Southern Alberta Art Gallery hosting three new exhibitions

By Lethbridge Herald on July 7, 2023.

Herald photo by Al Beeber Ontario artist Nathan Eugene Carson is in Lethbridge for the first time with his travelling exhibit called 'Cut from the same cloth' which opens at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery today.

Al Beeber – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – abeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

For Nathan Eugene Carson, art is his identity.

The 44-year-old contemporary artist who works in Hamilton, Ont. comes from a family of artists and first picked up a pencil when he was four.

“A pencil was one of the first instruments I picked up, said Carson Friday during an interview at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

“I constantly work daily, it’s fun for me, versus a job. I like to play in my studio all the time.”

In Lethbridge for the first time, Carson is staging his first major solo exhibition – Cut from the same cloth – at SAAG, a touring exhibition initiated, organized and circulated by Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery.

That exhibition and two others opens today at SAAG with receptions from 7 until 9 p.m.

Carson’s exhibition consists of four different bodies of work.

A synopsis from SAAG says the exhibit “presents several interrelated series of paintings and mixed-media works on paper. Known for figurative explorations of hybrid creatures, animals, and human figures — both fictional and historical — Carson’s subjects emerge from richly pigmented surfaces, and shed light on narratives that weave together themes of Black identity and history, personal memories, and charged symbolism.”

Carson prefers to let audiences interpret the meaning of works for themselves. While some art fans want to know what an artist’s intent was, “I like to leave it open,” said Carson at the gallery Friday morning.

“I feel really honoured and privileged to be out here in Lethbridge and for it to be showing in this community,” he said of the exhibition.

Carson said the minute he got off the plane he liked the city better than Calgary or Edmonton.

“It just seems like there’s so much more space, I really like the architecture, everybody’s been super lovely from the minute I walked out the airport,” Carson said.

When visitors step into the lower gallery, they will see the four different bodies of work which he considers different phases of his earlier career.

They include a black and white series of children, a more colourful series, collage work and then paintings and drawings.

“I often like to leave it open to interpretation and not feed feed people. I like them to take away what they do because I often find the event hearing feedback, critique, criticism, I really get excited at what people interpret the work as,” added Carson.

The exhibit is a huge honour for the artist, he said.

“It’s my first time having an exhibition at this scale within public institutions,” he said.

He’s worked with some wonderful curators over the last several years because each has a different vision and knows what works best for their communities, Carson said.

“I say I’m more like a universal being versus like I identify a certain way because that’s just what I feel comfortable with,” added Carson.

“I’m like the artist identity. I just like to create. It could be completely different and flipped next year. The wonderful thing about the Earth and the globe that we live in nowadays we can be multicultural. We can check so many boxes and which I really do feel with Adam’s (

Whitford) curation, the show does do that.”

“It just happened to fall that the first curator I had picked this work – I wasn’t like I have to show this or it has to be this type of work, it was just what they chose. I’ve been working in my studio for 40 years so I have lots of different work on lots of different identities.”

Carson and Shannon Norberg, the co-director of Calgary gallery Norberg Hall, will engage this afternoon from 2 until 3 p.m. in a talk at SAAG. That talk and the opening reception are free for members while general admission applies to non-members

Whitford said he hopes visitors will find something they identify with, something unique, or something they haven’t seen before when they visit SAAG for the new exhibitions.

Whitford said SAAG is the only place Carson’s exhibit will be seen in western Canada.

Ryland Fortie’s exhibit called Epoch Gnaw in the upper gallery may “provoke people to think about materials in different ways and what it says about contemporary life,” said Hadwin.

Fortie is an artist based in Victoria, B.C. whose “paintings, sculptures, and installation works exist in a new biomechanical mythology. Referencing science fiction, Fortie’s objects seem distantly abstracted from any original purpose, as if they were part of an archeology of a future dark age. Fortie’s first major solo exhibition, Epoch Gnaw, looks to natural systems like tafoni rock formations to think about a hybridized mythology of science, technology, and natural forces. Select artworks in this exhibition were created by Fortie in April 2023 through the Gallery’s artist-in-residence program hosted at the Gushul Studio in Blairmore,” says a SAAG synopsis.

This is his first major gallery, museum solo show, said Whitford. 

The other exhibit opening is called Witch’s Fingers by Calgary artist Sean Jena Taal, who works primarily in exacting graphite drawings of cave interiors.

The artist “presents a new series of rocky clay and resin sculptures as they form into body parts of hands, fingers, and legs. Created to imitate the limestone depositions of flowstone, stalactites and stalagmites, these half-formed bodies suppose the cave as its own living body, with skins of regenerative rock and fingers that drip and dangle,” says SAAG.

Whitford says he’s always looking for artists on the rise “or artists who are doing really interesting things. And I like to also show artists at all different stages of their careers, whether it’s a senior artist who is producing a new, different body of work or a young artist on the come-up who is making something really interesting, too.

“In this series of three exhibitions, we do skew a little bit toward the younger, not emerging, but artists who are really starting to shine.”

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