SEP 7, 2012 – SEP 22, 2012
Common Sense bids a farewell to summer with Shady Gardens, a new exhibition of abstract and figurative constructed metal sculptures by the artists of the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop.
Shady Gardens presents new work, freshly picked from the studio, by each of the resident NESW sculptors. Some of these sculptures have been honed over months or years, and might now be considered finished pieces, while others may yet be works in progress process.
Mark Bellows, Andrew French, Ryan McCourt, Stephen Pardy, and Rob Willms are the award-winning resident artists of the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop. While Bellows and McCourt are both Edmonton born, French, Pardy, and Willms emigrated here from England, Newfoundland, and British Columbia, respectively. All make sculpture in the shared NESW.
As the respected Canadian art expert Terry Fenton writes:
“This does not amount to their charting a common course. If anything, the shared studio has confirmed them in separate directions: the hothouse atmosphere appears to have stimulated both invention and individuality.”
Shady Gardens provides an opportunity for both the art-interested public and the Workshop artists themselves to get a clear and focused view of these individual works: to judge them on their own merits; in the context of the other sculptures present; and ultimately, among the broader local and global realm of historical and contemporary art and visually-based aesthetic experience in general.
Despite the relative cultural infertility of our isolated frontier city, and the notoriously stultifying incompetence of the entrenched leaders of Edmonton’s public visual arts establishment, the uncompromising artists of the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop continue, like potent weeds, to stubbornly blossom here in the shadows.
Common Sense opens Shady Gardens with a public reception on Friday, September 7, from 7 – 11 PM. Admission is free, and the artists of the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop will be in attendance.
After the opening evening, the exhibition is only viewable by appointment or by chance, until September 22, 2012.
Common Sense 