Alberta Printmakers

Young Man’s Fancy
2018-06-04 - 2018-07-27 | Alberta
About the Exhibition
Masculinity is complex and multi-faceted; it is rooted in our tangled histories, it has no correct form, and is experiencing a crisis as we renegotiate it in our current cultural climate. There are people who defend its roots in tradition, some forced to reflect upon their relationship to it, in light of trauma and abuses of power, and others subverting or rejecting it entirely. Rather than attempt to describe its widespread and varied effects on others, this work discloses my connection with it, through art objects, clothing, and material related to my body and identity.
Using various print and craft techniques, including etching, monoprint, indigo dying, sewing, and embroidery, and pre-existing or discarded materials, Young Man’s Fancy takes the form of a layered quilt, as one of many traditional patterns. Its title refers both to the construction of gender identity and its performances, and the collective nature of (re)creating these genders through presentation and their associated ‘appropriate’ tasks – domestic work for women, and anything but that, for men. Instead of upholding this exclusion, my work suggests the expansion of masculinity through pattern making, to include and revalue femininity and feminist masculinity, turning to gestures of care, empathy, connection, and intimacy in all genders.
Artist Bio: Mitchell Chalifoux is an Edmonton-based emerging artist working in print and craft, and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta. He recently completed the Emerging Artist in Residence program and will be exhibiting his first solo exhibition, Selvage, at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists in fall, 2018. His art practice is invested in textiles, gendered labour, and expanding new masculinities, and while not making art, he spends his time baking and longing for summer blooms.

Makeshift Tales
2018-04-20 - 2018-06-01
About the Exhibition
Makeshift Tales – exhibition essay by Jenn Law
​​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.
In 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.
Semi-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.
D’Agostino’s work regularly plays with such material and conceptual contradictions-strength in fragility, variability in originality, singularity in multiplicity.
A 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.
Against 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.
We 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.
About the Artist
Elizabeth 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.

Absurd Walls
2018-02-23 - 2018-04-07
About the Exhibition
A room without pictures – exhibition essay by Dan Shipsides
A room without pictures. I don’t like the pictures. Why?
They are all scary, so scary.
How do you mean?
Dying people and lots of dead bodies and monsters.
I don’t want to see anymore pictures, why are they so scary? Well, I guess it’s a complex set of reasons…
They scare me.
I know. I’m sorry, I suppose they are meant to be scary. But why?
Hmm. Well, remember these paintings were made before TV and the
internet when there were not so many pictures in the world as there are now.
I want a room that’s empty. Can we go to a room without pictures?
They are so freaky.
Yes, I know. Spooky and monstrous too.
And 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?
Well, they are stories which were made to be very vivid and dramatic so people would remember them and probably then be worried about themselves.
I 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?
That’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.
But it’s so real and those people look poor and weak, not like baddies.
Ah well, yes that’s true…
The 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.
Yet 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…).
Absurdity 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’.
In 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.
Of 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.
About the Artist
Jacqueline 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.

Surface to Surface
2018-01-05 - 2018-02-16
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Amanda Clyne
With every touch, we leave a trace of ourselves, intentionally or not. The trace may be so slight that we fail to notice the change we’ve triggered. Whether recorded deep in the annals of memory or physically in the minute wear of the surface we’ve encountered, our touch never lands without reverberation. Sustained by our material nature, we imbue our lives with rituals of touch. Personal and unremarkable, these rituals may grow out of habit, out of a kinship with the familiar, or out of struggles with distress. But with each repeated touch, changes to a surface begin to accumulate, and the one that touched and the one that submitted both enter a process of transformation.
The stark and fragile forms that populate this exhibition were born from such instincts. During a period of grief, Katie Bruce found herself folding and re-folding her fabric handkerchief. While undergoing a cross-country move, Christie Kirchner noticed that she was absent-mindedly folding and re-folding discarded papers left in her pocket. Both were captivated by the stories embedded in these intimate gestures. What they could have dismissed as a nervous tic, they adopted as a source of insight. With each print, their meditative, reflective actions became fossilized in the tight grip of the printing press, delineating the surviving traces of their hands’ (and minds’) occupation on the paper’s thin skin. As printmakers, they adhered to the wisdom of Agnes Martin who once wrote: ”Experiences recalled are generally more satisfying and enlightening than the original experience.”
By re-enacting the simple process of folding and unfolding, Bruce and Kirchner have transformed small sheets of paper into implicit bodies. Bruce’s figures fold inward, as fragile walls shield against the viewer’s gaze. In Bruce’s piece ”alternatively”, they seem to float inside an ethereal force. Each fold results from a protective instinct, yet with each new edge stressing the delicate surface, the whole begins to weaken. As if to assess the damage, Kirchner performs a post-mortem, unfolding blackened sheets of carbon to reveal dissecting paths. These fissures slice through the dark void, cracking open the black depths. The fold’s mark is made monumental.
The principles of printmaking lie at the heart of this exhibition. Paper is both subject and medium, each print existing on the threshold of object and image. The repeated act of folding and unfolding echoes in the recurring cycles of the printing process. Shadowy planes and incised lines harken to a prior state, just as the print testifies to the now lost referent. In form and substance, the artists harness the generative power of repetition. Every fold, every line, every print brings surface to surface.
When words fail and reason abandons us, our body can lead us toward renewal and reflection through the smallest of gestures. Guided by the sensations of rhythm and touch, the body seeks to leave its mark, to expel and expose a world trapped within. Bruce and Kirchner’s work tells the story of this quiet, revitalizing process. Gazing into the web of their frail lines and sheer structures, we witness the passing of time, the instinct to rebuild, and the grace and grit of the pursuit of intimacy.

2017 Not-So-Mini Print Exhibition and Exchange
2017-12-08 - 2017-12-23
About the Exhibition
Each year, A/P holds a non-juried show and sale to showcase the work of local and international print artists, and to raise funds towards Alberta Printmakers artistic and educational programming. A/P invites all interested printmakers to submit an edition of ten 8” x 10” prints that relates to the theme of transition for exhibition and exchange in the Artist Proof Gallery. Each participant will receive 8 prints created by other artists, and A/P will retain 2 works from each edition for sale in our studio and gallery.

Artists included in the exhibition:
Clare Budke, Brandon Giessmann, Jessica Brousseau, Ian Gregory, Minca Kidd, Eveline Kolijn, Mark Eadie, Graeme Dearden, T. Knudsen, Josh Brien, Teddi Driediger, Jacqueline Huskisson, Bob Thornton, Shinobu Mitsuhashi, Richard Torrence, Sally Reesman, Emily Mickelsen, Lisa Valentine, Tara Williams, Christina Nalder, Kellen Spencer, Deron Sunwall, Ryan Statz, Heather Urness, Tim Van Wijk, Patience Pearson, Marzieh Mosavarzadeh, Trista Simon, Helen Young, Katie Merrick, Alden Alfon, Stan Laberge, Kate Baillies, Sarah Bigelow, Gabrielle Arrizza, Carrie Phillips-Kieser, Irén Gibson

The Mountie in The Family
2017-12-04 - 2025-08-06
About the Exhibition
My maternal grandfather was a Mountie. This photo of him on horseback, dressed in his formal Canadian Mounted Police uniform, represents such an iconic symbol for Canada. Having passed away in 1995 he would have been 106 years old this year, as Canada turns 150. This artwork is an investigation into my own identity, within Canadian culture, and how my personal view on heritage, lineage, and nostalgia have played a part in the formation of this identity.
Artist Bio: Kenzie Housego has always been drawn to found objects and imagery with a sense of history. Through her art, she seeks to investigate societal narratives of a romanticized past as well as the narrative of objects. She often highlights contemporary modes of gender roles and beauty by reflecting on the symbolic or iconized within society. Housego holds a BFA in Print Media from the Alberta College of Art and Design and resides in Calgary Alberta.

