SNAP at 40, Part I: Wrapped in Double Obscurity
oral history of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists (SNAP), compiled from artist statements, reviews, articles from SNAP's newsletter, and interviews with members of the Edmonton printmaking community
copies of the publication are available here; the text on these pages contains additional photos and text cut from the print publication due to space and budget constraints
Introduction • Part I • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4 • Part 5 • Part 6 • Part 7 • Part 8
oral history of the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists (SNAP), compiled from artist statements, reviews, articles from SNAP's newsletter, and interviews with members of the Edmonton printmaking community
copies of the publication are available here; the text on these pages contains additional photos and text cut from the print publication due to space and budget constraints
Introduction • Part I • Part 2 • Part 3 • Part 4 • Part 5 • Part 6 • Part 7 • Part 8
Above: SNAP founding members Marc Siegner and Robin Smith-Peck, c. 1985
Bente Roed: You want the whole story?
Walter Jule: …from the beginning?
Marna Bunnell: It’s been quite a journey—you’re finding that out from everyone…
Dee Freadrich: Seems like just a little while ago we were trying to get it all going…
Loren Spector: I can’t believe it’s been that long. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, but sometimes I think it’s a miracle.
Bernd Hildebrandt: SNAP was always sort of an enigma to me; it was Robin and Marc.
Sydney Lancaster: What were your motivations in making this organization happen? I know it was born of need—it was practical on one level—but I think there was a lot more involved than that?
Robin Smith-Peck: Well I think that the need—the obvious need of students graduating in printmaking and not having a place to print outside of the institution—was really a need expressed by Walter [Jule]. Marc and I had only been in Edmonton for about a year, and we both came from places where there were multiple different places that we would print. [1]
Marc Siegner: When I first got here, this felt like a cultural wasteland. Coming from Toronto, you can imagine, in the early ‘80s, this would have been quite the shock.
Liz Ingram: The city was very different—you know, it was 350,000 people. It was very architecturally, to me, ugly, to look at as a visual. It seemed like a place with no history, no culture. I thought, where did I come to?
April Dean: When I came back to Edmonton after living in Halifax, I had this moment of realization… I think I must of been on the bus… that this is the ugliest fucking city. It’s ugly here! It’s ugly! It’s just so ugly! And because I grew up here, it didn’t occur to me until I spent a good enough time away and could see that it was ugly… it was just ugly. Not to say there are not beautiful pockets, but those are beautiful because of the trees, not the buildings.
Liz Ingram: I honestly thought I’m here for maximum two years then I’m out of here.
Walter Jule: I started with the department [of Art and Design at the University of Alberta] in 1971. I had immigrated to Vancouver in 1970 and when this job came up, I actually didn’t know where Edmonton was. My new Canadian friends kidded me saying things like, “It’s above the tree line; you shouldn’t go.” [2]
Marlene MacCallum: When I moved from Montreal to Edmonton, that was an enormous shock. Because I had grown up in a certain kind of landscape, and a certain kind of political environment, a certain kind of culture. I had grown up in a province where culture was of value. And that was not the impression I received when I moved to Edmonton, in terms of the broader social valuing of cultural production. You didn’t have to apologize for being an artist in Montreal.
Charles Mandel: For years, mutterings from the East have drifted West about the lack of culture in Edmonton; indeed, only two years ago, an art critic and writer expressed the opinion in a phone call that the city is considered a “black hole” in the nation’s art fabric. [3]
Clement Greenberg: Montreal and Toronto […] took it for granted that prairie art was nothing but provincial——and were all the readier to do so because they themselves felt in a provincial relation, art-wise, to Paris and New York. For this reason I saw prairie art in Canada as being wrapped in a double obscurity. [4]
Marytka Kosinski: This is a place which does not have memory of the past and where people live suspended between the huge open sky and the vast landscape of earth. The loneliness of this environment fosters intensified consciousness of inner self. At the same time, this loneliness provokes man to define everything that exists beyond the personal, intimate and internal worlds. People are encouraged to build bridges of communication, to establish human relations and to create their social and cultural environment. [5]
Bente Roed: You want the whole story?
Walter Jule: …from the beginning?
Marna Bunnell: It’s been quite a journey—you’re finding that out from everyone…
Dee Freadrich: Seems like just a little while ago we were trying to get it all going…
Loren Spector: I can’t believe it’s been that long. Sometimes it makes perfect sense, but sometimes I think it’s a miracle.
Bernd Hildebrandt: SNAP was always sort of an enigma to me; it was Robin and Marc.
Sydney Lancaster: What were your motivations in making this organization happen? I know it was born of need—it was practical on one level—but I think there was a lot more involved than that?
Robin Smith-Peck: Well I think that the need—the obvious need of students graduating in printmaking and not having a place to print outside of the institution—was really a need expressed by Walter [Jule]. Marc and I had only been in Edmonton for about a year, and we both came from places where there were multiple different places that we would print. [1]
Marc Siegner: When I first got here, this felt like a cultural wasteland. Coming from Toronto, you can imagine, in the early ‘80s, this would have been quite the shock.
Liz Ingram: The city was very different—you know, it was 350,000 people. It was very architecturally, to me, ugly, to look at as a visual. It seemed like a place with no history, no culture. I thought, where did I come to?
April Dean: When I came back to Edmonton after living in Halifax, I had this moment of realization… I think I must of been on the bus… that this is the ugliest fucking city. It’s ugly here! It’s ugly! It’s just so ugly! And because I grew up here, it didn’t occur to me until I spent a good enough time away and could see that it was ugly… it was just ugly. Not to say there are not beautiful pockets, but those are beautiful because of the trees, not the buildings.
Liz Ingram: I honestly thought I’m here for maximum two years then I’m out of here.
Walter Jule: I started with the department [of Art and Design at the University of Alberta] in 1971. I had immigrated to Vancouver in 1970 and when this job came up, I actually didn’t know where Edmonton was. My new Canadian friends kidded me saying things like, “It’s above the tree line; you shouldn’t go.” [2]
Marlene MacCallum: When I moved from Montreal to Edmonton, that was an enormous shock. Because I had grown up in a certain kind of landscape, and a certain kind of political environment, a certain kind of culture. I had grown up in a province where culture was of value. And that was not the impression I received when I moved to Edmonton, in terms of the broader social valuing of cultural production. You didn’t have to apologize for being an artist in Montreal.
Charles Mandel: For years, mutterings from the East have drifted West about the lack of culture in Edmonton; indeed, only two years ago, an art critic and writer expressed the opinion in a phone call that the city is considered a “black hole” in the nation’s art fabric. [3]
Clement Greenberg: Montreal and Toronto […] took it for granted that prairie art was nothing but provincial——and were all the readier to do so because they themselves felt in a provincial relation, art-wise, to Paris and New York. For this reason I saw prairie art in Canada as being wrapped in a double obscurity. [4]
Marytka Kosinski: This is a place which does not have memory of the past and where people live suspended between the huge open sky and the vast landscape of earth. The loneliness of this environment fosters intensified consciousness of inner self. At the same time, this loneliness provokes man to define everything that exists beyond the personal, intimate and internal worlds. People are encouraged to build bridges of communication, to establish human relations and to create their social and cultural environment. [5]
Above: 1. Left to right: Jane Ash Poitras, Marna Bunnell, and Liz Ingram looking over one of Bunnell’s prints at the UofA printmaking studio, c. 1981, photo by Jane Edwards; 2. Left to right: Robin Smith-Peck, Anne McMillan, and Briar Craig working in the UofA printmaking studio, c. 1985, scanned from the cover of “From Edmonton to Tokyo and Back,” exhibition brochure, courtesy Walter Jule; 3. John Freeman, MVA show installation view featuring Hollywould Western, Flowers 3D, and Cloud Flower Perspective Distortion, 1972; Freeman and Lois Whitford were the first two masters students to complete degrees in printmaking (and in Freeman’s case, printmaking and painting) at the University of Alberta, Canada’s oldest studio-based masters program; 4. Lois Whitford, MVA show installation view, SUB Gallery, University of Alberta, 1972
Bente Roed: The printmaking division at the University of Alberta is largely responsible for the success of Edmonton’s print community. Not only has it provided necessary facilities, but staff members have worked to establish their presence in the broader community, fostering an environment which encourages artists to remain after completion of studies and attracts print artist who are not necessarily teaching or studying but desire professional and social intercourse with peers. [6]
Charles Mandel: [Lyndal Osborne] recalls teaching in the Butler Hut, as it was then known. Off in an isolated parking lot on campus, the hut’s loading doors didn’t close well. […] Across the parking lot, Jule taught at a facility known as the Athabasca Kitchen. [7]
Walter Jule: Students in Athabasca would play guitars and lutes and sing ‘60s songs, strangely, while we put the acid tray on a hot plate to thaw it out. We’re talking 3:1 nitric.
Lyndal Osborne: I recall coming in and seeing snow had blown in over the litho stones,[…] and the stones got so cold that the chemicals like solvent you put on them froze. [8]
Liz Ingram: In those days the winters here were really cold. You know, sun dogs all the time. Just the feeling that, if you’re in a vehicle and anything happens you’re dead. Because out there? You’d freeze to death in no time.
