Common Sense is now accepting submissions of exhibition proposals from emerging, mid-career, and established artists.
Email a link (or links) to at least ten (10) online images of your related work, a CV and short bio, a brief statement of your general artistic intentions/philosophy, and a description of your proposed exhibition to info@commonsensegallery.com.
Successful applicants will be contacted by Common Sense to immediately schedule their exhibition for 2012.
This fall at Common Sense, the NESW presents an Open Studio Exhibition. New works and works in progress are available to be seen, by appointment, in the Common Sense gallery and the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop studios. For more information, or to make an appointment to view the show, call 780-482-2685.
Figure/Ground – An exhibition of paintings by St. Albert artist Samantha Williams, and public reception with artist in attendance.
Reception: 7 – 11 pm, Friday, July 8, 2011.
Show runs until July 31, 2011, by appointment or by chance.
Samantha Williams – 780-974-0303 or samanthawilliams@live.ca www.samanthawilliams.viewbook.com
Starting Saturday July 8, 2011, at 7:00 pm, Common Sense presents Figure/Ground – An exhibition of new paintings by Samantha Williams.
Samantha Williams work focuses on the human figure and the natural landscape. These two genres of paintings have historically been separated, but her paintings challenge history and reflect a congruency and similarity between the two styles. The unexpected solitude of the human figure in her paintings and the engulfing natural elements, breaks the borders of simply a figure within the landscape, and becomes a figure broken into the landscape. Her work has evolved to explore the relations between imagination and reality in a natural environment.
The process begins with an idea of a place, real or imaginary, and the placement of a figure into the natural landscape. Often sculptural models are referenced. The figure is then broken and distorted to become a part of the landscape. The work proceeds through a series of sketches to a full-sized drawing, which is transferred to canvas. Her technique for the actual paintings involves building up areas of color through the application of many thin layers of transparent paint to achieve vibrant color effects.
This set of work truly highlights the link between the landscape and the figure. These natural compositions reflect much study on the anatomy of the human body and the landscape that penetrates it.
SOLILOQUY: new sculpture
Rob Willms @ Common Sense Gallery
10546-115 Street, Edmonton, AB
all evening: Saturday, March 12
by appointment until April 30
“Soliloquy” is presented as a quiet aside to all the hawkers’ clamour for your vested attention. It is, at least in part, a vibrant whisper asserting that art be taken at face value. Keen, hard work has built into these sculptures my particular experience of things, though what each piece might have to say I’ll leave for you to discern. It takes two to monologue. — Rob Willms
“The artist, writer, composer, choreographer, director, performer invites the beholder to accept the judgment-decisions he has accepted for himself. He asks that these be intuited by others as positively, with as much satisfaction, as he himself has originally intuited them. He counts on the beholder’s, auditor’s, reader’s taste as he counts on his own…. …That is, letting esthetic intuition alone decide everything.” — Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics.
Starting Saturday November 6, 2010, at 1:00 to 4:00 pm, Common Sense presents ‘Of Mysteries’ – An exhibition of photography by Elaine Steinke. “In ‘Of Mysteries’ I continue to explore, discover, create and build on the series of images from my prior solo show ‘Earth, Wind, Water, Fire’.
"Plume", Elaine Steinke
My medium is photography, but the materials that my images are made from are metal, paint, rust, and the touch of nature and her elements, and of man’s activities and tools. These are found materials, not created or set up by me for the purpose of capturing an image.
The materials have experienced weathering, growth, disintegration, movement, burning, scraping, human alteration, freezing, crushing. Photography, at a given point in time, captures and reveals in the image, what has been wrought. And as it is my photography, the images are strongly influenced by my love of nature, landscape, and the portrayal of change and time. For me, the images reveal and evoke landscapes, environments and worlds, inhabitants and lives, hidden and now discovered, but perhaps beyond our knowing, and times, not yet or long ago experienced, images ‘Of Mysteries’.
I am very pleased to share my images with you and to present ‘Of Mysteries’”
- Elaine Steinke
Starting Friday September 10, 2010, at 7:00 pm, Common Sense presents Fact and Fancy – An exhibition of narrative paintings by Jessica Plattner. Jessica Plattner is an Oregon artist and educator whose narrative paintings reflect her love of art history and her interest in all kinds of stories: literary, cultural, and personal. Her work has been exhibited in solo, group, and juried shows in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Italy. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Southwestern Oregon Community College and the Grande Ronde Hospital Regional Medical Center, and were recently featured in the High Desert Journal.
Plattner has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship to Mexico, a Vermont Studio Center Artist’s Grant, a Skowhegan Fellowship at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a University Fellowship at Tyler School of Art, and several Faculty Scholar awards from Eastern Oregon University. She was one of ten national finalists for the 2008 Miami University Young Painters Competition for the William and Dorothy Yeck Award. Jessica is currently Associate Professor of Art at Eastern Oregon University and a board member of the Union County Art and Culture Center.
