Alberta Printmakers

Gathered Mass
2015-04-24 - 2015-06-06 | Alberta
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Christie Kirchner
Rooted in printmaking, multidisciplinary artist Audrey Hurd’s practice explores the notion of the trace, and the meaning that is inherent in the gestures of making. As we move through the world, following cycles of growth, movement, sorrow and joy, marks are left upon us and we leave our own traces on the other people, places and objects we encounter. Documenting the marks and gestures invoked in the careful creation, archiving, and ultimate disassembly of three amorphous sculptures, Hurd’s work in the exhibition Gathered Mass is centered on the physicality, intimacy, and tangibility of the traces that are around us and within us, and how they act as a material echo of human experience.
Created from the slow, meticulous layering of ephemeral domestic materials such as paint, stucco and wallpaper, the sculptures in Gathered Mass were gradually grown from tiny cores into dense, weighty objects that belie the lightness and delicacy of their constituents. With the intimate, time consuming ritual of growing the masses daily in her studio, the addition of each new layer of material became a trace of a gesture, of a moment, and of a thought for Hurd, all held within the object and sealed between each carefully applied coating. As each new strata of material was applied, what is underneath was concealed, and yet that material history is held within the sculpture and is inherent in its form – as each layer shapes that which came after it. The physical formation of the masses and the traces of the thoughts and gestures retained within them give a heavy, tangible physicality to the intangible weight of the reflections and emotions carried by the artist throughout their creation.
Hurd further emphasizes the importance of the act of making and physical transformation of these objects by chronicling their progressive development through a set of three photo- based lithographs that accompany the sculptures in this exhibition. The three prints document the sequential growth of the sculptures by layering images of the masses in various stages
of completion, providing a visible archive of the now invisible gestures of creation. Resembling three giant, haunting irises, the layered prints accentuate Hurd’s interest in the act of making by looking backwards in time to recount the history of each sculpture’s creation. Once fully formed and documented through the accompanying prints, the dense, visceral sculptures were then slowly deconstructed until all that remained was a small, cross-sectioned piece of each mass that can easily fit in the palm of one’s hand. This cathartic act of carving, chipping and tearing the masses apart reduced them to piles of their material elements, which Hurd once again photographed and printed as four-colour separation lithographs. Conjuring images of piles of ashes or other lifeless remains, the residual traces of the heavy, burdensome objects and the prints that depict them again give a physical tangibility to the incorporeal, emotional process of letting go. Shown together, the prints and sculptures in Gathered Mass offer a material and gestural narrative that speaks to the cyclical nature of life, death, and transformation, and the deep impressions such experiences leave upon us.
Artist Bio: Based in St.John’s Newfoundland, Audrey Hurd approaches a variety of media from the perspective of a printmaker, interested in both the act of and motivations behind the creation of an impression. She has a BFA from NSCAD University and has participated in residencies and exhibitions in Canada and the US.

Natural Resources
2015-04-07 - 2015-05-31
About the Exhibition
“Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us” – David Suzuki (The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature)
Natural Resources is an observation of the current state of Canada’s iconic landscape. Through the use of handmade objects Natural Resources explores human intervention, Canadian imagery, concepts of natural space along with the idea of constructed versus natural landscape.
Artist Bio: Tait Wilman is an artist currently based in Calgary, raised on the prairies and by the sea of the West Coast. Experiencing the Canadian heritage, landscape, and our connection to nature are some aspects of inspiration to Tait’s practice. Creating artworks that revolve around these influences and using a sense humour fuels my creativity.

Singular Repetition
2015-04-01 - 2015-04-30
About the Exhibition
Singular Repetition is an Andy Warhol inspired print exhibition and sale in partnership with LOFT 112 and Teatro Berdache.

Artists included in the exhibition:
Shinobu Mistuhashi, Trevor Gieske, Eveline Kolijn, Keri Macleod, Alison Frank, Tracy Lawson, Robin Koch, Kale Vandenbroek, Ken Li, Dan Cleghorn & Scott Baird

The Creation of the Universe
2015-02-27 - 2015-04-11
About the Exhibition
Essay by Nathan Flaig
The work of Montreal-based artist Emmanuelle Jacques explores the reflexive nature of urban space, the expansive potential of territory, and human reflection upon these structures. Presented through ever-evolving projects, the content of her work reflects the process from which it is birthed; excitingly transformative and speculative, projects like The Creation of the Universe mediate the boundlessness of possibility, randomness, and the limitations of the mind. Jacques’ projects have been exhibited across Canada and she has hosted an abundance of creative workshops that continue the explorative nature of her practice. Her art book Lieux communs: Commonplaces is an emotive rendering of cartography, which recalls psychogeographic explorations of space. This work highlights the wonder in the mundane, echoing the sentiments of the Situationists in its emotive reorientation of utilitarian space. Similarly, The Creation of the Universe recasts this wonder in a spectacular fashion, positioned outward to the cosmos.
With beginnings in 2010 during a residency at Open Studio in Toronto, The Creation of the Universe draws inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Library of Babel. Jacques’ process mimics the method described in the story, which describes a vast library that resulted from an alphabet of only 25 characters. Jacques created her own characters by engraving 25 blocks, each with “the motif of the stars standing for the infinite possibilities,” thereby assembling a cosmic alphabet from which 15 625 possible permutations could be derived (Jacques, 2012). Using a typographic press and maintaining a limit of three matrices per image, Jacques printed 1250 of these permutations with process colour inks of yellow, magenta, and cyan. By employing the primary triad of colour, Jacques evokes the elemental construction of matter, suggesting that simple beginnings can result in a multitude of diverse creations. Such a process lends itself to the print medium, which allows for the mechanical reproduction of works with subtle variation, commenting on both the innovation of the work while hinting towards the infinite. The projects exhibited in a dual fashion, utilizing both time and space as indicators of vastness and the limits of human comprehension. By displaying the printed pieces in a repetitive manner, the subtlety of the process is highlighted, while also confronting the viewer with a near overwhelming volume of permutations. The contradictive feeling produced on one hand signals comprehension, while alluding to that which cannot be conceived. The physicality of the printed works forms a spatial relationship between the viewer and boundlessness, while the adjoining video piece situates the mutations in time, with variations moving in succession before the viewer’s eyes.
Artist Bio: Emmanuelle Jacques’s practice is rooted in drawing and the print media. Her work is presented in various forms such as installations, artist books, videos, relational art or other manoeuvres. She develops her work by way of projects, some of which have been unfolding in parallel for several years. In pursuing repetitive, even endless tasks, she creates contexts that are conducive to lengthy reflection, which allows her to articulate ideas and make her work meaningful. Having been influenced by the philosophy of the absurd, she views the world with both a sense of wonder and, due to the impossibility of finding meaning in it, one of revolt. Her recent projects explore notions of space and territory, whether it be through their appropriation by individuals or communities (Une cartographie subjective, Les chemins de traverse), their poetic and political resonance (Lieux communs: Commonplaces) or their imaginary dimension (La création de l’univers, Cartographies spontanées).
Emmanuelle Jacques lives in Montreal where she earned a BA at UQAM in 2004. She has presented her work, given work- shops and carried out residency projects in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Moncton, SaintJohn’s, Baie-Comeau, Natashquan and the Iles-de-la-Madeleine. Her artist book Lieux communs: Commonplaces was a finalist in the Artist Book of the Moment competition at the Art Gallery of York University (Toronto, 2012). An active member of her milieu, she was the president of Arprim’s board of directors and for 5 years she took part in the organization’s transformation into an artist-run centre dedicated to the dissemination of contemporary print- related art practices.

