Artist Exhibits
Mutual Cores, Arcana Shanks
Mutual Cores is a sculptural performance and installation artwork that reflects upon ideas of labour, femininity, time, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth. Audience members are invited to watch and are welcomed to engage by touching, imprinting, and marking pieces of clay as presented to them by the artist.
Hands Holding, Andrew Thorne
Hands Holding is a large-scale percussive instrument constructed from various metals, wood and paper.
There is joy in making music together. The artist asks that festival goers grab a drum mallet and give this piece a whack. Each hand is unique and resonates in a slightly different tone from one another. This work is about discovery and collaboration.
Humanity, Bushra Yousaf
Humanity is a captivating and thought-provoking project that encompasses a series of contemporary portrait paintings. Each artwork within this collection is distinguished by its landscape size, providing a visually immersive experience for the viewer.
The Break, Devin Chambers & David Clark
Sir Winston Churchill Square
The Break is an interactive mobile app that uses audio and imagery to present a short fictional narrative about a man on a bench. This project asks viewers to navigate through fragments of memories situated in Churchill square. This project is best experienced with earphones and includes subtitles.
Digital Abstractions, Giuseppe Albi
The desire to capture the movement of colour and light led me into making videos. I use an assortment of objects and materials, some handmade, to produce these works. The videos can be viewed on a variety of digital display devices, offering the viewer unique interface possibilities, such as looping the video, pausing individual frames, and varying the playback speed.
One Big Happy,
Jo Anna Lange
This exhibit is a sampling of a body of work that has been ongoing for the past 23 years. Colourful, cartoonish, and let’s face it, kind of weird—a lot like the artist. Though the figures are all pretty much the same, it is the text that really gives the viewer pause and acts as a touchstone to their own personal memories.
CANOPY sponsored by Stantec, Jonathan Monfries
CANOPY represents an innovative approach to providing amenity for the public realm. Tree canopies typically provide natural beauty, filtered sunlight, and an area to relax. In dense, concrete environments that experience extreme heat as the climate changes, CANOPY provides shelter for the public to sit and appreciate art.
How to Vanish, Kaida and Keith Kobylka
How to Vanish is an intergenerational and interfamilial exhibition that contrasts Keith Kobylka's original newspaper illustrations for the Edmonton Journal in the 1980s and 1990s with Kaida Kobylka's artistic interpretations of themes as seen through the lens of an AI generator.
MASKIHKÎY OF METAMORPHOSIS, KAYLA BELLEROSE (BB ISKWEW)
Maskihkîy is a word for medicine in the nêhiyawêwin language, meaning a gift that has spiritual healing power. I see butterflies as a symbol for transformative healing amongst the land, and the butterflies' process of metamorphosis is an inspiration speaking to our own ability to heal and transform ourselves as human beings. The land can heal us if we ask her.
Jiā yóu/Just add oil: Portals of Nowhere, Kev Liang
With the synthetic materiality of tarps and acrylic silk screening, Kev reflects on the concept of “oil country” in Alberta as a recontextualized social material from the existential and anthropocentric perspective of being a queer and diasporic 2nd-gen Chinese-Canadian body under the anxieties of colonial displacement and capitalism.
Celebrate the Summer, Celebrate the Skies, Misty Ring
Don Wheaton Family YMCA – 10211 102 Ave NW
Misty Ring began a daily sky study practice in early 2020. With the ensuing pandemic, the project found new depth and scope. This exhibit showcases one large halo panoramic work borne from a year of watching the skies, as well as sketches and studies that supported it. The works celebrate Alberta's awe-inspiring skyline, embodying hope, mental wellness, and the unifying power of the sky amidst the challenges of COVID.
Hello Human!, Moment Discovery
Hello Human! is an immersive tech-art installation that invites participants to create a world of light and sound with the computer as their collaborator. Participants can interact with their 3D avatar, initiate digital chatter, paint with light, compose music and poetry with movement, and play live art games.
