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Rubbing Off: Impressions of Banff

by on April 23, 2013 in Arts, Community connection, General, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

It’s been almost six months since I left The Banff Centre as a work study. While living in Banff, I was often making work through rubbings from spaces in town or in Glyde Hall as a way to familiarize myself with this place and to make it more my home. The process of rubbing initiates a certain level of intimacy with an object that you wouldn’t normally have. You become familiar with the scrapes and dings on a stool, or how the edges of a table are so much smoother where the finish has worn off. It’s a way to take a space from just being the place you are, to a place you can think of as familiar.

The Walter Phillips Gallery invited me to lead a spring workshop earlier in April as part of springstART, leading a group though different spaces downtown. It was thought of as a way to help people see the parts of Banff that are often overlooked, as well as an invitation to think about alternative ways to create artwork. My art practice is based on alternative methods of printmaking, often making work from found materials or things that are found outside of the traditional art supply stores. One of the works I made while in Banff was a rubbing of a large picnic table at the recreation grounds. After, I traced over the print with ink. The piece was a record of the condition of the frequently used table, but by drawing over it, by altering the image, I was able to claim it.

Twenty people signed up for the day, and thirty people joined us at the Banff Park Museum Saturday afternoon, despite the wet spring weather. There were several families, as well as Banff Centre employees, locals, and travelers who participated. Nobody was afraid to  really explore Banff. For me, this workshop was a great reason to come back to Banff. It also gave me the chance to step back from my work, to see people discover the materials I spend so much of my time with.

Sarah McKarney is an Edmonton-based artist who works with alternative printmaking materials. Previously a Banff Centre work study, McKarney was recently invited back to the Centre to run Rubbing Off: A printmaking workshop as part of springstART programming.

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In the studio with the little critics

by on March 22, 2013 in Arts, Community connection, General, Thematic Residency, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

New Crits on the Block was a school program piloted by the Walter Phillips Gallery this past February 2013 to give young people unique opportunities to engage with visual artists in residence here. Small groups of students from the Banff Elementary School were paired with artists to conduct studio visits, unmediated by any accompanying adults. This youth-led exchange was a unique occasion for participating artists to consider how their work is understood by a younger audience, and about how they communicate about artistic practice. For local students, the program offered a wonderful opportunity to meet face-to-face with a contemporary artist, providing insight into the process of making art.

Grade Four students from Banff Elementary School with artist William Brisco.

Grade Four students from Banff Elementary School with artist William Brisco.

The following text was written by five Grade 4 students from the Banff Elementary School about their studio visit with Vancouver-based artist William Brisco, who was in the Visual Arts residency Our Literal Speed. 

WILLIE BRISCO By Max, Brodie, Logan, Abigail and Megan

On February 6, 2013, the Grade Four students walked to The Banff Centre to meet professional artists and to learn about life as a professional artist. Everybody got split into different groups and each group got assigned to meet a different artist. Max, Brodie, Logan, Abigail and Megan were all assigned to Willie Brisco. All the groups had written down some questions on some paper to ask the artists.

The students asked Willie what his favourite part about art was and he said “Uncertainty”.

When our group got into his studio, he showed us some of the sculpture work he likes to do. On the other hand, the art he also likes to do is photography.

Willie said his favourite piece he has ever done is a photograph of his sister. Then, Willie let us draw so that we could exchange our drawing for his artworks.

There were many pieces of art on his desk and most people had a favourite. He said that how he decides what his art is worth takes a lot of discussion. So, in conclusion, the students’ day with the artist “Rocked!”