Past Iterations
2015-02-07 - 2015-03-31
About the Exhibition
My current work explores the connections between traditional media and how it interfaces with digital technologies specifically aimed at the growing vocabulary of print based processes. Using digital tools as aids, my work is built up in layers where linear elements, geometry and symmetry, are embedded and superimposed on open and fluid spaces.
While the use of digital applications has become a significant component of my practice it is important that my own hand can be seen in the work. I am interested in the disjunctive qualities of analogue and digital print processes when they are combined, and the potential point in which they converge and become symbiotic.

Artist Bio: Shawn Reynar holds an MFA in Print Media from Concordia University, Montreal, QC. He received a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax, NS, as well as having studied at Langara College in Vancouver, BC. Most recently, Reynar was Artist in Residence at Towson University in Maryland, Visiting artist at UNC Charlotte and Snap Line newsletter artist for the quarterly publication of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-Artists. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States.

String and Tape
2015-01-07 - 2015-02-21
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Scott Baird
The briefest, most glancing analysis of contemporary drawing practice reveals the obvious variety of work exhibited under the name of “drawing”, making it increasingly more difficult to define the term. Drawing is traditionally seen as the basis of visual communication, existing well before the written alphabet or culturally complex language. Within all of its many forms, the act of drawing retains the most basic systematic process: to observe, understand, and record. In his work, Jeff Kulak takes on the responsibility of facilitating the understanding of complex ideas through graphic, typographic, and pictorial elements.
His unconventional works challenge the public’s preconceptions about which forms a drawing can take. The experimentation with composition resembles the organization of visual data in diagrams, mind-maps, and flow charts. The playful use of such alternative materials as string, tape, and vinyl adhesive brings the drawings into a three-dimensional space in which they must respond to the parameters of their environment, while retaining the two-dimensional characteristics of the geometrically linear, canonical drawing.
These materials betray the perfection of ideal geometry and mi- pose an ephemeral, temporary nature on the work, which inspires the artist to further capture the effects of gravity and tension on his drawings.
String and Tape consists of four silkscreened prints, a site-specific installation, and a suite of photographs that describe the artist’s unusual drawing process, which was developed over the course of three years. The subsequent photographing of his installations, digital recreation, and silkscreening all point to an interest in documenting and lengthening the tenure of these temporary compositions. Taking the images further in these mediums extends the depth of play within the artistic practice, while simultaneously capturing the changes and physical decay of the dynamic drawings. Jeff Kulak has found a working method to create large scale drawings with minimal resources that challenges and extends the traditional concepts concerning the parameters of drawing.
Interview between Scott Baird and Jeff Kulak:
Q: How did you begin making these experimental drawings, and what led you to utilize the printmaking process as a form of documentation for your installations?
A: I started making the drawings on my apartment walls and usually left them up for a few weeks before trying another composition. The tension of the string against the tape led to
unpredictable changes in the form of the drawing over the course of its lifespan. Initially when I returned home to find a drawing had lost some of its structure, drooping or tangled into itself, I felt a disappointment at the loss of the precision of the original alignment. At some point I recognized this feeling of disappointment as something compelling and inherent to this method of playing with point and line.
The prints serve to document this transition from an initial, intentional composition towards a less controlled state. Using screen prints allowed me to overlay several states of the drawing very precisely, mapping the trajectory of form as it surrendered to gravity or more deliberate cutting and pulling. In turn, seeing the overlaid stages in the prints helped me understand the ways in which I could create the initial drawing with their eventual disintegration in mind.
Q: Your background in digital illustration and graphic design seems far removed from the tangible, material nature of this type of drawing. Do you believe these two fields to be disparate?
A: Finding a balance between the ability to rapidly experiment with alternatives on a computer and a more focused engagement with drawing and physical media is central to the way I approach my work. I think the string drawings tap into the desire to be exceedingly precise and are in many ways a lot like drawing with vectors on a computer. You can create long, straight lines and very accurate angles.
In a very concrete way, most of the images I produce digitally are born of a process identical to the way I would approach a silkscreen. In a print I have to be more economical in terms of layering, but when working digitally I often end up with images with a few hundred layers.

Artist Bio: By trade and training Jeff Kulak is a graphic designer and illustrator. His responsibility in both roles is to facilitate understanding of complex ideas through the use of graphic, typographic and pictorial elements. Underlying his practice is an exploration of drawing as the basis for visual communication. What is a drawing? Where is its place today? How can it exist in the world in new ways?
He pursues responses to these questions through a process that incorporates chance, change, and a playful manipulation of common materials. Tape, string, adhesive vinyl, found Paper and ink converge with digital and analogue printmaking techniques to create works that are mutable, impermanent and responsive to the physical parameters of their environment.

Oral Microflora
2014-12-07 - 2015-01-31
About the Exhibition
Oral Microflora contemplates the small world of cellular life that surrounds us, specifically the microbial life that comes into contact with our mouths. This imagery explores the relationship between cellular life and humans, how these small, seemingly trivial things have a huge effect on our daily lives.
This print creates the response of viewers instantly reaching for their hand sanitizer, but it also allows viewers to see the beauty of microbial life. This relationship we share with microbes is one that is both symbiotic and nocuous, we can’t survive with- out them and yet they can be deadly. Oral Microflora I causes the viewer to be both uncomfortable as well as in awe of these tiny cells that surround our everyday lives.

Artist Bio: Nicole Edmond is an emerging artist and recent graduate from The Alberta College of Art and Design. She works mainly within the realm of print-media; her specialties include Relief, Etching and Silkscreening. Nicole’s artwork explores the invisible microscopic world that surrounds our everyday lives. She is interested in the grotesque beauty within this infinitesimal world and uses printmaking to reflect this.

2014 Not-So-Mini Print Exhibition and Exchange
2014-12-01 - 2014-12-31
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:
Maria Doering, Trish Hondzel, Jenny Hamilton, Jessica Lanigan, Scott Baird, Irén Gibson, Anna Desramaux, Rob Lemerweyer, Aldon Alfon, T. Knudsen, John Abram, Carrie Phillips-Kieser, Jolie Bird, Trevor Gieske, Kate Baillies, Alison Frank, Claire Coutts, Tamara Deedman, Jeanette Lazar, Marcus Jackson, Joshua Brien, Cate Kuzik, Bonnie Baker, Hannah Genosko, Golriz Rezvani, Maria Nowak, Melissa Roa, Tyler Zurawel, Barbara Sutherland, Nora Morris, Christine Nalder, Sally Mayne, Anne Petrie, Amanda West, Kaitlin Reckorel, Ash Slemming, Nicole Schlosser, Evan Smibert Marie Winters, Lisa Turner, Shinobu Mitsuhashi

interweave
2014-10-07 - 2014-11-30
About the Exhibition
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
interweave is a diptych of intaglio prints that toys with representation of the intrinsic duality of one’s desire to find reason, structure, placement juxtaposed with the pleasures of losing oneself within the irrational, the letting go of conformity and expectations. On one side the well crafted stitch stands in as the crafted life that we consciously work to build, and the other is the wild nature of letting go. Within both sides, lie beauty and darkness, foreboding and anticipation.
Artist Bio: carrie phillips kieser is a Calgary-based artist whose work revolves around relationships between control and helplessness. Through symbolism and motifs she explores ideas around the uncanny; where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of strange uncomfortability.
To see more visit www.carriephillipskieser.com

Wasteland / Wanderland
2014-09-14 - 2018-10-12
About the Exhibition
Wasteland / Wanderland – exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford
Any 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.
Laura 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.
Her 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.
Children 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.
About the Artist
Laura 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.

