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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20140914
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20181013
DTSTAMP:20250801T205444Z
CREATED:20250801T205444Z
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SUMMARY:Wasteland / Wanderland
DESCRIPTION:About the Exhibition\nWasteland / Wanderland  – exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford \nAny soul born from childhood will connect with the universal experience of growing up\, a sensation that Laura Peturson implores with apparent effortlessness – and capitalizes on as a space to draw attention to the world that today’s children are destined to inherit. Within large scale murals\, Peterson immerses her audience in a fantasy land that at first glance seems separate from the adult world. And yet\, there is something looming in the margins. Some hunch that two realms are in a quiet conflict with each other. The innocence of children\, so enchanting in the ease of their wonderment\, is being invaded by the greater\, corruptible\, ever more complicated context that  cradles them. The world we live in now.  \nLaura Peturson is based just outside of North Bay\, Northern Ontario\, a place known as “the gateway” between North and South. And so it is no accident that Peturson’s work also serves as a gateway\, a journey between two worlds. Her journey includes a B.F.A from York University in Toronto in 20011\, followed by an M.F.A from New York Academy of Art in 2005. And for the last decade\, Peterson has given her time as Associate Professor of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Nipissing University in North Bay Ontario. She has shared a myriad of exhibitions along the Eastern artistic hubs of Canada and the U.S\, including numerous shows through both Ontario and New York. Those shows have featured Peturson;s printmaking with a focus on relief\, screenprint\, and papercut processes. Though\, like any artist\, describing her simply by her academic history and preferred mediums falls drastically short of capturing her body of work- a narrative- based exploration of the defining experience of childhood and how its imprint and resulting identity interacts and resonates with place. And like many of her themes\, the notion of “place” represented an interconnected series of manifestations\, including geography\, internal space\, familial environments\, a globalized planet\, and no doubt much more than that. For Peturson is an artist that doesn’t seem too concerned with operating inside these constraints.  \nHer work is likewise ungoverned by arbitrary rules or constrained by boundaries\, be they artistic or imposed – most importantly those often self-imposed. And yet\, as much as her work exists in a boundless world\, it also lives on a razor thin edge\, that place that Peturson herself describes as\, “The line between peril and safety\,” a notion echoed in the title of her exhibition\, Wasteland/Wanderland. And “wander” and “wonder” and in doing so blurs the line between each. And wonder most certainly has a place in this exhibition as well. Be prepared to be immersed in an uncanny world\, an experience carrying with it both the familiar and the deliberately unknown. This Wasteland/Wanderland\, most definitely evoking a forest as a totem that immediately conjures a sense of both danger and whimsy\, borrows well from the history of children’s stories. Should anyone have had the good fortune to come across the original images from the wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland there will be a familiarity in the artistic style of Peturson’s work\, clearly influenced by earlier print images in children’s books. Within these woods\, overgrown\, dead\, or dying\, there is an instant sense of both nostalgia and fear. Nostalgia for the uninhabited and explorative experience of childhood and fear in the wisdom that burdens adulthood\, the recognition of peril and decay. But the dread that seeps out of every chasm and fissure in every root and every tree\, is still so easy to ignore\, even as it threatens to overtake the children that recall such a sense of enchantment.  \nChildren have been called the world’s most valuable natural resource\, and the irony of that claim is apparent in Peturson’s world\, intended or not. This precious resource\, incumbent with inheritance\, children are unwilling participants in the chapter-book of our collective worlds. Just as we all were once. And now\, in a space where we’re allowed to stand on the edge between that penultimate innocence and the gravitas knowledge we now possess\, what will it mean to each of us? What will we walk away with? What will we leave behind? Because in the answers to those questions\, may be the world that we entrust to the children.  \nAbout the Artist \nLaura Peturson is a printmaker based in Northern Ontario. Her work uses narrative to explore themes of childhood\, gender\, and place. She is interested in the ways the domestic spaces we inhabit as children form our identity and a conception of our place in relation to family\, geography\, and nature. Peterson’s recent work has been exhibited at Flowers Gallery (New York\, NY)\, The Thunder Bay Art Gallery (Thunder Bay\, ON)\, White Water Gallery (North BAy\, ON)\, and Idea Exchange (Cambridge\, ON). In January 2017\, she installed a 9 x 16 ft printmaking mural at the Gladstone Hotel as part of Come Up to My Room\, an exhibit in the Toronto Design Offsite Festival. Her recent curatorial projects include a national artist residency for the creation of site-specific installations in North Bay entitled You are Here: Visualizing Place at the Gateway to the North. Peterson teaches printmaking\, painting\, and drawing at Nipissing University. 