Graeme Dearden
2017-10-05 - 2017-11-24
About the Exhibition
I’ve always had a terrible memory. I have a lot of trouble concentrating on things and, as a result, end up missing a lot of information that I would love to be paying attention to. This is something I’ve spent a while attempting to patch and work around to varying degrees of success, but something that still frustrates me is my inability to remember my own emotions.
I often find that when I’m really happy or sad or angry or what have you, was difficult to even remember what those feelings were like the next day. The closest vessel I want to be able to remember and reflect on, the closest vessel I can find at the time–cup or a bowl or a bottle doesn’t really matter. They’re just simple forms that I feel comfortable metaphorically filling with the experience I’m having. Until I have created a codified, reproducible symbol. Meditate on that emotion to remember it more clearly.
Artist Bio: Graeme Dearden is a Calgarian fine artist and writer working primarily in printmaking, flat glass processes, drawing, and visual poetry. He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Alberta College of Art + Design in 2015, majoring in glass. His work has been showcased in numerous visual and literary projects throughout Alberta and the United States. Generally, his work looks at methodology and how people go about the task of making artwork-or making anything for that matter.

Taking Stock
2017-09-08 - 2017-10-13
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford
The modern global community simultaneously increases the interconnectedness between people around the world, while also alienating their contextual perspectives. The rise of globalization has created a world of intimate and unseen relationships between individuals, their identified place,and the global systems and institutions that play a significant role in shaping experiences. However, people rarely see where they fit in that typically inaccessible and enigmatic puzzle. Chad Erpelding provides a platform for people to situate themselves within a systemic global network by representing these systems through data visualization in an accessible and surprisingly appropriate print medium.
Chad Erpelding himself has contributed to the global conversation as a visual artist for more than 20 years. He began his formal studies in 1994 at Central College where he participated in a study abroad program in Wales at Trinity University before receiving his BA in Studio Art from the Central College in Iowa. He later went on to achieve a Masters in Fine Arts at the Southern Illinois University of Carbondale in Illinois in 2006. Throughout that time Erpelding’s work has been seen all over the world in the form of public art and several solo and group exhibitions in places like Japan, Romania, South Korea, Hungary, Russia, and of course, all over the United States. The international network of his exhibitions is reminiscent of his work itself, consistently considering our place within the context of systemic global relationships.
Globalization has emerged as a result of long-standing political systems, increasingly powerful corporate institutions, and a vast, sprawling network of travel around the world. The current global situation is one of constant interconnection. And while many discussions about people connecting across the world credits social media, citing something like Facebook for providing global platforms, Erpelding has identified the evidence of these networks in their footprint of data and information. Through his precision work, Chard Erpelding calls our attention to the global institutions and systems that truly construct a network of interconnectivity by portraying contextual data visualizations. As Erpelding himself says, “I am interested in the movement of people, capital, business, and organizations and the effect this has on contemporary perceptions of place.”
For his exhibition at Alberta Printmakers, Erpelding analyzes data from Canada’s S&P/TSX composite index, studying its relationship with the Global Economy. These numbers offer a unique glimpse into Canada’s connection with the rest of the world, and offer the viewer a new platform to consider their own connection with Canada and the globe. It is a relationship that some experts follow closely, but one that most people dismiss or overlook, living their everyday lives without examining its effect on them. Erpelding’s work compiles the data in a new way- far from the news report on the radio, the black and white print in the paper, or the scrolling numbers on a screen. His pieces provide you with an opportunity to consider this visual data as evidence of global relationships, a barometer of a place’s relationship to the world and how you are intricately connected to it.
Artist Bio: Chad Erpelding (b. 1974, Iowa; MFA Southern Illinois University Carbondale 2016) formed an interest with data and maps through extensive travelling, including riding a bicycle across North America and hiking the Appalachian Trail. His work has been exhibited throughout the world and he’s been awarded residencies in Argentina, France, and Armenia. He is currently a professor of Art and Director of the graduate Program at Boise State University in Idaho.

Field Work
2017-08-18 - 2017-10-13
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Andrea Williamson
…A series of book-sized etchings, true to techniques of the past, practices of making the past present…Their dark registers and diminutive humanoids approach and conjure some kind of back- looking vision of some kind of primeval action. Vibrational energies swell around a vortex, carry souls down a river, hover over a birth of an idea, assemble tools under a sharp cliff. We remember a time when we measured small and humble in the landscape, and when the art of technology was our hope of survival. Memories are shrouded in a fertile darkness, with glimmers and sparks that pierce the distance of time- a spritz of resinous powder on a metal plate. These memories are far away and in their place, separated by a perfectly achieved gauge, a threshold that sinks experience into its own place within an otherwise untouched paper. The illuminations hang on a wall above us out of reach like a misty sky of constellations. This dark place- dark skies, black water, unrecognizable forms, and crouching figures- this is where myth lives and works.
While vaporous, shadowy and shaky qualities of this art form give birth to myth, the myths themselves portray art making in content, creating a staircase from one process to another. This time, in the stories of the pictures, we’re witnessing a very different kind or use for art, one that is very close. Stacey talks about living and dying with art pieces- allowing objects to affect us over time. Each framed story is a recollection, an echo, of a time when she and others brought alchemical, cinematic, otherworldly, magical art, directly into the everyday. Why not? The fabrication of a “well for bad wishes” out of paper and wheat glue, transforming ubiquitous cheap plastic cd covers into a crystal palace of fractal wonder, reenacting trench warfare, being enveloped by the darkness of night skies under billowing sails… In these escapades with friends and places, the artist exercises making life more wonderful without reserve. Superseding everyday aesthetics, which looks for transcendence in the mundane, everyday activities such as chores, these projects say “to hell with the everyday”, and make each day an epic quest for the sublime. Living with the props and aids to these extra-quotidian experiences means carrying with us reminders of the potential for flight into other realms. Failure is a constant bystander, as it must be, when the utopic impulse reaches toward open play, collaboration and serendipity.
What we must talk about, or represent, is what we are not already living. These projects recognize and fulfill the desire to live within the messy blurring of art and life, of intention and process, of self and other. And that is where I believe myth comes back in.
Myths are needed to house everything that is bigger than our conscious understanding and individual lives. They pay tribute to all the experiences of Jungian’s place beyond or below the threshold of consciousness, which are deeply effective nevertheless. I believe the artist continually seeks encounters with awesome events and forces, as well as her own humility, situatedness, and embeddedness in something bigger. The artist’s printmaking practice extends this figuring of other forces into her process, in a careful and attentive orchestration alternating technical prowess and welcome surprises. But what the prints offer, among many things, is a necessarily distant or aerial view upon these lived events- one which opens up the space to observe the complete mystery and magic that is people sharing dreams.
Artist Bio: Stacey Watson is a Calgary-based artist. She completed a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Printmaking at the University of Calgary. Her work in photography, print and sculpture deals with how human imagination is linked to landscape and weather. She also has a collaborative practice with Vancouver artist Justin Patterson and their work was most recently exhibited in the 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. Watson also teaches at ACAD in Calgary.