Jennifer Dickson: It is ironic that the climatically extreme rather bleak environment of Edmonton would draw as a magnet visiting artists of the calibre of Shoichi Ida, Tetsuya Noda, Allen Jones, Malgorzata Zurakowska, Katsunori Hamanishi and Carl Heywood. The enthusiasm of students and staff is such that several distinguished guests have returned a second time. There is an atmosphere of high energy once one sets foot in the printmaking studios, which puts one on one’s mettle. I am reminded of S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris in the 1960s, when one could get intoxicated by the exuberance of the dialogue. [9]
Bente Roed: The printmaking division at the University of Alberta is largely responsible for the success of Edmonton’s print community. Not only has it provided necessary facilities, but staff members have worked to establish their presence in the broader community, fostering an environment which encourages artists to remain after completion of studies and attracts print artist who are not necessarily teaching or studying but desire professional and social intercourse with peers. [6]
Charles Mandel: [Lyndal Osborne] recalls teaching in the Butler Hut, as it was then known. Off in an isolated parking lot on campus, the hut’s loading doors didn’t close well. […] Across the parking lot, Jule taught at a facility known as the Athabasca Kitchen. [7]
Walter Jule: Students in Athabasca would play guitars and lutes and sing ‘60s songs, strangely, while we put the acid tray on a hot plate to thaw it out. We’re talking 3:1 nitric.
Lyndal Osborne: I recall coming in and seeing snow had blown in over the litho stones,[…] and the stones got so cold that the chemicals like solvent you put on them froze. [8]
Liz Ingram: In those days the winters here were really cold. You know, sun dogs all the time. Just the feeling that, if you’re in a vehicle and anything happens you’re dead. Because out there? You’d freeze to death in no time.
Jennifer Dickson: It is ironic that the climatically extreme rather bleak environment of Edmonton would draw as a magnet visiting artists of the calibre of Shoichi Ida, Tetsuya Noda, Allen Jones, Malgorzata Zurakowska, Katsunori Hamanishi and Carl Heywood. The enthusiasm of students and staff is such that several distinguished guests have returned a second time. There is an atmosphere of high energy once one sets foot in the printmaking studios, which puts one on one’s mettle. I am reminded of S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris in the 1960s, when one could get intoxicated by the exuberance of the dialogue. [9]
Above: Roger Silvester, image from The Bodyssey series, silkscreen [?], c. 1969-1972
Bente Roed: Roger Silvester, an Englishman who taught at the university from 1969 to 1982 […] proved to be an important figure in the structuring of the printmaking division. He was instrumental in developing philosophical and pedagogical guidelines, and in the establishment of the graduate program in 1970. [10]
Robin Smith-Peck: He was so supportive of whatever a student wanted to do and then he wanted them to take it farther. That’s where we got people like Mary Ann Moffat building plexiglass boxes and crawling in them to get photographed. So it wasn’t enough to just say ‘I want to do an image of a person held into a box;’ he’d say ‘where’s that image going to come from? How can we build it? How do we make that happen?’
Bente Roed: While not a prolific printmaker, his serigraph series Song of Solomon, which incorporated images and words in a contemporary manner, caused quite a stir when it was exhibited in 1971. [11]
J.E. Simpson: Soft-edged, rather opulent fragments of nude female torsos are draped with entire passages of what is surely one of the most sensuous love poems ever written. […] Full-bodied blues, greys, and purples predominate, with one or two joyous notes of turquoise or rich green. […] The elegant typeface of the text almost caresses the shifting planes of the half-suggested forms. Although the occasional word or phrase registers on the mind, the overall impression is textural, not scriptural. [12]
Roger Silvester: I have been fascinated for some time with the fine balance between the erotic and spiritual in this classic poem, and have, I think, finally found adequate visual imagery with which to create a harmonious balance against the text. Whatever the response, I trust the series will be viewed more as an attempt to illustrate spiritual union by use of interdependent picture and text, rather more than a pictorial representation of physical love. [13]
Alasdair Dunlop: Five prints from a series of 15 entitled The Song of Solomon were impounded by the morality detectives on March 20. […] Roger Silvester, the “perpetrator,” feels that the total set of prints must be seen as a complete, if imperfect, statement with each print dependent on the context given by the series as a whole. […] When this series was shown in the Student’s Union Art Gallery I commented that the interpretation showed considerable insight and delicacy. Having looked again at the prints I see no reason to change my view. [14]
Edmonton Journal: According to the prosecutor’s office, charges were dropped because detectives failed to seize all parts of the exhibit, and the law is firm that material must be considered within context, and separate parts must not be taken out and exhibited as such alone. [15]
Bente Roed: Roger Silvester, an Englishman who taught at the university from 1969 to 1982 […] proved to be an important figure in the structuring of the printmaking division. He was instrumental in developing philosophical and pedagogical guidelines, and in the establishment of the graduate program in 1970. [10]
Robin Smith-Peck: He was so supportive of whatever a student wanted to do and then he wanted them to take it farther. That’s where we got people like Mary Ann Moffat building plexiglass boxes and crawling in them to get photographed. So it wasn’t enough to just say ‘I want to do an image of a person held into a box;’ he’d say ‘where’s that image going to come from? How can we build it? How do we make that happen?’
Bente Roed: While not a prolific printmaker, his serigraph series Song of Solomon, which incorporated images and words in a contemporary manner, caused quite a stir when it was exhibited in 1971. [11]
J.E. Simpson: Soft-edged, rather opulent fragments of nude female torsos are draped with entire passages of what is surely one of the most sensuous love poems ever written. […] Full-bodied blues, greys, and purples predominate, with one or two joyous notes of turquoise or rich green. […] The elegant typeface of the text almost caresses the shifting planes of the half-suggested forms. Although the occasional word or phrase registers on the mind, the overall impression is textural, not scriptural. [12]
Roger Silvester: I have been fascinated for some time with the fine balance between the erotic and spiritual in this classic poem, and have, I think, finally found adequate visual imagery with which to create a harmonious balance against the text. Whatever the response, I trust the series will be viewed more as an attempt to illustrate spiritual union by use of interdependent picture and text, rather more than a pictorial representation of physical love. [13]
Alasdair Dunlop: Five prints from a series of 15 entitled The Song of Solomon were impounded by the morality detectives on March 20. […] Roger Silvester, the “perpetrator,” feels that the total set of prints must be seen as a complete, if imperfect, statement with each print dependent on the context given by the series as a whole. […] When this series was shown in the Student’s Union Art Gallery I commented that the interpretation showed considerable insight and delicacy. Having looked again at the prints I see no reason to change my view. [14]
Edmonton Journal: According to the prosecutor’s office, charges were dropped because detectives failed to seize all parts of the exhibit, and the law is firm that material must be considered within context, and separate parts must not be taken out and exhibited as such alone. [15]
Above: Walter Jule, Filling the Tear in the Cloud, photointaglio, 1989
J.E. Simpson: Silvester and Jule have certain things in common. They are first-rate craftsmen, meticulous in their concern for finish. The subtleties of space and colour matter very much to each of them. [17]
J.A. Forbes: [Walter Jule’s] images themselves are rather ambivalent—combinations of geometric forms and organic shapes which [he] abstracts from photographs of items which interest him. There is enough of the real in some of his photographic fragments to invite the viewer to commit himself as to the identification of the images, but not enough to satisfy him completely. [18]
James Purdie: Jule will never make the perfect fine art print, although he’s already making some of the most nearly perfect prints of their kind to be found in Canada. The reason the Edmonton printmaker has abandoned the dream of perfection is his conception of the ultimate print as an invisible occurrence in the thin air at the middle of a gallery. It would have no visible material support, no stone, canvas or paper to make it accessible to the viewer. [19]
Derek Besant: He arrived on the art scene when the trajectory of art was progressing from interior to exterior, from the influence of the mythopoeic tradition, which sought to move deep within personal experience, and the phenomenological critique, which was attempting to reposition the site of meaning in art to the surface of things. Artists in Canada, as elsewhere, were following these trends, and the influences of Pop, Op, land, body and conceptual art were quickly assimilated into printmaking practice. Against this rapidly shifting conceptual background, printmaking was forced to question its essential character——what particular combination of qualities and functions might set it apart from other art media. [20]
Walter Jule: Different media make different possibilities approachable. Printmaking makes a set, or a quality of possibilities approachable for me that seem to mirror most accurately the kinds of concerns that I have. And there’s a magical quality about printmaking, anyway. I’m really interested in the kind of cyclical situation in printmaking, though, where the image is constructed, and at the beginning stages it’s like a dream, and each step of the process is the reality that you’re dealing with. But you don’t know what the end will be. And then it’s a process of slowly removing those feelings from yourself to the point where they exist in a separate kind of way; a kind of otherness. And then you don’t have anything to do with them anymore so it’s possible to see them like you see a tree when you wake up in the morning, or a rock, or something, and you digest them back inside from different portals maybe. And then that cycle continues when they emerge again. I’ve always felt that the most most powerful kinds of images——the most powerful occurrences——in the world, in the universe, happen——maybe happen——when one dimension is becoming two dimensions, and two dimensions is becoming three and three becoming four. [21]
Agnieszka Matejko: Once our perception of linear time is put to doubt, something very interesting happens: our understanding of cause and effect crumbles like a stack of cards blown by a sudden gust of wind. If there is no linear time then what comes first? Does the wind bend the tree or is the bending tree causing the wind? While this paradigm-shattering perception of time has recently caused controversy in modern physics, Zen masters have spoken about it for centuries. The 13th-century Japanese Zen Master, Dogen, expounded the religio/philosophical treatise that cause and effect are one. The enormous difference between science and meditation is that when questioning of linear time comes through personal experience rather than intellectual speculation, it can irrevocably change a person's life. [22]
Jim Corrigan: From the mid 1960s through the 1970s and 80s, Jule concentrated on mastering lithography, screen printing and embossing, which he combined to create prints of great chromatic subtlety. In the early 1990s, however, he began to explore the possibilities of photo-etching, using the now-familiar images of paper stretched around cut-out cardboard shapes. The figure or animal-like forms often appearing in the centre of the compositions came from sketches of visual hallucinations experienced during long periods of concentrated meditation. Jule may also have been trying to recreate the visual sensation of light reflected in darkness: sunlight bouncing off the black ceramic tiles of temple roofs which he had photographed in Japan. [23]
Robin Smith-Peck: These interests, expressed through the medium of printmaking, have lead to a process of image-making that in itself reveals a poetic commitment to the mysteries revealed through careful investigation of the apparent banality of everyday materials. The images begin and end with a sheet of paper. [24]
