Upstairs in Hub is the mall, the residences, and connections to Business, Tory, the Humanities Center and the Fine Arts Building. Thousands of people use the building on a daily basis, as a continuation of their home and learning communities; they have become intimately familiar with the space. However underneath Hub is a series of artist’s studios in, which are created some of the more viable and intriguing work done on this campus. This literal underground provides a ready metaphor for the figurative underground that Edmonton forces its artists into.

The lack of visibility can be explained by a number of factors, the government has cut university funding for the arts, the University under prioritizes art in relation to science and technology, the minute size of the faculty and even the common view that the only art being created in Edmonton are like the steel sculpture that is housed between FAB and the law building or the goopy, overly gestural and reactionary abstract expressionism done by people like Graham Peacock.

Even if these studios did not exist in HUB, they would be hard to get to, the studio space is a private one and admittance is limited often to curators, fellow artists and sometimes critics or dealers. The work on the walls is mostly incomplete, research material is scattered about and the couches are third generation cast-off. But if we show these artists in the spaces that they inhabit, then perhaps there would be a greater understanding of the role that the arts have in this place.

To achieve the goals of visibility and representation this feature is intended to show the work of five artists, shown to be working in and outside the traditions of Edmonton. The five depicted here are not the only artists working there, but are a representative and diverse sample.


Colin Barney.

After living all over eastern Canada, including Montreal and Nova Scotia, Colin Barney decided to settle down and work in Edmonton. His work is filled with that sort of restless energy, managing to combine images of cows, ostriches, hand washing, and plastic surgery into an ambiguous central narrative surrounding ideas of redemption and rebirth. In his words, " I work on ideas that are common to all religions; a ritual cleansing, into a different person, a different soul." Outside of a series of center concepts, the works maintain a common aesethic, they are hard worked with many layers of encaustic making a canvas whose surfaces are pockmarked and gnarled, they look like they have been struggled with
He describes the appearance of his work and all of art making as a struggle, claiming "art is always struggling, the lightening strike of inspiration is pretty rare."
That hard work and struggle makes the pieces difficult to look at, their familiar representations no longer comfort but isolate. He might paint a cow but it’s an esstentalist cow, and not in that peaceful Hindu way, and he has painted an Ostrich, but its an ostrich that carries history on its back. But that doesn’t mean that he thinks that the work cannot be understood, there is a striving to "be relevant to public concerns, speaking to people in some way, you have to give people an entry point." That mediating between private practice and public consciousness seems new here; even caring about putting an entry point into the work has not been a well-known art practice in Edmonton.

Carolyn Campbell

Carolyn Campbell has lived here all her life, doing her undegrad work here, working for the Business administration, getting married and having a kid here. Her desire to go back to school was a desire to reengage with Edmonton as a place to make art, but that desire was not fully formed until she had a set of identical twins. Describing that experience, she combines it with her desire to make art that " keeps relating to each other, in a sense of symmetry, balance, equal attention and evenness, I started creating this work as a body that was a balanced member."
This balance also connects to her use of art historical themes, caging drawing technique from such masters as Holbien and Manet, then conflating that with self portraits or colour field painting from the 1960s. She describes this practice as a "desire to see different eras in art history that work in tandem", but also the way she paints continues this twinning. She paints, and the draws or takes photographs and then draws them, no one medium work without the inclusion of the other. She describes this intention as "there is a sensitivity to painting in the way I draw, it is really a way for them to work together."
Her giving birth to twins, and then working on art that doubles in on itself, in its history and medium, and a concentration on the body as site of historical depiction, all have a subtle tint of feminism. The autobiographical nature of her work upends the feminist maxim that the personal is political, in Campbell’s work the personal is beautiful.


