Weekend Notice from TrépanierBaer
The Fall season is upon us with events and exhibitions aplenty! We’d like to take this moment to remind you of shows that you should definitely see.
On view now at TrépanierBaer is the stunning show SCULPTURE: Jen Aitken, James Carl, Michel de Broin, Stéphane La Rue. The opening was a smash hit with audiences fascinated by ways each artist presents and re-presents the genre of sculpture via numerous media, and how their works interact with space.
Glenbow Museum just opened Wolves: The Art of Dempsey Bob. This must-see exhibition celebrates the Tahltan-Tlingit master carver’s outstanding achievements with over 65 incredible pieces on loan from private and public collections across Canada, including a selection of masks, sculptures, and regalia, complemented by his work in bronze casting and vestment production. It is the first-ever retrospective of Bob’s career from the 1970s to the present.
If you have not seen Robert Houle: Red is Beautiful / Misquah Oneshéshen at Contemporary Calgary, or need to see it one more time, now is your chance at the exhibitions closes on Sunday, September 18. The exhibition consists of large installations, paintings and drawings created between 1970 and 2021. Robert Houle is one of the most influential First Nations artists to break into the contemporary art world. His work blends abstraction, modernism and conceptualism with First Nations aesthetics and histories. Houle went from residential school to art school to museum boardrooms and on to the art world stage as an artist, curator and writer.
Currently on view at the Esker Foundation are three exhibitions of note well-worth visiting.
Robin Arseneault: Falling Off The Log. The exhibition of works by Calgary-based Robin Arseneault, features five related works created over two-and-a-half years, is imbued with the creative energy and tension of a project on the go. Individual pieces were born from explorations with “found” materials, whether palm-sized bits of wood or a 1967 book on the history of dance. Through careful consideration and small acts, Arseneault transformed these humble hand-me-downs in fresh and wonderful ways. The five pieces interconnect through the use of magnification, a sub-theme of dance and reproduction processes ranging from photography to three-dimensional scans. A must-see!
Gailan Ngan: From The Studio Floor. Her work makes fated connections, not in any linear way, but poetically, by crafting associations between herself, the objects she collects, and the material she uses. This exhibition features hand-built sculptures that, while simply expressed, broadly explore shape, surface treatment, and colour.
Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau: The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum. Much of the work they producerequires active collaboration, not simply with each other, choreographers, musicians, and dancers, but with the objects they produce; objects that perform collectively as costumes, sets, noisemakers, and sculptures. Theirs is a performance- and material-heavy practice informed by their time in the avant-rock group AIDS Wolf—of which they were founding members—and the DIY, scrappy, screen-printed poster work made under the pseudonym, Séripop.
Last but not least, do forget to see these exhibitions at other galleries around town:
Nathan Eugene Carson: Long Lost Friends at Norberg Hall.
Curtis Cutshaw: Nothing Natural at Herringer Kiss Contemporary Art
Erik Olsen at Viviane Art
Stu Oxley: Surfacing at Paul Kuhn Gallery
Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 at The Nickle Galleries
AND
The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of The Handmaid’s Tale at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium. This dance drama transports audiences, with thrilling effect, on one woman’s journey through the dystopian social order of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.