Visual arts & new media

March is Alberta Francophonie Month! So for this week's Work of the Week, we are sharing an artwork by one of the Francophone artists in the AFA collection - Drop City, 1964 by Josée Aubin Ouellette.

About the Artist: Josée Aubin Ouellette
 

Multi-disciplinary artist and curator Josée Aubin Ouellette describes herself as “interested in the dynamics between artist and institution [and] the relationship of artworks to their exhibition space.” She earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing at the University of Alberta (2007), during which time she undertook a “Works to Work” curatorial internship at Edmonton’s The Works Art & Design Festival (2006) and another internship with the Art Dealers’ Association of Canada at the Scott Gallery (2007). After receiving the Natalka Horeczko Scholarship in Painting and Print-Design through the University of Alberta (2006) and the Jason Lang academic achievement scholarship through the Government of Alberta (2007), she undertook her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2012). She completed the Society is a Workshop Visual Arts Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2013) and the Gushul Studio Trap/door collaborative residency with Erik Osberg at the Crowsnest Pass in Blairmore, Alberta (2014).

While running her own fashion design business La Fabrique since 2009, she’s served as curator for the Hydeaway All Ages Art Space in Edmonton (now closed), the Blue Plate Diner restaurant, the NextFest Emerging Artist Festival, and her own Institute Parachute.

Aubin Ouellette has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Skirt the parlour and shun the zoo... at The Walter Philips Gallery in Banff, Don’t leave me This Way at the Künstquartier Bethanien in Berlin, and Autonomous Supports (with Aideen Doran) at Generator Projects in Dundee, Scotland. She’s mounted solo shows in Glasgow, including BODY BLOCKS/Electric Blanket at the Govanhill Baths Ladies Pool and Provisional Structure Gallery at the Shipping Container Gallery, and several one-woman programmes in Edmonton including Sick Room at the Art Gallery of Alberta, MILK at Harcourt House, and Object Theatre Paintings for The Works Festival.

Aubin Ouellette’s prizes include an arts bursary from the Edmonton Arts Council and the Florence Andison Friedman Award in Painting from the University of Alberta. She has received two nominations for the Professional Arts Coalition of Edmonton (PACE) award at the Mayor’s Celebrations of the Arts (2009, 2010) and in 2014 received The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

This week's Work of the Week is Gallery by John Snow. 
 

September is Month of the Artist in Alberta! A good way to celebrate is to visit one of the many excellent galleries and museums in Alberta - just like the people in this lithograph by Alberta artist John Snow. 
 

Find an art event or exhibition taking place near you (or online) by visiting the Month of the Artist website. 

Did you know? The word 'museum' is derived from ancient Greek, which denotes a place dedicated to the Muses - the Greek patron deities of the arts! The most visited museum in the world is the Louvre in France. 

About the Artist: John Snow (1911-2004)

John Harold Thomas Snow was raised between Vancouver, BC, England, UK, Olds, AB, and Innisfail, AB. At age 15, he told his father he wanted either to be a banker or a painter and had successful careers as both. In 1928, he joined the Royal Bank of Canada, first in Bowden, AB, then in Calgary, from which he retired after 43 years at age 60. His time with RBC was interrupted only once with his enlistment and overseas tour during World War II from 1940-1945.

Once back in Calgary, Snow began studying life drawing under Maxwell Bates and experimenting with woodblock printing techniques. In 1953, Snow and Bates rescued two decommissioned lithography printing presses and several old limestone blocks from the Western Printing and Lithography Company, and Snow quickly established himself both as a master lithographer and an instrumental mentor to colleagues and new artists. He exhibited nationally and internationally during his lifetime in print and graphics biennials, as well as in solo and group gallery shows. His landscapes, still lifes, florals, and portraits in lithography, watercolour, oil, mixed media, concrete sculpture, textiles, and intaglio relief helped usher Alberta into the modernist period.

