Exhibits open at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on July 9, 2022.

Herald photo by Al Beeber Co-curator Ania Slexzkowska and artist Peter von Tiesenhausen set up his main gallery exhibition SAAG. The exhibit opened Friday. The artist is speaking at SAAG this afternoon.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Peter von Tiesenhausen recalls former Southern Alberta Art Gallery curator Joan Stebbins saying in the mid 1990s he wasn’t ready to exhibit in the renowned Lethbridge gallery.
Four years later, when Stebbins said she felt he was ready she told Tiesenhausen that in his life he would only ever get one exhibition at the gallery.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and now the Grande Prairie area artist has just opened his second SAAG exhibit called “Plasma.”
The exhibition in the main gallery opened Friday and runs until Sept. 4 along with one called “Soft Smoke” by Azadeh Elmizadeh and Ella Gonzalez being staged in the upper gallery. It is curated by Adam Whitford as is a third exhibit called “Unhomely” by Kellen Spencer which runs in the gallery library while a fourth called “Project Spaces” is running at Centre Village Mall.
Stebbins, who in 2007 was named a member Order of Canada and in 2009 received an honourary doctor of fine arts from the U of L, is a person who von Tiesenhausen considers to be a long-time good friend.
And now he’s proven his friend wrong after getting an invitation about six months ago to return to SAAG for “Plasma,” which is co-curated why Ania Sleczkowska and Whitford.
von Tiesenhausen will be at SAAG today at 2 p.m. to discuss his art and the exhibition’s development as part of the gallery’s Articulations Art Lecture series.
An opening reception was staged Friday night at SAAG for all the exhibits.
Until the SAAG opportunity materialized, von Tiesenhausen basically considered himself retired. An exhibit at a private gallery in Edmonton opened and closed in one day after pandemic restrictions were introduced in March 2020.
“I said maybe I’m retired.” But after sitting for two-and-a-half years, the artist felt he wasn’t ready to be retired, he said Thursday.
His exhibition focuses on carbonization.
The resident of Demmitt, Alberta told media he has a big scrap yard and tree stand at his home and he “just started to play” with materials at hand and used his cheap cellphone to capture video in the process.
For the artist, plasma “became a way to think about the exchanges between matter, energy and life,” says a SAAG statement about his work.
The artist said all the stuff he planned to use for the show ended up being discarded in favour of the video the artist shot, he told media.
“I’m trying to do a universal thing 300 metres from my house,” he said.
Von Tiesenhausen recalled Stebbins around 1995 looking at his work and saying “yeah, probably not. Then about four years later she approached me and said I think you’re ready but you only get one show in your life.”
“The place had a really good reputation worldwide” and he thought an exhibition there was a big break.
“Joan trusted me completely,” he recalled.
“She did say only once in your life so when I was approached about five months ago to do another exhibition, I said I don’t think I’m allowed,” but the gallery said they’d make an exception, he recalled.
“I’ve been at it for 32 years now full-time, he said.
Curator Whitford said the “Plasma” tile comes from the artist’s efforts to find “ways to connect our daily lives, the cosmic forces, time, natural processes and “Plasma” became a way to think about all those things together in terms of art-making and the things that are larger than us.
“What is really important to this exhibition is the process of carbonization, that kind of slow burning of things over time to make charcoal versions of themselves, that there’s only carbon left.”
Visitors will see such things poplar bark the artist has found or hives of naturally deceased bees that have gone through carbonization.
“That ties into the title ‘Plasma’ because plasma exists in space, it exists in lightning, it’s basically just super-heated matter and plasma also exists in the torches Peter uses on his property. So Peter’s really kind of the quintessential artist. He really refurbishes a lot of materials,” said Whitford.
“Soft Smoke,” the exhibit upstairs, was developed out of a conversation between the artists who shared an empathy for cross-cultural migration, says the gallery.
“They bonded over a common desire to contextualize their paintings through a lens not solely informed by a Eurocentric view of art history. They share a common investigation into the psychic space of belonging that resides in cultural traditions, dreams and architectural residues of lived experience,” says SAAG.
The “Unhomely” exhibit, says SAAG, “begins with the familiar shapes and constructions of residential homes and breaks them into unfamiliar building blocks. HIs (Spencer’s) copperplate etchings reduce the recognizable single-family home to desolate, stark and sometimes impossible constructions of concrete foundations.”

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