Meet the Artists From the 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Arts

The 2017 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, entitled for the time being, is curated by Peta Rake and Kristy Trinier, and jointly organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The Biennial features new works by 24 Alberta artists, split between the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre. 

The opening reception in Banff takes place Saturday, June 24 at 6 p.m. at the Walter Phillips Gallery. Get to know the artists featured below, then come see their work!

b. Calgary, based in Calgary, Alberta

Ashley Bedet came back to Calgary, Alberta, where she was born. Bedet is the product of many very different worlds reproducing, meeting difference, and then reproducing again. That makes her the product of at least four distinct separate paths. She graduated from NSCAD University in 2014 and has been slowly making and showing work since.

This work illustrates the cyclical evolution of energy in a galaxy’s life span. Persistence of energy and matter in a continuum of its metamorphosis. No body, moon, planet, star or dust, exists in isolation—the energy exerted unto and from an entity will effect a greater whole.

b. Brantford, Ontario, based in Edmonton, Alberta

Andrew Buszchak is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, print, and exchange, and holds a BFA from NSCAD University. In 2015, he participated in the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Do It Yourself: Collectivity and Collaboration in Edmonton and his durational office light installation, Beacon, was produced for Edmonton’s inaugural Nuit Blanche. Other engagements of note with Edmonton’s arts community include his limited edition woodblock print accompaniment to the Society of Northern Alberta Printmakers’ spring 2014 edition of SNAPline, and his performance Custodial Walk (2014, in collaboration with Émilienne Gervais), presented by The Drawing Room. 

What is the Secret to Infinite Wealth? presents two statements that hover around the middle of a set of quadrants: tautology, contradiction, the obscure and the obtuse. Both statements are offered as potential hints to the imagined secret to infinite wealth, though both are also firmly uninformative. As the question in the title is tempting yet unrealistic, these statements offer little in the way of a straightforward answer, but hopefully help to complicate the viewer’s personal understanding of wealth in their own lives. 

b. Hamilton, Ontario, based in Lethbridge, Alberta

Roy Caussy was born 1981 in Hamilton, Ontario. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 2006, and successfully completed his MFA at the University of Lethbridge in 2015. Caussy’s group exhibitions include Art Gallery of Hamilton (Hamilton), Cambridge Galleries (Cambridge), eyelevel gallery (Halifax), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge) and Centre A (Vancouver). Caussy has also attended residencies across Canada including Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity (Banff) and the Medalta International Artists in Residence (Medicine Hat). Roy would like to thank the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for their generous support in the production of the work for the Alberta Biennial.

Caussy’s Kalispell (Mataji) takes its name from the ten-limbed Hindu Goddess Kali, who is associated with the dualities of death as well as motherhood. The works’ title is also a reference to the small town of Kalispell, Montana, the once-home of L. Ron Hubbard, the infamous founder of Scientology. The shrine-like platform and objects gesture to an international Indian diaspora and the artists own familial migrant experience in Canada. Kalispell (Mataji) and Rock My Religion (after Graham) materially expose references from dominant mainstream culture with coded and appropriated references to Hinduism, such as the triangle form intrinsic to the Goddess Kali. Caussy’s process-based work is a non-hierarchical exploration on the absurdity of the majority of human activity, musing upon solitude, ego, and death

b. Edmonton, based in Sherwood Park, Alberta

Gerry Dotto lives and works in Sherwood Park outside of Edmonton, Alberta. He attended the Alberta College of Art where he received his undergraduate in 1981. Dotto’s practice includes printmaking, mixed-media, collage and photography. His work has been shown in group exhibitions in New York, Vancouver, Edmonton and Toronto and most recently, in the Salt Spring National Art Prize exhibition. His solo exhibitions include Flow of Traffic Theory at the Art Gallery of St. Albert (2016); Daffodil Gallery (2012) and Latitude53 (2010). His work is held in the public collections of Esso Petroleum Corporation, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. His work has been featured in publications such as Manifest Gallery 3rd and 5th International Photography Annuals, and PrairieSeen Notes. 