Amy Gogarty: Prints are mirror images: doubles, opposites or echoes of origin. They are impressions produced through intimate but hidden contact, alchemy and pressure. Prints are multiples, copies without originals, duplicates without limit. Handmade——yet mediated by machinery and technology——prints bridge the gap between inner and outer, between painting's fetishization of manual processes and technology's love affair with spectral electronic images. Apparently direct and spontaneous, prints are the product of a conceptual imagination and numerous discrete and indirect processes that reconcile opposites into a coherent whole. [25]
Monique Westra: There is a difference between printmakers who create multiples of a single image with fairly predictable outcomes and artists like [Jule] whose prints are the final outcome of a complex process of layering and synthesis, which incorporates many steps, combines different print techniques, and adds an element of chance. This creates strikingly original images that could not be achieved in any other medium. [26]
J.E. Simpson: Silvester and Jule have certain things in common. They are first-rate craftsmen, meticulous in their concern for finish. The subtleties of space and colour matter very much to each of them. [17]
J.A. Forbes: [Walter Jule’s] images themselves are rather ambivalent—combinations of geometric forms and organic shapes which [he] abstracts from photographs of items which interest him. There is enough of the real in some of his photographic fragments to invite the viewer to commit himself as to the identification of the images, but not enough to satisfy him completely. [18]
James Purdie: Jule will never make the perfect fine art print, although he’s already making some of the most nearly perfect prints of their kind to be found in Canada. The reason the Edmonton printmaker has abandoned the dream of perfection is his conception of the ultimate print as an invisible occurrence in the thin air at the middle of a gallery. It would have no visible material support, no stone, canvas or paper to make it accessible to the viewer. [19]
Derek Besant: He arrived on the art scene when the trajectory of art was progressing from interior to exterior, from the influence of the mythopoeic tradition, which sought to move deep within personal experience, and the phenomenological critique, which was attempting to reposition the site of meaning in art to the surface of things. Artists in Canada, as elsewhere, were following these trends, and the influences of Pop, Op, land, body and conceptual art were quickly assimilated into printmaking practice. Against this rapidly shifting conceptual background, printmaking was forced to question its essential character——what particular combination of qualities and functions might set it apart from other art media. [20]
Walter Jule: Different media make different possibilities approachable. Printmaking makes a set, or a quality of possibilities approachable for me that seem to mirror most accurately the kinds of concerns that I have. And there’s a magical quality about printmaking, anyway. I’m really interested in the kind of cyclical situation in printmaking, though, where the image is constructed, and at the beginning stages it’s like a dream, and each step of the process is the reality that you’re dealing with. But you don’t know what the end will be. And then it’s a process of slowly removing those feelings from yourself to the point where they exist in a separate kind of way; a kind of otherness. And then you don’t have anything to do with them anymore so it’s possible to see them like you see a tree when you wake up in the morning, or a rock, or something, and you digest them back inside from different portals maybe. And then that cycle continues when they emerge again. I’ve always felt that the most most powerful kinds of images——the most powerful occurrences——in the world, in the universe, happen——maybe happen——when one dimension is becoming two dimensions, and two dimensions is becoming three and three becoming four. [21]
Agnieszka Matejko: Once our perception of linear time is put to doubt, something very interesting happens: our understanding of cause and effect crumbles like a stack of cards blown by a sudden gust of wind. If there is no linear time then what comes first? Does the wind bend the tree or is the bending tree causing the wind? While this paradigm-shattering perception of time has recently caused controversy in modern physics, Zen masters have spoken about it for centuries. The 13th-century Japanese Zen Master, Dogen, expounded the religio/philosophical treatise that cause and effect are one. The enormous difference between science and meditation is that when questioning of linear time comes through personal experience rather than intellectual speculation, it can irrevocably change a person's life. [22]
Jim Corrigan: From the mid 1960s through the 1970s and 80s, Jule concentrated on mastering lithography, screen printing and embossing, which he combined to create prints of great chromatic subtlety. In the early 1990s, however, he began to explore the possibilities of photo-etching, using the now-familiar images of paper stretched around cut-out cardboard shapes. The figure or animal-like forms often appearing in the centre of the compositions came from sketches of visual hallucinations experienced during long periods of concentrated meditation. Jule may also have been trying to recreate the visual sensation of light reflected in darkness: sunlight bouncing off the black ceramic tiles of temple roofs which he had photographed in Japan. [23]
Robin Smith-Peck: These interests, expressed through the medium of printmaking, have lead to a process of image-making that in itself reveals a poetic commitment to the mysteries revealed through careful investigation of the apparent banality of everyday materials. The images begin and end with a sheet of paper. [24]
Amy Gogarty: Prints are mirror images: doubles, opposites or echoes of origin. They are impressions produced through intimate but hidden contact, alchemy and pressure. Prints are multiples, copies without originals, duplicates without limit. Handmade——yet mediated by machinery and technology——prints bridge the gap between inner and outer, between painting's fetishization of manual processes and technology's love affair with spectral electronic images. Apparently direct and spontaneous, prints are the product of a conceptual imagination and numerous discrete and indirect processes that reconcile opposites into a coherent whole. [25]
Monique Westra: There is a difference between printmakers who create multiples of a single image with fairly predictable outcomes and artists like [Jule] whose prints are the final outcome of a complex process of layering and synthesis, which incorporates many steps, combines different print techniques, and adds an element of chance. This creates strikingly original images that could not be achieved in any other medium. [26]
Above: Lyndal Osbourne, Winter Kill, lithograph, 1991
Jennifer Dickson: The strength of the print division is based on a clear philosophical premise: you cannot teach what you do not practise. Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne are artists at the leading edge of contemporary printmaking. Both are consummate masters of every technical complexity in lithography and serigraphy. Both relegate this aspect to second place as their work rigorously explores ideas, concepts and cultural mythologies. Graduate and undergraduate students are expected to be in command of their metier. Pedagogic emphasis is on content, not cuisine. [27]
Jane Ash Poitras: I met Lyndal and I went ‘wow!’. Because I just so looked up to her, she was my mentor. And she brought me into her home and showed me all of her prints, and a big, sacred, plan-chest. And I looked at them, and she said ‘Jane, would you like one?’ and I went ‘no way!’ And so she signed it for me, and she said ‘for Jane.’ I still have that print, framed, and I took that print with me all the way to New York, when I did my MFA at Columbia, and I hung it on the wall, and I looked at it and I said ‘Lyndal, I’m going to make you proud of me!’ And she is proud of me. But you see, that’s what inspired me, was looking at her work and seeing her spirit and seeing if she can do it, I can do it. [28]
Reg Silvester: If you could bring back specimens from the world of your dreams, boxed and labelled, you would have something similar to the art of printmaker Lyndal Osborne. […] She draws her inspiration from a natural world that is neither pristine nor romantic. It's a world where objects erode, rot, shrivel, decay. It's a world where blood spatters from time to time, where things die and other things live, where light penetrates darkness. [29]
Charles Mandel: Her work contains a dream-like intensity, a benevolent reshaping of natural forms into new varieties. Some appear as tangles of energy as in Manger. That print shows what could be a series of soft folds and brushes of hair unravelling into whipping lines of life. [30]
Liane Faulder: Her studio testifies to the art of scavenging. Shelves are lined with dozens and dozens of bird’s nests, some with bright blue shells from broken Robin’s eggs. There’s a giant Puffball, big as a brain, collected from a local farmer’s field. It’s drying, waiting to be used as material or inspiration. [31]
Lyndal Osborne: I have made drawings and taken photographs of many different objects over the years but the ones selected seem to trigger stronger emotional and physical responses. As the work progresses another type of exploration begins as I discover relationships within the visual vocabulary and a deeper probing into the ideas suggested on a less formal level. One of the great pleasures I respond to is the purely physical and tactile qualities of particular objects. I am fascinated by imagining the evolution any processes which lead to decay, and often, to a new transformation. In the natural world this process may take days, years or centuries, but in my work I want to capture the whole cycle within one frame. [32]
Robin Laurence: She subjects her found materials to instinctive manipulations, “repetitive interventions” which include cutting, clipping, binding, weaving, dyeing, papering, painting and casting. Repetition of both form and activity in her work is essential Osborne says, “to suggest the flow of time which is a significant component of each object’s full nature.” [33]
Lyndal Osborne: I’m very attracted to things as they desiccate and decay [...] It’s more interesting than when they’re all leafed out and flowering. [34]
Robin Laurence: Osborne's mixed-media installation, Nature of Matter, which juxtaposes 30 lithographic prints hanging over wall-mounted racks with five trays of gathered, altered and molded objects, is paradigmatic of the way in which Osborne's installation art has evolved. Originally trained and identified as a printmaker, Osborne has drawn directly onto her lithographic stone from assemblages, sculptures or maquettes she has created out of her collected and altered objects. [35]
Michelle Hardy: The hand is not irrelevant here. Even as she shifted her practice from printmaking to sculptural installation (because it offered more immersive, affective experiences) her assemblages draw on still familiar haptic strategies (think: cooking, gardening, knitting etcetera). Her making is a way of making do, of figuring out, of thinking with and through materials in order to provoke deeper understandings and affective responses. [36]
Natalie Loveless: Osborne’s work is not about interpreting climate change statistics or direct action politics. Those are necessary, and data visualization has its place. But data visualization in its instrumentalized modes has failed to impact and motivate change. […] Instead of more and better facts and figures, Osborne’s work suggests, what is needed is a different mode of inhabitation; a new mode of sensing within this historical moment. [37]
Steven Harris: If art cannot change the world, it can offer another way of thinking that is necessary in order to be able to change the world, and it can do so through the sensuous evidence of that thinking; its appearance in the world in sensible form. [38]
Lyndal Osborne: I do believe the printmaking community, with Walter Jule and Liz Ingram, was a tremendous collaborative team to work with. And even though printmaking was considered a minor art, especially by the sculptors—they called it ‘recipe art’—we managed to do a number of things nationally and internationally by bringing in artists from all around the world. [39]
Garth Rankin: Printmaking had an advantage in that you could take your prints and send them in a tube to Amsterdam or Brazil or wherever for some big print show, spend your twenty dollars and cross your fingers and get acknowledged that way. And there was acknowledgment. Walter Jule, Lyndal Osborne, Marna Bunnell, Darci Mallon, and Liz Ingram, and Margaret May a little earlier than that. And many others—one of the dangers, as politicians will tell you, is you have to be careful when you thank people because you’ll forget someone!
