2018. 15 Exhibitions / 2 galleries
Reading The Sky / Tara Cooper
Jan 5 - Feb 10
Knocked the wind out of my sails; touch and go; even keeled; steady as she goes; three sheets to the wind; port out, starboard home.
Reading the Sky begins with an image of a boat, navigating the sea by night. It takes cues from the Beaufort Wind Scale—a 13-point observational system developed by naval officer Francis Beaufort in 1805—but also illuminates stories like Ann Davison, who was the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean alone, and William Gass’ poetic text On Being Blue. Combining techniques based in indigo resist dyeing, along with a collector’s impulse for all things nautical, the show uses installation-based strategies viewing the gallery space as something that can be read like a book. Three cheers to the Ontario Arts Council for supporting this exhibition.
ONE TO USE ONE TO LOSE ONE TO BREAK/ Jonathan Green
Jan 5 - Feb 10
Campsites, construction sites, and historical ruins: transitional territories between the natural environment and human culture. In this exhibition, Green has created a series of imagined scapes exploring these permeable interstices to consider how they work with or against the reality of nature. His images separate particular features of landscape images – such as mountains, trees, or glaciers – and reconstructs them in tandem with appropriated pictures of human-made architectural elements. Here, natural reality and manufactured reality meet in an eerie reflection of the Anthropocene.
Eyes Water Fire / Tomoyo Ihaya
Feb 23 - Mar 31
Artist Tomoyo Ihaya says about her work: “After many years of traveling and living abroad, particularly in India (sixteen visits since 2005), I have grown increasingly sensitive to people who have been forced to migrate. I have heard many stories of the loss of lives in struggle against suppression, lost homelands, escapes, and life in exile. There are many young and old friends with whom I have shared time together, who are refugees. Each of them possesses a story of hardship within his/her heart. They have not seen their families for many years. Some elder friends have passed away in the foreign land they escaped to, far from their native land. All these stories I have heard have made me think about what it is to be born and live. As a person who was born in a stable country (Japan) and who now lives in a stable country (Canada), my level of resonance/synchronization with these people and their journeys may not be able to reach the true depth of their despair. However, I do feel pain and I feel compelled to draw when I see the images and hear the stories of thousands of people escaping en masse over mountains, across great plains and oceans by any means possible. These works are the result of my direct and indirect experiences with people whom I have come to know.
Balance / Caitlin Bodewitz
Feb 23 -Mar 31
What do sea otters, polar bears, and caribou have in common besides four legs and fur? They are all listed as threatened or endangered on the Species At Risk Act in Canada. These animals act as keystone or indicator species, having imperative relationships with their environment, and have the ability to represent and affect the vitality of their entire ecosystem. The current state of these struggling species is directly linked to climate change and human influences; they require deliberate actions from humanity to paint a different future for them.
Through a juxtaposition of nature and geometry, Bodewitz explores the delicate balance between organic and structural, species and ecosystems, and humans and environmental impact. Bodewitz is interested in the space amongst the tension of these intersections where harmony can be achieved.
FELT / U of A senior print students
April 10 -21
This exhibition represents the culmination of a year of self-directed studio and academic research by eleven undergrad senior level printmaking students, and two first-year graduate students in the Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta. FELT is a dynamic and diverse exhibition that features a range of printmaking media including relief, etching, silkscreen, ink-jet, as well mixed-media works.The students explored a wide range of themes, investigating issues related to identity, mental health, place, commercialism and the environment through the medium of printmaking.
Featuring works by: Ardo Ahmed, Chelsey Campbell, Nick Davies, Zoe Dunlop, Daniel Evans, Karen Hasenbank, Luke Johnson, Max Keene, Billy Marshall, Kelley Nesdole, Vivian Trin, Hui Wang, Joanna Yip.
India Inked
Apr 27 - Jun 2
It all started in 2011 when Nirmal Raja and her artist and friend Dara Larson did a short residency at a print shop in Hyderabad, India. This little print shop called Banyan Hearts is an oasis in the bustling city. They were most impressed by the sincere interest and hard work by artist Sudhakar Chippa who owns and runs this print shop and residency. He provides great leadership and opportunities to young Indian artists who are often struggling for guidance once they graduate from college.
Since their first visit, numerous artistic collaborations and artists’ exchanges have taken place between Banyan Hearts and several artists in Milwaukee, WI where Raja resides. Slowly, the idea of India Inked! began to emerge—a show that highlights the full scope of printmaking among Indian and Indian American printmakers. Santhosh Sakhinala, one of the artists at Banyan Hearts and professor at JNTU Hyderabad, worked with Raja over a period of one year to curate this show. By giving this opportunity to printmakers who do not receive such recognition, both curators hope to elevate and examine the richness of the medium in the hands of artists who live in India and among Indian Americans.
Featuring works by 12 artists: Preeti Aggarwal, Moutushi Chakraborti, Arup Kuity, Kurma Nadham, Karuna Sukka, Gouri Vemula, Anujan Ezhikode, Sarojini Johnson, Ina Kaur, Shaurya Kumar, Sangeeta Reddy, Shantanu Suman.
