“My mother lives in a rural area of Kansas, threatened in recent years by encroaching suburbanization. Since 2024, my spouse and I have taken turns visiting my mother to help her with house repairs and to assert our presence to overly inquisitive realtors and developers eager to displace older residents.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is a TV tray table in my mother’s home, where we share our meals. In this modest and intimate setting, my mother steps into one of her most profound roles as our family’s knowledge keeper. Her stories—simultaneously historical, allegorical, almost mythic, and sometimes prophetic—come alive.

In one story, my mother explains how she sees herself, brave and capable of doing things alone. When she was a child in Taiwan, her family rented her a third-story bedroom separate from their first floor flat. Every night, she had to ascend the staircase outside into the mountains under the watchful eyes of mountain lions.

The works in this exhibition capture moments when my mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, one in which there might truly have been lions in Taiwan’s mountains, or perhaps an elusive Clouded Leopard before habitat loss caused them to die out and disappear. The tension of disappearance in these stories alludes to the repeated displacement my own family members, who have lost their homes to multiple occupying governments across generations.

The mountain lions of my mother’s childhood ended up being feral cats. Yet for a moment, as she passes her stories to my stewardship and safekeeping, the common becomes mythic.

Via this work, I interweave the personal and political, to strengthen local-global perspectives of colonization’s impact. I share my family’s stories as a frame through which we can better understand one another as different peoples connected through shared struggles—and shared imaginings for something beyond what our stories seem to be.”

Jenie Gao (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts business since 2014, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice, and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the public sector on equity and ethics.

Giving ourselves the space to be soft and silly during these times is a radical act and deserves some attention! HOT 4 THE MOMENT will be taking over the Alberta Printmakers Main Gallery with “NOTICE ME!”, a printed and quilted construction site. THE FIX-ITS is a parody performance, and installation work assuming the characters of a multi-talented duo of contract workers who critique systems of oppression and misogyny within professional spaces through hard work, physical labor and community care. Getting to work as THE FIX-ITS required the proper OHS approved signage, designating spaces to be soft and silly with yourself. This installation is the accumulation of the FIX-ITS body of work and will consist of the quilted signage used in our FIX-ITS performances, our constructed light box art crate signs, screenprints, and textile work.

Each year, A/P hosts a print exchange and exhibition in conjunction with an exciting sale and silent auction fundraiser.

Participants from around the globe submit an edition of ten original 8” x 10” prints to exchange with each other.  Two impressions of each edition are retained by A/P to sell and auction to lucky buyers/bidders at affordable rates.

The annual Not So Mini has become our most anticipated event of the year that showcases the work of local and international printmakers, with all funds raised directly supporting A/P’s community programming.

This year we received over 55 editions by artists from:

Calgary, AB; Edmonton, AB; Foothills, AB; Spruce Grove, AB; Sherwood Park, AB; Montreal, QC; Stukely-sud, QC; Golden, BC; Regina, SK; Halifax, NS; Astoria, NY; Brooklyn, NY; Ambala City, Haryana, India; Adachi ku, Tokyo, Japan; Sherwood Park, AB; Draycott, Derby, United Kingdom.

No Place Like Homo brings together screenprinted ceramic tile and prints on paper to illustrate a non-linear experience of masculine pregnancy and queer home life. Taking root at the intersection of reproductive justice and queer liberation, No Place Like Homo draws on themes of choice, loss, intention, and autonomy, and questions what it means to “conceive of” in the context of conception itself. The exhibition explores contrasting desires for visibility and for safety, offering a view that is both zoomed in and zoomed out, tender, lighthearted, resolute, and joyfully mundane.

For the 3rd year running, A/P is organizing Lasting Impressions, a non-juried exhibition for A/P members to showcase their work.

We are now accepting registrations, with new and returning members welcome!

Registration deadline: July 30, 2024.

For full details and to register, visit our Calls for Participation page.