Analog
2017-08-04 - 2017-09-29
Artist Bio: Robert Lemermeyer is a visual raconteur who shares his fascination with people, places and objects through photography for 25 years. His work has taken him to Russia, Israel, South Africa, China, Japan, Ireland and the US. His fascination with screen-printing is rooted in printing his images in a more graphic and adventurous way.

disPOSSESSION
2017-06-02 - 2017-07-15
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Dana Tosic
The setting for Miriam Rudolph’s exhibition disPOSSESSION is the Paraguayan Chaco, about one quarter of the Gran Chaco Americano, the second largest forest in South America. This semi-arid, virgin forest features an astounding level of biodiversity but has come under threat in the 21st century by global-scale agricultural development. Worldwide food shortages, increased demand for beef and soy, and low cost of land has brought transnational corporations and the development of large-scale soy farming and cattle ranching to the region, resulting in the rapid razing of vast areas of the forest. Scientists fear that the forest, much of which is as yet unexplored, will be wiped out more quickly than species can be researched and documented while conservationists warn of ecological disaster as deforestation and aggressive farming methods lead to widespread desertification and erosion. The last indigenous tribes to call the Chaco home are no longer able to sustain themselves through traditional means of hunting, gathering and fishing and as a result, are being displaced.
Although the context for this exhibition may seem melancholy in tone, there is a dark beauty to the prints, expressed in the lyrical quality of Rudolph’s line, the softness of the figures, delicate grass pattern, and painterly dark clouds. Rudolph is rigorous in her approach to printmaking, using a systematic medium to investigate a systemic problem. What distinguishes printmaking from other media is its reproducibility, which Rudolph takes full advantage of in creating multi-layered, narrative images. Using a library of plates, each etched with images that draw upon specific elements relating to themes of deforestation, enclosure, private property, displacement, cattle ranching, soy production, and indigenous land rights, Rudolph takes these individual elements (images of forests, clouds, fences, cattle, and groupings of figures) and prints, overlaps and flips them, working intuitively to construct rich narratives. disPOSSESSION includes up to20 printed layers, resulting in strikingly rich tones. In Advance Rudolph contrasts the encroachment of farming with the retreat of the forest by printing on both sides of the paper, utilizing its translucency to create not only a sense of distance but also to hint at the passage of time, revealing traces of the vegetation that has been lost. In Displacement the crisp, hard-edged imagery of farm equipment, juxtaposed against the sensuous quality of rich tones in the cloud, vegetation, and figures carrying jars for seeds mirrors the contrast between farming technologies developed for large-scale industry, and local, traditional farming methods. Hovering in the sky, farming equipment appears as a symbol of capitalism, a global power inflicted from on high and imposed on the land and its people who are losing their traditional way of life.
Working with multiple plates of varying sizes allows Rudolph to bring an additional element to her images, that of containment. The Enclosure series of prints uses the repetition of borders, some literal, such as the fence, others metaphorical, as in the visible edges of the etched plates or rectangular form of grass. This repetition of grid lines reveals the many methods by which a populace may be contained, restrained, and controlled. Power relationships are further investigated through the use of scale, as in Colonization by Cattle, in which the epic scale of the Deforestation caused by cattle ranching is evoked by using just two plates containing drawings of about twenty-five cattle each, and printing them repeatedly across seven sheets of paper. The very density and scale of the cattle, relative to the smallness of the forest, emphasizes just how much vegetation has been lost.
There is an obvious parallel between the encroachment of capitalist industry in Paraguay and its effect on the indigenous population, and similar problems around the world. Common to all countries in the western hemisphere is a history of colonization, environmental destruction, displacement of Indigenous peoples and irreversible change to their way of life. Exploitation of the land, whether by governments or private enterprise, serves to enrich the few at the expense of many. But there is hope for the future, and it is presented in Seeds of Hope, an installation work featuring a suspended banner consisting of a multitude of layered hands, reaching down toward a set of porcelain jars. Rudolph describes the gesture of the hands as “blessing from above for the labour of planting and the traditions of saving seeds.” The jars they reach toward depict images of the germination of seeds as they grow into crops. It is here where we may seek solace in the future of the Chaco; as each life cycle dies, a new one begins, continuing on in perpetuity.
Artist Bio: Miriam Rudolph was born and raised in Paraguay, South America. In 2003 she moved to Winnipeg to study Fine Arts at the University of Manitoba where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours in 2007 and a Bachelor of Education in 2010. From 2011-2014 Miriam lived in Minneapolis where she continued to make prints at the Highpoint Centre for Printmaking, She recently completed the Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (2017). She was awarded the University of Alberta Graduate Recruitment Scholarship in 2014 and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) along with the Walter H. Johns Graduate Fellowship and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Scholarship for Art and Design in 2015. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. In 2016, she co-won the first prize (Best in Show) at the 5th Biennial International Footprint Exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut. She has shown her work in Asuncion-Paraguay, at Global Print 2013 in Portugal, at the International Print Center New York, at the Highpoint Centre for Printmaking – Minneapolis, in Washington D.C., at Martha Street Studio – Winnipeg, Toronto, and Ottawa.

Lingering in Doorways
2017-06-01 - 2017-07-20
About the Exhibition
This is where things shift. Intervals of change – those transient spaces that we occupy in between our befores and afters – are the uncertain territories of simultaneous disruption and formation. We describe them as places to move through and not as places in which to linger. My current work explores what it is like to be still within these in-between spaces.

Artist Bio: Tracy Wormsbecker is a Calgary-based artist with an academic background in both psychology and fine art from the University of Calgary. Her work examines the elusive quality of experience as it is perceived, remembered and imagined, and how this relates to the formation and reformation of identity and self.

The Intricacies of People, 20 colour etchings by Robert Pugh
2017-04-21 - 2017-05-27
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Mary-Beth Laviolette
Robert Pugh is a senior artist whose artistic practice began to take shape in England in the 1970s. Over the years, much of his time has been devoted to painting despite acquiring a press twenty years ago and creating, over time, an oeuvre of printed works. Five years ago Pugh started producing figurative colour etchings, nineteen of which are on display at Alberta Printmakers. One engraving with aquatint is also included.
These art works involve some of the oldest techniques in printmaking but in the hands of a capable artist like Pugh there is a vitality, visually speaking, that makes these small-scale prints speak totally of the present. Underlying it all is an informal style of drawing that avoids the illustrative while conveying as much as the viewer needs to know. It’s a case of: implied but never revealed, evoked but never declared.
This approach plays well with the subject matter addressed by the artist. Let’s call it the quotidian or a preoccupation with everyday moments in the artist’s life and his friends. It’s people that interest Pugh and in each etching generally some kind scenario is depicted. A naked man dips his foot in a Cold stream, a couple embrace in a deep Kiss. In Rain, running for cover is a man attired in a bright striped red shirt and blue jeans while in a crowded Rooftop Café a patron near the back holds forth.
The exception to all of this ordinariness is Squeeze where inspired by a 1977 video, a woman visitor is required to squeeze past a naked and stone-faced Marina Abramovic, the performance artist. The other woman’s expression is one of uncertainty or perhaps embarrassment. Through compressed body language, this artwork evokes a quiet intensity that gets repeated in other prints such as Tight (2015), Asha (2016), A Drink (2016) and others.
Responsible for conveying all of this, is his sketch-like drawing which transfers well to his etching. The drawing seems to be a spontaneous affair but according to Pugh is the result of absorbing information from photographs he has taken or borrowed from friends. A lot of process is involved then in this trajectory from photograph to drawing (several) to a soft-ground etching. As a viewer I was compelled to ask: where’s the photo? It was nowhere to be seen, hence, a convincing conversion.
In addition to the etching itself, the artist employs two and sometimes three aquatint plates – one with warm colours and the other with cool to enhance the humanity of the scenario he has created. Here tone plays a role rather than line; giving us a sense that some of these images are located in a tropical environment. It doesn’t take much but the experience of rain pelting down on a Pink Umbrella (2016) or being a blue-shirted tourist in a crowded Beach House (2016) is lucidly implied. Most beautiful among the twenty prints is the aquamarine-drenched background in front of which a gesture of kindness is performed in The intimacy of strangers(2017).
Finally, is the spirit of Edgar Degas being channeled someway in these prints of Robert Pugh? The French artist is best known for his paintings of ballerinas but he was also a prolific printmaker (monotypes) noted for the ease of his mark making. Pugh’s work is completely of a contemporary kind but the spirit of urban life is also a strong feature too. Conveyed is the conviction that even in the very ordinary matters of life compelling images are to be found.
Artist Bio: Robert Pugh is a painter and printmaker living in West Sussex UK. He attended Byam Shaw School of Art, obtaining a Distinct degree. He has attended classes in printmaking at Morley College, Camden Arts Centre and Brighton Independent Printmakers. Pugh is a member of the Printmakers Council, East London, and Brighton Independent Printmakers.

