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Look who came to lunch

by on May 16, 2012 in General, Visual Arts

The latest in our Q & A series with the people we meet over lunch in Vistas Dining Room.

As the panoramic views of the Bourgeau Mountain Range were embellished by the bright blue sky, I met Natalie Doonan, Joanna Neborsky, and Megan Morman – and I asked them a little about themselves.

Megan Morman (left), Joanna Neborsky, and Natalie Doonan in Vistas.

We are: visual artists and writers here for the Visual Arts thematic residency. It starts with Life is Beautiful, but you should look up the full name.

We are from: Montreal, New York, and Saskatoon

I came to The Banff Centre because: Megan: I make art about artists, specifically stories about the arts community and gossip about artists. I’ve always wanted to come to The Banff Centre because of the stories I’ve heard. I’m interested in the crazy things that happen when you get a bunch of artists together in a high-intensity, creative environment.

This morning: Joanna: I had a morning meeting where we rehearsed the schedule for the week. I then had a bit of studio time before lunch.

My after-lunch plans: Natalie:  I have a studio visit with a residency faculty member. We have three faculty members who we each meet with individually to discuss what we’re planning on doing during the residency and how it fits in to the general body of our work.

First impressions of Banff: Natalie:  There’s a lot going on. I’m still working on juggling my personal artistic objectives with all of the planned activity of the thematic residency.

Before I leave the Centre I want to: All: Visit the hot springs!  

The best item on today’s menu: The macaroni and cheese.

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Setting stone for artist Mark Leckey

by on April 28, 2012 in Visual Arts

Installing BigBoxGreenScreenRefrigeratorActions in the Walter Phillips Gallery. Photo: Kim Williams

Four of the people from our preparatorial team at the Walter Phillips Gallery moved this giant slab of Rundle rock into the gallery this week. The rock plays a key role in Mark Leckey‘s exhibition BigBoxGreenScreenRefrigeratorActions, which will be on in the gallery through July 15. An iconic natural building material in the Bow Valley (it’s all over the Banff Springs Hotel and many of the Banff Centre’s buildings), there are only two Rundle rock quarries still in operation. One of them, Kamenka Quarry, near Canmore, loaned this stone for the show.

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Sarah Anne Johnson’s 3D vision

by on March 28, 2012 in General, Visual Arts

Sarah Anne Johnson, Party boat, 2010.

Have you ever taken a photograph on a trip, looked at it when you got home, and felt…well disappointed?

This happens to me all the time. Those photographs just fail to capture how I felt in that exact moment, the smells, the sounds – what my experience really was. After an artist-led residency through the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sarah Anne Johnson was feeling the same disappointment. Left with only calendar-quality photographs and her memories, she wondered how to capture how she felt about the effects of global warming – everything about her experience that had been outside of the camera’s frame.   

I figured out I can add that in – I can paint that in.  All my worries, all my concerns, and all my hopes and fears of the future of this place, I can paint it right on. 

Here, as part of the Banff Artist in Residence winter program, Johnson is taking this work one step further by creating a giant sculpture based on her photograph Party boat. “I’m learning so much and that’s why I came here – I have an idea, with no idea how to turn it into a physical reality.”

Sarah Anne Johnson working on the framework for the fireworks in her sculpture. Photo: Don Lee.

To create the party boat, Johnson will use many similar sculpture techniques she used in House on Fire. What she is here at the Centre specifically to work on is the construction of the fifteen-foot round fireworks that need to hang from the ceiling and light up. 

“The inside skeleton needs to hang from the ceiling, so it can’t be over a certain weight. It also needs to break down for shipping. It’s quite a technical project,” she says.

After this project, Johnson plans to take a break from the political realm of global warming.  Her thoughts are already on to her next subject - intimacy and sexuality - a personally risky topic. “As artists, we can - and we should – be talking about things that are difficult to talk about and sharing the pictures in our head that are difficult to share.”

