The Art Gallery of St. Albert of St. Albert ends 2024 with a new exhibition that strives to delight and surprise.
Guilded – Gobsmacked features close to 70 city and regional artists from St. Albert’s five arts guilds: the Potters Guild, Painters Guild, Floral Arts Society, Quilters Guild and Paper Arts Guild.
For this treasured biannual exhibition, St. Albert Place Visual Arts Society sets the theme, and a surprising number are nature focused.
“There are a lot of artists who took this opportunity to push their practice or bring spontaneity into their work. Some have added abstract elements or used bright colours with lots of joy and a lot of exploration,” said gallery curator Emily Baker.
One of the most stunning pieces is Diane Gwilliam’s eight-foot towering ceramic pillar titled Birds. The project was started in 2020 and attempts to duplicate the natural world. It is an amalgamation of different tree chunks layered one on top of the other. Diverse birds attracted to different types of trees feed from their favourite chunk of tree or sit on branches.
“Now that she’s retired, she wanted to see how big she could go, and she started to make these stunning pieces which are about her passion and joy. She loves birds and is very intentional where they go. Some feed upsides down the way they do in the wild. She observed how they fly, how they act, how they move,” Baker explained.
On the other hand, Brenda Malkinson contributed The Garden Dances, a mixed media painting with cut-outs from wood blocks that trail off the main body.
“It was inspired by her mother’s garden and she pursued the project just for her. When you look at it, you feel like a child hiding in foliage surrounded by this bright world of flowers.”
Lizette Puffer’s 72-inch-high by 54-inch-wide quilt is dubbed Untitled Masterpiece. Draped on a wall, the work-in-progress is hundreds of hexagon shaped flowers painstakingly hand-stitched together. It’s bright, child-like and no two flowers are alike.
Another showstopper is the Group of 6’s Alberta Skies. Six visual artists each painted a vertical 60-inch-high by 18-inch-wide panel based on their interpretation of Alberta’s skies.
The group captures the sky’s many tones and moods from bright sunny vistas and tranquil evening light to the spectacular Milky way and stormy clouds hovering over prairies.
“Alberta Skies is so familiar. It’s gorgeous and the colours are so lush. This reminds us of the skies we’ve all seen. With this group project, you can do inspirational pieces. These are different voices of different people in common working together,” Baker said.
The gallery’s most poignant painting is Norma Callicott’s When Time Stopped, a layered collage. She created this canvas after her husband passed away to push pain out.
“It’s lush and gorgeous because there’s so many textures. We all experience pain. But the flip side of Gobsmacked is that can be tender. This piece holds a lot of important feelings about things we find hard to talk about. With this piece you can feel with her pain even if you don’t know how to talk about it.”
And Wayne Gorman’s Lest We Forget painting is a tribute to Indigenous Veterans who participated in all of Canada’s seven wars from the time of Empire Loyalists in 1776 to the NATO Afghanistan War of 2001 to 2014.
Guilded – Gobsmacked is on display until January 25, 2025. A reception is on December 7 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. and in-person tours run on Dec. 12 at 6:30 p.m. and on Jan. 15 at noon.