>>REVIEW
BEYOND EMMA LAKE
Curated by Andrew Oko and Jacek Malec
Runs until October 29
Triangle Gallery
Saskatchewan is not the place most of us think of when it comes to groundbreaking art centres. Yet the province’s Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2005, has become known for attracting artists from across Western Canada and the world, who have migrated there for inspiration, friendship and creative renewal.
Now Triangle Gallery is hosting an exhibition entitled Beyond Emma Lake: Contemporary Art of Alberta and Saskatchewan, featuring more than 80 pieces of art from a prominent group of western artists who have, at some point in their careers, made the pilgrimage to this legendary landmark on the Canadian art map.
Beyond Emma Lake was co-curated by Triangle Gallery director Jacek Malec and local art historian Andrew Oko. Not intended as a historical accounting of the workshop, this exhibition is instead a lingering snapshot that suggests the breadth of artwork created by those who have been touched by Emma Lake. "The exhibition pays homage to the forceful, penetrating voices that have shaped the conception and practice of visual culture in Alberta and Saskatchewan, elevating their creative output to national and international prominence," write the curators.
Located at Murray Point, Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop can trace its influence on Canadian art back much further than its official beginnings in 1955. It was in 1935 that landscape painter Augustus Kenderdine – an English immigrant trained as an artist in Paris – first began to hold workshops on Crown land there.
For the purposes of this exhibition, the curators have concentrated on the period from 1955 to recent times. Upstairs at the gallery, modern works by the likes of Marion Nicoll and Ted Godwin demonstrate in unequivocal terms how Emma Lake’s guest instructors encouraged Western Canadian artists to embrace contemporary art. Godwin’s Vernal Equinox answers the question of whether Prairie folk of the day could create high-quality abstract art. Inspired by such American painters as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland, both of whom conducted workshops at Emma Lake, Godwin created this painting in 1958, three years before he arrived on the national scene with his participation in the 1961 National Gallery of Canada exhibition Five Painters from Regina.
Nicoll, meanwhile, studied with American painter Will Barnet at Emma Lake in 1957, and that experience led her to seek further training at the Arts Students League of New York. Her Sicilia 5, The House of the Padrone from 1959 is featured here.
In the main part of the gallery, works from other noted Alberta and Saskatchewan artists make a strong argument for the significance of Emma Lake. With this exhibition, viewers get a half-century survey of Prairie artistry that ranges from a Joe Fafard ceramic piece called Dead Cow to the compelling documentary photograph Dancer From Sulukule District, Istanbul, Turkey (#29) by Frances Robson.
With co-operation from a host of private and public galleries, corporations and private lenders, the two curators have been able to assemble a collection of art that underscores how many gifted Alberta and Saskatchewan artists have been able to cross over conventions of the day and seek new ways of expressing their creative visions.
This point is reinforced by Mary Ann Moser’s 1990 video Nature, Culture and Putrefaction. It was shot, not at Emma Lake, but at the outskirts of southeast Calgary and captures a group of artists gathered for what was at the time "The First Annual Graceland Art Rodeo." Initiated in 1986 by Bart Habermiller (and joined later by a group of Alberta College of Art students), the Graceland project, much like Emma Lake Artists’ Workshop, evolved into a place where artists found creative freedom beyond their studios and galleries – sometimes beyond their own expectations of themselves.
Fuelled in part by their experiences at Emma Lake, the artists represented in this retrospective have created a rich legacy, which is being celebrated here in recognition of the Saskatchewan and Alberta centennials. |
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