A graduate of the University of Manitoba and the Yale School of Art, Sarah Anne Johnson won the inaugural Grange Prize in 2008 from the Art Gallery of Ontario.  She lives in Winnipeg, where she teaches sculpture at the University of Manitoba, and is Artist in Residence. 
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Dateline: Banff, 1947

by on March 12, 2012 in General, Library & Archives, Visual Arts

When curator Ruth Burns saw a photo from the Whyte Museum archives, of painter H.G. Glyde and fellow art faculty from what was then called the Banff School of Fine Arts, it led her on a year-and-a-half search for an important piece of Banff Centre history. Collected with a group of paintings, other photos and archival material, and video, the photo became the basis for Art School: Banff 1947, which just opened at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Burns calls the photo “a snapshot of Canadian art at that time,” a collection of artists who came together at Banff , who all had very different styles, though they influenced each other when they worked here. Artists like Jock MacDonald, Marion Nicoll, A.Y. Jackson, Walter J. Phillips, H.G. Glyde… The emphasis at the Banff School was on landscape painting, but many of these artists would be influenced here to build practices in figurative and abstract art. “Andre Bieler was told he should expect to focus on landscape,” Burns says. “But he hoped to influence the curriculum.”  

  

 Jane Parkinson, head archivist at The Banff Centre’s Paul D. Fleck Library & Archives, loaned the AGA a selection of archival photos, posters, interview transcripts, and rough sketches for a catalogue cover competition (entered by artists including Jackson, Bieler, and MacDonald, and won by painter Charles Comfort). “I don’t know that the exhibition would have come together without the help of the archives,” Burns says. Here are a few of the photos from the show, and an earlier catalogue cover, designed by artist Stanford Perrott when he was a painting student at the Banff School.

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A welding shop and a cathedral

by on February 29, 2012 in General, Leighton Artists' Colony, Visual Arts

 

Walking into Errol Lee Fullen‘s studio I am instantly immersed in his enchanted world of colour.  It’s no wonder the working title of this project is centered around the sun - the entire spectrum of colours hang in front of me.  

“Which one is your favourite?” he nonchalantly asks.

The pieces work together. I’m a little unsure if I’m really meant to pick one – the blue swirl, the metallic texture – I can’t begin to describe the intense vibrancy when I look at them as a collection.  Errol describes his work:

Visual poetry – using physical poetic metaphor – looking at one of my paintings says something different then if you were to describe it.

“I love this space,”  he says of the Gerin-Lajoie Studio in The Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony.  “It either feels like a welding shop when I’m working  – or a cathedral when I’m cleaned up.”

To get started, he measures the walls in his studio, builds his canvases, hangs them all up, and begins to get a feel for the space.   

There is no way this project would have worked in a different space.  Those square windows – it all comes together.  Look out the windows and what’s out there and then look at what’s in the paintings – it starts to show up in the work. 

“For this project,” he continues,  ”I’m throwing metallic paint – literally. You end up getting stuff you couldn’t get any other way – and you couldn’t have done it if you had been in total control.”  

“The other night I mucked up this one” – he points to the plain red canvas on the wall – “it was late and I realized I never really liked it anyway, so I painted over it.   With Wild Styles, my experience was if you just go, go, go then you get it done – and it worked!  This time I’ve learned I just need to back off a little bit.  Just go and do some other things – walk more – just get outside more.”

Errol Lee Fullen has been an artist in residence with the Leighton Artist Colony every year for the last five years.  He was born in Camrose, Alberta.  Fullen exhibits his work locally and internationally.  He is best known for his landmark public and private commissions of paintings and sculpture. All photos: Don Lee.

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Collected on camera…

by on February 27, 2012 in General, Visual Arts

We’ve asked Don Lee, head of Photo Services here, to regularly select a few great images from past weeks’ activity here at The Banff Centre. Here, three photos from the Open Studios event just over a week ago in Visual Arts. Artists from two thematic residencies, Ken Lum’s Master Class, and Trading Post with Candice Hopkins, invited the public behind studio doors.

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