Dr. Janet Youngdahl, soprano; Lise Boutin, violin; Peter Visentin, violin and Tido Janssen, cello

Tuesday, March 16, 2010
12:15 p.m.
University Recital Hall (W570)

Free Admission

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WALKS IN THE WOOD

The title refers to an historical moment in art, and says something about the technical aspect of the work; the substrate is OSB board, with it’s ‘’ ready-made “’ spaces “in the wood’. ‘Walks’ is meant to invoke a famous phrase of Klee’s—‘going for a walk with a line’ (Pedagogical Sketchbook). What is proclaimed in Klee’s words is a basic tenet of modernism, the autonomy of the artwork. Autonomy means that the line has an aesthetic presence and expressive force in itself before acting as a means of describing or representing something.

‘N-dimensional’ is my term for a special kind of space. I would describe this space as a synthesis of three kinds of space to be found historically. The most recent is the literal space of the work, its actual extension, the three-dimensionality of the support itself. This was established as an aesthetic object in the l960’s under the name of Minimalism. Before that Modernist space was flat, or ‘equivalent’ space: the equal value of figure and ground. Cubism was its supreme expression. Preceding modernism for four hundred years was ‘classical’ or representational space. Based on the conventions of perspective, this pictorial or “illusionist” space has been the dominant form in western painting.

My synthesis would be a combination and balance of these kinds of space: literal space, flat space and deep space. The format is important. I keep to the space of the book. I am thinking of books in ancient art, illuminated manuscripts, the Book of Kells, Persian Miniatures, etc. However, my main reference is one particular painting from the l9th Century, “The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke “ by Richard Dadd (l857). Ten years in the making this little painting has the amazing quality of being simultaneously ‘flat’ and spatial, and an unusual psychic effect results. I am working toward that effect but with an entirely different approach—what I would call a NEOMODERNIST sensibility.

Museum studies intern, Emily McCormick, with a work from the U of L Art Collection.

“My experience as an Art History/Museum Studies major at the University of Lethbridge has been filled with numerous opportunities,” says Emily McCormick. “I’ve worked at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and University of Lethbridge Art Gallery as a curatorial intern. Both galleries have allowed me to gain an invaluable amount of work experience for my future career.”

One result of McCormick’s internship at the U of L Art Gallery is Semiotica: The Persuasion of Text, the exhibition in the Helen Christou Gallery from March 12 through April 9. “Moving away from traditional art styles, this exhibition explores conceptual art involving written language,” explains McCormick. “It features works from the U of L Art Collection by Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari, Vera Gartley and Enn Erisalu.”

According to U of L Art Gallery Director/Curator Dr. Josephine Mills, “Emily proposed the idea for this exhibition last semester while working on an internship with me and she came up with a great concept”. Semiotica was built around one of the key works in the U of L Art Collection — American artist Jenny Holzer’s “Selections from Truisms.” During the 1980s, Holzer attained international recognition for her use of text in public locations with her “truisms” (short, provocative statements) that appeared on electronic signs and posters, was carved into benches and appeared in many other formats all over the world.

“The work in our collection includes a bank of many of these phrases running across a screen. When first acquired, it was exhibited widely as part of touring exhibitions, but given this high use, we have not included it in an exhibition for several years,” says Mills. “I am excited to see the work up in the Helen Christou Gallery and to give students and staff an opportunity to see it alongside other conceptual works from the collection.”

“The Museum Studies program has given me the opportunity to apply the knowledge gained in class and work in my chosen field before I finish my degree. This experience will definitely help me attain my career goals quicker,” she says with confidence.

“The Well-Curated Cheese Board”: A Year in the Life of a Curator
Sandra Dyck is curator at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa. She has curated 40 and coordinated 150 exhibitions, and published 16 catalogues. Her recent essay, A Pilgrim’s Progress: The Life and Art of Gerald Trottier, was recognized with a 2009 Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. She contributed essays toAround and About Marius Barbeau: Modelling Twentieth-Century Culture, published by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 2008, and Edwin Holgate, published by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2005.

Diane Borsato is a visual artist working in performance, intervention, video, installation, and photography and lives in Toronto. She has exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and internationally including Skol, The National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, the AGYU, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and The Power Plant. She is the 2008 winner of the prestigious Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding artistic achievement at the mid-career level from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Borsato earned a MA of Arts: Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, New York, 2003; MFA/Master of Fine Arts, with distinction: Performance, Installation, Video and Sculpture, Concordia University, Montreal, 2001; and BFA/Bachelor of Fine Arts, Dean’s Honour Roll: Visual Arts, York University, Toronto, 1997.

Malcolm Lim, percussion (Calgary)

Malcolm Lim, a Singaporean born percussionist, studied orchestral percussion at McGill University and L’Universite de Montreal. With the support of the Alberta Foundation and the Canada Council, he has enhanced his training in New York City and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His teachers include Pierre Beluse, D’Arcy Gray, and Louis Charbonneau (Orchestral percussion), Paul Walker (drum set), Glen Velez (frame drums), Michel Mirhige (Arabic percussion), Marcos Suzanno (Brazilian percussion), Alessandra Belloni (Italian percussion), Trichy Sankaran (S. Indian percussion).

