images, creating a meta-narrative wherein he places himself in video stills and iconic images representing different points in his life and his relationships to his father and others.
Mark Templeton and Nicola Ratti (Jan. 11-Feb. 9): Though not quite astral projection, you can still travel through the world without leaving the gallery, when Templeton and Ratti give you an intercontinental experience with sound and video that plays off of typical museum audio guides.
Jing Yuan Huang: Transmigrating Inadequacy (Mar. 1-Apr. 13): Meditative and contemplative, Huang’s collection prints hang throughout the gallery, from floor to ceiling, completely immersing the viewer in the artwork.
Circles of Confusion (Mar. 1-Apr. 13): Kyle Whitehead creates a structure out of old VCRs and record players and turns them on to recordings offering a narrative, with a clear climax and refrain.
Megan Dickie (Apr. 26-June 1): Finally, an exhibit that begs to be touched. Dickie’s colourful fabric and fibre structures of architectural and mathematical representations are playful and physically interactive.
Kristen Keegan (Apr. 26-June 1): Keegan questions the fallibility of memory with drawings and paintings based on photographs. How easily they can be manipulated begs you to question the accuracy of those photos.
Forged steel structure by Isla Burns, being featured at Peter Roberston Gallery.
Isla Burns: Samskara (Sept. 13-Oct. 2): The Calcutta-born artist, whose 20-year-old canoe-shaped structure sits on the north side of City Hall, forges and casts steel into organic shapes, to make heavy, rustic objects into something graceful.
Jonathan Forrest (Oct. 6-23): In his new works, the Scotland-born painter’s signature is protruding geometric shapes with layers of bright paints that create a unique sense of depth and dimension.
Perceptions in Scapes of My Land and Mind (Oct. 27-Nov. 13): If Hunter S. Thompson painted landscapes, they might turn out like David Alexander’s — distorted scenes with shallow valleys and surreal colours that somehow still give a true sense of the landscape.
Wanderlust: Scott Cumberland (Nov. 15-Dec. 4): Looking at one of Cumberland’s paintings, you can practically see how he tossed his brushes and used a carpenter’s trowel to create swirls on colour backgrounds.
Joseph Hartman: Return (Nov. 15-Dec. 4): Hartman unveils a personal body of photography from Heron Bay and Collins, two small Ontario aboriginal communities from his past. Having only lived in the towns as an infant, his previous memories are those constructed from stories and old photo albums.
Alice Teichert (Mar. 30-Apr.16): Passively look at the Paris-born artist’s paintings and you’ll notice a horizon with an unnatural palette. Look closer and you’ll see the thin layers of paint, laid out with a squeegee, the seamless blending of contrasting colours and the imprints of numbers, words and scientific notations.
Jim Davies' landscape paintings are featured at Scott Gallery.
Jim Davies: Prairie Darkness (Sept. 22-Oct. 9): Davies’s new landscapes don’t miss the beauty of nature at night and depict rural Alberta’s nocturnal majesty, from the pinks of the sunset to the shadows of trees to the subtlety of moving clouds.
Wendy Wacko: Soaring (Nov. 17-28): Wacko takes oil-on-canvas landscapes to new heights — literally, as she’s been flying over Highway 22 to get an elevated sense of the landscapes she recreates.
For the rest of the season, go to scottgallery.com
W.H. Webb's landscapes of Southern Alberta are featured at West End Gallery.
Rod Charlesworth (Oct. 13-25): Rare and perfect summer sunsets, with reds and pinks flying across the blue sky, get captured for eternity by Charlesworth in his oil paintings of Canadian landscapes.
Paul Jorgensen (Nov. 3-15): With the warmth and playfulness of an illustrated children’s book and a meticulous eye for details, Jorgensen paints suburban and urban scenes with oblong shapes and bright colours.
W.H. Webb (Nov. 17-29): After retiring from education, the England-born landscape artist dedicated himself to paintings of his adopted home, southern Alberta, and getting every blade of grass and ripple of water just perfect.
Jingle and Mingle Group Show (Dec. 6-24): Is there anything better than fresh snow, the sounds of carolers and nice walks? The West End Gallery teams up with the other galleries along 124th Street and Jasper Avenue for holiday mingling and an eclectic show featuring close to 40 painters.
Claudette Castonguay (Feb. 16-28): A regular feature in the gallery since 1994, Castonguay’s work features whimsical characters and spring-like colours reminiscent of early children’s book illustrations — obviously inspired by her previous career, as a kindergarten teacher.
Raynald Leclerc (Apr. 13-25): Quebec’s romantic countryside is a constant inspiration for Leclerc, whose pallet-knife paintings mimic the textures of wood-grained churches and country homes, smooth flowing summer grass and rocky foothills.
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