i/we
2017-03-30 - 2017-05-25
This series speaks to the contemporary and ongoing dialogue between the construction of the identity of self and the collective cultural identity, specifically in relation to social media. The layering and fragmentation of the portraits reflects the complex and multifaceted nature of identity and perception of identity in both the natural and digital world.
Artist Bio: Samantha Charette is a visual artist from London Ontario and recent Bachelors of Fine Art graduate from the University of Alberta. Currently working and residing in Calgary Alberta,her interests include the identity of self, cultural identity, identity formation and site specificity.

The Dormant Consciousness/Sleeping Awareness of a Human Within Urban Space
2017-02-24 - 2017-04-01
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford
The modern empire of mass media bombards the world with an unending montage of shallow images, creating a collective hyper reality that blinds its people to the uniqueness of their own critical thinking. This is the time and space that we live in. And this is the world from which Marek Pośpiech sets out to address the collective consciousness and the matrix entwined with it. His series of works titled simply Sign I through Sign VIlI presupposes that people are submerged in this hyper reality, created by our collective actions and perceptions.
The result is a vague pattern of place – a simulation of the urban environment, reminiscent of all form and meaning.
Pośpiech hails from Rydułtowy, Poland where he graduated from the Department of Art in the Studio of Painting at the State Higher Vocational School in Raciborz in 2012. He went on to graduate from the Studio of Letterpress and the Studio of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice in 2014. He utilizes a range of mediums, working in graphic art, art installation, painting, and drawing. His unique excavation of the human consciousness and its relationship to the modern hyper reality has been experienced in shows and exhibitions all over Poland, and around the world including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Thailand, and Canada.
At first glance, Pośpiech’s Sign series of prints appears ambiguous in scale. It is unclear whether the image is seen through the perspective of a microscope or a satellite. Traces of it seem familiar. Is that a brick? A curb? Shards of glass. Each has an uncanny texture and composition. But the ambiguity is Pośpiech’s challenge. In the world he has identified ,Pośpiech suggests that people are overcome by superficial and aesthetically irrelevant visuals, lured into the hyper reality as their perception and individual capacity for critical thinking are corroded. People are simultaneously influenced by, existing in, and also constructing this collective pseudo-world through their determined and sometimes unconscious activities. There is a danger in such an absentminded existence. A danger that Pośpiech calls to our attention.
His pieces exist deep beneath the hyper real. They are demanding of their audience. Citizens of the “Internet Empire” as Pośpiech calls it, must tap into a greater reservoir of perception, of consideration – of critical thought. In some ways, his show is an awakening. A quick *snap* of the fingers calling you to action to look here ,and look closely. But his work is also an invitation to the viewer to create their own meaning. Its substance is defined less by what exists within it, and more by what someone brings to it. Marek Pospiech’s precisely titled, The Dormant Consciousness/ Sleeping Awareness of a Human Within Urban Space is a collection of work that’s not just seen, it is developed in the moment; its true intention exists in the viewer’s own realm of conscious thought. It is a trigger. A catalyst. And as art often can, it reflects our world. The one we create. And the one we sometimes fail to see.
Artist Bio: Marek Pośpiech was born in 1990 in Rydułtowy. He graduated from Department of Art – Kazimierz Cieślik’s Studio of Painting – at the State Higher Vocational School (Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Zawodowa) in Racibórz in 2012. Between 2012 and 2014 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, graduating from the studio of Letterpress under the supervision of professor Kaziemierz Cieslik. He practices graphic art, artistic installation, painting and drawing.

Dwelling in it, Dwelling on it (Temporary Living Space)
2017-02-03 - 2017-03-23
Moving frequently has informed my understanding of ‘home’ as something that is bound to change. The temporary qualities of my past, and present living situations, due to school, and work, leave me imagining a more permanent place in my future. Dwelling in It, Dwelling on It (Temporary Living Spaces), considers the current state of home buying and the question of where to live, while facing the differences between what we imagine, what is attainable, and what is attained.
Artist Bio: Kellen Spencer is currently a Print Media student at the Alberta College ofArt + Design in Calgary, Alberta. Working primarily in printmaking, drawing, and photography, his practice focuses on ideas in architecture, urbanism, and the relationships we have to the places we inhabit.

God Love Brigus II
2017-01-06 - 2017-02-18
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Tracy Wormsbecker
Working under the moniker Weather Girl, Tara Cooper has been building an impressive body of work that encompasses a multifaceted exploration of weather. In both process and presentation, she employs a scientific exploration of weather as a meteorological phenomenon while thoughtfully integrating a reflective approach that also considers the personal impact of weather as it is experienced. Straddling this interface, she combines rigorous on-site field research with creative non-fiction to create work that amalgamates multiple art forms such as print media, sculpture, illustration, writing, artifact, and video. This visually results in work that poetically embeds scientific methodologies of observation, categorizing and archiving within personal and historical narrative and vice versa.
In God Love Brigus II, Cooper presents an alluring representation of personal, historical and weather research that she collected during a 3 week residency with Landfall Trust at a 200-year-old cliff side cottage in Brigus, Newfoundland. In line with other Weather Girl explorations, this exhibition continues to blend a scientific perspective of weather with the human experience of it. Particularly noteworthy in this collective work, is that a discernable dichotomy between the two is almost entirely removed. In a way, Cooper is drawing us in, inviting us to vicariously experience and consider Brigus fully, as a “landscape where nature is at the helm,” and as a unique place where “fog lies thick on the harbor” and a clear distinction between history, weather and daily experience is notably obscured.
In the center of the gallery, her thorough fieldwork manifests as a tactile arrangement of sculpture, print, text and illustration laid out atop a long table to be explored. In no particular order, viewers slowly encounter and consider the array of visual research that rests upon the table. Sculptures suggesting cloud formations, weathered sea vessels and other seafaring paraphernalia are dispersed throughout the display. Settled in among them, photographs, prints and drawings are presented along with weather-specific phrases of varying severity from “saltwater rainbow” to “weather the storm” to “lost at sea.” Multiple arrows appear, some revealing atmospheric forces and weather systems, while others direct attention to curious historical belongings and artifacts, eliciting further investigation. While the connections may not all be immediately clear, each component appears both independent and unified with an apparent shared significance.
Surrounding the table, screen-printed banners of written text and other images adorn the walls, embedding the display within a rich narrative context to be discovered. Some of the encompassing writings read as a personal diary of Cooper’s encounters with the landscape, weather, and local residents. Others reveal seemingly outlandish tales, like those of the infamous Captain Bob Bartlett, that were discovered through Cooper’s historical research and even directly from residents who maintain personal connections to these stories, only a few generations removed. Captain Bob is a particularly captivating character who is known for his formidable arctic expeditions that were fraught with such astonishing anecdote and bleak peril that they would seem pure folklore were it not for the dangerous climatic reality that Cooper has nestled throughout the exhibition. Weather remains the true protagonist here, the common denominator that blends science and subjectivity and bridges past and present.
In its entirety, the exhibition is truly engrossing. Each encounter with an object, image, or written text encourages the next as lines are drawn to elicit a deeper experience of this place. Cooper describes her work as visually poetic. Indeed, the installation that comprises God Love Brigus Il itself serves as a comprehensive field journal describing Landfall and Brigus. Though this description of the exhibition hints at its allure, it is no substitute for experiencing the installation, and in a way, Brigus, in person.
Artist Bio: Tara Cooper works in a range of mediums from print, photography and video to installation and book arts. Her teaching experience encompasses time-based media (video, sound, animation). All-print related media (lithography, serigraphy, relief, intaglio, book arts and digital imaging), as well as contemporary art issues and theory. As an educator, she has worked with the following institutions: OCAD University, Sheridan College, the Canadian Art Foundation and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Currently she works as an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo.