Husband and Wife is a paper-based work based on cut and torn pieces of consumer packaging from a collection of recycled materials. The work maintains the interior components of product and package design, by altering and scaling the proofing/registration marks. Dotto’s works are named based on his perception of them, a phenomenon called pareidolia; a psychological phenomenon involving a stimulus wherein the mind perceives a familiar pattern of something where none exists.

b. St. John’s, Newfoundland, based in Fort McMurray, Alberta

Megan Green was born in Newfoundland, but like many, migrated to Fort McMurray in the mid 1990s, where she spent her formative years. Following a diploma from the local college, she received a BFA from the University of Alberta (Edmonton) in 2011 and completed her MFA solo thesis exhibition The Jackalope in the Room, at the University of Waterloo in 2014. During studies at the University of Waterloo, Green completed their ‘Keith and Win Shantz Summer Internship in London (UK) with artist and taxidermist Claire Morgan and in the summer of 2014 she was included in Art Mûr’s Fresh Paint New Construction (Montreal).

Arising from an encounter with an errant deer leg on a Fort McMurray driveway, What exactly were we supposed to have learned from the fire? employs a personal anecdote to reconsider the aesthetics and narratives of oil as embodied. The work re-conceptualizes the ram-shackled plastic impermanence of the supposed landscape of ‘trailers and McMansions’ where the leg was found as spaces of new encounters with an affective geo-cultural landscape. A humorous and melancholic conflation of the strangeness and banality of a place considered dystopic and anachronistically other, yet central to petroculture studies. Originally from Newfoundland, the artist considers being at home, yet diasporic in ‘the offshore,’ and female in a space rendered masochistically. 

b. Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, based in Calgary, Alberta

Born in Manitoba in 1983, Kristopher Karklin grew up in rural northern Alberta and completed his BFA at the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2007. Karklin has been the recipient of several awards including the 2012 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award for an Emerging Artist. 

Karklin’s work has been included in major museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, (Calgary); Art Gallery of Calgary and the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton) as a participant of the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art. His work is held in the public collection of the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts as well as in private collections in both Canada and the United States including the distinguished photographic collection of Sir Elton John.

Home is an exploration of the discrepancy between the ideal and reality of a “home” in today’s economic climate. It is based on the experience of the recent decline of the oil economy within Alberta and the affects this decline has had on the younger homeowner demographic. The image portrays a young couple, nude and vulnerable, standing in front of a ubiquitous suburban dwelling. Once idealized as a safe haven and beacon of growth, the house now looms before its owners as a sobering symbol of seemingly insurmountable debt. Reflected in the monumental size of the work, the imagery speaks to a grave issue faced by many.

b. Edmonton, based in Calgary, Alberta

Kris Lindskoog is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Calgary, Alberta, with his wife and two daughters. He is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art + Design (Calgary) and has exhibited locally, nationally and in Europe.

Body Bottle Instrument is a drawing and sculpture project that examines the relationship between forms. Shared functions and forms are explored between breath/gas, liquid/water gas-solid-liquid, sound, breath hum cap, store, save and use. The vessel sculptures and drawings are collaged exquisite corpses that ask what are bodies? What are they for and how can I use mine?

b. Calgary, based in Okotoks, Alberta/Berlin, Germany

Wil Murray studied painting at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary and lives and works in both Okotoks (Alberta), and Berlin (Germany). Recent solo exhibitions include On Invasive Species and Infidelity, Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton); Please Boss Remember Me, VITRINE (London); Die Welt In Farben, P|M Gallery (Toronto); and Last Summer I Build A 1:8 Scale Model of Your Vagina, Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg, (Berlin). His group shows include A journey from a sweeping gesture to a lasting effect, VITRINE (Basel); NOT A PHOTO, The Hole (New York City); and The Painting Project, Galerie de L’UQAM in Montréal. Murray received an honourable mention in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2008, and previously exhibited in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art.