Snow worked diligently and prolifically until 1992 and died peacefully in 2004.

The awards bestowed upon him are numerous; notable among them are the Salon des Beaux Arts, Paris (1965), an honorary Doctorate from the University of Calgary (1984), the Alberta Achievement Award (1984), and the Alberta Order of Excellence (1996). His work is held in the collections of the Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Alberta Government House Foundation, and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2001, Snow’s two-storey home in Lower Mount Royal (Calgary), where he lived and worked for nearly 50 years, was purchased by Calgary author Jackie Flanagan to accommodate writers who took part in the Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Writers Programme. As of 2010, the John Snow House is administered by The New Gallery. It holds its resource centre (a combined library and archive), hosts an artist-in-residence program, and is available for community events.

This week’s Work of the Week is Night Prairie Piece by Lynn Malin.
 

Fall is a great time of year to get outside and do some stargazing! Alberta has some of the best night skies in the world for viewing the cosmos. In fact, our province is home to five Dark Sky Preserves, which are designated areas located all over the world where artificial lighting is reduced to a minimum and the reduction of light pollution is promoted and encouraged.
 

About the Artist: Lynn Malin

Lynn Malin is a painter working full time in Edmonton since 1985. She works primarily in oils on canvas, paper, and lexan, and practices both within and outside the tradition of landscape painting. She employs still-life and site-specific techniques, but veers away from the traditional wilderness scenes, and instead take a vertical, bird’s eye approach to her subjects. She incorporates small calligraphic marks in her work to represent both natural and man-made patterns in the landscape, and explores the human tendency to grid, order and reorganize nature. Her work explores the dichotomy of these patterns, and the process of order and disorder in the landscape.

Malin received her education at the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto, and attended residencies and workshops at Emma Lake, Emily Carr College of Art and Design, and at the Banff Centre. She is a member of the Alberta Society of Artists where she served as Vice President and Branch Chairman.

Malin was awarded public commissions at the Kelly Ramsey Building/Enbridge Tower in Edmonton, AB and at the Emerald Hills Leisure Centre and Bethel Transit Station in Sherwood Park, AB. She exhibits her work in solo and group shows throughout Alberta. Her work is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Government of Canada Embassy in Egypt, and in the University of Alberta Faculty Club and Alumni House.

You can see more of Malin’s work at the Art Gallery of St. Albert. The exhibition Lynn Malin: Landwatch is on view until October 24.

This week we spotlight Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert's artwork, Borrowed Power. Cardinal-Schubert's piece will be featured in David Garneau's exhibition Métissage, presented at the University of Calgary's Nickle Galleries.
 

About the art
 

Artist David Garneau requested the loan of Cardinal-Schubert's Borrowed Power to honour the late artist for her role as a mentor and influence in his life. Garneau's exhibition runs from February 2 - April 22, 2023.

This particular piece is featured in the 1994 documentary, Hands of History, where Cardinal-Schubert is filmed creating the artwork. Cardinal-Schubert is one of four contemporary female artists featured in the documentary which explores the role Indigenous women fulfill in nurturing Indigenous cultures.

Borrowed Power can be viewed in the AFA’s Virtual Museum, alongside a number of Joane's artworks held in the AFA collection. 

About the artist

Joane's legacy extends beyond her work as an artist. She played a vital role in establishing new relationships between the AFA and Indigenous artists within Alberta.

Helping to diversify the AFA's holdings in its art collection, her work lead to the acquisition of artwork from artists like Alex Janvier, George Littlechild, and Cardinal-Schubert herself.

Read more about the legacy of Joane Cardinal-Schubert and her impact on the AFA Art Collection.  

To acknowledge both Indigenous Veterans Day (November 8) and Remembrance Day (November 11), the AFA's Work of the Week is Untitled (Soldier Sask Airport Mural Drawing) by James Nicoll.

