Eye and the City Eye and the City

Eye and the City
One of humanity’s signature achievements, ‘the city’ is a multifaceted creation, presenting the observer with a host of complex
and contradictory faces. For some it is a place of wonder: a scene
of excitement, vitality, and boundless possibilities. Others, however,
hold a very different view. For them ‘the city’ is a ‘concrete jungle’: a
wasteland characterized by urban sprawl, traffic congestion, grime
and crime. Still other people’s opinions lie somewhere in between
these two extremes. While they may recoil from the ‘unpleasant’
aspects of city-life they are also drawn to it, appreciating the
opportunities and distractions ‘the city’ has to offer.
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program
Travelling Exhibition
The Art Gallery of Alberta is pleased to present this travelling exhibition to
venues throughout Alberta. Currently the Art Gallery of Alberta serves over
60 venues in approximately 35 communities. Exhibitions on tour from the
Art Gallery of Alberta easily adapt to space requirements of smaller venues:
schools, libraries, museums, health care centres and other community
facilities. The exhibitions are organized in such a manner as to make
unpacking, packing, hanging and shipping as easy as possible. Along with
the exhibition, each venue receives an Educational Interpretive Guide. These
materials enable teachers to use the exhibition within the school curriculum.
The intricate nature of the urban landscape has made it a fascinating
theme for visual artists for centuries. Prior to the 17th century
images of ‘the city’ usually formed a background for religious or
historical narratives. Beginning in the late 16th century, however,
the city as an independent subject in visual art became a legitimate
concern of genre paintings. Since then visual artists have portrayed
cities as records of mankind’s achievements, or lack thereof, in urban
planning and architecture; as settings for and reflections of political,
social and economic narratives; or as absorbing aesthetic constructs.
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Collection is the primary source of works
featured in the travelling exhibitions. Other sources for exhibitions may
include community partners, archives, private collections and loans from
artists. Each year we welcome new venues to enrich their community art
through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program.
The exhibition Eye and the City examines the contradictory views of
the city and various reasons for representing it as expressed by
five contemporary Albertan artists. Whether considering actual or
implied narratives or focusing on strictly formal matters, the artists
in this exhibition traverse the streets and alleys of Alberta’s main
cities, presenting their perceptions of the familiar and drawing
attention to what is often overlooked. United in their wish to arrest
the fleeting quality of our experiences, these artists invite viewers to
recognize the special experiences and complex beauty to be found all
around us.
The Artists:
Russell Bingham
Gordon Harper
David Janzen
The exhibition Eye and the City features art works by Russell Bingham,
Gordon Harper, David Janzen, Paul Murasko and Verna Vogel.
The exhibition Eye and the City was curated by Shane Golby and organized by the Art
Gallery of Alberta for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program.
The AFA Travelling Exhibition program is supported by the Alberta Foundation for the
Arts.
FRONT COVER IMAGES:
Top left image: Paul Murasko, In Royal Trust, 2002, Selenium toned
photograph, Collection of the artist
Top right image: Gordon Harper, The Walk to Joshua’s House, McKernan
(detail), 2014, Oil on wood panel, Collection of the artist
Bottom image: David Janzen, Outage, 1999, Alkyd and oil on panel
(with steel), Collection of the artist
Our Thanks
Paul Murasko
Verna Vogel
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts
and to the many individuals, organizations and communities who
contribute to the success of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Travelling Exhibition Program each year.
Contact
Shane Golby, Manager/Curator
AFA Travelling Exhibition Program
Region 2
Art Gallery of Alberta/CSF
10550-107 Street
Edmonton, AB T5H 2Y6
T: 780.428.3830
F: 780.421.0479
[email protected]
The Alberta Foundation for the Arts
Travelling Exhibition Program
Eye and the City
All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound
Russell Bingham
Afternoon Light, Reflected, 2012
Digital photograph
Courtesy of the artist
Edmonton artist Russell Bingham suspects that...most viewers will be struck by the
ordinariness of my subject matter, the everyday banality of these views. For the artist,
however, it is through encountering the banal that one can discover beauty.
Bingham’s photographic style derives from the modernist art movement which
began in the 20th century. By the early 1900s both painters and photographers
had begun to exchange pictorialist charm for a more sharply focused view bringing
elements of cubist abstraction, stark formality, geometry and metaphysical
concerns to work. Photographic artists, working towards a consciously aesthetic
end, attempted from WWI to the early 1970s to invest their works with
timelessness: to transcend any ‘sense of place’ and to concentrate attention on
formal issues of line, shape, tone and texture. This was the establishment of
photography based first on how things looked, their shape and their form, then
on their meaning both real and metaphoric. Modernist photographs came to
characterized by sharply defined ‘straight’ or un-manipulated images rather than
the soft-focus ‘romantic’ images of the nineteenth century. As expressed by the
famous American photographic artist Edward Weston in 1923;
(The camera) should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance
and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh...I
feel definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through realism.
