top five visual things i saw in calgary:

1) the glenbow collecting vintage neon, including but not limited to a 30 foot tall rocket, with a pink top and red clouds on the bottom
2) geoffery hunter, everybody knows, at paul kuhn. mishmash of textures and colours, swooping lines, hard scrabble backgrounds, delibrate, and well constructed, without being cautious, including elbow room, with its baby shit brown, lipstick red and fuschia loops, some blackened to dimness, some v. v. bright an folkways studies 3, which is mostly a dusty prussian blue, but with rough ochre gamboling around the lower third of the canvas.
3) Jason de Haan, Where the Ocean Meets This Guy, basement,stride gallery. he has spent the last 3o days building a 20 foot sailboat in this tiny room, the scale envolping and unwelcoming, the white and wwhite like the elephant in the room of modernist thot.
4) red eye, film and video from first nations, art gallery of calgary--dont have the list with me, but includes group of seven inches, with its queer peril of pauline subtext, and watching hockey in northern Ontario, which makes public the frustrations of audience, the breakages and noise (visual/auditory) of brakhage.
5) Marie Lanoo, 3 acrylic monochromes, deep almost digital pools of too pure colour, in the dusk/bruise range, humanised by the inadvertent dust.

worst 4:
1) show upstairs at stride oil on canvases of some womens lab (dog), badly painted, with no sense of humour about her work and earnestly self important
2)dean drevers brass knuckles
3)the cowboy prints in the washroom of the round up center
4)subpar early castings of farfard's horses, just look a mess.

jury still out:
janson nagle, whos early polarid transfers were dark, forboding and deeply in love wiht t oronto at the same time, an almost passive agressive discussion of what it meant ot be urban. his tow new ones, both at newzones, are large, v. large (25 feet diptych for one) of people at a baech, all washed out, but slick, they kind of remind me of a heavily rasterized version of testino's beach scenes, or a sirk movie, but not that busy, and oddly formalized.