Karen Curry: There were some pretty incredible professors there in my era—Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne—they were very influential to a lot of people. I remember mostly that they were extremely accessible, in terms of sharing their own work, their own excitement about their work, and being very encouraging about following your own path, and putting in the time to really get there. I remember a lot of encouragement.
Walter Jule: My sense looking back is that without knowing it consciously, we were offering ideas of ways of working that were dissimilar from what students were experiencing in painting and sculpture classes, so I think it became interesting as an option for ways of thinking and doing. Lyndal’s from Australia, Roger from England, me from the United States, so there wasn’t the flow of particular ‘ism’s. We all worked very differently from each other. The painting division and the sculpture division drew very heavily on ideological traditions, and I think printmaking was going through this change, and it was open here so we tried everything.
Liz Ingram: Interestingly enough my work became more self-reflective, in some ways more psychological. At York I had done some figurative work and some abstract work, so I was kind of not sure where I was. And here, I think Walter was a huge influence for sure, and Lyndal of course was very influential. The two of them.
Dawn Woolsey: They were very good, all the instructors that we had, but we had a lot conflicting information. At that time super-realism was no longer in vogue—it had been for a short while—and great, sticky, goopy things were popular. We all got hauled off to go to an exhibition at the Art Gallery downtown, and there was a fellow there that had great swaths of greys and browns and little bits of ochre, and a little sort of jiff of colour on one side, a triangular little bit. And they had a long discussion with him about the importance of his having added a horizon line to his work that year. And at that point I thought ‘I’m never going to be an artist,’ because I didn’t get any of that.
Nick Dobson: It was painting and sculpture—they were essentially about form. Technique was something that was completely overlooked, or seemed to be completely overlooked, and the content was not there.
Janet Cardiff: The painting department was really boring. They were into Matisse. And the sculpture department was totally modernist. The only interesting place where you could have ideas was printmaking. [40]
Nick Dobson: In printmaking, if nothing else, there was content in the technique, and I really liked that. Plus, there was the fact that you could bring anything to printmaking.
Elizabeth Beauchamp: Here in Edmonton we are still thought of by the rest of Canada (when we occasionally cross their minds, that is) as a colourfield town that also has a strong community of abstract steel sculptors. […] That the rest of the world had gone through several art movements since the hey-day of New York abstraction and was by 1980 rediscovering the representational image seemed to be of little consequence in Edmonton. The tragedy was that a lot of good artists simply left town. Maybe the annual Visitation and Blessing of the Pictures by doddering, once-eminent American art critics who specialize in New York-style abstraction just got to be more than some could handle. [41]
Blair Brennan: Some local artists, whom I respect very much, have wrestled something meaningful out of formalist abstraction. I will talk to these people about their art any time. In general, however, I will not debate the local modernists because it is like talking to a fundamentalist Christian about evolution. It is of little consequence to me that there were (and remain) a few Edmonton artists who want to be buried in the same coffin as Clement Greenberg. The rivalry between formalist painting and sculpture and an emerging post-modern sensibility mattered little to anyone outside the business even when the debate was current. However, those in “the business,” notably curators, collectors, critics, art writers and other artists often gave Edmonton a miss for this very reason. They knew what they would find in Edmonton in the 1970s and 80s. [42]
Robin Smith-Peck: The only way I could explain it was a kind of fractured animosity between media in Edmonton—which I certainly wasn't familiar with coming from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Marc had not noticed it coming from Toronto. Painters didn't talk to printmakers didn't talk to sculptors, and we felt like it was not healthy to attempt to make art in communities where that becomes the mainstay of discussion. [43]
Garth Rankin: A lot of those artists did have good success, with exhibit records and international shows. And there’s a lot to be said about abstraction and what it can give you visually, and a lot of the knowledge that I got has served me well for my life, but at the time it was restricting. Not for those who participated, but if you were out of that fairly narrow point of view, you were stuck, you know?
Jennifer Dickson: The strength of the print division is based on a clear philosophical premise: you cannot teach what you do not practise. Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne are artists at the leading edge of contemporary printmaking. Both are consummate masters of every technical complexity in lithography and serigraphy. Both relegate this aspect to second place as their work rigorously explores ideas, concepts and cultural mythologies. Graduate and undergraduate students are expected to be in command of their metier. Pedagogic emphasis is on content, not cuisine. [27]
Jane Ash Poitras: I met Lyndal and I went ‘wow!’. Because I just so looked up to her, she was my mentor. And she brought me into her home and showed me all of her prints, and a big, sacred, plan-chest. And I looked at them, and she said ‘Jane, would you like one?’ and I went ‘no way!’ And so she signed it for me, and she said ‘for Jane.’ I still have that print, framed, and I took that print with me all the way to New York, when I did my MFA at Columbia, and I hung it on the wall, and I looked at it and I said ‘Lyndal, I’m going to make you proud of me!’ And she is proud of me. But you see, that’s what inspired me, was looking at her work and seeing her spirit and seeing if she can do it, I can do it. [28]
Reg Silvester: If you could bring back specimens from the world of your dreams, boxed and labelled, you would have something similar to the art of printmaker Lyndal Osborne. […] She draws her inspiration from a natural world that is neither pristine nor romantic. It's a world where objects erode, rot, shrivel, decay. It's a world where blood spatters from time to time, where things die and other things live, where light penetrates darkness. [29]
Charles Mandel: Her work contains a dream-like intensity, a benevolent reshaping of natural forms into new varieties. Some appear as tangles of energy as in Manger. That print shows what could be a series of soft folds and brushes of hair unravelling into whipping lines of life. [30]
Liane Faulder: Her studio testifies to the art of scavenging. Shelves are lined with dozens and dozens of bird’s nests, some with bright blue shells from broken Robin’s eggs. There’s a giant Puffball, big as a brain, collected from a local farmer’s field. It’s drying, waiting to be used as material or inspiration. [31]
Lyndal Osborne: I have made drawings and taken photographs of many different objects over the years but the ones selected seem to trigger stronger emotional and physical responses. As the work progresses another type of exploration begins as I discover relationships within the visual vocabulary and a deeper probing into the ideas suggested on a less formal level. One of the great pleasures I respond to is the purely physical and tactile qualities of particular objects. I am fascinated by imagining the evolution any processes which lead to decay, and often, to a new transformation. In the natural world this process may take days, years or centuries, but in my work I want to capture the whole cycle within one frame. [32]
Robin Laurence: She subjects her found materials to instinctive manipulations, “repetitive interventions” which include cutting, clipping, binding, weaving, dyeing, papering, painting and casting. Repetition of both form and activity in her work is essential Osborne says, “to suggest the flow of time which is a significant component of each object’s full nature.” [33]
Lyndal Osborne: I’m very attracted to things as they desiccate and decay [...] It’s more interesting than when they’re all leafed out and flowering. [34]
Robin Laurence: Osborne's mixed-media installation, Nature of Matter, which juxtaposes 30 lithographic prints hanging over wall-mounted racks with five trays of gathered, altered and molded objects, is paradigmatic of the way in which Osborne's installation art has evolved. Originally trained and identified as a printmaker, Osborne has drawn directly onto her lithographic stone from assemblages, sculptures or maquettes she has created out of her collected and altered objects. [35]
Michelle Hardy: The hand is not irrelevant here. Even as she shifted her practice from printmaking to sculptural installation (because it offered more immersive, affective experiences) her assemblages draw on still familiar haptic strategies (think: cooking, gardening, knitting etcetera). Her making is a way of making do, of figuring out, of thinking with and through materials in order to provoke deeper understandings and affective responses. [36]
Natalie Loveless: Osborne’s work is not about interpreting climate change statistics or direct action politics. Those are necessary, and data visualization has its place. But data visualization in its instrumentalized modes has failed to impact and motivate change. […] Instead of more and better facts and figures, Osborne’s work suggests, what is needed is a different mode of inhabitation; a new mode of sensing within this historical moment. [37]
Steven Harris: If art cannot change the world, it can offer another way of thinking that is necessary in order to be able to change the world, and it can do so through the sensuous evidence of that thinking; its appearance in the world in sensible form. [38]
Lyndal Osborne: I do believe the printmaking community, with Walter Jule and Liz Ingram, was a tremendous collaborative team to work with. And even though printmaking was considered a minor art, especially by the sculptors—they called it ‘recipe art’—we managed to do a number of things nationally and internationally by bringing in artists from all around the world. [39]
Garth Rankin: Printmaking had an advantage in that you could take your prints and send them in a tube to Amsterdam or Brazil or wherever for some big print show, spend your twenty dollars and cross your fingers and get acknowledged that way. And there was acknowledgment. Walter Jule, Lyndal Osborne, Marna Bunnell, Darci Mallon, and Liz Ingram, and Margaret May a little earlier than that. And many others—one of the dangers, as politicians will tell you, is you have to be careful when you thank people because you’ll forget someone!