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Dip into the new Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition with “A Treatise on Baths”

by on February 15, 2013 in Arts, Banff, Community connection, Events, General, Visiting Artists, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

Parisian artists Chloé Maillet (right) and Louise Hervé talk about their work, A Treatise on Baths, in the Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition, An Ever Changing Meaning. Photo: Kim Williams, The Banff Centre

Parisian artists Chloé Maillet (right) and Louise Hervé talk about their work, A Treatise on Baths, in the Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition, An Ever Changing Meaning. Photo: Kim Williams, The Banff Centre

The work of contemporary visual artists often requires a familiarity with a dense body of theory or literature in order to make the artwork accessible. Parisian artists Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet, whose work A Treatise on Baths is presented at Walter Phillips Gallery as part of the exhibition An Ever Changing Meaning, have used a novel approach to facing the challenge of accessibility without diminishing the rigour of their work.

During curator François Aubart’s tour at the February 1 exhibition opening and on the following day, two scholarly docents – none other than the artists themselves – emerged serendipitously from the wings to elaborate upon the work for visitors. The performance momentarily inserted the artists and their expositions into the exhibition context, offering the public more background on the work. The presence of these two scholars seemed all the more justified by the particular nature of the piece, a slideshow reconstructing aspects of the social history of natural springs from early Roman civilization to contemporary Banff. Continue Reading →

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dOCUMENTA (13): A Banff Retreat

by on January 7, 2013 in Arts, Banff, General, Ideas, Indigenous Arts, Thematic Residency, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

Still from Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater’s Modest Livelihood (2012), courtesy the artists

Still from Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater’s Modest Livelihood (2012), courtesy the artists

What does it mean to retreat?

The densely valenced theme of “retreat” was explored by the 33 participants and six faculty who as artists, academics, and cultural practitioners gathered at The Banff Centre for the August 2012 Visual Arts residency The Retreat: A Position of dOCUMENTA (13).

The call for participants proposed “To enter or enact a retreat is to draw together, in refuge, seclusion, separation, and sharing – not in order to abandon active life with others, but to consider ourselves, with others.” Through seminars, public talks, ceramics workshops, participant presentations, social gatherings, and hikes, The Retreat offered an interdisciplinary space for critical and creative inquiry and reflection. Organized by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), Kitty Scott, then director of Visual Arts at The Banff Centre and a core agent for dOCUMENTA (13), and Imre Szeman, a Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, it was also the second Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) residency. Continue Reading →

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Banff Summer Arts Festival Report: Week Eight

by on August 17, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Summer Arts Festival, Community connection, Events, Festivals, General, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

 

Sunburn, bug bites and lack of sleep are all souvenirs from from the events of last weekend. Starting with the all-round good time of the Emmylou Harris concert in The Amphitheatre on Thursday night, followed on Saturday with the ultra-informative and skill-providing sessions at Shutterbugs and Butterflies in The Butterfly Garden. Then on to the sold-out opening performance of The Secret Garden in the Margaret Greenham Theatre. Even if it meant waking up at 4:45am to start the hike up Tunnel Mountain for a day full of moving performances called Inverted Mountains I still wanted to take in more!

I’ve attended plenty of events at The Banff Centre while working here this summer,  but knowing I was going to write this festival report allowed me to connect the dots about what the events I attended had in common: Beauty in the Great Outdoors.

On Thursday, I enjoyed the hot, hot sun to melodies performed by  The Barr Brothers, opening for Emmylou Harris. The sound of this three-guys-one-girl band’s harp, banjo, harmonica, and other instruments (including a bow on a bicycle wheel) filled the amphitheatre, getting everyone energized including a young toddler who moved throughout the night to all the music. On Saturday, for the first part of the session Shutterbugs and Butterflies, Calgary-based master gardener Katherine Ylitalo opened my eyes to the stories behind Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald’s installation “Butterfly Garden” outside The Walter Phillips Gallery and the second more instructional part led by Calgary-based photographer Dianne Bos let me focus on capturing its beauty.

We made our own pinhole cameras out of Maxwell House tins and other materials. Some of the attendees spent plenty of time in the garden trying to capture images of the plants, while I preferred using the “photogram” technique Diane Bos taught us to create black and white impressions of plants captured on photo paper.

Saturday evening, I returned to The Banff Centre to attend the opening night performance of The Secret Garden. One line in the performance caught my attention – “There is magic inside everything you see” – this was true of the whole show.