About the artwork
 

This drawing is part of a series of sketches that were used to develop a mural at a Saskatchewan airport. There is another James Nicoll drawing of a Paratrooper in the AFA Art Collection, and the artwork includes the following text: “Drawing Series for Mural – Royal Canadian Air ABM, Saskatchewan airport.”

AFA staff have been unable to identify for which airport in Saskatchewan these drawings were created. (Any tips can be sent to afacontact@gov.ab.ca.)

About the artist

James (Jim) Nicoll was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta in 1892, and he primarily grew up in Nelson and Fernie, British Columbia. He served during World War I.

Jim started painting in 1930, while he was working as an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Nicoll met his wife, well known Calgary artist Marion Mackay [Nicoll], at the Calgary Sketch Club in 1931. They married in 1940 and, in 1945, they settled in Bowness, a village just west of Calgary.

Jim was a realist painter, who worked primarily with oils. He was a self-taught artist who believed in representing the correct anatomy of objects, architecture, and people. Like his wife, Nicoll was important to the creation of the art scene in Alberta and Calgary. Read more about the artist. 

The AFA currently holds 389 different artworks by Jim Nicoll, which can be viewed on the AFA Virtual Museum. 

This week’s Work of the Week is Sunset on Boot Hill by Delia Cross Child.

Cross Child’s acrylics, such as Sunset on Boot Hill, are stunning evocations of colour that might be mistaken as psychedelic by anyone who had never witnessed the rolling prairies of southern Alberta. Her landscape scintillates with reds, ambers, and blues that rise like smoke into a sky aflame.
 

About the Artist: Delia Cross Child

Delia Cross Child is a Blood and Peigan artist and teacher who fuses historical and contemporary art traditions of Turtle Island and Europe to inspire her communities and educate the public about First Nations issues.

Born in Pincher Creek and raised in an one-child family on the Peigan Reserve at Brocket, Cross Child was fascinated by the landscape and its changing seasons, whose mountain-view hills and Old Man River valley she explored with her parents and siblings. The experiences became foundational to her later paintings; she describes “a performance… of ever-changing colour, sight, and sound” that was “only a part of the territory that… the Blackfoot Confederacy… had occupied for a long time. [It was] a place of solace during the times when my world appeared to be chaotic and confusing,” a world whose legacy included the mass-trauma of forced assimilation, residential schools, and “hunger, sadness, and abuse.”

Cross Child later attended the University of Lethbridge where she earned her B.A. in Art and Native American Studies (1996) and her B.Ed. in Art (2002). To motivate her students at Kainai High School on the Blood Reserve near Standoff, Alberta, she integrated traditional visual literacy into her teaching

Cross Child’s work has been exhibited at the Glenbow Museum, Walter Phillips Gallery, and Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and lives in the public collections of the University of Lethbridge, the Blood Tribe Administration, and the Glenbow Museum. Cross Child has received several academic and art awards, including membership in the University of Lethbridge’s Alumni Honour Society (2009), the Blackfoot Fine Arts Award (2008), and the Gerald Tailfeathers Art Scholarship (1996).

This week’s Work of the Week is Mind Over Matter by renowned Indigenous artist Alex Janvier.

This past Wednesday, September 30, was Orange Shirt Day – a day to honour residential school survivors and victims. In Alberta, there are about 12,000 residential school survivors and their families, including Alex Janvier.

About the Artist: Alex Janvier

Alex Janvier was born on the Le Goff Reserve, Cold Lake First Nations, Alberta, in 1935. He was raised in the Chipewyan tradition until he attended the Blue Quill Residential Indian School at the age of eight.

Janvier graduated with Honours from the Alberta College of Art in 1960 and since then has built an international reputation as a painter, muralist and printmaker. He has influenced a younger generation of native artists through his paintings and advocacy work with arts organizations and land claim committees.
 

His imagery is a combination of traditional native decorative motifs such as medicine wheels, floral designs and symbolic colour combinations. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, his work became more representational and concerned with specific social and political issues.