Karen Curry: There were some pretty incredible professors there in my era—Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne—they were very influential to a lot of people. I remember mostly that they were extremely accessible, in terms of sharing their own work, their own excitement about their work, and being very encouraging about following your own path, and putting in the time to really get there. I remember a lot of encouragement.
Walter Jule: My sense looking back is that without knowing it consciously, we were offering ideas of ways of working that were dissimilar from what students were experiencing in painting and sculpture classes, so I think it became interesting as an option for ways of thinking and doing. Lyndal’s from Australia, Roger from England, me from the United States, so there wasn’t the flow of particular ‘ism’s. We all worked very differently from each other. The painting division and the sculpture division drew very heavily on ideological traditions, and I think printmaking was going through this change, and it was open here so we tried everything.
Liz Ingram: Interestingly enough my work became more self-reflective, in some ways more psychological. At York I had done some figurative work and some abstract work, so I was kind of not sure where I was. And here, I think Walter was a huge influence for sure, and Lyndal of course was very influential. The two of them.
Dawn Woolsey: They were very good, all the instructors that we had, but we had a lot conflicting information. At that time super-realism was no longer in vogue—it had been for a short while—and great, sticky, goopy things were popular. We all got hauled off to go to an exhibition at the Art Gallery downtown, and there was a fellow there that had great swaths of greys and browns and little bits of ochre, and a little sort of jiff of colour on one side, a triangular little bit. And they had a long discussion with him about the importance of his having added a horizon line to his work that year. And at that point I thought ‘I’m never going to be an artist,’ because I didn’t get any of that.
Nick Dobson: It was painting and sculpture—they were essentially about form. Technique was something that was completely overlooked, or seemed to be completely overlooked, and the content was not there.
Janet Cardiff: The painting department was really boring. They were into Matisse. And the sculpture department was totally modernist. The only interesting place where you could have ideas was printmaking. [40]
Nick Dobson: In printmaking, if nothing else, there was content in the technique, and I really liked that. Plus, there was the fact that you could bring anything to printmaking.
Elizabeth Beauchamp: Here in Edmonton we are still thought of by the rest of Canada (when we occasionally cross their minds, that is) as a colourfield town that also has a strong community of abstract steel sculptors. […] That the rest of the world had gone through several art movements since the hey-day of New York abstraction and was by 1980 rediscovering the representational image seemed to be of little consequence in Edmonton. The tragedy was that a lot of good artists simply left town. Maybe the annual Visitation and Blessing of the Pictures by doddering, once-eminent American art critics who specialize in New York-style abstraction just got to be more than some could handle. [41]
Blair Brennan: Some local artists, whom I respect very much, have wrestled something meaningful out of formalist abstraction. I will talk to these people about their art any time. In general, however, I will not debate the local modernists because it is like talking to a fundamentalist Christian about evolution. It is of little consequence to me that there were (and remain) a few Edmonton artists who want to be buried in the same coffin as Clement Greenberg. The rivalry between formalist painting and sculpture and an emerging post-modern sensibility mattered little to anyone outside the business even when the debate was current. However, those in “the business,” notably curators, collectors, critics, art writers and other artists often gave Edmonton a miss for this very reason. They knew what they would find in Edmonton in the 1970s and 80s. [42]
Robin Smith-Peck: The only way I could explain it was a kind of fractured animosity between media in Edmonton—which I certainly wasn't familiar with coming from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Marc had not noticed it coming from Toronto. Painters didn't talk to printmakers didn't talk to sculptors, and we felt like it was not healthy to attempt to make art in communities where that becomes the mainstay of discussion. [43]
Garth Rankin: A lot of those artists did have good success, with exhibit records and international shows. And there’s a lot to be said about abstraction and what it can give you visually, and a lot of the knowledge that I got has served me well for my life, but at the time it was restricting. Not for those who participated, but if you were out of that fairly narrow point of view, you were stuck, you know?
Above: Cherie Moses, Celebration Image, screenprinted paper, chine colléd, folded, dyed, torn, and reassembled, 1979
Liz Wylie: In a larger centre with a more pluralistic art production this would not be as likely to occur. Seen with some perspective then, the Edmonton situation is something of a tempest in a teapot. But this doesn't reduce the drastic effect it can have on artists at variance with the predominant approach who are trying to establish careers in the city. [44]
Cherie Moses: There is such a lot of discussion in Edmonton about formal issues that sometimes I really wonder what people are talking about. Just because artists handle form without content does not mean that these formal issues are well understood. I don't want formal issues to prevent an understanding of my work. I don't feel at this particular point in my career that I am making art about art. I hope, of course, that I am contributing to a particular direction in terms of what could be considered art. Clearly, this includes social comment which, by its very definition, has to do with the structures of our particular society. Although we are all familiar with my ideas, my presentation may seem unfamiliar. That, however, is my art. [45]
Helen Collinson: [Moses’] work speaks about ideas, social issues, attitudes about human relationships. […] This is a work, therefore, with a social purpose as well as an artistic one, and it contains an idealism that is absent from that art which is entirely an expression of an artist's private esoteric aesthetic calling. As Cherie Moses says, she is unable to look at art only as formal or even most importantly as formal. [46]
Cherie Moses: I appreciate a well-made anything—I mean I wasn’t a conceptual artist, I wasn’t someone you know who would can my excrement and put it on a shelf. I wasn’t really into that; I still wanted a real object at the end. But you know I couldn’t blot out the years of literature, I couldn’t blot out the years of critical thinking, and I couldn’t blot out my undergraduate years at NSCAD which were difficult—but interesting. You know, they were interesting to me because I tried to wrap my head around what was going on there, but they had so many visiting artists and they were all different. It was hard to be cultish. It was almost impossible. So when I got to the UofA and saw how insular everything was, I resisted that a lot. I just did what I was going to do.
Cherie Moses (1980): For me the print media has been a drawing tool. I no longer work in editions, but rather deal with the monotype and collage. Printing, especially silkscreen, allows me to deal with various possibilities of paper folding—that is, the indentations of the folded/torn paper often serve the same purpose as a stencil. [47]
Cherie Moses: Maybe the tearing the paper was because I was pissed off, I don’t know. Look, I can make something beautiful out of almost anything. It was about taking apart everything I knew and reconstructing it.
Liz Wylie: Moving from her spare, fetishistic M.F.A. works, which were arranged in carefully planned installations, Moses plunged into photography more deeply than before in order to begin exploring ideas of the self, femininity and love in our culture. 'I felt it was no longer enough just to make forms', she says. [48]
Mary-Beth Laviolette: In other Canadian centres, there is the suspicion that despite her art's socio-political content she has to be tainted in some way by Edmonton's perceived preoccupation with formal issues and making precious art objects. […] Moses is not alone. Whatever side of the ideological fence Edmonton artists dwell on post-1970, there are certain consequences in terms of how their work is received, not just in Edmonton but elsewhere. What did this have to do with the art they produced? Not much. But since when has the art world, especially the publicly funded sector in Canada, been a generous, open-minded forum? Since when has work been evaluated on its own merits and within its proper context: An artist could be producing the strongest work of his or her career but if it is not in step with the prevailing curatorial and critical preferences, then tough luck. [49]
Garth Rankin: For a lot of people, I suppose, you’re limited to Edmonton to a great extent. You had books and magazines, and didn’t really have the internet… well, actually there wasn’t any internet at all. We really didn’t have the internet! But, for artists in Edmonton who were exploring things beyond abstraction, their options for exhibiting were very limited. Support was somewhat limited.
Glenn Guillet: I guess you get a little crazy working in Edmonton… there aren't people here who share the same concerns. [50]
Garth Rankin: It was a bunch of people wandering in the desert instead of forming a community.
Liz Wylie: In a larger centre with a more pluralistic art production this would not be as likely to occur. Seen with some perspective then, the Edmonton situation is something of a tempest in a teapot. But this doesn't reduce the drastic effect it can have on artists at variance with the predominant approach who are trying to establish careers in the city. [44]
Cherie Moses: There is such a lot of discussion in Edmonton about formal issues that sometimes I really wonder what people are talking about. Just because artists handle form without content does not mean that these formal issues are well understood. I don't want formal issues to prevent an understanding of my work. I don't feel at this particular point in my career that I am making art about art. I hope, of course, that I am contributing to a particular direction in terms of what could be considered art. Clearly, this includes social comment which, by its very definition, has to do with the structures of our particular society. Although we are all familiar with my ideas, my presentation may seem unfamiliar. That, however, is my art. [45]
Helen Collinson: [Moses’] work speaks about ideas, social issues, attitudes about human relationships. […] This is a work, therefore, with a social purpose as well as an artistic one, and it contains an idealism that is absent from that art which is entirely an expression of an artist's private esoteric aesthetic calling. As Cherie Moses says, she is unable to look at art only as formal or even most importantly as formal. [46]
Cherie Moses: I appreciate a well-made anything—I mean I wasn’t a conceptual artist, I wasn’t someone you know who would can my excrement and put it on a shelf. I wasn’t really into that; I still wanted a real object at the end. But you know I couldn’t blot out the years of literature, I couldn’t blot out the years of critical thinking, and I couldn’t blot out my undergraduate years at NSCAD which were difficult—but interesting. You know, they were interesting to me because I tried to wrap my head around what was going on there, but they had so many visiting artists and they were all different. It was hard to be cultish. It was almost impossible. So when I got to the UofA and saw how insular everything was, I resisted that a lot. I just did what I was going to do.