Through his ‘straight’ images Bingham hopes to reveal the power of photography
to isolate and transform everyday visual experience. By drawing attention to these
objects and sights he hopes to bring them to life and wishes viewers to look at
the world around them and recognize there are special experiences to be found
in the things we overlook and don’t think of as special. In turn, his photographic
work has caused the artist to pay more attention to the visual world around him
and the beauties in it. As expressed by Bingham, his work has
..honed my awareness of and delight in the beauty of the banal. ...there’s so much
variety and lots of beautiful things to see in a city. A city is a manufactured nature
or a new ‘natural world’ with lots to discover.
Verna Vogel
Just turn your head a little, 2013
Mixed media on canvas
Collection of the artist
David Janzen
Lamp Standards I, 2000
Graphite on paper
Collection of the artist
Edmonton artist Paul Murasko has stated that he does not ... want to
be the judging eye... but rather seeks ... to be the pointing finger. In other
words, his aim as an artist is to draw viewers’ attention to the world
around them: to the fleeting instants that pass in the blink of an eye and
to aspects of the city that are often overlooked. This aim is shared, to
greater or lesser degrees, by all the artists whose works make up the
exhibition Eye and the City.
Artist David Janzen needs a city to live in and in his art work he keeps
coming back to human habitation and the settlement of an area in one
form or another. In Janzen’s paintings and drawings presented in the
exhibition Eye and the City, however, the view he presents of the city is not
what one would usually expect to see. Rather than present the hustle and
bustle of roadways and traffic or crowds of people, Janzen points his finger
at objects that most people do not look at twice.
For Calgary artist Verna Vogel, the city is like a ‘sculpture’. According to Vogel,
if the city is looked at from only one vantage point one only gets a limited
understanding of it whereas, if one looks at it from multiple angles as one
does with sculpture, one gets to really know a place and develop a deeper kind
of understanding of it. As a city dweller Vogel has, until recently, always lived
in the downtown area and always above ground, never on the ground floor.
Having access to views from ‘high places’, either from her own home or from
the roofs of the buildings she lived in, she has enjoyed the perception of either
gazing down upon the world below her, directly at it, or upwards to the empty
sky. As expressed in an artist statement by Vogel:
For Janzen the streetlights and security cameras he portrays are synecdoches
of contemporary living. These objects signify or are metaphors for something
else, representing a whole world of communication or things we depend upon
but do not really think about. By isolating these aspects of urban living Janzen
hopes to open our thoughts to the multiple and complicated associations that
can be considered when actually noticing these objects and how all things are
ultimately connected.
This co-existence with her environment has found its way into Vogel’s art
where a patchwork of perspectives - buildings both high and low and directly in
view and telephone lines and light standards - jostle for attention in a colourful
construction on the canvases. Through her vibrant constructions and such
perceptions Vogel hopes
The objects Janzen portrays also speak to both the benefits of living in the
city and the prices to be paid for doing so. In speaking of the city light pole
drawings, for example, Janzen notes that these objects can be considered
odious, blocking out the light of the stars. At the same time, however, they
are absolutely essential as their light allows us to navigate the city streets
at night. Concerning the security camera works, the artist notes that these
instruments have become ubiquitous in the urban environment yet we have
stopped noticing them. By isolating them in his paintings he asks the viewer
to really consider how this presence makes us feel, the functions of these
objects, and what these objects might mean for society. For Janzen this
dichotomy of threat and benefit - this double-edged sword of living in the
city - is fascinating and stimulates his art practice.
...to raise questions. My work is my own reaction to and exploration of my
surroundings. I hope that it will resonate with other people; perhaps who find
themselves in similar environments, or perhaps who have little or no direct experience
with an environment like the one I find myself in....Perhaps my work may spark a
sense of curiosity about the places where people live.
According to David Janzen, the objects he renders could be considered standins for human figures. Rather than showing actual people, however, he feels
his work is more powerful by suggesting human activity and narratives rather
than actually showing them. Such a presentation thus opens the work for
viewers to interpret and create narratives for themselves.
The view from my 14th floor flat inspires in me a kind of 3-dimensional feeling
of floating among the buildings; they are not towering above me nor seen from a
distance, but rather we exist together somewhere between earth and sky.

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