With a newly-renovated Bighorn Library gallery space now ready, what better way to christen it than with a travelling art exhibit?
Until Aug. 25, Collage & Abstraction, a touring exhibition developed by the Alberta Society of Artists for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program will be installed at the library.
The exhibition is currently circulating throughout southwest/central Alberta and is financially supported by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
“The MD and the library society teamed up with some funding and we’ve put in picture rails in a renovated gallery space,” said librarian Rose Reid. “This will be our first proper art show.”
The most recent show at the library was of Burgess Shale-inspired quilts, “which was quite successful and popular,” said Reid. “It was quite well received.
“In the past, we’d put a hole in the wall for any new piece that came into the library, but with the new rails, we won’t have to do that anymore.”
Collage & Abstraction will feature 30 pieces by artists Lindsay Falk, Emily Geen, Becky McMaster and Viviane Mehr.
Collage and abstraction are two concepts associated with the beginnings of modernism in the visual arts. Both techniques break traditional notions of representation and narrative in art, breaking apart and recombining imagery in new ways.
Collage allows artists to value content and the physical process of making over the final product. External content from photographs, magazines and newspapers can be added, allowing the artist to directly reference and comment on current events, past memories or other cultural references.
The four artists in the exhibition create works using collage and abstraction to address issues of feminism, nostalgia, memory and family. Using found images, family photographs, magazines, postcards, paint, glue, thread and more, they recombine images in ways that make us think about our relationship to visual culture as well as our past, present and future.