Malcolm’s orchestral experience includes performances with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Calgary Opera, and the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra. He has taught at the University of Lethbridge, Augustana University College, Red Deer College, and The Banff Centre for the Arts. Malcolm has published several articles in Percussive Notes, the journal of the Percussive Arts Society, and currently is the director of the Calgary School of Samba.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
12:15 p.m.
University Recital Hall (W570)

Free Admission

Brendan Tang boasts a ceramic practice that is distinctly contemporary, yet rooted heavily in ancient traditions. Robotic armatures, mechanical hulls, rocket thrusters and other futuristic, manga/mecha-inspired components are fused together with delicate Ming dynasty vessels in an orgiastic mass. More than sculptural objects, they are entities entwined in a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependence. More than beautiful craft, they prompt conversations about globalism, hybridity, identity and the commodification of cultural artifacts.

Referencing French ormolu, an 18th century process which saw antique Chinese ceramics gilded with precious metals and appendages, Tang’s sculptures embrace a similar hybridity of cultural artifacts in an explicitly anachronistic manner. Where ormolu made the Orient more palatable to the appetites of a wealthy European elite, Tang’s work appropriates the popular tastes of today crippling the exclusivity of this historically privileged territory. In his series Manga Ormolu, he creates an amalgamation of historic Eastern ceramics with another Eastern tradition – manga – a comic style in which dark stories of robots and space travel were historically predominant. Today, manga has become a global phenomenon ground up in the mill of pop culture, and as a peculiar polyp on a Ming vase, seems poised to devour anything in its path.

The Western world’s view of its Eastern counterparts has induced much scholarship revealing imperialist power structures at the heart of prevailing definitions of non-European peoples. Tang’s appropriation and synthesis of cultural traditions that have been adopted, transformed, or some might argue, bastardized, by a global culture further demonstrates the added complexity of an ever-changing Western experience of the Orient, or more generally, the Other. Moreover, Tang’s explorations of ethnic identity and social hierarchies reveal a personal interest given his multicultural background, which spans China, India, Trinidad, Ireland and Canada. He notes, too, that like many immigrants, his family history is “one of successive generations shedding the markers of ethnic identity in order to succeed in an adopted country.”

Whether evoking genetic experiments gone awry, transmogrification in mid-process, or odd, yet harmonious unions, Tang’s recombinant ceramics splice the personal and collective, historic and contemporary, and exotic and quotidian. In doing so Tang provides a unique voice on contemporary culture, technology, and globalization.

Brendan Tang was born in Dublin, Ireland of Trinidadian parents, and is a naturalized citizen of Canada. His education includes an MFA from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Tang has exhibited in shows in Canada and the US, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. He has lectured at conferences and academic institutions across Canada.

Nanna Debois Buhl’s solo exhibition at SAAG, her first in Canada, brings together a body of work which explores Denmark’s colonial history in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands, an area where Danish, U.S., and African-Caribbean histories intersect. Through photography, drawing, film and text, the artist maps the residue of this colonial history—its images and representations—and considers their present implications.

The central installation, The Mapmaker (2008), reflects on the acts of mapping, naming and photographing as ways of occupying space, pointing to the overlap between the territory claimed by the colonizer and present day tourist routes. Integral to the artist’s project and to the exhibition is the idea of a two-way encounter, of traveling and exploring as ways of inverting the positions of “here” and “there.” The video work Postcards-Tivoli (2006), filmed in the Danish amusement park Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, takes us back to Danish soil. The work explores the park’s orientalist architecture, built in the mid 19th century and modeled on buildings found in France and England. A narrative soundtrack reflects upon the European vision of the East and on a series of “colonial exhibitions” on display in the gardens, intended to familiarize a Danish audience with the people in the Danish colonies.

In conjunction with the exhibition, SAAG will co-commission the artist book, A Journey in Two Directions. In this publication, Buhl and contributors from a wide range of disciplines consider her use of maps, travel journals, paintings and photographs in the formation of national self-understanding, then and today, and how this imagery has been used as tools of power, and later forgotten, suppressed or romanticized. A reading and research room will spatialize and activate components of the book, making visible how this case-study of Nordic Colonialism draws on both real and imagined material from many different sources.

Milena Hoegsberg, Curator

Buhl received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, (2006) and participated in The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2008-09). She was Artist in Residence at LMCC’s Work Space Program, New York (2007-08), and The Caribbean Museum Center, US Virgin Islands (2008).

Milena Hoegsberg is a New York-based curator, currently working on exhibitions, research, and arts related projects on a freelance basis. She earned her BA in Art History at Columbia University and her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She recently completed a large research project on biennials, and co-authored a paper on “discursive” biennials, which will be included in The Biennial Reader (forthcoming, Bergen Kunsthall, 2010).

Everyone is welcome to attend the opening of Buhl’s exhibition at Southern Alberta Art Gallery on Saturday Mar 13 at 8:00 pm