URL:https://albertaprintmakers.com/event/wasteland-wanderland/
LOCATION:Alberta
CATEGORIES:Exhibition Past,Past
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20180223
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20180408
DTSTAMP:20250801T202104Z
CREATED:20250801T201756Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250801T202104Z
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SUMMARY:Absurd Walls
DESCRIPTION:About the Exhibition\nA room without pictures – exhibition essay by Dan Shipsides  \nA room without pictures. I don’t like the pictures. Why?\nThey are all scary\, so scary.\nHow do you mean?\nDying people and lots of dead bodies and monsters.\nI don’t want to see anymore pictures\, why are they so scary? Well\, I guess it’s a complex set of reasons…\nThey scare me.\nI know. I’m sorry\, I suppose they are meant to be scary. But why?\nHmm. Well\, remember these paintings were made before TV and the\ninternet when there were not so many pictures in the world as there are now.\nI want a room that’s empty. Can we go to a room without pictures?\nThey are so freaky.\nYes\, I know. Spooky and monstrous too.\nAnd lots of naked people\, some of them being chopped up or stabbed. I know. I guess they try to make you imagine the bad things that might happen\, or show the horror of the world then or to fear the spirit world. But why are there pictures of that?\nWell\, they are stories which were made to be very vivid and dramatic so people would remember them and probably then be worried about themselves.\nI think they also show that some people are the winners and that the losers are punished either by god or by the laws made by the winners. So the dead people are bad people?\nThat’s often the idea but sometimes it flips around so the dead people are meant to be the good people but the pictures show that they suffered for their goodness.\nBut it’s so real and those people look poor and weak\, not like baddies.\nAh well\, yes that’s true… \nThe architectural face of the city is designed to mask the horrors of exploitation\, the core business of capital\, often in a morally encoded form of awe\, a surface veneer of sheen\, civility and moral power. ‘Everything here is Normal\, Proper and Right… ‘\, but behind that countenance there’s a sniggering\, lusting\, reveling\, wild heart of darkness that no architectural fac;ade can truly keep at bay. \nYet this masking acts as deception that quick turns to absurdity. Sisyphus is not pushing his rock up the mountain for fun\, it’s because it is the only action allowed to him as a punishment for daring to enact his own will. There’s nothing now he can do to escape his task but acknowledge its absurdity and push on. This absurdity of meaningless agency is an agency that nonetheless shifts responsibility to the individual to deal with the consequences (thank Sigmund and his nephew for that…). \nAbsurdity and its proximity to the grotesque darkness of selfish power is well revealed\, in what is the prototype of the Theatre of the Absurd\, in Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays. Ubu is the absurd central character who gains power and acts in such a clearly nakedly unveiled manner that it’s impossible not to recognize that any fac;ade is absent. He kills\, steals\, brings upon his subjects a magnificent benevolence and then with equal measure capricious terror. All the acts of a man in power who cares for nothing but the immediate desires and cravenness of the self. He is unmasked and unchecked in equal proportion to the city which is fully masked and apparently ‘in check’. \nIn Huskisson’s compelling images\, gallery installations and urban interventions the darkly absurd is unmasked\, paradoxically often through the wearing of masks(or as human-animalhybrids)\, but it is not unchecked. Rather the work becomes the screening\, surfacing and texturing of our experience. The inner and concealed is openly revealed or acted out on the surface\, above ground\, in the open. But its revealing isn’t unchecked because there lies a level of filtering which synthesizes with humor and craft which is turned to critique\, self-exploration and honesty. A judgement is at play which is finely tuned to the affective so that the viewer is faced with their own subject-hood and implicated as the source or absence of meaning as much as the artist. In Huskisson’s work a sense of the overwhelming or excess is active but here it is not an exercise of power like the city’s architecture or the megalomaniacal behaviour of leader\, the aesthetic power here pitches towards states of unbecoming and draws from a combustible mixture of nineteenth century transcendentalism and from Beckettian animalistic rituals of repetitive failure. \nOf course there’s no room without stories because every wall embeds our desires\, dreams and delusions and even the wide-open wilds populate with our myths\, monsters and morality-traps. \nAbout the Artist\nJacqueline Leigh Huskisson considers herself primarily an artist who draws. Everything she does starts with the lines that lift off the page and evolve into video\, installation\, printmaking\, comics\, and illustration. Her art can be a question\, a reflection or a joke of the human condition and how one perceives our place in the universe. She was born and raised in Calgary and started her artistic career with a B.F.A in 2011 from the Alberta College of art and Design. Looking for a challenge she migrated to the emerald isles\, and in 2017\, earning a M.F.A from the Belfast School of Art. Currently Huskisson pursues a studio practice in Calgary and is awaiting her next adventure.