Cherie Moses (1980): For me the print media has been a drawing tool. I no longer work in editions, but rather deal with the monotype and collage. Printing, especially silkscreen, allows me to deal with various possibilities of paper folding—that is, the indentations of the folded/torn paper often serve the same purpose as a stencil. [47]
Cherie Moses: Maybe the tearing the paper was because I was pissed off, I don’t know. Look, I can make something beautiful out of almost anything. It was about taking apart everything I knew and reconstructing it.
Liz Wylie: Moving from her spare, fetishistic M.F.A. works, which were arranged in carefully planned installations, Moses plunged into photography more deeply than before in order to begin exploring ideas of the self, femininity and love in our culture. 'I felt it was no longer enough just to make forms', she says. [48]
Mary-Beth Laviolette: In other Canadian centres, there is the suspicion that despite her art's socio-political content she has to be tainted in some way by Edmonton's perceived preoccupation with formal issues and making precious art objects. […] Moses is not alone. Whatever side of the ideological fence Edmonton artists dwell on post-1970, there are certain consequences in terms of how their work is received, not just in Edmonton but elsewhere. What did this have to do with the art they produced? Not much. But since when has the art world, especially the publicly funded sector in Canada, been a generous, open-minded forum? Since when has work been evaluated on its own merits and within its proper context: An artist could be producing the strongest work of his or her career but if it is not in step with the prevailing curatorial and critical preferences, then tough luck. [49]
Garth Rankin: For a lot of people, I suppose, you’re limited to Edmonton to a great extent. You had books and magazines, and didn’t really have the internet… well, actually there wasn’t any internet at all. We really didn’t have the internet! But, for artists in Edmonton who were exploring things beyond abstraction, their options for exhibiting were very limited. Support was somewhat limited.
Glenn Guillet: I guess you get a little crazy working in Edmonton… there aren't people here who share the same concerns. [50]
Garth Rankin: It was a bunch of people wandering in the desert instead of forming a community.
Above: 1. Blair Brennan, Azucar, branded paper, 2015; 2. left to right: four paintings by Phill Mann, six mixed-media prints with drawing by John Roberts, in the exhibit Five from Edmonton, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), Lethbridge, Alberta, 1981; 3. three mixed-media prints by Richard Titus, in the exhibit Five from Edmonton, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), Lethbridge, Alberta, 1981; SAAG installation photos courtesy of the SAAG/Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin
Blair Brennan: When you left the UofA, you became involved with [Latitude 53]. That just seemed a natural progression—though I also felt rather “recruited” by the then president John Roberts. You had an even greater reason to become involved with Latitude because it was outside the institutions propping up the formalist status quo. It represented a true alternative to that kind of art by the time I got involved. There are few exceptions but if you didn’t make abstract painting or abstract welded steel sculpture, you were unlikely to become involved in any way in teaching at the UofA and exhibitions at local commercial galleries and the Edmonton Art Gallery. [51]
John Roberts: Well, it was a very weird situation, because all of the academia, except for printmaking, was directly plugged into the Edmonton Art Gallery, which was 30 years behind the times.
David Scorgie: A former technician at Gemini GEL and Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles, [John Roberts] is not unfamiliar with the tragicomedies in the North American lithography diorama. [52]
John Roberts: I had always, you know, wanted to start some kind of a print shop, but it was sort of on the back burner, because my immediate sort of allegiance was to get Latitude back to some kind of semblance of… of anything. There wasn’t any money, there soon wasn’t any space, there was tonnes of bureaucracy, and everybody was all over the place. A lot of the older people had sort of had their fling and left, and so I was left with about six people and nothing but a lot of resistance as far as the bureaucracy and funding. Things were not in place.
David Scorgie: Roberts said the lack of any fine art lithography shop space was going to kill artists in the city. Sure, Roberts admitted, there is the university. But one wonders where an artist who's graduated can really work, in a space outfitted in any comparable way with the university’s? […] A proposal put to Alberta Culture a while ago by the Latitude 53 people sought a print shop set up to the tune of $250,000. The payoff, Roberts was quick to point out, would be in the quality, limited-edition Alberta art which would inevitably come out of such a unique facility. [53]
John Roberts: There was also a proposal I made with a couple of other printmakers about establishing a printmaking shop. […] It was myself, and Richard Titus, Gwen Molnar, who was the mother of one of the students and was a curator or something or other, and Titus’s girlfriend. It was basically sent to the minister of culture and it was ‘to provide an agenda and ongoing record of cultural heritage;’ you know, all of the stuff that you had to do to get them to fund it. So it was laid out, it was to be in the basement of the Princess Theatre on Whyte Avenue. […] That was summarily turned down.
David Scorgie: Artists really are twilight creatures at best, living marginally at their work, perhaps teaching to offset the price exacted by their vision. They need an environment that feeds their insecurities at the same time as it assures them they can have their work produced, that there are sufficient galleries to show their work and most important of all, that there is a public that seeks their images and icons. Without these elements, the artists will leave. [54]
Brian Donnelly: Space can determine the direction of the work, as for example with Jimmy Golden. Having taken three semesters of printmaking at the Alberta College of Art, he would like to be printing if possible, but Edmonton lacks an open printmaking facility. […] Elise Johnson is especially relevant to the consideration of space and the artist, because of the unique requirements of her work. She divides her time equally between animated films and etching. [She] plans to establish, with others, an independent print studio in Edmonton. This move to set up the means by which artists can produce their work, and take control of their working situation is the most exciting future development that I’ve heard recently. [55]
Mary Joyce: Walter Jule knew that people graduating from printmaking needed to have a shop, a place to work. So he got a group of us together, Bonnie Sheckter was one of them, and me and I can’t remember who else… but I remember chomping around in downtown Edmonton in those days, it would be the area that is now South Chinatown, sort of near the river. And we were looking for spaces—we were looking for old warehouses or new warehouses or something that we could afford and put a printshop into. I remember several walks like that. I don’t remember it doing much else, besides looking for space.
Blair Brennan: When you left the UofA, you became involved with [Latitude 53]. That just seemed a natural progression—though I also felt rather “recruited” by the then president John Roberts. You had an even greater reason to become involved with Latitude because it was outside the institutions propping up the formalist status quo. It represented a true alternative to that kind of art by the time I got involved. There are few exceptions but if you didn’t make abstract painting or abstract welded steel sculpture, you were unlikely to become involved in any way in teaching at the UofA and exhibitions at local commercial galleries and the Edmonton Art Gallery. [51]
John Roberts: Well, it was a very weird situation, because all of the academia, except for printmaking, was directly plugged into the Edmonton Art Gallery, which was 30 years behind the times.
David Scorgie: A former technician at Gemini GEL and Cirrus Editions in Los Angeles, [John Roberts] is not unfamiliar with the tragicomedies in the North American lithography diorama. [52]
John Roberts: I had always, you know, wanted to start some kind of a print shop, but it was sort of on the back burner, because my immediate sort of allegiance was to get Latitude back to some kind of semblance of… of anything. There wasn’t any money, there soon wasn’t any space, there was tonnes of bureaucracy, and everybody was all over the place. A lot of the older people had sort of had their fling and left, and so I was left with about six people and nothing but a lot of resistance as far as the bureaucracy and funding. Things were not in place.
David Scorgie: Roberts said the lack of any fine art lithography shop space was going to kill artists in the city. Sure, Roberts admitted, there is the university. But one wonders where an artist who's graduated can really work, in a space outfitted in any comparable way with the university’s? […] A proposal put to Alberta Culture a while ago by the Latitude 53 people sought a print shop set up to the tune of $250,000. The payoff, Roberts was quick to point out, would be in the quality, limited-edition Alberta art which would inevitably come out of such a unique facility. [53]
John Roberts: There was also a proposal I made with a couple of other printmakers about establishing a printmaking shop. […] It was myself, and Richard Titus, Gwen Molnar, who was the mother of one of the students and was a curator or something or other, and Titus’s girlfriend. It was basically sent to the minister of culture and it was ‘to provide an agenda and ongoing record of cultural heritage;’ you know, all of the stuff that you had to do to get them to fund it. So it was laid out, it was to be in the basement of the Princess Theatre on Whyte Avenue. […] That was summarily turned down.
David Scorgie: Artists really are twilight creatures at best, living marginally at their work, perhaps teaching to offset the price exacted by their vision. They need an environment that feeds their insecurities at the same time as it assures them they can have their work produced, that there are sufficient galleries to show their work and most important of all, that there is a public that seeks their images and icons. Without these elements, the artists will leave. [54]
Brian Donnelly: Space can determine the direction of the work, as for example with Jimmy Golden. Having taken three semesters of printmaking at the Alberta College of Art, he would like to be printing if possible, but Edmonton lacks an open printmaking facility. […] Elise Johnson is especially relevant to the consideration of space and the artist, because of the unique requirements of her work. She divides her time equally between animated films and etching. [She] plans to establish, with others, an independent print studio in Edmonton. This move to set up the means by which artists can produce their work, and take control of their working situation is the most exciting future development that I’ve heard recently. [55]
Mary Joyce: Walter Jule knew that people graduating from printmaking needed to have a shop, a place to work. So he got a group of us together, Bonnie Sheckter was one of them, and me and I can’t remember who else… but I remember chomping around in downtown Edmonton in those days, it would be the area that is now South Chinatown, sort of near the river. And we were looking for spaces—we were looking for old warehouses or new warehouses or something that we could afford and put a printshop into. I remember several walks like that. I don’t remember it doing much else, besides looking for space.