The Fifth Medicine, Alex Cheesequay, Aleck (Spider) Flett, Carl Giroux, Tracy (Billie) Kootenay, & William (Ceno) St. Savard with NiGiNan Housing Ventures
Things like food and laughter are often referred to as medicine.
In Cree Culture there are 4 medicines that teachings are given on: Sweetgrass, Sage, Tobacco, and Cedar. They are used in healing and ceremonies and harvesting them promotes connection with land and community.
The Fifth Medicine is about art as medicine, showcasing work by five First Nation artists living in supportive housing with NiGiNan Housing Ventures.
Dance for Joy by Okamabdq, Okama Brook
Dance for Joy by Okamabdq is an empowerment workshop meant to encourage movement and contribute to mental wellbeing. Learn the joy of belly dance through folkloric Egyptian and Moroccan dance fused with West African music and dance, and Afrobeats. Okama will lead two events during the festival — an introductory workshop for all levels to experience this art form, and an opportunity for those interested to be mentored to present a final showpiece.
Reaper, Binder, Reinventor, Paddy Lamb
Light, shadow, and video combine with the slow, unpredictable, independent movement of the mobile sculptures to create a conversation or a dance in slow motion.
Where does this begin: in the mobile sculptures, in the shadows, or with the shapes that appear both real and ephemeral on the unfurled binder panel? They echo back and forth, distorted, like our memories.
We Will ART YOU!, Ryan M. Wispinski
The Westin Edmonton – 10135 100 St NW
Ryan M. Wispinski breathes life into wood and ink through tireless dedication to his craft. Some works in this show have taken years to complete, many “wood chips, knife slips, potato crisps” with the artist returning to them again and again until the material and the subject are truly one.
WAY STATION, Sandra Vida
Employing subdued colour and an abstracted interplay of video images, Calgary artist Sandra Vida explores the legacy of cultural histories in the present. WAY STATION comes to grips with the oppression, violence, and conquest that characterize most ancestral pathways. In response, she performs rituals of healing, transformation, and regeneration.
1967 & I Speak Tree, Sylvain Voyer
Time Machine and the Jacket Potato Man, Thomas Weir
Time Machine and the Jacket Potato Man was produced through a multi-step process combining drawing, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. Through the mixing of these mediums and the layering of these various forms of printmaking, ranging from cyanotypes, relief printing, and digital printing, the created images are abstracted from reality.
my children, my mother, her mother and their mother, and their mother, and their mother, and their mother..... nitawasimisak, nikawiy, okawiya ekwa okawiwawa, okawiyiwa, ekwa okawiyiwa ekwa okawiyiwa....., Tiffany Shaw
This work is a knitted series about my family which I am calling grief work. I started making this work shortly after my mother passed in 2020 as a way to physically work through my grief. Titled my children, my mother, her mother and their mother, and their mother, and their mother, and their mother..... nitawasimisak, nikawiy, okawiya ekwa okawiwawa, okawiyiwa, ekwa okawiyiwa ekwa okawiyiwa..... This work is about the generations in my family, from those who came before me, to those who will be after, and the trauma, love, and connection that passes with each generation. This work encourages you to sit upon it to rest and relax. Though it might be noisy and a bit awkward to find a resting spot upon it, my hope is that it will ultimately support and comfort you.
Sigils of Sovereignty, Veronika Marks
1. Find your Intention
2. Create a sigil inspired by your intent on paper (there are no rules)
3. Hold your paper in your hand, giving energy to your sigil
4. Place your creation in the sacred container
5. An off-site ritual performed with your sigils will be uploaded on August 1 on Vimeo
PROTECTION–RESTRICTION, Zarafshan
PROTECTION–RESTRICTION, through reproducing a natural protective system (seed pods) and mimicking political boundaries and human-made protective devices (Covid19 face shields), explores the relationship between protection and restriction or control. The ink drawings are from the seed pods collected in several places outside and inside Canada, including Alberta.