URL:https://albertaprintmakers.com/event/absurd-walls/
LOCATION:Alberta
CATEGORIES:Exhibition Past,Past
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20180420
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20180602
DTSTAMP:20250801T202814Z
CREATED:20250801T202814Z
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SUMMARY:Makeshift Tales
DESCRIPTION:About the Exhibition\nMakeshift Tales – exhibition essay by Jenn Law \n​​In the story of evolution\, the most successful organisms are the ones most able to adapt to their surroundings. A form of creative problem-solving\, adaptation is a process steered by contact and exchange between diverse species in a shared environment. Evolution cannot be predictably mapped\, however\, but rather develops in often makeshift\, happenstance ways and owes a great deal to random events and mutations. Indeed\, often the most elegant evolutionary advances are the result of accidental\, haphazard or repeated attempts at mediating complex challenges-eyes\, for example\, which independently evolved dozens of times; or feathers\, which did not originally develop for flight\, but were first employed for warmth and display. While makeshift solutions may be imperfect\, they may nevertheless be lauded as strategies of adaptive innovation\, requiring resourceful ingenuity and a creative capacity to adjust\, regroup\, and ultimately resolve seemingly insurmountable problems using the materials at hand. \nIn Makeshift Tales\, Elizabeth D’Agostino embraces improvisational experimentation and adaptive problem-solving in both her technical approach to material making and in the conceptual issues she chooses to engage. Drawing on environmental debates surrounding species extinction\, biotechnology\, genetic engineering\, climate change\, urban expansion and population pressures\, D’Agostino creates a fantastical floating world of miniature architectures and hybrid life forms. Set against a printed backdrop of layered narrative veils illustrating a complex history of sociobiological interactions\, her mixed media prints and sculptural assemblages model evolutionary processes in their very construction\, tapping into print’s historical propensity for adapting and combining rapidly transforming technologies and strategies of mimetic reproduction. \nSemi-transparent layers of silkscreened\, etched\, and mono-printed Japanese washi paper (gampi) are grafted onto wood\, ceramic\, and paper clay surfaces. Tissue-thin\, this delicate paper is sensitive to its surroundings\, becoming gently animated with the shifting movements of the viewer in the gallery space. Though seemingly fragile\, gampi is made with long inner plant-based fibres\, which are stretched rather than chopped and is thus deceptively stronger and more resilient than Western rag or pulp-based papers\, which are made with shorter fibres. \nD’Agostino’s work regularly plays with such material and conceptual contradictions-strength in fragility\, variability in originality\, singularity in multiplicity. \nA natural story teller\, D’ Agostino is inspired by nineteenth century natural history collections\, curiosity cabinets\, and print-based botanical illustrations\, combining empirical data with imaginative elements to construct multiple interconnected story lines. She is a keen observer and collector of the world\, gathering specimens from her surroundings that often make their way\, in one form or other\, into the images that compose her multi-species ethnographies The urban Canadian landscape here serves as the artist’s primary field-site\, the ideal creative laboratory for studying adaptation among competing species in overlapping niches. \nAgainst this backdrop\, D’Agostino combines botanical\, entomological\, ornithological\, and mammalian specimens with manmade forms to create new hybrid structures and organisms\, where nature and culture become at times indistinguishable. In the artist’s hands\, a butterfly wing is repurposed as a door\, foliage masquerades as architectural tiles\, a ladder mimics a DNA chain\, molecular cellular structures become wallpaper. Through the lens of hybridity\, D’Agostino challenges an anthropocentric approach to the world which places humanity at the centre of the universe\, while unveiling the mechanisms by which such illusions are upheld. Rather\, her narratives allow multiple species and object ontologies to intersect and mutually inform one another\, breaking down traditional binary oppositions between human/non-human; nature/culture; fact/fiction.  \nWe have been engineering the world since the beginning of humanity\, but along with great technological advances\, human interventions and adaptations have irreversibly damaged fragile ecosystems\, altered climate patterns\, and decreased the planet’s biodiversity. D’Agostino reminds us that life is a complex entanglement of interlocked agencies and storylines in constant process of shared becoming! In response\, the makeshift becomes the artist’s modus operandi – a type of miniature world-making that finds compromise in adversity\, seeking sympathy in difference. Hers is a strategy of becoming that embraces every adaptation as speculative and every contact as an opportunity for creative collaboration\, allowing for unexpected evolutions to be revealed in the process.  \nAbout the Artist\nElizabeth D’Agostino holds a BFA from the University of Windsor and an MFA from Southern Illinois University\, Carbondale. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including Iziko: Museum of Cape Town\, South Africa\, Manhattan Graphics Centre\, New York\, and The Print Centre\, Philadelphia. In addition\, D’Agostino’s prints can also be found in many private and public collections including the University of Changchun\, Jilin\, China; Anchor Graphics at Columbia College Chicago\, Illinois\, Department of Foreign Affairs Canada\, and Ernst and Young\, Canada. D’Agostino is the recipient of many awards including the Hexagon Special Projects Fellowship at Open Studio\, Toronto. In 2015\, she was selected by the Department of Foreign Affairs\, Trade and Development Canada to create the custom carpet design for the Ontario Room in the newly renovated Canada House\, London\, England. Elizabeth D’Agostino lives and works in Toronto and is a member of Open Studio FIne Art Printmaking Centre and Loop Gallery. 
URL:https://albertaprintmakers.com/event/makeshift-tales/
LOCATION:Alberta
CATEGORIES:Exhibition Past,Past
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://albertaprintmakers.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/03_Makeshift.jpeg
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