Public School
2014-09-03 - 2014-10-18
About the Exhibition
Public School began in early 2013 as a proposition to generate and sustain shared projects that involve a rotating roster of artists and thinkers spanning great distances. Ardent researchers and itinerant, multidisciplinary artists in their own right, Emily Hope and Lea Bucknell have modelled Public School to be a roving forum, for inquiry and knowledge sharing. By mailing out thematic art kits to participants all over the country and exhibiting the results, sharing information through the online Public School Newsletter , and engaging communities with workshops, artist talks and public forums, Public School aims to develop a strong ensemble of talented collaborators.
Curators, Lea Bucknell and Emily Hope are multidisciplinary artists with a strong focus on socially engaged projects.
Artists included in the exhibition:
Dan Anhorn, Marnie Blair, Jennifer Bowes, Darlene Kalynka, Andrea Kastner, Donald Lawrence, Colin Lyons, Anna Madelska, Nate McLeod, Cassandra Paul, Jamie Q., Sarah van Sloten, Su Ying Strang, Tania Willard, Craig Willms

Threshold Figures
2014-08-07 - 2014-09-30
About the Exhibition
Threshold Figures are a series of lithograph prints composed of abstracted elements from Gustave Dore’s illustrations of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy; figurative compositions constructed from manipulated 19th century interpretations of 14th century super-sensible landscapes. Dante and Dore provide the framework to discuss the transition from figuration to transfiguration. Threshold Figures are invested in representation and interpretation; with breaking down traditional print methods while simultaneously honouring them. Through the conceptualization and materialization of these prints, the artist is confronted with the disparity between the printing press and the internet; with how these different methods of information production and consumption have influenced thought (static versus amorphous).
Artist Bio: Alexis Grey Hildreth is a Vancouver-based artist whose work revolves around relationships between internal and external geography. Alexis is balanced by terror and awe; the stable and the amorphous. From innkeeper to nightwatchman, Shepard to security guard, grocer to gardener; Alexis feels the pain of the shovel intensifies the pleasure of the pen.

You Are Needed
2014-06-11 - 2014-07-31
About the Exhibition
You Are Needed – Exhibition essay by Jessie Bryant
Ericka Walker’s lithographic prints in her series You Are Needed speak to the viewer across the decades that span early- 20th century wartime to the present day. Like a formidable call to attention, viewers are invited to come face-to-face with the series’ bold imagery, powerful imperatives, and the deeper meanings behind them.
Although Walker’s prints engage in a re-presentation of wartime propaganda posters, they veer away – in increasingly apparent ways – from mere appropriation. As we perceive the intricate depiction of a horse’s flanks or the fine details of a rocket launcher, we feel a sense of the artist’s celebratory reverence for machinery, innovation, and the lithographic craft itself. At the same time, a poignant critique of propaganda appears tangibly woven into the display of text and imagery that are juxtaposed in unsettling ways. “Victory,” reads one print, “is a question of stamina.” The word “stamina,” evoking endurance in the face of adversity, visually sinks into near-obscurity behind ocean waves. This raises the possibility of destabilizing other seemingly sturdy principles in the propaganda vernacular: honour, duty, patriotism, that which is ‘right.’ What are the meanings behind these principles? Are they foundationally sound, objective and timeless, or are they propped up by sticks, and if so, what would it take to blow them down? Walker hardly proposes a simple answer.
Binaries course through text and imagery in You Are Needed. Beyond the thematic coupling of animal and machine, violent and bucolic, and individual and institution, we discover other underlying dyads, such as that between strength and insecurity. Underneath the bold semblance of power and perfection lay tinges of vulnerability, which leaks through in words like ‘loss,’ ‘question,’ ‘demobilized’ and ‘reduced,’ and in the unusual pairings of slogans and images that invoke inquiry rather than certainty.
It is in the occasionally unexpected transaction of these timeworn texts and images that we find the freshness abundant in these works, and here we discover another binary: novelty within the familiar. In addressing, but not displaying a preference for, either aspect of these various relationships, Walker opens the floor to possibility and even nominates a potential symbiosis of both alternatives within these pairings. As it is said, the truth is never pure and rarely simple.
A final relationship to touch upon is that between past and present, as it is through the very lens of the past that these prints speak to contemporary issues. The use of familiar images and texts taps into the depth of the Western collective unconscious, providing an eerily recognizable picture with which to highlight the Jungian ‘shadow’ aspects of Western growth: imperialism and war. You Are Needed invites us to confront these remnants of our collective past and their origins that, though perhaps latent, may be still present today.
Because our past shapes our future, it is through a careful consideration of our history that we may meet current challenges and move forward conscientiously. You are needed, as the viewer, to address the urge to oversimplify complex and challenging issues, and to reconsider within yourself notions of true and false, good and evil, right and wrong.
About the Artist
Erika Walker explores the vernacular history of printmaking to illustrate contemporary relationships between the imagery of industry, national identity, familial histories, nostalgia, romance, and war. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include group and solo exhibitions in North America and Europe, and Walker’s work appears in public and private collections including the Denver Art Museum, the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, the University of British Columbia, and the Athens School of Fine Arts. A selection of her Iithographic propaganda prints were recently reviewed in the Spring 2012 edition of Printmaking Today. Walker received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. She currently lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Distillation
2014-06-06 - 2014-07-31
About the Exhibition
Glass is a generative tool when I use it. It is a hand tool, a substrate, a filter, and a set of parameters. The prints presented in Distillation are the direct result of the material used in those contexts. They are drawings of ground and polished glass objects, abstracted using rules derived from the glass’s material qualities, and hand printed with glass plates. In this way, the images have become my distillation of the quiet, yet commanding presence of the material.

Artist Bio: Graeme Dearden is a Calgarian fine artist, working primarily in printmaking and cold glass sculpting. He has received instruction through The Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), The Corning Museum of Glass, and TheAlberta Printmaker’s Society and exhibits in local galleries throughout Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta presently. Although working in a variety of different media, Graeme is consistently exploring vitreography: a process involving pulling prints from glass plates. He has assisted in demonstrating vitreography for glass artists and printmakers alike. Graeme is currently earning his BFA as a full time ACAD student, majoring in Glass.

