The Southern Alberta Art Gallery opens three new exhibits this week, with an added twist if patrons  want to err on the side of caution in a post Covid world.
“I’m doing a virtual tour on Instagram,” said SAAG public engagement and event co-ordinator Courtney Faulkner, noting she will be touring all three new exhibitions “Figure Like Hearse,” by Anne Low, Sarah Ferguson’s “Penumbra” and Angeline Simon’s “ A Phantom Speaks.”

The tour will be live on Instagram on Dec. 5 from 2-3 p.m. and will be posted on SAAG’s Facebook page as well as on the SAAG website.

“ We usually like to gather in person for the opening, but we aren’t doing that this year,” she continued, noting the SAAG is still open to the public during regular hours.
 Anne Low’s work explores in between states, exploring form, storage and transportation.

“Many of the works will travel packed inside another, where the container for the artworks is also hand-made while carefully considered as an equivalent form, stuffed with hay and handwoven fabric salvage. In this way, there is no separation from the skilled handcrafting by bodies from the structures which carry, support, and unveil an artwork in readiness for its intended public life. The physical structures which connect and protect are conditional and have an equivalent set of conditions in the creation of their form, from design to production, for the supported interior body of work to be able to live and perform,” according to the SAAG website.

Anne Low has created “ a series of commemorative new works which anticipate the various in-between states that a work inhabits: coming into form, storage, transportation, rest.”
 Low incorporates her research into the methodologies of functional practices including woodworking, paper making and weaving.

 

Calgary based sculptor Svea Ferguson’s “Penumbra” conveys a feeling  of gentleness inspired by penumbra, which is defined as “in the wake of an eclipse, where light is blocked by the passage of material, exists the penumbra: the partial shadow of that obscured light around a given form. As philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle articulated in her last passages, penumbra exalts a sense of gentleness,” according to the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Her sculptures incorporate industrial and flooring to examine the “relationship  between synthetic, everyday selves and our physical selves.”
 They SAAG describes them as “entrancing because of her use of scale in relation to our bodies.”

Lethbridge based multi-disciplinary artist Angeline Simon’s “Phantom Speaks” explores the phantoms of displaced family histories reflected in photographs. She draws from 200 photographs  of her Chinese-Malaysian and German family members from the 19402 -’70s her family’s photographic archives to explore “lateral connections in time and geography.”

She has acquired, arranged, described and preserved her photographs, but also digitally manipulates, cuts, collages and  merging them into new works including removing  digital information from them and replacing  them with their surroundings through Photoshop.
The exhibitions run  from Dec. 5- Feb. 14.
The SAAG is open from 10 a.m.- 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. on Sundays and noon to 7 p.m. on Thursdays. They are closed  Monday and Tuesdays.