Julian Forrest

Julian Forrest came very recently to Edmonton from Sackville, a city ten times smaller and has moved away from the landscapes that made him prominent down east. It seems a little ironic, since Alberta would have rewarded the landscapes that he does so well and might be made nervous of his new work. He describes this move as more then geographical though "I wanted to sink into another zone, I wanted to switch gears, not only where I was but what I was painting. I wanted to shake things up, and after you have been working in the in the same place, you get a kind of muscle memory in which you are derivative of yourself."
He is now painting 10 foot by 6 foot canvases deriving from the imagery of advertising, but including things that those images only hint at. He has put a naked man in the midst of one of them, a women laying prostate in another. He repaints a Versace ad so it’s 6 times the size of it, making a women’s exterior genitalia unavoidable, and disguising the breasts in a piece of clothing that resemble a nuns habit.
These paintings would not be shocking in other places; outsize nudes in overtly sexual poses would be a played out act of machismo in other places. But the sheer love that this man has for paint, and the subtle blocking and sensuousness of the colours have been retained from those landscapes and avoid the cliches that could have occurred.

Kateria ________

If Forrest is moving to using advertising images in art, Kateria Vedda has gone in the opposite direction, saying "I am moving away from using advertising images in art, because it has a lot of social and political baggage", and her work has become more personal, discussing non verbal language and the role of the body in presenting identity. Her charcoal drawings are human scaled, not too small and not too large and are imposing because of their stark black and white. She expains her use of colour, saying "if I do use colour I try to stick to the primaries, in a way I feel it gives me a greater sense of objectivity, colour is emotion, so colour can get in the way of reading the piece"
The sources of these drawings are a series of preparatory photographs, which can be seen in the sheer intensity of the work, telling us that "I work from photos, I find taking a photo and manipulating it through drawing can have a greater impact," While the photographs may seem like the origins, and not works in themselves, one cannot exist without the other. She expands on this use, saying "both the photos I take and the images I find, I can crop until I can find a good angle—I like dealing with images that are suspenseful or uncertain especial in retain to the relationships."
That cropping also occurs in the photographs, and it results in images with out heads or with odd emphasis on stomachs, or arms. Emigrating from Poland at the age of 7, she had to learn how bodies communicate before she learnt the language. Her concentration on flesh away from the face is a concentration on the ambiguities of language. , She explains this: "that comes from when I was a little girl and came from Poland, I didn’t have the words to work with and I had to pay attention to their bodies, so that started me off in the focusing on what their bodies say, on how people moved, on their tone of voice as opposed to the words they used." The silence of these pictures allows an audience to interpret the work as a series of ambiguous symbols, and avoids the didacticism that mars much realism. Edmonton used to avoid feeling, the abstract work that was committed to canvas was all about feeling in place of and not through the artist. Here is work that cannot come from anyone but Kateria Vedda and through that manages a universalism.

Duncan Johnson

Duncan Johnson makes the kind of art most people hate and would prefer that critics did not use the same 6 words to describe his paintings and installations, in fact it’s almost impossible to get any words at all out of him. He even denies that the audience is relevant, and wants "this work to post questions about architecture, space and colour" as opposed to making any statements. He begins the interview hemming and hawing over the usual questions, and getting useful answers is like pulling teeth. He wants the work to speak for itself, and eventually after asking if he can be candid, he talks to me about the work we are looking at, a series of 12 plywood boards liberally slthred with black paint. "I get a real kick out of the paint dripping off these 2 x 4s, there is something really beautiful in that for me. That is the chief thing one gets from Johnson’s work, is beauty. He cares deeply about the right shade of yellow to paint a pegboard, or ahow to make one half of a particle board sqaure matte black and the other half glossy. Sometimes this is infused with a sense of whimsy, like when he leans a board against a wall, the top half of the board painted in the exact colours as a rectangle on the wall. The work is deeply modern, a continuation of the traditions of modernism that Edmonton is historically enraptured with, but it moves past all those old people and into something new, a new kind of earnestness.

These five are wholly different, their works concerned with theory and practice in different ways—if they lived in Vancouver or Toronto there would be a series of student associations, artists run centers, collectives, found spaces and galleries to show their work. Here there is a limited amount of resources, a lack of interest or care in contemporary art practice. This is a town who has had two new large engineering buildings in the space of five years, and who also have only two full time instructors teaching painting. The small community that exists here to support art, are those who make art themselves or care about art or write art or conceptualize it. There is so little outside interest in the work that is created, and more importantly there seems to be an opedial struggle between those who used to make art and those who now make art.

I hope that this work tells new stories about young people who practice in contemporary art practice and make their efforts a bit more known.