Embroidery of Code Lines
2014-04-16 - 2014-05-31
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Stacey Watson
By choosing a drastic reduction of form and material, Hélène Latulippe emphasizes action in her series Embroidery of Code Lines. Comprised of four prints, made by inking an object and then rubbing paper laid over it, the work demonstrates the simplest and earliest of printmaking techniques. Viewed from afar the lines depicted stand in orderly stillness, but close-up they vibrate with inconsistency.
Indeed if we are to consider that this could be code as the title suggests, then it is the moments of delineation that require attention. There are the instances of larger transgression: where lines are split, crossed, paused or ended incomplete. These punctuations are at times made with collage: pasted craft paper causes slight elevations of the surface, as an embroidery would do. Perhaps there is also a code within a code, because the subtle meanderings of the lines, so minute, are like the grooves in a vinyl record.
Less important here than a message within the marks is how the code is created. The titles of Latulippe’s prints at times lead the viewer to take note of actions which disturb the order of the lines (Rompre la ligne, Franchir la ligne, Point a la ligne). Still, repetition dominates. In close-up are the details which document a hand at work, working carefully over and over (again a link to embroidery as is intimated by the exhibition title). One can sense that there is a performative aspect to this work. To link these lines that immediately speak of control to a process of the body is one of the key points of meaning.
In the text “The Analysis of Performance Art” by A. Howell, the author notes that “inconsistency is a primary action, one of the fundamental poles of action:” He is referring to the repetition of performative acts, a process in which inconsistency is unavoidable. Pure repetition is as impossible as pure inconsistency. Howell goes on to say, “repetition underpins our inconsistencies:” It is meaningful to dwell further on repetition when looking at Embroidery of Code Lines, because of a reference to printmaking tradition.
One must read works made in the printmaking tradition in a different way now, as compared to in days gone by. Current technology gives us the ability to repeat an action or duplicate a mark or object to precise exactitude, with very very minimal inconsistency. The practical function of the early printmaking techniques (to copy image and text for distribution) is potentially an obsolete point in the meaning of a contemporary work made with these same methods. Or perhaps here it is key to meaning, Hélène Latulippe calls attention to how traditional printmaking vibrated with life while making duplicated works with repeated acts. It is the performance of the artist, in private or public, inking and printing over and over, that Embroidery of Code Lines celebrates.
About the Artist
Hélène Latulippe was born in Quebec. She lives and works in Montreal. She first studied industrial design at the lnstitut des Arts appliques in Montreal (1968). She worked in large office spaces, establishing the needs and setting functional and technical programs. But she kept visual arts in mind.
Tracking between work and family, she received a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal in 2012. She also studied in Italy and in France. She has received grants from McGill University in Montreal and from the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres Quebec (CALQ). Her work has been shown in various exhibitions. Her next solo will take place next November at the Galerie d’Art du Pare in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec.

…And It’s Good for You
2014-04-16 - 2014-05-30
About the Exhibition
This is an etching of a half of a red cabbage that I prepared and ate in my kitchen. To monumentalize an object is to give it weight and imbue it with importance. Because of the necessity of nourishment in our everyday lives, as well as our often negative interactions with food as affected by body image and time constraints, we frequently forget that eating can be a simple and joyful act. The use of colour, pattern, and size in this work is meant to be inviting, friendly and accessible in order to convey a simple message of delight.

Artist Bio: Madeleine Greenway is a Printmaker currently residing in Calgary. She studied at the Alberta College of Art + Design, receiving a BFA. Her work focuses on the physical connection that human beings have to nature through the food they eat. She creates large and colourful works to exemplify investment and delight.

World Machine
2014-02-26 - 2014-04-05
About the Exhibition
Exhibition essay by Skylar Borgstrom
Halifax-based artist Mark Bovey uses printmaking techniques from past and present to explore his personal fascination with the ways humans connect, learn and question place. Bovey presents the collapse of space and time, known and unknown, through the multiple layers and varied processes used to create his work.
Bovey is an artist and Associate Professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University who has exhibited both nationally and internationally. His work includes traditional printmaking techniques (intaglio, lithography, screen printing and woodcut) and more recent modes of artistic production including inkjet prints and digital video projection. With one foot in printmaking’s oldest and most fundamental technologies, and the other residing firmly in the present, Bovey’s work creates a bridge between that which we think we know and that which we seek to understand.
Previously, Bovey has used a combination of traditional and new media techniques to create installation works like those in Ledge_Suite (2011). Exhibited in “Last Frontier”, which was curated by Sarah Filmore at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Ledge_Suite challenges our concepts as virtual as opposed to lived experience through a backlit video projection of century-old documents, including a ledger from 1895 in works like Plume. For the past five years Mark Bovey has explored the nature of printmaking as a surrogate for the virtual experience and his current body of work is a continuation of his interest in the function of printed media in communication and technologies’ ever expanding nature.
First impressions of Bovey’s newest 20” x 30” faux slate works in World Machine reveal the use of “trompe-l’œil”, an optical illusion or trick of the eye, designed to give the viewer a sense that they are examining an age-old teaching tool and traditional repository or knowledge, the chalkboard.
As Bovey’s work, created through multiple technologies and media, writes, re-writes and scrapes away the surface, literally and figuratively, so too does the traditional chalkboard. If a chalkboard is a locale of learning and information transfer, Bovey reveals it also as one of erasure, repositioning and revised histories.
Bovey’s critical understanding of printmaking’s varied process allows him to treat “every work as a journey” in which the exploration of a multitude of artistic media creates a forum for open dialogue between artist and viewer. Bovey’s hope is that the works elicits questions about the “evolution of knowledge through technology,” as viewers are encouraged to evaluate their own relationship to art, science, knowledge and technological innovation. By contrasting the concept of “real” and the projection of “real” Bovey affords viewers the opportunity to question history and truth for themselves.
If we agree that what we have been taught as factual history is in a reality a manufactured construct frequently gilded as truth, and that technology is thought to have a homogenizing effect on culture, Bovey’s World Machine exhibition attempts to usurp the effects of both “fact” and technology by combining them.
About the Artist
Mark Bovey is an artist and Associate Professor in the Printmaking Area at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax Nova Scotia Canada (2004-present). He received his MVA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 1992 and his BFA from Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario in 1989. Bovey’s work has represented Canada internationally in juried biennial and triennial exhibitions in 17 nations worldwide. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada including 15 curatorial projects. Bovey’s practice ranges from traditional printmaking (combinations of Intaglio, Lithography, screen printing and woodcut) to print installation works incorporating inkjet and digital video projection that reference and incorporate the history of printed forms. His work is in numerous collections, most recently, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Visual Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax Canada, Tama Arts University Tokyo, and the Danforth Museum, Boston Massachusetts USA.

Sister Series
2014-02-06 - 2014-03-31
About the Exhibition
Exploring the intersections between atmosphere and memory, this series of work, Sisters Series, focuses on photography as a tangible piece of nostalgia.
The images are an opportunity to explore your own memories and reframe them within the boundaries of the alien-like and haunting landscape of the English coast. The bleak images on expired film are also an introspective peek into my own early memories of photography. An unidentified woman is a solo wanderer inside trying to capture her own memories with a phone. Therefore, the images also juxtapose the idea of memory creation with digital media.