Air, Fire, Water
2016-10-21 - 2016-11-26
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Joanne Fung
lan Brown’s work, Air, Fire, Water, interrogates both the transient nature of the photographed subject and the mutability of the photo- graph through the work’s multiplicities. The repetitive depiction of the three elementals heightens their unstable presence in the natural world, and emphasizes the constant inconsistency of the climatic phenomena. When one photograph portrays the forcefulness of water leaping across rocks, so does another find the water stable and certain in its moment of capture. In the multiple representations of the natural events, Brown highlights their significance as being ultimately mutable and impermanent. However, the multiplicities in Brown’s work do not only explore the transient nature of the photographed climactic phenomena, but also work in tandem with the photographed subject to call the audience’s attention to the mutability of the photograph itself.
Revolving around Brown’s work is an exploration of how different photomechanical processes influence an audience’s interpretation of the images. The mutable nature of texts is evidenced through Brown’s disassembling of the original image into expositions of the various processes and layers, with each multiple producing a unique image that is as transient and changeable as the subject matter it portrays. Depicted are the three elementals in their momentary, but significant forms. With each image uncovering yet another layer of photo processing, and contextualized with the subject matter of the images, Brown hints towards each process shown as momentary, but significant. Viewing the images that are a display of the processes that the original went through, we are asked to reexamine the way we view texts that have projected the world we live in. There is the question of whether the original image is an accurate representation of the climatic phenomena depicted. How often do we glance over the processes used to create different texts, and in what way does the text become an entirely different text based on the stage of process it is in? Brown’s exposition of the various geometric shapes, harsh lines, shades, hues, etc. that are a part of the photomechanical processes are a stark reminder of this oversight. Too often do we forget that within each image, video, or film, there are various mechanisms that have produced the final text. However, through the enlargement of these mechanisms in his work’s images, Brown demonstrates that texts are often as mutable and transient as the subject they portray.
Brown purposefully disassembles the original texts, dissecting and uncovering each surprising layer. His work questions the lenses that have fallen between the world and a reader’s eyes. However, it is ultimately the experience of the audience that determines the significance of the photomechanical processes that have mediated the relationship between the natural world and the reader. In the moment of viewing the multiple images and acknowledging the often forgotten processes, the reader is asked to reexamine their own interpretations. Thus, Brown’s exploration of the photograph becomes one that is rooted in an audience’s interpretation of the varying images produced through photomechanical processes.
Artist Bio: I​​an Brown is an artist from England. His current interest is in natural climatic phenomena, and specifically the transient nature of these incidents. He uses material from a variety of sources, his own photographs, the internet, video, as well as images that have already passed through the print process. As a print maker, he is interested in process, the range of photomechanical deliveries that lie behind the way an image is presented on paper. The repeated testing of the visual protocols that freeze or fix a moment in time, and the consequent impact on the reading of the image, underpins all his work.

Veils
2016-10-01 - 2016-11-25
About the Exhibition
The notion of a layered identity is of interest to me in my work, as I explore the process of many layers coming together to form a person, and the significance of putting together these layers to construct a sense of self. I intend to symbolize the connection between physical coverings and concealments of the body with the notion of the ways in which myself, and many other people, show and hide themselves through their sense of being. This work speaks about the fabrication of a sense of self, and the multiple layers of identity that can be revealed and concealed through our interactions with others.
This body of work is derived from a performative piece in which explored the notions of layering, concealing, and revealing through the movements of fabric over and around my body. These actions were captured on film, and I then used stills of these movements as references for the silkscreened images.

Artist Bio: Andrea Rizzuti is currently a student at the University of Calgary, working towards a combined degree of Visual Arts (Honours) and Communication Studies. Her work is focused on the human figure and portrait, in which she portrays identity as ephemeral, mysterious, and undefined. Her practice has involved many different mediums including drawing, painting, printmaking, textile arts, installation, photography and video art.

Threshold
2016-09-09 - 2016-10-08
About the Exhibition
Exhibition Essay by Gina Freeman
Laura Wider describes her work as “a quiet act of defiance in a digital age.” The Kelowna-based artist finds herself living in tension with our connected/dis-connected world. She seeks to celebrate the physical and handmade in an era of glossy tablets and storing memories on a cloud. These memories are permanent, and yet subtly impermanent. While they may never be lost, they are easily changed and altered. Hand-made, physical objects, however, are not so easy to change. They carry with them the histories of their making – the errors and triumphs of their creation.
In the linocut process, Widmer finds a living world of greys between the black and white. Each cut gives life and depth to her subjects – bringing them away from the simple binary. There is a tension within the linocut process itself. Though it is gradual and time consuming, there is a certain immediacy in cutting: every gouge is lasting, and will appear in the final print. We live with the imperfections of the physical type. Each cut is permanent, made in a moment, persisting forever. In our push towards digital perfection we lose these moments and the history entwined in them.
Threshold’s large-scale prints present glimpses of a shifting, sensual world. Heads, hands and torsos are cropped, abstracted. Strings of pearls are grasped tightly and held dear, freely offered and willingly accepted, tangled throats and fingers, and draped lovingly around shoulders. There is an ambiguity in the moment captured. Without knowing what came before or what will come after, the viewer cannot know whether the pearls are being offered or received. The exact nature of the moment remains enigmatic. Widmer encourages the viewer to interact with the images, to create their own narratives and find the stories hidden in their histories.
There are many hidden, parallel histories captured within each of Widmer’s images. There is the history of the person: a lifetime filled with sudden and gradual changes, negotiations between shifting states. Each pearl contains its own history as well. Starting out as an irritant – a parasite or grain of sand within the shell of an oyster – each pearl accumulates value over years until it becomes something that is sought after and treasured. Finally there is the history of the print itself: cuts captured in proofs and stages, contemplated and recut. The creation of a body of work, like the creation of a pearl or a personal history, is a slow and solitary process. With Threshold, Wider explores these private narratives and presents a fleeting glimpse of them to the viewer.
In Threshold Widmer takes intimate moments and makes them public. She catches a brief, shifting instant and makes it eternal through a slow and meditative process. With accumulated cuts and gouges she carves out a moment of time. In her work Widmer explores contrasts between black and white, permanence and impermanence, intimacy and openness, and finds a vibrant world between opposing forces. This tension makes her work alive and animated, like the string of pearls featured in Threshold: pulled taut, thrumming with energy.
Artist Bio: Laura Wider earned her Fine Arts degree with a concentration in printmaking from the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. In 2014 she completed a residency at The Banff Centre and returned to a long-standing interest in hand papermaking, which she has since incorporated into her print-based practice. Laura regularly exhibits her work within Canada and internationally. Her work has been shortlisted twice for the Open Studio National Printmaking awards, earning First Prize in 2010 and Honourable Mention in 2014. She was also awarded the Muskat Prize at the 2011 Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial.