My family’s circus stopped touring in the summer of 1943 because of travel restrictions brought about by the same war that dropped the Fu-Go bombs the following winter. By depicting my visits to the ten geographical venues they shared and conflating their seasonal landscapes via brush stroke, I tell a time travel story in which the circus, the balloon bomb, and I meet on the Canadian prairies. I insert my own journey between the end of the circus and the beginning of the bombs falling and in so doing, open a small space in which I can consider my own contemporary anxieties about indiscriminate violence and the sacrifices we accept in our attempt to keep it at bay.

b. Brooks, based in Calgary, Alberta/Vancouver, British Columbia 

& b. Washington, D.C., based in Calgary, Alberta

Justin Patterson and Stacey Watson are a collaborative duo that formed in 2003. Alongside their individual art practices and work with the Arbour Lake Sghool, they have maintained an ongoing creative exchange. Both are graduates of the University of Calgary, where Stacey received her MFA in 2004 and Justin received his BFA in 2005. Their collaborative work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Calgary (2003), Kulturpfeiffer, Berlin (2006), Salt Gallery, Cornwall, UK (2006) and at Kunstverein das weisse haus, Vienna (2008). They have exhibited sculptural installation work at IDEAL, Calgary (2008) and their immersive room piece entitled The Filthy Water Grotto was constructed at Art Gallery of Calgary in 2009. Leading up to the 2017 Alberta Biennial the duo are creating video works in Calgary and Vancouver B.C. 

Object Vocation is a series of audio/video vignettes that animate the discarded and domestic into a series of anti-narratives. Banality provides the backbone for a universe where subtle menace and abjection mingles with humor. Patterson and Watson respond directly to the things in their respective environments and playfully cull found materials and half formed sculptures from the detritus of their individual studio practices and everyday lives. By giving static objects absurd tasks throughout the videos, the artists attempt to reassign the fate of the overlooked in cycles of growth and decay. Patterson and Watson locate the boundlessness of their instinctive exchange in the compost of the object world.

b. Manila, Philippines, based in Calgary, Alberta/ Montréal, Quebec

Marigold Santos pursues an interdisciplinary art practice involving drawn, painted, and printed works, sculpture, animation, and sound. She holds a BFA with Honours from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal. As a recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. She is represented by Jarvis Hall Gallery and Galerie D’Este. She currently divides both residence and practice between Calgary and Montréal.

A shrouded figure levitates in a space void of specificity, a cloaked giant. The colour-field realm connotes an hour of magic, the vastness suggests possibilities. Surrounded by hundreds of golden amulets whose density decreases towards ascension, the figure appears buoyant yet magnetic with mass, the intersection between weightlessness and gravity. Within this interstitial space, the body is fragmented, and is one and the same with the unraveling garment. Informed by a landscape consisting of personal experience, social politics, folklore, pop culture, and science, an invented mythology is created, a visual language that favours a selfhood that is unfixed, porous, multiple. 

b. Toronto, Ontatrio, based in Calgary, Alberta

Justin Waddell graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design and received his MFA in Integrated Media from the University of Windsor in 2003. He has worked in various capacities at several artist-run centers, festivals, galleries, and magazines in Canada including Prefix Photo, Trinity Square Video, Lola Magazine, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the New Gallery, and the Gendai Gallery at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Center. He has served as the Director of Programming at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the Director of the Stride Art Gallery Association, and more recently as a Board Member of the Calgary Cinematheque, M.S.T. Performative Art Festival, and as a founding Board Member with the every-age art and music venue, Local Library in Calgary, Alberta. His work and research is rooted in the development of a personal narrative of experimentation and process. Right now, he is interested in escapism. Waddell currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Permanent Instructor in the School of Visual Art at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Float in Space and Drift in Time, consists of small, carved steatite sculptures arranged on a reflective, lowered platform alongside a custom film projector with a 16mm looping film and un-synched soundtrack. The colour film has been hand-processed and dyed to create an abstracted image of one of the steatite sculptures as light moves over its surface. The resulting image is an abstracted and ambient field of colour with reference to a mountainous and rocky landscape. The soundtrack is composed of tuned electric guitar, feedback, drones, percussion, field recordings, and is intended to invoke a spirit of deep time and lost space.