Artist Bio: Elyse Bouvier is a Calgary based photographer who received her BComn. from Mount Royal University in 2011. Having recently returned from living abroad in London, UK, Elyse has worked as a travel, portrait, coffee, and film photographer extensively in Canada, the UK, and much of Europe.

Capturing Moments: Tracing the Journey
2014-01-08 - 2014-02-22
About the Exhibition
Capturing Moments – exhibition essay by Sheri Nault
“As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them, which they would write if they could only find the time.” Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead
Jimin Lee creates and communicates stories, through her prints, of experiences which focus on the physical point of a body and the ways in which that body relates to the space around it. The incredible familiarity of the imagery she utilizes creates a sense of deja-vu, allowing the viewer to see both a particular moment that Lee herself must have experienced and, simultaneously, one which they themselves may have had. Through this familiarity, repetition, and open narration Lee transforms brief captured moments into disarmingly familiar narratives about both the artist, and her viewers.
In the past, Lee has often been recognized for her work dealing with mundane and everyday objects; objects which have a relationship to her body through repetitive acts of touch, indicative of and referential to lived personal experiences. Capturing Moments: Tracing the Journey is the third solo exhibition of Lee’s more recent series, in which she has shifted from the physical relationship of the body to objects and, instead, considers the position of the body as a focal point within the experience of movement, migration, and environment.
Through unique and labour-intensive processes, Lee creates images in which her familiar perspective is the centre of a nostalgic universe. She describes the view from within the containers that hold our bodies, that we look out from within, and experience the world through.
Contemporary experience is highly mobile, it is physically and digitally globalized, and many day to day activities lack an immediate physical reality, they are digital, cyber, unreal – there is no scent or smell or sensation of being within them. In contrast to this, Lee, through travelling, began to focus on her experience of the tactile physicality of being in those places. These recent works consider travel, literally, through mobility and migration but also metaphorically, as an experience that moves the individual.
What is particularly striking about her work is the incredible accessibility of the images she creates. The road, traffic, vehicles interlocked in gradual movement, or the view out the window of a plane are experiences, tied to daily life, that almost anyone can relate to. This open quality of her work invites viewers to insert their own stories and narratives into the visual spaces she has created – a potential amplified through manipulations of each image.
Though the content of Lee’s prints may appear to be as immediate as a photo on instagram, the process of producing these eerily familiar images includes many steps and translations. Each print may consist of one image or many, combined through digital processes, manipulated to create a singular narrative moment. Further, whether edited minimally or laboriously, the image must then be adapted to become viable for printmaking. Finally, the seemingly immediate moment is transformed through the physically laborious process of producing the prints themselves. The effectiveness of Lee’s subtle manipulations is the deception, translation, and narration embedded within each of her familiar, nostalgic images.
Producing prints is a process that Lee relates to travel itself, the outcome always uncertain.
About the Artist
Jimin Lee is a Korean-born, California-based artist. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Anchor Graphics in Chicago; QCC Art Gallery at the City University of New York; Don Soker Contemporary Art in San Francisco; DoART Gallery/Hyundai Gallery in Seoul, Korea; Shirota Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; An drewShire Gallery in Los Angeles; Megalo Gallery in Canberra, Australia; Open Studio Gallery in Toronto, Canada; and Guan Ian Original Printmaking Base in Shenzhen, China. Notable group exhibitions include Crosscurrents: 8 American Contempo rary Printmakers at II Quadrato di Omega, Rome, Italy; Tradition & Innovation II at Museum Zallerein Halle 6, Essen, Germany; and Graphica Creative 2009 at Jyvaskyla Art Museum, Jyvas kyla, Finland.
Since 1995 Lee has been living in the San Francisco Bay Area and she is a professor of art and heads the print media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA.

Field Notes
2013-12-06 - 2014-01-31
About the Exhibition
The artist often captures microscopic images and videos in the development of her artwork. She habitually looks for repetition and pattern in forms and movements. The existence of mimicry in structures and behaviours that are reiterated across species and at different scales of life is an expression of forces of natural selection at work over millions of years.
These prints exhibit multiple ambiguities; they are abstract and referential, expressive and structured, constructed and dismantled, balanced and unsteady. Like any organism, the figurative component of each composition is to some degree interwoven with its environment. These etchings contemplate habitat, home, shelter, nest, pattern, recurrence, organization, and connectedness.

Artist Bio: Lisa Matthias is an artist residing in Edmonton, Alberta. She completed her Master of Fine Arts in printmaking at the University of Alberta, and prior to that carried out a Master of Science in plant ecology from the University of Manitoba, and a Bachelor of Science in ecology from the University of Guelph. Her artwork has been exhibited in a number of local and international shows.

Wave Interference
2013-10-23 - 2013-11-30
About the Exhibition
Wave Interference – exhibition essay by Keri Macleod
UK artist Rachel Duckhouse exhibits her print-based artwork in Wave Interference, a study of Calgary’s water infrastructure and the effects of the recent flooding. This body of work is the continuation of Duckhouse’s exploration of patterning and system mapping–those familiar with her practice will recognize the delicate pen and ink drawings that highlight her skillful hand. Her work is dynamic- aesthetically it draws parallels to early Op Art in the way she represents rhythm and reverberation. Also present throughout the exhibition is an emotive quality that bridges the abstract with the personal.
For the past year, Duckhouse has served as the Artist in Residence for Watershed+, a partnership between the city of Calgary’s Public Art Program and its Parks and Utilities departments. Stationed at Ralph Klein Park, she consulted with civic engineers in developing a visual language to represent the city’s water systems. She also had the opportunity to conduct field research and survey the trajectory of water flow throughout the municipal system.
Her recent exhibition Only Flow at TRUCK Contemporary Art imagined Calgary’s waterways as if they were architectural elements in their own right- eliminating existing structures such as the riverbed and bridges from the picture plane allowing for the flowing water to take precedence.
Shortly after Only Flow opened, disaster struck and Calgary’s overflowing rivers affected thousands of residents. Wave Interfer ence responds to the flood and serves as a means of continuing a dialogue that unites Calgarians around the subject of our water systems. “On the one hand I felt I had a responsibility to respond to the flood” Duckhouse says, citing her position as Artist in Residence for the city’s water services, “though on the other hand it is a very sensitive issue.”
Duckhouse’s understanding and empathy for those affected by the flood is present in many facets of the exhibition: the large-scale silkscreen depicting an apartment Aoor plan inundated with rushing water pays homage to residents whose homes were wiped out. This particular print was the result of several conversations with a couple who lived in an apartment that had been flooded.
Duckhouse asked each of them to hypothesize and visualize how the floodwater flowed into their apartment. The violence of the rushing water is startling- waves surge into the apartment and reverberate along adjacent walls creating a chaotic pattern of layered ripples.
Alongside this print is an audio piece that serves both as a didactic accompaniment and additional layer of sensory stimulation. The piece features the personal accounts of the aforementioned couple describing what transpired in their apartment. The voices gain momentum, overlap and then recoil, mimicking the swell of floodwater. The juxtaposition of objectively surveyed material and personal accounts of the disaster serve as cultural documents and a platform on which to continue the dialogue.
Attention is also brought to the research component of Duck house’s residency with the digital reproduction of her notebook, giving the viewer a rare opportunity to peer inside the process of artistic production. A trusty companion to many artists, the ubiquitous Moleskine notebook is easily recognizable- its pages are replicated on a poster-sized print outlining the progression of her research. The print features hand-scrawled notes, sketches and observations.
Rachel Duckhouse is in the final stages of her residency with Watershed+, currently hosted by Telus Spark. Upon her return to the UK, she hopes to enroll in future research-based residencies and continue working in response to environmental elements.
Watershed+ Artist Residency Program at Ralph Klein Park is a partnership between the City of Calgary’s Public Art Program, Utilities & Environmental Protection
About the Artist
Rachel Duckhouse is a UK-based visual artist specialising in abstract, geometric etchings and screenprints as well as highly detailed, labour intensive pen and ink drawings. Her practice is both research based and process led and is often characterised by repeated geometric motifs and arrangements of multi-layered, sculptural forms in 20. The complex patterns and systems in nature, architecture and human behaviour form the basis of much of her work either directly as a focus of research, or indirectly in the processes of production on a more intuitive level.
Rachel explores Calgary’s watershed as a complex, multi-layered system, and her research has focused on the living, moving network of water Aow patterns underpinning every local landscape.
Rachel has exhibited in galleries in Canada, the USA and the UK, including the Royal Academy in London and the National Gallery in Edinburgh, and her drawings, screenprints and etchings have been acquired by the British Museum in London.