Mapping
2016-08-05 - 2016-09-30
“My current artwork acts as both a means of self-representation and self-expression, allowing me to talk about the things that are most important without having to resort to words. The concept that I work with mostly revolves around the idea of time and journey, especially immigration and the feelings that are associated with it. It explores the ways in which immigrants locate or map themselves from one place to another; and the new adaptation they need to function within foreign societies. As an immigrant myself,I found it important to speak of the hardship that people face when moving to a new place. One may feel isolated and desolate in new surroundings. Overcoming cultural obstacles and language barriers is reflected in the kinetic movement and motion within my use of different mediums such as printmaking.”

Artist Bio: Anbareen Abeer is a Canadian artist currently enrolled in Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary. Abeer’s specializations are in Printmaking and Photography.

MRI IN USE
2016-06-10 - 2016-07-16
About the Exhibition
MRI In Use: A Psychological Snapshot – exhibition essay by Heather Caverhill
Through MRI In Use, Darian Goldin Stahl offers a glimpse into the experience of navigating a medical diagnosis and living with chronic illness. The print-based installation emerged from the ongoing collaboration between the artist and her sister Devan Stahl, a writer and bio ethicist who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her early twenties. Devan’s research, her personal accounts, and her magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans are the specific source material for the exhibition. MRI In Use addresses broader, shared anxieties and uncertainties surrounding medical intervention, the fallibility of the human body, and mortality. It calls attention to the rift between the hopes attached to medical science-its potential for discovery and healing-and the bureaucratic and dehumanizing aspects of undergoing diagnosis and treatment.
The immersive installation includes a series of life-sized hospital gown prints suspended from the ceiling of the darkened gallery. These worn and wrinkled garments immediately call to mind a patient who is absent. They appear ghost-like, vulnerable, and delicate. Goldin Stahl created the works by applying multiple toner transfers to large pieces of waxed ultra- fine silk. The innovative and physically demanding technique accounts for the vibrant colours of the gowns, which radiate in the dim light of the gallery. The irregularly shaped, almost transparent prints are highly illusionistic. Viewed from the front, they appear almost sculptural. Once viewers move through and activate the space, the diaphanous textiles swing and sway to reveal their flatness. The hovering garments appear as slices of something larger when viewed from the side–a reference to the ways that medical scans reduce the three dimensional form.
While the MRI machine slowly and incrementally documents the body, patients might remain confined and immobile for hours. Goldin Stahl has constructed a psychological ​​snapshot of this uneasy and claustrophobic environment in the congested space of the gallery. In sporadic intervals, the sizeable prints are illuminated by projections of actual MRI scan metadata. The intermittent rhythm and repetition of the projector points to both the tedium of the diagnostic imaging procedure and to the stamina required to undergo such an experience.
The specialized technical language of medical imaging scans is incomprehensible for most people. Goldin Stahl interrupts this stream of abstract information by interspersing the projections of light and shadows cast by Venetian blinds. For the artist, the image of sunlight escaping through blinds is at once beautiful and dangerous. They evoke the bright spots that she has observed on her sister’s medical scans, which represent lesions or scars left by multiple sclerosis. This analogy is a subtle reminder of the complex and unanticipated ways that diagnosis and knowledge of illness may be carried into domestic spaces and everyday life. MRI In Use provides a setting to think about and question the ways that medical science comes into contact with human beings, and how it is used to interpret the body.
By combining and juxtaposing the clinical with the familiar, the installation endeavours to rehumanize the anonymous and alienating nature of medical imagery and diagnosis.
Artist Bio: Darian Goldin Stahl has recently completed an eight-month scholarship residency at Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver, BC. She will begin her PhD in Fine Art Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal, QC this fall.

Extinguish
2016-06-03 - 2016-07-29
About the Exhibition
Artist Statement: Initially I lit the candle as an act of remembrance. The action brought a singular light into the darkness of winter months, a symbol of hope.
Making contour drawings of the candle, allowed me to immerse myself into the moment the candle burned, allowing for a lifting of spirit. Drawing the candle image on the copper etching plate, allowed for a transformation of the drawing through the process of printmaking. Before each immersion into the acid, I drew a new network of line, over over the old. Following each etching of the image, a print was made documenting each stage the image went through until the final print. On the surface, it appears I have come full circle from dark to light, light to dark. However, following this process of destruction of image through printmaking, I come to a place of new place symbols enriched through this act of re-creation.
Artist Bio: Kate Baillies discovered the magic of making prints during her high school years. She studied art with a focus on printmaking at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, ON. She later extended this education, obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts in Art Education from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, NS. Kate has worked in the capacity of printmaking technician at Alberta College of Art and Design. She has taught art to children in schools located in Halifax and Calgary, as well as in programs at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the City of Calgary’s North Mount Art Center. Most recently, Kate completed a month-long residency at the Zea Mays Printmaking.The studio, located in Florence, Massachusetts, specializes in sustainable. “green” printmaking practices.