Leda and the Swan (The Taxidermist), Jessica Plattner oil on canvas, 2009, 36" x 60"
Jessica Plattner’s Statement:
My paintings reflect my love of art history and my interest in all kinds of stories: literary, cultural, and personal. I’m particularly interested in where these stories overlap and contradict one another. How does our individual experience reflect and distort society’s archetypes? In my work, I merge narratives from classical mythology or the bible with the personal stories or dreams of real people who model for me. Some works focus more heavily on the literary narrative, while others focus entirely on the life story of the model. I want the viewer to connect with the characters I depict, and to question the influence of society’s narratives on the roles we all play in life. My creative process involves extensive preparation for each piece, including conversations and interviews with models, research into literary or cultural sources, and study of relevant art-historical references.
Rather than illustrating a narrative, I look for complex relationships between the real life of the model and the idealized life of the story. As each model’s experience is multifaceted and varied, each painting becomes more intricate throughout its development with layered visual and conceptual elements. The structure of each composition is informed by art history’s broad array of pictorial and painterly languages, from Italian Renaissance to German Expressionism to Mexican Social Realism.
Fact and Fancy – An exhibition of narrative paintings by Jessica Plattner, opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, September 10, 2010, and the exhibition runs until October 8, 2010. Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.
Starting Saturday June 19, 2010, Common Sense presents Sights To See: Selections from the Cassady McCourt Collection, an exhibition of landscape prints, drawings, painting, photography, and sculpture, owned by Edmonton artists Nola Cassady and Ryan McCourt.
Sights to See features a diverse selection of abstract and representational explorations of landscape by well-known local, Canadian, and international artists, including Gwen Bailey, Nola Cassady, Terry Fenton, Jodie Harpe-Lesperance, Kawase Hasui, Shiro Kasamatsu, Tsuchiya Koitsu, Ryan McCourt,David ShkolnyandRob Willms. These artworks span generations and continents, from 1930s Japan to Canada in the 21st century. Each work selected, in addition to being artistically outstanding, serves also as a personal landmark in the private lives of their makers and their owners.
Sights To See: Selections from the Cassady McCourt Collection opens with a public reception at 1 – 4 pm on Saturday, June 19, 2010, and the exhibition runs until July 19.
Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.
Starting April 2, 2010, Common Sense presents the world premiere of ‘Getwiste Staal’, The Dutch Connection’, an exhibition of seven recent sculptures by award winning sculptor Mark Bellows.
Bellows is known in Edmonton for a number of public art projects, including “Twisted Triptych”; the large, brightly-coloured sculptures that currently grace the exterior of the Shaw Conference Centre on Jasper Avenue and 97th street.
Bellows’ focus is “to create energy – let the metal do the talking” by transforming clean-cut bands of steel into twisted colourfully-painted ribbons. ‘Getwiste Staal’ showcases the continued evolution of Mark Bellows’ recent mono- and polychrome torqued steel works, in forms scaled for intimate interior spaces.
Kick Stand Kid, Mark Bellows, 2010, painted mild steel.
‘Getwiste Staal’, The Dutch Connection’ opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, April 2, 2010, with the artist in attendance, and runs until May 7. Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.
Artist Biography
Mark Bellows lives and works in Edmonton and holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Alberta (1999). Bellows is a recipient of three project grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA). His artwork is also in the AFA Collection, as well as in other private and corporate collections. When not sculpting, Mark Bellows works as an exhibit technician at Edmonton’s Royal Alberta Museum.
Starting January 15, Common Sense presents Wood Forms: Sculptures by César Alvarez. A recent graduate of the University of Alberta’s acclaimed sculpture MFA program, Alvarez has caught the eye of critics both at home and abroad with his recent work.
Veteran New York art critic Piri Halasz called “Queen’s Beddings”, one of Alvarez’s latest works, the “most exciting new sculpture” she had seen on her recent Edmonton survey:
“Made of stained, waxed, & exquisitely pale wood, its surface was so sensuous that it made me want to caress it. The shape was also exciting: something of a table with what seemed a mostly flat top, but with all manner of startling new things going on below…. Born in Chile, he migrated to Canada at the age of 24, taught himself carpentry and passed the provincial licensing exams to become a journeyman carpenter and cabinet maker. Later, he turned to art, and enrolled in [Professor Peter] Hide’s program at the University of Alberta, but “Queen’s Beddings” clearly demonstrates the importance of his earlier experience in wood-working. Alvarez, too, is one of [the Edmonton Contemporary Artist Society’s] newer members, and the work he is showing… has no equal in New York.”
Wood Forms: Sculptures by César Alvarez opens with a public reception at 7:00 pm on Friday, January 15, 2010, with the artist in attendance, and runs until February 28.
Admission to Common Sense is always free, by appointment or by chance.
Common Sense is now accepting submissions of exhibition proposals from emerging, mid-career, and established artists.