Janvier has been the recipient of many accolades throughout his career. Since 2007, he has received honourary doctorates from both the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, was appointed to the Order of Canada, received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts and was the first ever recipient of the Marion Nicoll Visual Arts Award from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Alex Janvier continues to live and work in Cold Lake.

This week’s Work of the Week is Viking II by Douglas Motter.

When someone says the word ‘Viking’ do you think of a burly, blonde man wearing a horned helmet who plunders villages? If so, you may want to think again!  A new study suggests that Vikings didn’t exactly fit these modern stereotypes. Read more about it here. 
 

About the Artist: Douglas Motter (1913-1993)

Douglas Motter was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1913. He moved to Calgary, Alberta with his family in 1919. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design from the University of Missouri in 1935.

Motter was an educator, a watercolour painter, a printmaker, and a weaver. He was introduced to hand weaving in 1945, when he bought a loom for his wife. What started out as a hobby ended up turning into a career, as he was weaving professionally by the 1960s. Motter opened his own weaving studio called Doug Motter & Associates in 1961. His company specialized in creating decorative pieces, and one-of-a-kind fabrics. His studio also provided novice weavers with a place to test out their weaving skills.

In 1958, Motter was selected to exhibit at the Brussels World Fair. He was also chosen to exhibit at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Quebec (or Expo 67, as it commonly referred to).

Motter started teaching classes part-time at the Alberta College of Art in 1962, and by 1968 he was a full-time instructor at the College specializing in weaving, drawing, and design. He made a significant contribution to establishing the visual arts scene in Calgary, as he was one of the founders of the Allied Arts Centre. Motter also served as the President of the Alberta Society of Artists for two terms, and held the position of Provincial Director for Alberta at the Canadian Crafts Council.

His watercolour paintings reside in private and public collections in North America.

This week’s Work of the Week is October Snow, Foothills Morning by David More.

Well, it’s mid-October and that means it’s time for snow! Many parts of Alberta will be getting their first snowfall of the year today.

About the Artist: David More

David More is a painter, illustrator, author, and muralist.
 

Born in Scotland, he moved with his family to Canada in 1948, eventually settling in Red Deer, Alberta. Growing up in a community surrounded by forests and parks had a profound effect on shaping his art practice, especially what he calls his direct landscape paintings. He makes beauty out of the ordinary, whether depicting wild or manicured spaces, and explores in paint the range of moods in places often known only to locals.

More uses his art to explore subtle changes in the landscape, including the ebb and flow of the Medicine River through the seasons, the various cloud formations over the sky in the prairies, and the slow but destructive effects of acid rain in New Brunswick. More began his Garden Ceremony series in 1975, and he has returned to this series continually over the years. Inspired by his travels throughout Canada and to countries including Brazil, France, England, Trinidad and India, these large-scale garden paintings explore the juxtapositions between man-made and organic forms.

He graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts) in 1972. In his early career, he worked as an art history researcher, a medical graphics artist, and taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design for three years. He came back to Red Deer and was a part-time instructor in the faculty of visual arts at Red Deer College for over 30 years, until his retirement in 2014.

In 2019, More donated about 200 sketches, drawings, and paintings to the Red Deer Museum & Art Gallery, as a way to give back to the community where he has spent most of his life painting the fields, streams, and skies.

This week’s Work of the Week is Revenant Portrait No. 5 Locked Doors by Calgary artist Karrie Arthurs.

About the Artist: Karrie Arthurs

Karrie Arthurs is a Calgary-based artist who works with paper and ink. A long-time tattoo artist, Karrie says her two artistic practices influence one another—almost melding together.
 

For several years, she has sourced and collected a large amount of “antique” paper, envelopes, documents, portraits etc., some dating 150 years old or more. This is the material she incorporates into her art - drawing on it with ink, charcoal and chalk primarily.

You can learn more about Karrie Arthurs and her artistic practice in her Alberta Artist Profile on our website.