Landscape Gaze and Breezy Erudition, and What About Formal Freedom?
2016-04-22 - 2016-06-04
About the Exhibition
Joani Tremblay – Landscape Gaze and Breezy Erudition, and What About Formal Freedom? – exhibition essay by Christie Kirchner
Joani Tremblay’s work is rooted in the creation of spaces, both external, physical spaces to be occupied, and internal, psychological spaces of experience. Working in embroidery, printmaking and drawing, she creates illusory multi-media environments that weave together imagined places and experienced places, leading us tenuously along and across the borderline between our outer and inner landscapes. Her installations – often characterized by suspended embroidered drawings interspersed with prints, sculptural objects, and even live plants – create spaces that must be physically occupied, but that also provide an ethereal, abstract environment, in which the viewer can project their own backdrop of memories, fixations, and fantasies.
Tremblay’s exhibition Landscape Gaze and Breezy Erudition, and What About Formal Freedom? explores the transfer between the physical experience of a place and the imaginings it conjures by endeavoring to re-create the “feel” of an existing place. In this work, she is interested in how we connect to and experience the feeling of powerful, emotionally loaded places – landscapes that have a particular mystical, ritual or historical significance. This specific installation draws inspiration from the Untermyer Garden in New York state: an elaborate, century-old garden founded by Samuel Untermyer, then a prominent lawyer and Jewish-rights advocate, and designed in the Beaux-Arts style at the turn of the century. Upon Untermyer’s passing, the gardens were endowed to the state, abandoned, and soon fell into neglect, becoming a neo-renaissance-styled shelter for transient people and a mystical site for conducting occultist rituals. For several days, Tremblay walked, sketched, photographed and collected minerals and flora from the park as source material for her work, while internalizing a distinct feeling invoked by the esoteric history, architectural details and abandoned, outgrown aesthetic of the gardens.
The resulting works seek to elicit this affective experience in the viewer – the layers of time, overgrowth, and mysticism – through the repetition and layering of imagery. Within her sketches and photos, Tremblay looked for interesting details and gestural marks that resonated with her inner experience of the landscape. She then reproduced these tiny pieces of the collected garden imagery and re-configured, repeated and collaged them over and over in her prints and drawings into larger images and onto objects that form the new landscape of the installation. The ore and foliage collected at the site were ground into pigments to make inks from which the resulting imagery is printed, creating works that capture the feel of the gardens through both formal reflection and materiality.
Re-contextualizing these elements from their original locale into the layered marks of a maze of drawings, prints and objects, Tremblay’s installation creates a parallel space that exists somewhere in between the garden’s actual landscape and its distinct emotional experience. From this distilled essence of its history, visual details, and natural elements, we as viewers are invited construct our personal inner experience of the Untermyer gardens. By triggering a particular feeling or emotional response through our interaction with her constructed space, Tremblay seeks to explore our internal perception of and connection to the physical landscapes around us, and how we understand the notion of place.
Artist Bio: Joani Tremblay is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She is an MFA candidate at Concordia University with an art practice based in print media, drawing and installation. Tremblay’s work has been shown in Tokyo (3331 Arts Chiyoda), New York City (DRAFTspace), Denton, Texas (tAd Gallery) and throughout Canada in Toronto (Open Studio Gallery), Montreal (Parisian Laundry), Rimouski (Caravansérail) and soon in Calgary (Alberta Printmakers Gallery) and Edmonton (Latitude 53). Tremblay has also done artist residencies in Tokyo and Berlin. Her work is part of the Loto-Québec Collection and numerous national and international private collections. She is the recipient of the Vladimir J. Elgart Graduate Scholarship and a research grant from The Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture.

Too Ignorant to Face Reality
2016-04-01 - 2016-05-27
Zareen Abeer explores macroscopic patterns that are found deep within nature to represent human organs, such as lungs and the heart. She considers the heart to be the most important organ in the body because it helps us to feel. Just like nature is to earth, she uses lungs to show that we are destroying the one thing that helps us to stay alive which is nature. Through her work, she addresses the topic of environmental issues and human impact on the environment.
“I focus on repetitive tasks that we might overlook. In my collage work, the tasks overlap and create an obscure version of the world we live in, reinforcing the absurd image of our existence; a world where the parameters of our movements and thoughts were already built before we were born into it, to the extent where our instincts are no longer primitive or required.”
Artist Bio: Zareen Abeer is a Bachelor of Fine Arts student at the University Calgary. Her specialization is in printmaking and photography. Her work uses variations of geometric patterns that are found with nature to represent objects, organs or elements of nature.

Blowing In The Wind
2016-02-29 - 2016-03-09
About the Exhibition
April Dean’s Word Work – exhibition essay by Blair Brennan
April Dean is an artist and a writer who transmits messages from her home in Edmonton. In this Alberta Printmakers exhibition, Dean presents prints and related work that reveals her ongoing interest in the connection between emotions and words. Dean confronts our seemingly inexhaustible need to relate our deepest thoughts and feelings and the misplaced sloganizing that often accompanies our attempts to communicate meaningfully with others.
The majority of works in this show are photographic images of text on T-shirts. Dean prints phrases on the T-shirts and photographs them wet on a light table. The final works are digitally printed on transparent Pictorico Film and displayed off the wall by a few inches. These works have the feel of X-rays, nicely commenting on our need to communicate our innermost desires with this relatively recent fashion item. T-shirts proclaim, “this is what is inside me”, whether they say, “WE ARE ILL-EQUIPPED & UNPREPARED”, as one of Dean’s works declares, or “Go Oilers!”
Dean’s phrases are provocative, sometimes vague, but consistently open to deeper interpretation about the meaning of these specific words or larger ideas about how living language works. Like a Facebook update, Dean’s printed T-shirts disclose our current status to the world. In most cases, Dean’s phrases are assertive announcements in capital letters that begin with a plural pronoun. Nonetheless, the proclamations express some awkward self-doubt. Dean is interested in how various public platforms are used to express emotional states; however the text’s peculiar evasiveness may reflect Dean’s parallel interest in the things we choose not to share publicly.
Much has been written about the benefits and challenges that current technology brings to communication. A recent Globe and Mail article on media scholar Sherry Turkel’s new book Reclaiming Conversation: the Power of Talk in the Digital Age, suggests that electronic communication may hinder face to face communication. Distracted by technology, we “move in and out of paying attention, our conversations become light, losing much of their empathetic possibility.” Some psychic urgency in Dean’s communications leaves me anxious about the state of language itself. I wonder if words can still elicit genuine empathy.
In June 1916, Hugo Ball stated that it was “imperative to write invulnerable sentences.” When Ball wrote this, it must have seemed to him and his Dada compatriots that language had been rendered useless in the face of the carnage of the First World War. Nightly performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and other seemingly absurd actions could be interpreted as a ritualized madness for a world gone mad with Ball’s own sound poetry revealing a special kind of trauma-induced linguistic madness.
Contemporary life is difficult (not WWI difficult) although, on a daily basis, we negotiate challenging psychic and emotional territory. Without fail, language is our primary tool in these negotiations. It is a way to communicate with others and, simultaneously, the way we discover our own thoughts. April Dean’s oddly self-assured declarations draw attention to the process of language as thought and language as self examination.
Artist Bio: April Dean is a visual artist living and working in Edmonton, Alberta. She has a diploma in photographic technology from the Northern Alberta Institute for Technology (NAIT), a Bachelor of Arts Degree with distinction from The University of Alberta with a major in Art &Design (Printmaking) and a minor in English. In 2012 she was granted a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Fine &Media Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art &Design (NSCAD University) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her graduate thesis research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her work is held in both public and private collections and has been purchased by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. In 2012 Her work was selected to represent contemporary Canadian print media in the Novosibirsk International Triennial of Contemporary Graphic Art and the International Printmaking Biennial Of Douro in Alijó, Portugal. Her creative practice incorporates all forms of print and print related media, video, installation and text-based expressions of humanness. In her spare time she is the Executive Director of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists (SNAP), a non-profit and artist-run centre in Edmonton, Alberta.