Three Lines
2013-10-06 - 2013-11-30
About the Exhibition
Three Lines serves as an exploration of the de- and recontextualization of pop-culture nostalgia, in a visual arts medium that both elevates and denigrates seemingly meaningless ephemera. The artist’s background with cinema as both an academic and unabashed fanboy obsessive informs the monumentalizing of often unmemorable lines of dialogue from popular Hollywood cinema. By including references to these films, which epitomize postmodern pastiche, the work continues to reappropriate the reappropriated, furthering their postmodern status as well as fashioning them into a decontextualized piece of text to be taken at nearly face value. The work then serves as enigma to those lacking the nostalgic reference, and makes those who are so equipped complicit in the work and the cultural dialogue it strives to create.
Artist Bio: Paul Baker is an emerging artist based in Calgary, Alberta. He holds a BFA in Visual Studies from the University of Calgary. He is a printmaker at Burnt Toast Studio, also working in photography and music.

Falling Angels
2013-09-04 - 2013-10-19
About the Exhibition
In Light or In Darkness – exhibition essay by Lizzie Carr
Printmaking is an ever evolving artistic medium with techniques differentiating from one geographic region to the next. Print collaborates with the traditional and the modern, using basic techniques with experimental and contemporary trends. Its technical diversity has broadened the concept and definition of print in the 21st century, and artists working within this medium continue to push the boundaries and foster new possibilities for the art of printmaking.
Guy Langevin is a remarkable artist who has made a distinct impression on printmaking in Canada. Through his skills in drawing, lithography, and mezzotint, Langevin has become one of the most acclaimed Canadian print artists He has participated in more than 300 group exhibitions including 80 international biennials and juried exhibitions, and has had more than 60 solo exhibitions in Canada, U.S.A, France, Belgium, Portugal, China and Germany.
Langevins’ solo exhibition, Falling Angels, at the Alberta Printmakers’ Society’s Artist Proof Gallery, is a continuation of a former series. The exhibition consists of figurative mez zotint prints and digital prints. Using the human form as his subject, Langevin’s mezzotints present a struggle between light and shadow, between abstraction and realism. Moving on from his earlier works which display a dark background with light projecting from the human figure, this series pres ents a clear background causing the figure to become less identifiable, and thus wraps the human figure in it’s own darkness.
‘Based on the duality between fugitiveness of light and moment*’, Langevins’ work navigates between exactitude and blurry images to exaggerate this duality. The human figures portrayed, twist and become disfigured, modified by his ephemeral light, which in turn rests itself upon a metaphor of man’s consciousness of his own death. The belief of the eternity of one’s spirit or soul, or the attempt to make an existence appear longer in the memories of others, becomes representative in the ambiguous movement of the human figures.
Although in unascertainable positions, the figures are falling. Yet no recognizable place, no ground, no safety net, nothing that identifies reality besides the body placed on the paper, is apparent. It is here, in this realization, that the viewer can decide and interpret where the figure is falling; in light, or in darkness. There is a subtle yet constant aura of death, which is only announced through the perceptible play of light and time in these prints. The human bodies moving throughout the space of the work become a material, not a model. The body, ‘is the image, creates the image; it is not only a part of it.*’ By forming the human body without concrete identification, the viewer is allowed to create their own pronouncement of the represented figure, and develop his/ her own relation to the work.
About the Artist
Guy Langevin is an award-winning print artist based in Trois Rivieres, Quebec. Originally from Chicoutimi, Langevin moved. to Trois Rivieras to study art at the University of Quebec in the 1970s. He is an extremely accomplished artist who has been presented with many awards which include the Trois-Rivieres sans Frontieres Award in 2010, the Guanlan International Print Prize, Guanlan, China in 2009, and the Grand Prize of Bharat Bhavan Art Print Biennial, Bhopal, India in 2006. His work resides in multiple collections including the Musee du Quebec, the lnstuto per la culture e I’ arte, Catania, Italia, the City of Clamecy, France, and Teoartis Gallery, Evora, Portugal.

Approval Pending and Not to Scale
2013-08-09 - 2013-09-30
About the Exhibition
My work deals with the relationship that architecture has to history and to an imagined space. I use unrelated objects at different scales, alongside architectural features to change the symbolism of both objects. I combine unrelated images in a uneven scale as a way to draw similarities and contrasts between the two that would not seem evident at first glance. The disproportionate scale of a natural and man made objects implies a different hierarchy. When the hierarchy is changed the relationship between the objects is changed as well.
Artist Bio: Joel Qualleis a Calgary based artist who is a recent graduate of the Alberta College of Art and Design majoring in Print Media. His recent works deal with architectural elements that pay homage to diagrammatic renderings.

