Letter from Calgary.

February 1998

Exhibitions by printmakers and First Nations artists filled many galleries last season and continue this winter. Joane Cardinal-Schubert's retrospective at Calgary's Muttart Public Art Gallery, "Two Decades" (Oct 9-Nov 7), was packed with video, installations, a performance, paintings and drawings that blended personal experience with First Nations issues. Cardinal-Schubert's strongest works employ, yet subvert and critique ethnological practices. This diverse and haunting exhibition by a pioneering contemporary Native artist tours Canada in 1998-99.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, whose paintings combine surrealism and West Coast Native imagery to visually wrest the land and its meanings from colonization, has branched into performance art. In An Indian Act: Shooting the Indian Act, the artists literally fired a gun at copies of the Indian Act. The performance took place in the U.K., but documentation was displayed at grunt gallery (Jan 6-30). Also in Vancouver, Faye HeavyShield is creating a spiral of friends' red-dyed clothes as part of her installation "Spiral and Other Parts of the Body" (until March 6) at Artspeak Gallery. "A `Jana' Zhaya/GOT LOST: Traditions/New Visions" (the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Feb 12-Apr 5) is an exhibition of Yukon artists who challenge the boundaries between traditional and contemporary art.

After an apparent hibernation, printmaking is appearing everywhere. Jeannie Thib (Toronto) prints appropriated floral motifs, maps and texts on unconventional materials - blackboard slates, leather gloves, mylar. She combines encyclopedia-like images and museological strategies to examine our attempts to map and control nature and our bodies. Her show is at Lethbridge's Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Mar 14-Apr 26).

Calgary's Glenbow Museum presents "Frontiers, Frontieres, Fonteras: Rene Derouin," a 40-year retrospective of one of Canada's most innovative printmakers. The show (until May 17) not only includes prints but installation, drawings, paintings, relief sculpture and ceramics. Also at the Glenbow (Feb 14-Jul 26) is "Just For the Love of It," 746 recently-donated early 20th-century Canadian prints from the Shirley and Peter Savage collection. Accompanying the western tour of "Edvard Munch's `The Scream' and Popular Culture," at the Vancouver Art Gallery, are Munch's strange, obsessive and experimental symbolist prints from the Vivian and David Campbell Collection (both until April 13).

Other upcoming exhibitions of note: "Flight," a swarm of fingers, tongues and ears cast in beeswax make up Karen Ralph's installation about community and communication at Kelowna's The Alternator Gallery (Feb 5-Mar 8); Curtis Cutshaw is showing "MIRAMAR," recent mixed media abstractions on canvas at Paul Kuhn's, Calgary (Feb 14-Mar 7); and Helene Dyck's "Flashpoint," a multi-media installation and bookwork, is at Ace Art in Winnipeg (Feb 27-Apr 4).

Recent changes: John Tupper is new Director of the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff. After fourteen months as director of Truck (Calgary), Cate Rimmer moves to a new position at Charles H. Scott Gallery (Vancouver). Judy Bower is the new Administrative Coordinator and Jennifer Hambleton the Programme Coordinator at Saskatoon's AKA Artist-Run Centre. And Calgary's New Zones Gallery has moved into a new, purpose-built building (730, 11th Avenue SW) next to Paul Khun's.