Construct / Carly Greene
Aug 3 - Sep 8
Construct is an exhibition of new works by SNAP’s 2017 Emerging Artist in Residence, Carly Greene.
Memory is built in pieces: assembled layer upon layer, each piece leading to others until we reach a sense of completeness, a progression of time. I am interested in what happens when the layers are disrupted, destroyed, or left unfinished. Using construction materials and objects as reference points, I deconstruct, adapt, replicate, and rebuild until the materials surpass their original qualities or purpose. Like memories, my sculptures, drawings and prints, are themselves a series of approximations; elements assembled out of context; a collection of incomplete thoughts.
Doilies the meaning of life / Wendy Tokaryk
Aug 3 - Sep 8
Doilies the meaning of life presents a series of relief prints that recombine recycled and collected textiles as assemblages to explore interiors, objects, and iconography as subject matter. Like a storybook, the relief prints form a narrative about a woman in mid-life considering her past experience, contemplating the future, and relating a personal perspective of her life and dreams. The imagery examines symbolism, traditions, and stereotypes. Intimate and personal motifs such as a ring, mirrors, and celebratory cake, as well as still life interiors, lamps, and afghan blankets are symbols of ontological formation.
Home and Garden / Micheline Durocher
Jun 18 - Jul 21
Artist Micheline Durocher says about her work: “In my photos I embrace the inherent theatricality of objects. Banal objects and consumer goods appear both as props and actors. I have this passion for objects. I am an active scavenger of high and low culture who often takes things out of context and out of their original function. By repurposing, and redisplaying these objects and establishing new interactions through the camera lens I look for new meanings and relationships in the stuff that we consume. My work takes the broader feelings of everyday life, and puts them into an aesthetic perspective.”
Copy Tropic / Megan Gnanasihamany
Jun 18 - Jul 21
Copy Tropic is a search for love, belonging, & mutual ownership in six acts. A two-dimensional theatrical journey, plants drawn from second-hand memory are objects of affection and guides in pursuit of reciprocal affection from The Place You Belong To. 1. study and research. 2. sensory satisfaction. 3. production and ritual of a shared meal. 4. light and the mimicry of memory. 5. aestheticization. 6. participation in capitalism.
Aplacados – entre cascos percutidos y bardas / Miguel A. Aragón
Sep 21 - Oct 20
Beginning with the idea of erasure as language, I concentrate on the use of processes that are reductive in nature to create my work. Any form of erasure, however violently destructive, can be seen as constructive in some way; something comes through the destruction, the negation of an image is not actually nothing. The negation takes its form from an erasure of a particular image. It is my intention to transform the image, through erasure, from crude and unbearable into a more beguiling or subtle form for presenting disturbing images; the void thus becomes a space nurturing memory of what was there before engaging the viewer into a more lasting experience with this difficult subject matter. What I am looking for, as a result of these deletions is not to forget the horrific crimes these images convey; rather, I am searching for an understanding of what has happened by acquiring a sense of catharsis.
Selvage/ Mitchell Chalifoux
Sept 21 - Oct 20
What began as unfamiliar, Selvage documents the process of learning textile and craft techniques through the artist’s gendered inexperience. As a tactile, print installation, this series investigates the meanings of fabrics in varied forms – selvages, scraps, previously owned materials, and home furnishings. Grounded in feminist politics, these works build awareness to the properties and layered histories of the printed materials, and to the artist’s illusory skill with a now hobbyist level of craft. Through the exhibition and residency, Mitchell has gained introductory skills in embroidery, hand quilting, upholstery, sewing, and creating repeating patterns, through self-taught methods, familial knowledge, workshops, and online homemaking resources. Collaborating with existing materials, without overriding their pasts, is core to Mitchell’s working methods.
Brains and Breasts: Omitted Anatomies / Helen Gerritzen & Marilene Oliver
Nov 2 - Dec 1
Brains and Breasts: Omitted Anatomies is an exhibition of print based work made by Gerritzen and Oliver that explore these omitted anatomies visually, emotionally and politically. Their initial conversation has sparked a longer, deeper, richer artistic discussion, the results of which will be exhibited at SNAP. Anatomical illustration and medical imaging are the foundation of Gerritzen and Oliver’s works but they are then transformed through various print processes such as etching and collagraph. The works offer both a lived and feminist exchange of the female body’s long history as a repository of cultural, sexual, medical and religious meanings and reminds us of the tenuous corporeal and symbolic “body” being represented here.
Guys I went to High School with / Bernadette Paetz
Nov 2 - Dec 1
This work serves as a reflection on youth, identity, memory, and gender. Portraits of male youths drawn using the artist’s high school yearbook as source material are combined with traditionally feminine imagery. In entangling the images of these young men/boys with feminine motifs the artist teases out the nature of her own perceptions of gender and youth, maleness and vulnerability, memory and projection, high art and ornamentation.
The work features a variety of scales and media, from archival small prints to impermanent wallpaper which will be destroyed when the show is complete.
SNAP Members Show & Sale
Nov 17 - Dec 15