The next morning I saw frosted windshields and  my own breath in the darkness as I walked  toward the Centre. Parks Canada officials and others who were working with The Banff Centre to coordinate Inverted Mountains  led our ascent to the top of Tunnel Mountain to see the sun rise up over the mountain tops. The whole day had performers acting animalistic, almost primitive, jumping and dancing, and hooting through the woods. When the day of performance ended by the Bow River Falls, dancers from Compagnie Coleman Lemieux explained that the performance was their interpretation of how things go from “inanimate to animate”. 

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dOCUMENTA (13) comes to Banff

by on July 25, 2012 in Arts, Banff, Banff Artist in Residence, Banff Summer Arts Festival, Events, Festivals, General, Thematic Residency, Visiting Artists, Visual Arts, Walter Phillips Gallery

Giuseppe Penone: Ideas of Stone, bronze and stone, 2004/2010, photo Roman Mensing, from dOCUMENTA.

Every five years, the contemporary art exhibition dOCUMENTA, located in Kassel, Germany, brings together curators, artists, and art-lovers for a concentrated experience of current thought and creativity in the form of a large exhibition. In 2008, Turin-based writer, art historian, and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was appointed artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) (June 9 to September 16, 2012) . Titled The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted and lasted for a long time, this edition will include over 100 artists from 55 countries who will gather to present artworks as well as other objects and experiments in the fields of art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, photo courtesy dOCUMENTA.

In addition to Kassel, Christov-Bakargiev has developed new sites for the 2012 exhibition, including The Banff Centre. She is working with Kitty Scott, the Centre’s director of Visual Arts who is a Core Agent for dOCUMENTA (13), and Imre Szeman, a Canada Research Chair at the University of Alberta to organize a residency on the subject of retreat in Banff in August 2012 as a section of the exhibition.

dOCUMENTA is widely regarded as one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in the world. It began in 1955 as an opportunity to refocus the position of culture in postwar Germany, establishing itself in Kassel with an overview of significant European painting from the previous 40 years. It quickly grew into a beacon of current thought in contemporary art, exhibiting minimalist and conceptual work, and eventually representing art from a vast geographic and stylistic range.

Christov-Bakargiev was a guest at a 2011 Visual Arts residency, On the Commons, and she immediately saw the potential for The Banff Centre, with its long history as a setting for creative retreat, to play a significant role in dOCUMENTA. Having begun creating a program for this thirteenth imprint of the exhibition as a gathering of artists working in many disciplines, she saw the Centre as a valuable place that had already established itself in multiple creative disciplines.

Kitty Scott talks about the August residency with excitement that rightly identifies the importance of allying The Banff Centre with this monumental international contemporary art exhibition. “The Banff Centre can be a profound space for the creation of new knowledge, be it in the form of art and/or ideas.” she says. “It will be a place for artists and scholars from all over the world to reflect on what it means to retreat in the current condition.” She continues, “dOCUMENTA questions exhibition-making. It represents a hyper-curiosity about the world, and creates an urge to connect art-making to every other discipline.”

The Retreat residency will bring together 30 participants from multiple disciplines, with faculty including Italian media theorist and activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Cornell University-based literature professor and translator Bruno Bosteels, French philosopher Catherine Malabou, French artist Pierre Huyghe, and Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás. The sessions, which will run during the dOCUMENTA exhibition in early August, will be part of The Banff Centre’s collaboration with the University of Alberta for Banff Research in Culture (BRiC), an annual residency program for scholars in cultural disciplines.

The Retreat promises to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for artists and scholars to participate, in real time, in an exhibition of international significance, with the mandate to truly test the benefits of creative retreat, and allow breakthroughs in artistic, intellectual and personal achievement. 

The Retreat is supported by The Banff Centre, the Canada Council for the Arts, dOCUMENTA (13), The Kahanoff Foundation, and the University of Alberta

 

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