Spread
2016-01-08 - 2016-02-20
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Kristina Arnold
Marilee Salvator’s work is deceptively beautiful. Entering one of her room-sized installations, the viewer is drawn into a candy-coated world. A riot of jewel-toned circles bursts across the walls and cascades to the floor, shiny, plastic and playful. Forms tumble and spill, coalescing into patterns both lacy and bold. There are no frames on the wall, meticulously crafted editions or flat paper surfaces. Instead, thousands of single-color clusters are relief printed onto transparent film, each then painstakingly cut out by hand. In overlapping layer upon layer, nearly buzzing with life, each piece is pinned to the wall, seemingly to prevent it from escaping. The addition of lighter, less intense ghost prints, the introduction of neutral greys to the work’s palette, and the shadows created through the clear print surface provide a counterbalance, and give a physical and temporal depth to the work.
Spread’s process and materials reference both traditional “women’s work” and the more traditionally male space of the factory. Visual elements strongly rooted in the feminist-inspired Pattern and Decoration movement, traditional quilts and children’s coloring books are paired with manufactured plastic film and an industrially-inspired process for creating multiples. Cloth piecework and mechanical die cutting are equally/visually present. The individual artist’s hand is concealed- through the intervention of the machine to create image, and at the same time revealed – by altering each piece individually (via cutting it with scissors) once it comes off the press.
Encountering Salvator’s dense work we wonder: is this a jungle or a seascape? Has our scale shifted, and we are instead navigating the space under a microscope? We could be observing flora or fauna: breeding, morphing, mutating, and taking over a space. In her print project, Salvator harnesses the potential energy that lies latent within a process of multiples. A single building block, used over and over, stacks, fills, and masses. One cell divides, and these daughter cells divide, exponentially covering space.
Salvator’s shapes and layers reference the build-up of time – both metaphorical and actual. We navigate the rain forest and smell the sweet overgrowth of decay; we snorkel through the accretion of barnacles and sealife on a long- ago sunk ship. We marvel at the dramatic complexity that is our body magnified many times over. One component is,by itself, beautiful, healthy and desirable. But, when repeated obsessively, a small piece metastasizes, becoming toxic to its body host, or envelops its environment completely and becomes dangerously claustrophobic. Beneath the gleeful, colorful surface lies a darker significance. Perhaps it is that the plastic film, though attractive, is busily proliferating in oceanic trash islands, suffocating the very sea life it depicts. Maybe the jungle vines, brought to a new environment and planted to share their beauty, are now reproducing out of control, choking out the native landscape. Or the lifestyle we enjoy is barraging our bodies with daily toxicities that eventually add up to cancer.
Lest the viewer despair, our fears of what may lie behind the curtain are balanced by Salvator’s sheer positive visual energy. We are cautioned of the consequences of our indulgences, but are ultimately left with a gift. Like the proverbial kids in the candy store, we have immersed ourselves within her transformed fantasy world, have consumed our fill, are satiated and slightly sick. We are richer for the experience, and if given the chance, we would do it again.
Artist Bio: Marilee Salvator is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking and Design at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green Kentucky. Her work has been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions throughout North America, South Korea, China, Japan, Portugal, Serbia, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, Italy, New Zealand and Romania. Her work is included in over 25 collections including JCI University, Jiangxi, China and Sakmi Art Museum, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan.

2015 Not-So-Mini Print Exhibition and Exchange
2015-12-05 - 2015-12-23
About the Exhibition
Each year, A/P holds a non-juried show and sale to showcase the work of local and international print artists, and to raise funds towards Alberta Printmakers artistic and educational programming. A/P invites all interested printmakers to submit an edition of ten 8” x 10” prints that relates to the theme of transition for exhibition and exchange in the Artist Proof Gallery. Each participant will receive 8 prints created by other artists, and A/P will retain 2 works from each edition for sale in our studio and gallery.

Artists included in the exhibition:
Kate Baillies, Alison Frank, Margot Van Lindenberg, Lillianne Daigle, T. Knudsen, Brandon Giessmann, Carole Bondaroff, Mahwish Ahmed, Kaitlin Reckord, Randie Feil, Gabrielle Arrizza, Nicole Edmond, Mark Eadie, Tara Cooper, Jennifer Byrnes, Tee Kundu, Raegan Little, Ainsley Dack, Claire Coutts, kathryn Dutchak, Oliver Dunbar, Boenish Gilles, Melissa Rae Huapaya, Paul Hammacott, Max Gregory, Ryan Ericksen, Bethany Drake, John Charles Cox, Carrie Phillips-Kieser, Alden Alfon, Robert Pugh, Anne Petrie, Emily Thomas, Catherine Tam, Jesse Wardell, Sofia Roy, Nadine Simec, Andrew McKay, Angela Smyth, James Michele, Kale Vandenbroek, Mitsuko Sakurada, Marzieh Mosavarzadeh, Elmira Sarreshtehdari, Shinobu Mitsuhashi, Sumi Perera, Lisa Molvig, Richard Steiner, Marg McArdell, Hannah Raper, Darby Womack

Lost Geography
2015-12-04 - 2016-01-29
These colour woodcuts are developed from small collage studies I did in the 1970’s. The reductive woodcut process allows me to reconsider the interaction between shape and colour in the original compositions. These are not reproductions but rather explorations seeking new meanings in a different time and place. The series references maps, diagrams and billboard remnants: fragments that might represent imagined space.
Artist Bio: Sara Norquay has been a printmaker for almost twenty years, making monotypes, photopolymer etchings, woodcuts, linocuts and recently copper etchings. She also makes artists books and works with felt. After living, working and exhibiting for nearly 20 years in California, she moved back to Canada in 2009 and now exhibits her work in Edmonton, Calgary, and Toronto as well as in California.

Terminal Work
2015-10-23 - 2015-11-25
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Daniel Cleghorn
Bloom, Fade, Repeat
As a flower is bound to bloom, it is also bound to fade; coinciding with the promise of one’s end is another’s creation- a spark in the dark. From the blooming flower comes the promise of honey, a nutrient to other wildlife and ourselves. From this donation of nectar comes the collapse of the petal’s peak and the brewing of a renaissance. We have become dependent on the blossom, the bees, and the cycle of fading and rebirth of the flower. As small as the flower is, we are largely unaware of our need for beauty to survive. Much like the flower, our hearts work in a rhythmic sequence; as one cavity blooms, the other fades, cycling through the blood, completing the revolution and transporting nectar to the rest of the body. The beauty of any cycle is not recognized until almost lost.
Marnie Blair experienced a cardiac arrest at the young age of nineteen, which led to her being diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome, a condition that affects the heart’s electrical system. As a result, Blair had to have surgery to implant a cardiac defibrillator. Her personal experience with her heart condition and defibrillator led her to become aware of the inherent beauty within the heart’s cycle. Now partially dependent on an technological alien force to continue the rhythm of her heartbeat, Blair creates installations and images with print media derived from derelict industrial and medical sites as a reflection on fragility and resilience; the biological and the artificial; the private and public; decay and resuscitation.
A motif and design strategy found throughout her exhibitions is the application of juxtaposition to create a visual cycle and enhance the physical nature of the work. While this can be said about many artists, Blair goes beyond the obvious employment of direct contrast to heighten the qualities of a pair; she succeeds in creating a conversation between the material, her thematic concepts, and a powerful personal history. The strength of the work lies in understanding the intimate relationship between her and the media; within this same strength, however, exists a possible detriment to the work- the deeply personal meaning can distance the viewer or cause confusion. Once we become intimately familiar with Blair’s past, we can truly be immersed in the
exhibition and be overwhelmed in the best possible manner, finding abstract and beauteous ways to relate and empathize with her work. Considering the physical nature that Blair’s work takes, there is an obviously intentional interplay between the duality of the natural and the controlled/manufactured. This relationship ultimately ties back to her personal story and experiences, but is subtle enough to be open to further interpretation by her audience. Marnie Blair’s examination of her personal history, the relationship between the technological and the biological, and her exploration of print media materials engages the viewer and encourages an immersive experience.
Artist Bio: Marnie Blair has a BFA from Lakehead University and an MFA from the University of Calgary. She studied at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, the Studio Art Centers International in Florence and has interned at Manhattan’s Lower East Side Print Shop. She presently teaches Printmaking at Red Deer College.