Above: Bonnie Sheckter, Host of Players from a Catatonic Dream, lithograph, 1980
Bonnie Sheckter: A few months before graduating with my Master of Visual Arts in Printmaking, Liz Ingram and I were invited by Walter Jule to collaborate on creating a studio for the three of us. After a frustrating experience the year before starting the Edmonton Printmakers Society, which never got off the ground, I jumped at the opportunity. The EPS had been a non-starter, composed of students with no money to buy equipment and widely varying views on what direction we should take. The only possibility at the time was setting up a silkscreen shop, which didn’t interest me. After about 6 months or so the society dissolved, the only accomplishment being to build 4 tables which we sold when we disbanded.
Liz Ingram: We thought we’d try to form some kind of organization and make a print workshop where students who finished could come and make work, or people in the community who are artists and want to make prints. And I think that’s what we called ‘the Edmonton Printmaking Society.’ We got people to sign up, and then the next step was to get a space, put the press in it, and we had to build counters, we had to make everything from scratch. And so the idea was everybody would chip in and work on stuff and help building it. Well, nobody ever had time to come and do any work. So it was Walter, Bonnie, and I doing everything.
Walter Jule: I think for Liz and Bonnie and I, the primary motivation for getting a shop together was that unlike some of the space in sculpture and painting, there was no space allocated for staff research in printmaking. So when you were [at the University], you were teaching.
Bonnie Sheckter: We found a great studio space not far from the University, and together built all the necessary counters, darkroom, exposing equipment and private cubicle spaces for each of us, all possible because of Walter’s design and building experience. My father owned Alberta Bakery, a huge factory which was lighted using mercury vapour lighting, and he gave us one of the spare bulbs and ballast to use for exposing our plates. To run our vacuum palette, my dad also had one of his engineers who dealt with the technical side of maintaining his massive ovens, freezers and slicing machines, build us a compressor from scrap iron pieces he had around the bakery; it weighed about 200 pounds.
Liz Ingram: We ordered an offset press from London, England, and it got shipped. It was all painted with asphaltum, because it came by sea, so they paint everything with asphaltum to keep it from rusting. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we got this warehouse space near Whyte Avenue, and it had a dirt floor. That’s the first place where the press was delivered. So it wasn’t ideal for making prints. Then we got a place that had concrete floors, not far away. And what I remember so well is getting the press moving, and I don’t know how Bonnie and I did it! You know how heavy that press is!? We got it on to the tailgate of her father’s big, box, bakery truck. And Bonnie’s really small, and she’s driving this big truck. And the press was on the tailgate of the truck. We tied it down with ropes and stuff, but I was driving behind, in case it slid off. That’s how we moved the press, to the place it ended up for quite a long time.
Bonnie Sheckter: It was in this studio, during the late ‘70s, that I worked on a series of prints which combined 2 or 3 photographs, the combination of which was facilitated by the offset press, allowing me to achieve dot on dot registration. One of the photographs I’d use would be of metallic glitter laid on black velvet using a moving camera over a long exposure to create a series of energetic white lines. These images would be combined with photographs of cardboard constructions and in later prints, photographs of paper as well with which I could manipulate the transparency and opacity directly through the printmaking process. I feel good about the prints I did back then; I like that they couldn’t have been done in any other way than through the printmaking process, at least at that time. Nowadays, photoshop can do just about anything, but the quality of the resultant printed image would be very different, and to my sensibility, not as magical or aesthetically pleasing.
Bonnie Sheckter: A few months before graduating with my Master of Visual Arts in Printmaking, Liz Ingram and I were invited by Walter Jule to collaborate on creating a studio for the three of us. After a frustrating experience the year before starting the Edmonton Printmakers Society, which never got off the ground, I jumped at the opportunity. The EPS had been a non-starter, composed of students with no money to buy equipment and widely varying views on what direction we should take. The only possibility at the time was setting up a silkscreen shop, which didn’t interest me. After about 6 months or so the society dissolved, the only accomplishment being to build 4 tables which we sold when we disbanded.
Liz Ingram: We thought we’d try to form some kind of organization and make a print workshop where students who finished could come and make work, or people in the community who are artists and want to make prints. And I think that’s what we called ‘the Edmonton Printmaking Society.’ We got people to sign up, and then the next step was to get a space, put the press in it, and we had to build counters, we had to make everything from scratch. And so the idea was everybody would chip in and work on stuff and help building it. Well, nobody ever had time to come and do any work. So it was Walter, Bonnie, and I doing everything.
Walter Jule: I think for Liz and Bonnie and I, the primary motivation for getting a shop together was that unlike some of the space in sculpture and painting, there was no space allocated for staff research in printmaking. So when you were [at the University], you were teaching.
Bonnie Sheckter: We found a great studio space not far from the University, and together built all the necessary counters, darkroom, exposing equipment and private cubicle spaces for each of us, all possible because of Walter’s design and building experience. My father owned Alberta Bakery, a huge factory which was lighted using mercury vapour lighting, and he gave us one of the spare bulbs and ballast to use for exposing our plates. To run our vacuum palette, my dad also had one of his engineers who dealt with the technical side of maintaining his massive ovens, freezers and slicing machines, build us a compressor from scrap iron pieces he had around the bakery; it weighed about 200 pounds.
Liz Ingram: We ordered an offset press from London, England, and it got shipped. It was all painted with asphaltum, because it came by sea, so they paint everything with asphaltum to keep it from rusting. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we got this warehouse space near Whyte Avenue, and it had a dirt floor. That’s the first place where the press was delivered. So it wasn’t ideal for making prints. Then we got a place that had concrete floors, not far away. And what I remember so well is getting the press moving, and I don’t know how Bonnie and I did it! You know how heavy that press is!? We got it on to the tailgate of her father’s big, box, bakery truck. And Bonnie’s really small, and she’s driving this big truck. And the press was on the tailgate of the truck. We tied it down with ropes and stuff, but I was driving behind, in case it slid off. That’s how we moved the press, to the place it ended up for quite a long time.
Bonnie Sheckter: It was in this studio, during the late ‘70s, that I worked on a series of prints which combined 2 or 3 photographs, the combination of which was facilitated by the offset press, allowing me to achieve dot on dot registration. One of the photographs I’d use would be of metallic glitter laid on black velvet using a moving camera over a long exposure to create a series of energetic white lines. These images would be combined with photographs of cardboard constructions and in later prints, photographs of paper as well with which I could manipulate the transparency and opacity directly through the printmaking process. I feel good about the prints I did back then; I like that they couldn’t have been done in any other way than through the printmaking process, at least at that time. Nowadays, photoshop can do just about anything, but the quality of the resultant printed image would be very different, and to my sensibility, not as magical or aesthetically pleasing.
Above: Liz Ingram, Profane Ascension, inkjet, intaglio, 2012
Liz Ingram: My press, the one I have in my studio, I bought and kept in garage storage. When Walter got his place, we moved it out there, and Walter bought another press, and moving that was another saga. Those offset presses are bloody heavy… Bernd was involved, it got dark, we couldn’t get it down the hill into the studio through the mud, or the snow, so we covered it and waited until spring! The things we did, it was hilarious. But we all had a really good time together.
Bonnie Sheckter: I moved to Toronto to live with my soon-to-be-husband, and Liz and Walter each built their own studios, Walter buying his own offset press and Liz buying a convertible litho/etching press. I bartered with them to buy out their shares of our mutual press, trading Liz my upright piano for her share, and eventually paying Walter the debt I owed him as part of the price when I sold him my 6 acres of land which was adjacent to his property. Living in an apartment in Toronto, I had no place to put the press, so my father stored it at his bakery till I would be ready for it. In Toronto, I immediately got a job as Director of Lithography at Open Studio.
Walter Jule: You know, it was very interesting because when I became chair of the Print and Drawing Council of Canada, the Canada Council asked if I would serve on this print workshop jury, which was brand new. There were a number of shops evolving in Quebec, and Ontario—Open Studio for instance. It was when I went to those workshops, and talked to people on that jury, and government people, I realized for the first time the Canadian government was aware of this almost universal movement, at least in North America, towards artist-run shops.
Marc Siegner: I mean you could say that the Print and Drawing Council maybe was the birth of that in a sense, or a stepping stone when they realized that there was nobody else in the country who was on the same page as they were.
Jo Manning: The [Print and Drawing Council of Canada (PDCC)] survived for a few more years, until 1993, thanks to Rudolf Bikkers, the new CEO, who found exhibition space for it in the Extension Gallery, at 86 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, and office space at the OCA (which in 1996 became the Ontario College of Art and Design, or OCAD), where he was head of printmaking. But then the trail disappears. The trust funds, interest from which had financed the annual awards, vanished. Also gone were the annual print show and the CPE's Presentation Print, both of which helped create a market for works on paper. And little remains of the archives collected after the PDCC moved west in 1976. [56]
Marc Siegner: And as far as programs go, there probably wasn’t anything comparable to the UofA, outside of some notable exceptions, like NSCAD at the time…
Walter Jule: It really became obvious that if we were going to continue the work here, as a legacy in terms of Edmonton’s cultural community, there had to be a permanent facility that wasn’t run by the university. At that point, very casually, we got 20 or 30 students together in the third floor lounge and said this is how you could do it…
Liz Ingram: My press, the one I have in my studio, I bought and kept in garage storage. When Walter got his place, we moved it out there, and Walter bought another press, and moving that was another saga. Those offset presses are bloody heavy… Bernd was involved, it got dark, we couldn’t get it down the hill into the studio through the mud, or the snow, so we covered it and waited until spring! The things we did, it was hilarious. But we all had a really good time together.
Bonnie Sheckter: I moved to Toronto to live with my soon-to-be-husband, and Liz and Walter each built their own studios, Walter buying his own offset press and Liz buying a convertible litho/etching press. I bartered with them to buy out their shares of our mutual press, trading Liz my upright piano for her share, and eventually paying Walter the debt I owed him as part of the price when I sold him my 6 acres of land which was adjacent to his property. Living in an apartment in Toronto, I had no place to put the press, so my father stored it at his bakery till I would be ready for it. In Toronto, I immediately got a job as Director of Lithography at Open Studio.
