New artists on display at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on September 17, 2022.

Herald photo by Al Beeber Exhibit curator Anne Marie St. Jean Aubre looks at works by Canadian contemporary artist Jin-Me Yoon at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Friday. Three new exhibits open at SAAG today.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Three new exhibitions open at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery today and run through Nov. 19. An opening reception was staged Friday where guests had a chance to meet with the artists.

One of the exhibitions is the first retrospective dedicated to the career of renowned contemporary artist Jin-Me Yoon, whose family immigrated to Canada in the mid 1960s.

The exhibit called Elsewhere Other Hauntings was conceived and organized by the Musee d’Art in Joliette, Que. and curated by Anne-Marie St. Jean Aubre, the curator of contemporary art at that institution.

St. Jean Aubre will be conducting an in-person talk and tour today from 2 – 3 p.m.

Elsewhere Other Hauntings is a touring exhibition and SAAG is the last of six stops, the curator said Friday.

Jin-Me Yoon is based in Vancouver and the exhibition covers her career through 2019. The show was first staged in Joliette, the curator said.

The exhibit is staged thematically rather than chronologically, she said.

One of the works she’s best known for hangs just inside. Called Souvenirs of the South, it shows the artist front and centre in various images. They originally existed as postcards that the artist created at the Banff Centre, St. Jean Aubre said.

As her career progressed, her presence in the images became smaller with the landscape taking a more prominent place.

Her art asks the viewers to think about how we understand our presence in relation to the landscape, the curator said. In later images, taken on the B.C. coast, she is seen ever smaller as waves crash along the shoreline.

“The relationship between the landscape and the future changed a lot. In the earliest one, Souvenirs of the South, the figure is very prominent in the landscape so she’s the focus point and she’s asking viewers to think how we understand our presence in that landscape.”

In the B.C. photos “suddenly it’s no longer about her presence as an immigrant in the national landscape and a very prominent Canadian landscape” like the Rocky Mountains, she said.

“Here it’s her against the ocean, looking toward Korea and she’s disappearing in that hole she’s digging. So the way I interpret these images, this gesture of digging a hole (is) changing the landscape but in a way that doesn’t change it forever because the water will wash this out.

“How do we inscribe our presence in the landscape without disturbing it so much?” the curator said of the theme.

The exhibit includes multi-media elements with video displays as well with scenes from her homeland. The artist’s family has a visible presence in her works, said the curator.

The other exhibits include sculptures by Alberta artist Jude Griebel called Next World Emissaries and Futility Index, a series of photographs by Emily Promise Allison.

Next World Emissaries is a series of new sculptures that “builds upon previous work exploring eco-anxiety in fantastic and dystopic tableaux,” says SAAG in a release.

“While these past dioramas processed environmental collapse in miniature environments, elements of these new works are both true to scale and oversized – awarding humanity’s current ‘pests’ a monumental scale. These sculptures explore the concept of ‘new beginnings’, influenced by speculative fiction in historical and contemporary writing, visual art, and popular culture.”

The release says Allison’s photo series “depicts the limitations and possibilities of physical balance. Utilizing an array of household, industrial, constructed, and natural materials, Emily Promise Allison intricately balanced and photographed hanging assemblages. The details of each assemblage were considered with an utmost regard for authenticity, meaning that nothing in the composition was altered in post-production. The resulting artwork is a collaboration between the artist and natural forces, as gravity demands the size, weight, and position of the item to be added next.”

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