A Knight Move ou Petites Histoires Racontées Par Moi
2013-06-12 - 2013-07-27
About the Exhibition
Proliferations of the Senses – exhibition essay by Melinda Topilko
“A line, a tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see” – John Berger, On Drawing.
Using ‘writing and drawing in space’ Pascaline Knight has created A Knight move ou Petites Histoires Racontees Par Moi; an installation composed of a variety of pieces that utilize not only traditional printmaking techniques, but also collage, embroidery, sculptural elements and text. The title of the work references the game of chess, one of strategy and anticipation of another’s motives; the transformative action of butterfly from larval (or child) stage to adulthood; and the deeply personal subject matter of the underlying theme of the exhibition – death by suicide.
Referencing the daily and mundane details of life – often through a child-like lens – allows an access point to the work, and a glimpse into the invisible behind the visible that inspires Knight’s practice. This fragile reality, both intimate and shared, is communicated through a non linear narrative about death and grief created by the images, position of the objects and the use of text within the installation.
The centrepiece of the installation is the book A Knight Move ou I’Émergence de la Chrysalide. The silkscreened work is a combination of images and texts – in both French and English – taken from Knight’s personal journals, themselves a daily exploration of ideas through drawing and writing, and are presented alongside.
The wall works are a collection of smaller pieces that can be read individually and as a whole. Installed in a tight group, some with threads leading between and over each other, these pieces demonstrate Knight’s sensitivity for line and attention to detail. The images used and created are at once familiar and foreign, resulting in both clarity and ambiguity of meaning that allows the ‘mind to fill in the gaps, and make up its own storyline.’
Extending the dialogue, Knight has created cement sculptures engraved with the letters R – E – G – R – E – T, surrounded by small envelopes. Inviting viewers to write down a regret about a person lost, and then place it within one of the envelopes to leave behind, speaks to the universality and terrible uniqueness found in grief.
Acknowledging the impossibility of knowing an individual’s inner emotions and thoughts, Knight not only allows for, but cultivates and anticipates, the viewer’s unique and personal interpretation of the objects present both singularly and as a whole. Within the framework of Death, Knight creates a space both physical and conceptual that plays with the tension created by our denial of the inevitable. In this way, she is also speaking to the universality and unifying possibilities of the processes of grief and loss, and how ‘our senses are perforations that allow experiences to leak between us’.
The artist would like to thank the Canada Arts Council and the Quebec Arts Council as well as IPOLC for their support in the realisation of this installation.
About the Artist
Born in 1969, Pascaline Knight lives and works in Montreal. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University. She was selected by David Uss for an exhibition in Galerie VAV at Concordia in 1996. She studied and practiced abroad at the University of Philadelphia in Rome, Italy, a four month study in India, a residency at the Printers Guild of Leith in Edinburgh, Scotland and at the Lama Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. Upon return to Montreal in 2001, she developed silkscreen interventions with which she performed while directly printing phrases, questions (what makes the irreversiblet). These interventions take diverse forms, including the exhibition Aux Bons Plaisirs Fugace/ Sans Nom at Dare-Dare in Montreal.
Knight received grants from CALQ and CAC to write and publish the book A Knight Move. In 2011 she collaborated with Guillaume Brisson-Darveau with whom she has completed several residencies across Canada. Together they continue to explore the possibilities of silkscreening, sculpture and performance, which ore brought together through installations.
She is currently pursuing an artistic practice that comprises of performance, drawing, writing and collage.

Modus
2013-04-17 - 2013-06-01
About the Exhibition
Pál Csaba – exhibition essay by Concetta Zurzolo
Hungary has a rich history of art that lives alongside its’ vibrant contemporary art scene. It is often called the “Paris of the East” and is known for its stunning architecture. What a wonderful place to emerge as an artist, an environment that all at once embraces the new while the old is still preserved and visible; a place where art is nurtured and has a welI-rooted presence.
Pál Csaba is a Hungarian artist based in the bustling capital city of Budapest. Csaba makes work using a variety of techniques and a wide range of subject matter. He says that the subject is often determined by the technique whether it’s printmaking, paintings, installation or digital prints. Inspiration for his most recent work is derived from the continuous conflict between our external world and our innermost dreams and desires. The viewer can clearly see this conflict when looking at the works. The harsh lines seem to embody this struggle. The question that Pál wants the viewer to answer is, “what is real and what is our inner response to this reality?”
“The human soul is full of unconscious desires and emotions and these often run counter to the desires of the external world. The opposition between what we feel and what we see causes conflict between our unconscious and conscious minds, so that finally the desire to expel these incompatible forces overwhelms us. I want to express these unconscious elements (of the human psyche) in my work” -Pál Csaba
Pál’s images are not intended to represent nature, but rather the focus is on the creative process, its stratification and the construction of the absolute and the possibility to impress upon these images a sense of time. Each piece is titled with dates, and the significance of these dates is meant to serve as a record of (human) experience.

Following Traces
2013-04-05 - 2013-05-31
About the Exhibition
The subjects in my artwork are found during explorations of my personal heritage. In this search I discover what character traits and sensibilities have been passed down through the generations in my family, and how my own disposition has been influenced from that past. The work in Following Traces focuses on two girls; one of whom is my grandmother, Betty (Elizabeth), and the other is her sister, Babs (Barbara). They were as different in temperament as they were in appearance, and I began to understand their characteristics as well as parallels to myself through the process of recreating this imagery.
Artist Bio: Multidisciplinary artist, Amy Gaulin, captures a nostalgic essence through paint, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, bookmaking, and many other media. She received her BFA in printmaking with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design, and currently resides in Calgary, Alberta.

Paul Mitchell
2013-02-27 - 2013-04-06
About the Exhibition
So Close Yet So Far: Paul Mitchell’s Transmedia Yearning – exhibition essay by Mario Trono
When philosopher Slavoj Zizek looks for meaning in a horror film, he suggests we should ignore whatever specifically causes the horror. Only then can we see the real content—the real horror—of the film’s story.This critical maneuver yields interesting results: Psycho becomes a film about women’s lives in a woman-hating society, Alien a piece about exploited workers under capitalism, and The Cabin in the Woods a treatise on humanism dying under consumerism.
It’s an interesting test for art of any type.
So. What happens if one disregards the ostensible or most obviously apparent contents of Paul Mitchell’s prints—the fragments of faces and bodies, the letters limned by a line of ink, the cartoon fang, the facade of a house, the tangle of trees and fencing?
Answer: Evidence of the intaglio printmaking process itself having taken place, the scoring of surfaces and the subsequent insertion of ink into the resultant cavities, a materially intimate act. And it is that act—the forceful and intentional manipulation of media to get one thing into another—that reflects the broader theme of this exhibition, which is the restless, transmedia urge to explode out of form, content, representation, and materiality to forcibly (desperately? humanly?) connect with the Viewer-Other to ask, “ls this Darkness in you too?”
The other formal elements of this exhibition, beyond the prints, inscribe and express a hunger to enter into a state of co-consciousness with Beholders of the work, as if a benevolent demon yearned to redeem possession and elevate it to sublimity, but, unable to bridge space and time, had to turn to art and was trying everything! The exhibition’s various forms of expression attempt collectively to vault the Void ‘twixt self and other.The abstraction of the prints and their associative transmogrification of the mundane muck of urban dwelling attempts to draw you into the mystery of an Other’s psyche. Text whispers here, and there, evoking typographic language and the auditory register in ghostly fashion, and since Word always implies Reader, it is another call to you,Viewer-Other, from the hungry demon beyond the representation, beyond the paper that stretches from ceiling to floor, ensuring you maybe see Him, maybe glimpse a shadow beyond surfaces, as light from windows and spots plays its games, the light of world paradoxically suggesting the dark of disconnection.
This transmedia, itinerant, and restless yearning for You finds further expression in the conceptual enactment provided by Amanda Schoofs, an enactment that underscores the show’s theme of graphical-textual dissemination as a form of yearning for connection. Her costume is “composed” of the exhibition’s versions of this theme, and since it materially spills onto the floor that the gallery-walking Other treads, it reveals itself as another bid to traverse the gap between representation and represented, and thus, between viewed and viewer.That the costume remains as a relic of that effort is another echo that a Self was here, moving in, through, and around the art, a Self calling to you through materiality made significant. Be not fooled by Schoofs’ mock, staged reading from The Plinth-Propped Book That Purports to Mean. (How could such meaning be stable when the “reading” is improvised?) Her performance is finally indeterminate in meaning because latent content is not the point.The overall exhibition is not about the yearning for connection, for the inauguration of the co-consciousness that art desperately hopes can come into being. It is a debris field of signification that provides evidence of an attempt to make it happen.
Can it ever happen? Were it to, art would disappear, for there would be no need anymore to express oneself to other—Other would finally be Self. Today, here, now? We are at least able to embrace the consolation of Mitchell’s art, art that at least lets you know that the Other is thinking of you.