Walter Jule: You know, it was very interesting because when I became chair of the Print and Drawing Council of Canada, the Canada Council asked if I would serve on this print workshop jury, which was brand new. There were a number of shops evolving in Quebec, and Ontario—Open Studio for instance. It was when I went to those workshops, and talked to people on that jury, and government people, I realized for the first time the Canadian government was aware of this almost universal movement, at least in North America, towards artist-run shops.
Marc Siegner: I mean you could say that the Print and Drawing Council maybe was the birth of that in a sense, or a stepping stone when they realized that there was nobody else in the country who was on the same page as they were.
Jo Manning: The [Print and Drawing Council of Canada (PDCC)] survived for a few more years, until 1993, thanks to Rudolf Bikkers, the new CEO, who found exhibition space for it in the Extension Gallery, at 86 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, and office space at the OCA (which in 1996 became the Ontario College of Art and Design, or OCAD), where he was head of printmaking. But then the trail disappears. The trust funds, interest from which had financed the annual awards, vanished. Also gone were the annual print show and the CPE's Presentation Print, both of which helped create a market for works on paper. And little remains of the archives collected after the PDCC moved west in 1976. [56]
Marc Siegner: And as far as programs go, there probably wasn’t anything comparable to the UofA, outside of some notable exceptions, like NSCAD at the time…
Walter Jule: It really became obvious that if we were going to continue the work here, as a legacy in terms of Edmonton’s cultural community, there had to be a permanent facility that wasn’t run by the university. At that point, very casually, we got 20 or 30 students together in the third floor lounge and said this is how you could do it…
continue to part two...
***
Footnotes, part 1:
[1] Robin Smith-Peck, interviewed by Sydney Lancaster on 14.02.2020, “Robin Smith-Peck Interview Transcription,” online supplement to SNAPLine, 2020.1, https://snapartists.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ROBIN-SMITH-PECK-INTERVIEW-TRANSCRIPTION.pdf
[2] Walter Jule, interviewed by Alexandra Duncan, in art & design @ 50 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Department of Art & Design, 2015), 114.
[3] Charles Mandel, “’Steel city’ can boast about sculptor Peter Hide,” Edmonton Journal, September 9, 1998, C4.
[4] Clement Greenberg, “Clement Greenberg’s View of Art on the Prairies,” Canadian Art, Vol XX no. 2, Issue no. 84 March/April 1963, 91.
[5] Marytka Kosinski, essay for inside/out (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1991) 8-9.
[6] Bente Roed Cochran, Contemporary Edmonton Prints (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1988) 9.
[7] Charles Mandel, “Sightlines celebrates world of printmaking,” Edmonton Journal, October 1, 1997, C2.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jennifer Dickson, “The Institution and Its Printmakers,” inside/out (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1991) 14.
[10] Bente Roed Cochran, Contemporary Edmonton Prints (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1988) 4.
[11] Ibid.
[12] J.E. Simpson, ‘Troubles of togetherness,’ Edmonton Journal, September 7, 1974, 49.
[13] Roger Silvester, artist statement for ‘Song of Solomon,’ quoted in “Nude art seized, dealer summoned,” Edmonton Journal, March 22, 1971, 25.
[14] Alasdair Dunlop, “Physical Distaste in a Hymn to Love?,” Edmonton Journal, March 26, 1971, 68.
[15] “Obscene material charges dropped,” Edmonton Journal, April 17, 1971, 52.
[16] J.E. Simpson, “Troubles of togetherness,” Edmonton Journal, September 7, 1974, 49.
[17] J.A. Forbes, “Walter Jule,” artscanada, Issue 204/205, April/May 1976, 80.
[18] James Purdie, “Ancient eyes, intruding planes,” The Globe and Mail, August 27, 1977, 30.
[19] Derek Besant, “Silent Attention: Six Encounters with Time” in SKIN: Walter Jule, Selected Works 1968- 2008 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Department of Art and Design, 2008) 10.
[20] Walter Jule, interviewed by Lyndal Osborne, Commonwealth Print Portfolio, directed by Jack Keeoh, produced for the University of Alberta Department of Art and Design by University of Alberta Radio and Television, 1978.
[21] Agnieszka Matejko, “A Gift of Stillness,” in SKIN: Walter Jule, Selected Works 1968-2008 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Department of Art and Design, 2008) 10.
[22] Jim Corrigan, Threshold: Ryoji Ikeda/Walter Jule, Works 1986-2013 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Museums, 2013) 30.
[23] Robin Smith-Peck, “Does the plane ever land?,” SNAP Newsletter, May 1992, 4.
[24] Amy Gogarty, “Margaret May: Mind’s Eye,” Artichoke, Summer 1996, 21.
[25] Monique Westra, interviewing Walter Jule, “Walter Jule: Visual Jazz,” Galleries West, December 31, 2002, https://www.gallerieswest.ca/magazine/stories/walter-jule%3A-visual-jazz/
[26] Jennifer Dickson, “Introductions,” in Edmonton Prints: Brazil (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1988) unpaginated.
[27] Jane Ash Poitras, artist panel ‘Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in Conversation - Edmonton Edition,’ Art Gallery of Alberta, January 16, 2020.
[28] Reg Silvester, “From a Private World,” Edmonton Bullet, volume 8 no. 4, May 9, 1990, 10.
[29] Charles Mandel, “Site Markers reveals art’s abundance in natural world,” Edmonton Journal, October 13, 1996, C4.
[30] Liane Faulder, “Value of artists’ contribution impossible to price,” Edmonton Journal, January 27, 1994, B11.
[31] Lyndal Osborne, artist statement, 1988.
[32] Robin Laurence, “Naming and Claiming,” in [un]natural histories (Victoria: Open Space Gallery, 1997) 16-17.
[33] Ibid., 16.
[34] Michelle Hardy, “Introduction,” in Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons (Calgary: Nickle Gallery, 2018) 6.
[35] Natalie Loveless, ‘Mutation and Care in the Anthropocene,’ in Lyndal Osborne: Mutation of the Commons (Calgary: Nickle Gallery, 2018) 18.
[36] Steven Harris, “Time for a Witness,” in Witness: Sherri Chava and Lyndal Osborne, exhibition catalogue, 5.
[37] Lyndal Osborne, artist panel ‘Rebellious: Alberta Women Artists in Conversation - Edmonton Edition,’ Art Gallery of Alberta, January 16, 2020.
[38] Janet Cardiff, interviewed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, in Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller (New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2001) 27.
[39] Elizabeth Beauchamp, “Art scene stagnated in the ‘80s,” Edmonton Journal, January 2, 1990, B4.
[40] Blair Brennan, “Art in Edmonton, Art Writing in Edmonton and Edmonton Ignored,” PrairieSeen, February 15, 2013, https://prairieseen-blog.tumblr.com/post/43178734272/art-in-edmonton-art-writing-in-edmonton-and
[41] Robin Smith-Peck, interviewed by Sydney Lancaster on 14.02.2020, “Robin Smith-Peck Interview Transcription,” online supplement to SNAPLine, 2020.1, https://snapartists.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ROBIN-SMITH-PECK-INTERVIEW-TRANSCRIPTION.pdf
[42] Liz Wylie, “The Underside of Edmonton: Bob Iveson, Tommie Gallie, Jim Davies and Cherie Moses,” Vanguard, vol. 13 #4, May 1984, online at: http://ccca.concordia.ca/c/writing/w/wylie/wylie006t.html
[43] Cherie Moses, interviewed by Helen Collinson, “Mother,” Edmonton Bullet, vol. 2, no. 3, May 30, 1984, 13.
[44] Helen Collinson, “Mother,” Edmonton Bullet, vol. 2, no. 3, May 30, 1984, 13.
[45] Cherie Moses, artist statement for ‘Not Just Another Print Exhibition,’ touring exhibition sponsored by the Alberta 75th Anniversary Commission in cooperation with Alberta Culture, Visual Arts, September 1980 to March 1981
[46] Liz Wylie, “The Underside of Edmonton: Bob Iveson, Tommie Gallie, Jim Davies and Cherie Moses,” Vanguard, vol. 13 #4, May 1984, online at: http://ccca.concordia.ca/c/writing/w/wylie/wylie006t.html
[47] Mary-Beth Laviolette, An Alberta Art Chronicle (Canmore: Altitude Publishing, 2006), 144-145.
[48] Glenn Guillet, quoted in Nina Miller, “Lonely boy,” Edmonton Bullet, vol. 2, no. 3, May 30, 1984, 15.
[49] Blair Brennan, “First Times,” Latitude 53 Blog, February 7, 2012, https://latitude53.tumblr.com/post/17228343392/first-times-blair-brennan
[50] David Scorgie, “Artspectrum,” Edmonton Journal, July 31, 1981, C4.
[51] Ibid.
[52] In addition to this proposal for a collective printshop and the proposal made through Latitude 53 to Alberta Culture, there is mention of an ‘Armoury Print Society’ in the documents of a proposal to the municipal government of Edmonton, written by Roberts while he was president of Latitude 53, to have Latitude 53 coordinate 14 arts organizations as tenants of the Ortona Armoury in Edmonton’s River Valley by the fall of 1980. This proposal was not accepted, and the majority of organizations mentioned in the document are now defunct.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Brian Donnelly, ‘The Meaning of New Talent,’ Interface, July 1979, 20-21.
[55] Jo Manning, A Printmaker’s Memoir: A Personal History of an Era (Manotick, ON: Penumbra Press, 2009) 173.
