Our work extends to local, national, and international communities. 26.11.2021 to 06.02.2022
UNDER THE VAST SKY | BRITTA MARAKATT-LABBA
Under the Vast Sky is a major solo exhibition with renowned Sámi visual artist Britta Marakatta-Labba. While not strictly an all-out retrospective, Under the Vast Sky works a fine balance between a generous selection of both characteristic and iconic works, as t
hey appear across her career extending across now six decades, and new works, both recent and made directly for this exhibition. The included works build as well a carefully targeted selection across the major axes in Marakatt-Labba’s oeuvre – such as the epic works chronicling Sámi history, culture, cosmology; works choreographing narratives born in the vernacular, domestic, the intimacy of daily life; and works engaging the contested and urgent issues of our time – climate catastrophe, extractivism, terror and violence, racism and neocoloniality, and more. Under the Vast Sky honors Britta Marakatt-Labba as a master of embroidery, her skill in managing the stitch as the miniature unit with which she is able to compose, narrate and visualize the universe, a technique that turns time and endurance into vision and precision. But the exhibition also includes Britta Marakatt-Labba’s forays into other media, such as her work with installations that assemble stitched objects, small sculptures giving three-dimensional form to figures from embroideries, as well as the inclusion of sound and yoik in several recent works. BODY LONGING | MANDY ESPEZEL
Mandy Espezel’s site-specific painting installation engages with the lived bodily knowledge of both painter and viewer. Subjective experiences are received and perceived through the body, and meaning is manifested through the embodied act of vision. Seeing a painting is not accomplished only through the senses but through a bodily situation in time and place. Espezel's works resist an organizing schema, instead inviting bodies to be present in a painterly way, using eyes, mind, and body together to decipher and experience meaning. The installation of Espezel's work is akin to a painting in space. They extend choices of colour, line, scale, and composition into the three-dimensional gallery. Each installation involves a process of allowing the exhibition context to influence visual and tactile choices. Espezel accentuates the quirks of the century-old Carnegie library gallery space for an experience that entwines vision, tactility and movement. Works are created and installed in response to the physical and luminous specificity of the gallery. Partitions are built to obscure and necessitate movement, as well as rewarding visual exploration. The title, Body Longing, in Espezel's words refers to, "a question of whether humans will mourn for a state of bodiment that we will no longer inhabit." The pandemic-stricken world accelerated the technological “de-bodying” of personal interactions enabled through video calling, messaging, scrolling, and liking. Experiences of intimacy, vulnerability, and sensuality are mediated through monetary and informational corporate exchange. Espezel's artistic practice is an active questioning of this continual de-bodiment. THERE WERE NOTHING BUT PEDIGREES ALL AROUND US | LUKE JOHNSON
Pedigrees recall a well-documented record of succession leading to the present day. The pedigrees that built the Southern Alberta Art Gallery are written into its buildings, exhibitions, collections, and publications. Originating with a grant from wealthy steel magnate Andrew Carnegie over one hundred years ago, the spirit of Lethbridge’s first purpose-built library is kept alive through SAAG’s own art-focused public library. In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of Lethbridge’s Carnegie library building on January 23rd, 2022, artist Luke Johnson re-examined SAAG’s publication history, experimenting with tangential image research among its holdings. There Were Nothing But Pedigrees All Around Us nods towards the chance encounters of searching, exploring, touching, and guessing only possible in the library space. Luke Johnson’s art considers how knowledge is standardized, categorized, and hierarchized. Beginning with a dozen SAAG publications from 1979 to 2012, Johnson found mentions of their titles, or those same arrangement of words, in publications decades older. The much older pictures and illustrations found near these mentions also curiously represent the original SAAG book. Johnson built a network of knowledge, crossing genres, forms, and decades and created printed postcards using the illustrations and images from Wikimedia commons. SAAG’s publication history is represented and re-presented as an investigative game for visitors, offering new encounters with forgotten books. Visitors are invited to trace each image back to the original book and exhibition which provoked its discovery.
