Southern Alberta Art Gallery opens three new exhibits
#Lethbridge; #Alberta; #TheSouthernAlbertaArtGallery; #SwedishAndAlbertaArtists
Lethbridge/Canadian-Media: The Southern Alberta Art Gallery would display three new exhibitions found in three different areas of the gallery until February 6 showcasing the works of one Swedish and two southern Alberta artists, media reports said.
Image credit: www.saag.ca
Under the Vast Sky by Swedish artist Britta Marakatt-Labba would be displayed in the main gallery, Body Longing by Mandy Espezel is located in the upper gallery space, and There Were Nothing But Pedigrees All Around Us by Luke Johnson is located in the library.
Britta Marakatt-Labba, Avverkning/Deforestation (detail), textile, 2020. Courtesy of North Norwegian Art Museum, Tromsø.
Britta Marakatt-Labba is a Swedish North Sápmi, the Indigenous peoples of Sweden and Norway. Her exhibition represents the biggest retrospective of the most comprehensive collection of her work to date.
Her works touch on different themes like Sápmi mythology, cosmology, global warming and climate issues, everyday scenes of Sápmi people and cultures and traditions as well as more contemporary issues, said Adam Whitford, interim curator for Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge Herald News reports said.
Body Longing by Mandy Espezel, a Lethbridge-based artist and University of Lethbridge professor who completes painting installations, appeals to the value of lived experience and the body as a field of sense and emotion.
Image credit: www.saag.ca
“In conceiving the exhibition with Mandy, she is very interested in creating a whole painting in the gallery space, not just paintings on canvas that are hung on the wall,” said Whitford, Lethbridge Herald News reports said.
Whitford added she has drawn paintings that come outside of the canvas paintings and interact with the Carnegie library space that is the upper gallery
In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the historic Carnegie library building on January 23, 2022, artist Luke Johnson re-examined SAAG’s publication history, from 1979 to 2012 experimenting with tangential image research among its holdings and found mentions of their titles, or those same arrangements of words, in publications decades older. A series of postcards feature There Were Nothing But Pedigrees All Around Us.
Image credit: www.saag.ca
“These images are presented as postcards that people can take away from the exhibition, as sort of a reflection on the weird things that you find in libraries that maybe you also take with you,” said Whitford, Lethbridge Herald News reports said.
Represented as an investigative game for visitors, SAAG’s publication history invites visitors to encounter forgotten books to trace each image back to the original book and exhibition which provoked its discovery.