“The News from Here: 2013 Alberta Biennial”

Governor General Award- winning critic and Calgary-based independent curator Nancy Tousley delivered “The News From Here: 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art” to the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton this spring. This is the eighth version of the Alberta Biennial, which began in 1996. Since 1998, it has been directed by AGA’s Director/Chief Curator Catherine Crowston. An exhibition of Alberta artists selected by Alberta curators (Richard Rhodes has been the only exception to date), the Biennial’s purpose has always been to raise the profile of contemporary art provincially and nationally—to cultivate a critical dialogue about art among artists from far-flung communities, to develop a more adventuresome audience and to frame a snapshot of the province’s contemporary art history. Arguably, the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to the Biennial has contributed to its status as the provincial institution for contemporary art, this title sealed by a name change in 2005, prior to the launch of architect Randall Stout’s new building in 2010 and ongoing program partnerships with the National Gallery of Canada.

Although there seems to be a commitment to maintaining a strong regional identity for the Biennial, Tousley writes in her catalogue essay that this exhibition starts with an examination of the idea of “post-regionalism, in order to point to a new frontier of geographical context, whose reach moves beyond traditional notions of regionalism.” Since the late ’50s and ’60s, Canadian regionalism in art has been superseded by post-modern relativism and almost made redundant by contemporary global art trends. Regionalist ideas of the centre and the periphery or even colonial power plays between the East and the West seem to be increasingly less relevant to a global, cosmopolitan art world. Yet, counter- intuitively, globalism’s relocalization as evidenced by the Berlin Biennale, the Québec Triennial or even the itinerant Manifesta, to name a few, encouraged direct critical reflection about the place in which the art is made and shown, and in the process perhaps reoriented global issues relative to local ideas and art histories. As international biennial battles between Western and non-Western art histories suggest, economic, conceptual and historical directions in art are always locally bound to some degree. In “The News From Here,” local or regional issues are understood to have global resonance—consider the local oil industry vis-à-vis climate change, or First Nations issues in relation to human rights and land claims. Here, art from a region, while informed by the international scene, locates the particular values of a place.

Put simply, some ideas resound more loudly in some places than others, and this attention to the specifics of place, as seen in Alberta’s art, is both what makes the regional focus of the “Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art” unique and also what became the crux of Tousley’s research into post-regionalist ideas about place. Over the course of 18 months, she reviewed 164 applications, conducted 62 studio visits and selected 48 new works by 35 artists (including three collaborating couples). As familiar as she is with the art of Alberta, Tousley discovered new artists and a diversity of work that, given the expansive nature of the project, was challenging to frame under any premise, however overarching. Consequently, a robust collection of new works spanning almost every media—including, for the first time, a stand-alone independent film program with fabulous shorts by Trevor Anderson and the Oscar-nominated animators, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby—layer sub-themes that loosely frame the idea of place.

Perhaps predictably, the Alberta landscape returns to haunt many of the works. But in the animations, projections and photographs by Tilby and Forbis, Elisabeth Belliveau, Noel Bégin and Kristopher Karklin respectively, it is an interior, psychological and even melancholic landscape grounded in the subject as much as the land. Often the place remains undefined or has a feeling of incompleteness; it is a sketch of an identity in formation. Or, it is endless, sublime and romantic, as in Jason de Haan and Miruna Dragan’s large, panning video projection, The Wood and Wave Each Other Know, made in collaboration with de Haan’s childhood friend Daniel Bosch, who works as a wildfire lookout in Northern Alberta. From this vantage point he turned the octagonal tower into a resonating chamber for a cello that he made and taught himself to play while surveying the treetops.

The politics of place resonate in Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton’s socially engaged performance sculpture, Hunter, Gatherer, Purveyor, which foregrounds economic and social difference by making tea out of plants plucked from Edmonton neighbourhoods. Laura St. Pierre’s Urban Vernacular photographs imagine urban architectures out of industrial detritus, Sherri Chaba’s sled domicile prophesizes a post-petroleum world, and Bruno Canadien draws on Plains and Dene visual traditions as an act of resistance to environmental and political exploitation, especially the impact of the oil industry on First Nations land claims.

Technology mediates our understanding of place in Noise, a subtle indigo weaving by Mackenzie Kelly-Frère that charts lightening patterns. Robyn Moody’s mesmerizing Wave Interference poetically destabilizes Modernism’s belief in technology and rational order as slits of fluorescent light emanate from a carpet of oscillating tubes driven by the dissonant drone of an organ. Even more otherworldly is Pamela Norrish’s Outfit for the Afterlife, a meticulously glass-beaded t-shirt and jeans with zippers, rivets, frays and pockets, a young woman’s death suit that shimmers, and embodies the labours and loves of one’s life.

Although these contemporary artworks undoubtedly resonate outside a regional context, “The News From Here” offers an opportunity to reassess the unique potential for regional biennials to situate the specifics of a place within a global context more amply than international biennials, which may lack regional focus or connection to local communities. ❚

“The News From Here: 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, from January 26 to May 5, 2013.

Diana Sherlock is a Calgary independent curator, writer and educator.