Twenty-Eleven

"Twenty-Eleven"; this year's Bachelor in Fine Arts Honours Graduating Exhibition; will be showing the works of a small yet greatly talented and diverse group of emerging artists. Whose very distinctive styles open up intense discussions around intimate spaces, memory, preservation and notions of life and death. I am excited to curate this exhibition and to assist in documenting the journey of four artists whose surgeon through art school at the University of Calgary, have accumulated and converged into this tangible and focused show.

The works chosen for this exhibition stand as representations of these individual journeys. As much as their experiences are personal they share very similar influences having been in the same art classes and received instruction from the same professors; I am interested in highlighting the essence of what they have become together and apart from each other. And this is the major influence of the curatorial process of this show.

When in the gallery space, the exhibition attempts to surround the viewer with an atmosphere that creates interactions between expressions in art and life and the fluid boundary thereof. From suggestions of a layered investigation of the complex relationships between constructed identities and contained environments as seen in the works of Whitney Horne; to the creation of spaces within spaces with a suggestive focus on the inherent individualism of perception in the works of Kristine Zingeler. The notions of existence and the ever-changing, precious, and fragile nature of memory, tradition and identity within Katherine Cregan's works and the interest in subtle spirituality of everyday life intertwined with an exploration into the development and recollection of memories in the works of Joseph Brocke. This selected body aims at housing a deep and satisfying reality of what we are, what we have become and what is important to us. The very representation of the next generation of art in Alberta lies potentially in these artists that we see today and in their journey now and beyond now.

Chika Udok [curator]

Joseph Brocke - Memory #1
dry pigment, gesso, acrylic medium on panel, 107 cm x 122 cm