The Invention Moves in
2013-01-09 - 2013-02-16
About the Exhibition
The Invention Moves in – exhibition essay by Tracy Wormsbecker
“An invention starts as a curiosity, extra to what seems necessary. We may regard it at first from a mental distance of amusement or amazement, as something bizarre or exotic. Then, if successful, the invention moves in, bringing pandemonium. Like a rearrangement of our furniture, it treacherously alters familiar terrain. It disrupts habits, roughs up values, and generally remould us- drastically, like the automobile; subtly like the microchip – into different people in a different kind of world.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Instant Age,” in Legacy of Light, ed. Constance Sullivan.
Although it was written to introduce a book celebrating the Polaroid instant photograph as “the climax of the invention cycle” and “one of photography’s most extraordinary advances,” this passage, which is perhaps more relevant in today’s digital terrain, echoes through Michelle Brownridge’s current exhibition. Since the advent of digital technology, the rate of technological advancement and its pervasive role in contemporary life seems to be accelerating dramatically. Amidst the quickening cycle of new replacing the old. The Invention Moves In invites us to take pause. Through her thoughtful selection of media and subject matter, Brownridge artfully underscores the outdated within a contemporary context and invites us to re-examine our understanding of the obsolete and its perceived value in the modern world.
In her process, Brownridge uses both an iPhone and original Polaroid instant film to capture the images shown throughout this exhibit. While the result is similar, a more conspicuous comparison is achieved through contrasting modern and antiquated printing techniques by layering each digitally enlarged image and printed photograph with stone lithography. Although we may initially be drawn to the digitally printed photographic images, it is the lithographed patterns sourced from security envelopes, which cover each scene that lends a distinct and authentic aesthetic quality to each piece. Demonstrating the influential presence that modern digital technology has in print media, Brownridge compels us to engage with the traditional method and successfully illustrates that while it may be considered obsolete in comparison, it continues to share this presence.
Her carefully chosen imagery likewise incites an alluring engagement with the obsolete. By depicting scenes and objects that are readily identified as outdated and technologically archaic by modern standards, Brownridge entices us with nostalgic sentiment for a previous time and place. But when can we confidently locate these images in time? It may be reasonable to assume that they were photographed several years, even decades ago, yet digital processes including iphone photography reveal that they actually exist in a current time and place. Brownridge aims to elicit this confusion and by doing so, suggest biased perceptions of contemporary life that are skewed towards the latest invention, which, as the opening quote states, “alters familiar terrain” into what we come to interpret as a “different kind of world.” The modern and outdated tend to be seen as mutually exclusive – the former belonging to the contemporary; the latter belonging to the past – and not residing in the same contemporary context. As Brownridge illustrates however, they do indeed coexist.
As the old continues to give way to what is newer and often viewed as more exciting, the world and our perceptions of it are indeed rearranged and remoulded. What was once new quickly becomes outdated and subsequently seems to carry an inherent quality of loss. Disregarded as obsolete, the outdated may therefore not be considered relevant in a contemporary context. Through this exhibition, Brownridge reminds us that the outdated coexists with the contemporary and retains a certain siginific=gancer and appeal; as invention continues to move in, the obsolete and its influence persist.
About the Artist
Michelle Brownridge studied print media at the University of Regina. She has participated in print exchanges across North America including Miami, Chicago, Buffalo and Seattle, and has exhibited in a number of group shows in Canada. Her work is also represented in permanent collections at the University of Regina,as well as the PrintZero Studios Collection in Seattle. This is her first exhibition in Calgary.

Accidental Poetry
2012-10-17 - 2012-11-24
About the Exhibition
Accidental Poetry – exhibition essay by Loren Spector
Accidental Poetry presents a selection of ultraviolet screen prints by Briar Craig. Craig’s prints invite consideration of the varied and sundry fragmented visual experiences that signify moving through one’s day in a society teeming with visual debris, and invite us to question if and how we consciously or unconsciously make connections that give meaning to the messages.
Briar Craig is a printmaker, a screen printer in particular. He has said that, “one of the reasons [he is] an ardent printmaking advocate is for its ability to amalgamate and synthesize diverse imagery, materials, and approaches to art-making.” The evolution of Craig’s work across the last twenty-some years conceals entirely where the techniques and materials of printmaking inform his work, and where the content of his imagery necessitates choosing printmaking for its materialization. But the synthesis within Craig’s work is incomplete – in the best possible way.
A duality bordering on contradiction lurks about the edges of a Briar Craig exhibition, Accidental Poetry being no exception. His pieces raise questions, and only half-heartedly suggest clues towards answers. They ask us to examine the relationship and the separation/space between form and content, between media and message, between art and gallery space, between the personal and the public, and between viewer and art.
It is typical, when approaching “printmaking” in a gallery setting, to move in close to the work, nose-to-glass as it were, in order to better read the fine marks, layers and intricacies of the piece. While Craig’s prints are certainly intricate, the extensive layers of translucent colour, tactile surface qualities and myriad nuances and subtleties generated by the photographic process uncharacteristically lead the viewer to step back – to take in a broader view of the work and perhaps to seek a context that distance might provide.
These are narrative images that read very successfully as abstract work – an esthetic that will happily usurp the minor impetus of theory within, should the viewer allow that to happen.
Ah, but what of those unanswered questions? One can lose oneself in the attraction of the ink for only so long, before returning to the beguiling nature of the narrative/poem presented. Yet a theorized reading of the images does not determine a foregone conclusion of meaning therein. Craig marries Dada and absurdist thought with a Pop Art sensibility. Can an object at once have meaning provided by the context of its reception, and also be so commonplace as to lose all significance except as a symbol of how well we know it? (i.e. is an image of a National Geographic magazine cover a place holder for associations with the wild, untamed corners of the Earth, or an ironic reference to boxes stored in musty garages?)
Craig writes, “Whether we are walking down a street, listening to a radio, surfing television channels, or reading a newspaper each of us will be individually drawn to specific things for specific and personal reasons... My frequent use of hand written texts and of weathered objects is an attempt to appeal to the viewer on the most basic and ‘human’ of levels. The texts and objects I use are often the ‘clues’ we leave behind that reveal who we are and the kinds of things that occupy our lives.”
In the works shown at the Artist Proof Gallery, Craig employs a principle of chance to bring found words together in what he calls accidental poetry. Words that might not typically be connected are juxtaposed for their provocative and evocative potential, to invite interpretation. But Craig’s evident choice of just exactly what words will be juxtaposed is an aware and artful mischief that challenges viewers to interpret the clues he leaves behind in his text/object-pairings to deduce an intended meaning, all the while instinctively aware of our own individual meaning-making practices.
