Aug. 18, 2010 - Issue #774: Blues Fest

Revue

Peering beyond stereotype

Alberta's gems are hidden in Timeland

In the panel discussion for Timeland, one of the few things said about the actual show was Richard Rhodes' assertion that he had avoided art that looked like it was trying to be elsewhere, to be a part of an international commercial esthetic, in favour of finding work that was quietly doing it differently in Alberta. The show is rather more complicated than that.

The first room of the show is packed with flashy colourful fragmentation with just such a look of elsewhere success. Jason de Haan's "Salt Beard" provides something to put on the poster. Chris Millar and John Will compete for most crazy combination of bright things put together in a slightly haphazard but probably very considered way (if you only stopped to look at it long enough). Scott Rogers provides some audience-implicating conceptualism. All of these are, like two-thirds of the show, imported from Calgary and mostly men, and they seem like a perfect realization of a basically uninformed Edmontonian's stereotype of what art down there is like, fed by insecurities about our northern isolation and the way that big Torontonians like Richard Rhodes don't really know about us. Only the Cedar Tavern Singers' wall comes from elsewhere.

I'm being a jerk now, and Millar deserves some excitement, but I am terrified that most visitors to the AGA this summer have only had their ideas about contemporary art confirmed, their experience wrapped up in the press-release hype of the building and the sponsors. People who miss out on the real strengths of the show, which Rhodes has tucked away, hoping someone will pay close attention. People like the couple who peeked into Wednesday Lupypciw's "Tranzar É Pras Amantes: Sex is for Lovers" and without even noticing the carefully constructed amateur special effects and the terrifying awkwardness that makes it compelling, decided it was pornography and that one of them didn't even want to look a little bit despite having paid admission to the gallery.

Like Lupypciw's work, there are little places around the corners and through doorways in the smaller rooms of the show that make it worthwhile. Seek out Clint Wilson's homemade solar eclipse. Turn left from the first room, and brave past a Robert Geyer to see a whole set of David Cantines sitting on a shelf—but by the time you get there you've already walked right past Kris Lindskoog's amazing middle finger to the inattentive, a small circle of painty bottles of water on a low pedestal with a tiny, scratchy background soundtrack which most gallery visitors—especially the frantic masses of new members on opening night—never notice. That's Alberta art. You'll find gold in the big works too, among Walter May's monuments and unfortunate decisions made by Kristin Ivey and Chris Willard. This is Alberta too: Rita McKeough, Paul Bernhardt and Ron Moppett take up the drive for bigness and the province's strange architectures in crowd-pleasing and funny work.

Back in the first room, despite the press, the real action is in two places: The Cedar Tavern Singers' sharp but underproduced songs grounded in a bogus conviction that they aren't actually musicians, and John Will's huge, ridiculous wall of ugly hyper-masculine paint reaching beyond the province while stuck in its insidery local jokes and paired, self-consciously, with a poster of "NOTHING." V

Until Sun, Aug 29
Timeland
The Art Gallery of Alberta (2 Sir Winston Churchill Square) vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus