SNAP at 40, Part III: Mozart & Pavlov's Dog
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: Selected works by visiting artists at SNAP in the 1980s and '90s: 1. Izabella Gustowska, Secret IV, lithography, hand-colouring, 1989; 2. Krystina Piotrowska, photointaglio, 1989; 3. Ryoji Ikeda, photointaglio, chine-collé, 1997; 4. Ondrej Michálek, collagraph, silkscreen, 1988
Tina Cho: You are doing the history of SNAP, not just the people who were renters or members——maybe you’d be interested in the artist in residence portion of it?
Walter Jule: We were starting to show in these international shows, and we would get the catalogues. We’d say ok, you take the catalogue, Lyndal, tonight, and tomorrow Liz, you’ll take it from Lyndal, and then I’ll take it, and here’s the deal: go through it and find a work that’s better than anything you’ve ever done, something you’d like to be able to do, and something you don’t understand, and flag it. I can’t tell you how many times after this exercise we all would have flagged the same person’s work. So then we would just say, we’ll get in touch with these people.
Tina Cho: There was an artist from Poland, her name is Malgorzata Zurakowska. It was in 1987 and I got a call from Walter Jule and he said “Tina, would you like to billet a Polish printmaker? She will be working at SNAP and will be giving workshops and then at the end she will have a show.”
Walter Jule: I got in touch with her somehow—I think I called her on the phone even? And she said 'ok I’ll come,' and it was winter, so she borrowed a fur coat from a friend, and went to Warsaw to get a visa. And they thought she was upscale and was trying to get to Canada illegally, so they denied her to come. I had to have some long phone calls with Ottawa to convince them that it was ok.
Malgorzata Zurakowska: The first time I saw the Northern Lights was on a fall evening in 1987. I was driving from the airport in Edmonton, where I had just arrived as a visiting artist, invited by the University of Alberta. The magic happening in the sky was a wonderful introduction to a visit that would be full of surprises and artistic epiphanies. [1]
Walter Jule: And so she came here, Karen and I picked her up from the airport, took her to the High Level Diner— she was jet lagged, we sat down, we were eating, she looked up, she saw a guy across the table—and she says ‘My god! That was my boyfriend when I was 12 years old!’ And they re-met, got married, and they’re still together.
Tina Cho: She stayed with me for a month, working there, and she made prints while she was there, and then had a show at the end. I had an apartment downtown, and SNAP was just up the street, it wasn’t very far, so it was the perfect location for her to stay. She did a lot mezzotint prints—small, very small—and then she gave a workshop on how to do mezzotint.
Kathy Ruckman: Malgorzata Zurakowska's visit to the city in December gave us not only a chance to look closely at her striking imagery, but also an interesting and informative interpretation of the mezzotint process. On the 12th and 19th of December, eleven artists from SNAP and the University of Alberta attended a mezzotint workshop; […] Zurakowska’s enthusiasm showed when she offered additional help on Wednesday the 16th to ensure motivation and progress between the two Saturdays. [2]
Tina Cho: You are doing the history of SNAP, not just the people who were renters or members——maybe you’d be interested in the artist in residence portion of it?
Walter Jule: We were starting to show in these international shows, and we would get the catalogues. We’d say ok, you take the catalogue, Lyndal, tonight, and tomorrow Liz, you’ll take it from Lyndal, and then I’ll take it, and here’s the deal: go through it and find a work that’s better than anything you’ve ever done, something you’d like to be able to do, and something you don’t understand, and flag it. I can’t tell you how many times after this exercise we all would have flagged the same person’s work. So then we would just say, we’ll get in touch with these people.
Tina Cho: There was an artist from Poland, her name is Malgorzata Zurakowska. It was in 1987 and I got a call from Walter Jule and he said “Tina, would you like to billet a Polish printmaker? She will be working at SNAP and will be giving workshops and then at the end she will have a show.”
Walter Jule: I got in touch with her somehow—I think I called her on the phone even? And she said 'ok I’ll come,' and it was winter, so she borrowed a fur coat from a friend, and went to Warsaw to get a visa. And they thought she was upscale and was trying to get to Canada illegally, so they denied her to come. I had to have some long phone calls with Ottawa to convince them that it was ok.
Malgorzata Zurakowska: The first time I saw the Northern Lights was on a fall evening in 1987. I was driving from the airport in Edmonton, where I had just arrived as a visiting artist, invited by the University of Alberta. The magic happening in the sky was a wonderful introduction to a visit that would be full of surprises and artistic epiphanies. [1]
Walter Jule: And so she came here, Karen and I picked her up from the airport, took her to the High Level Diner— she was jet lagged, we sat down, we were eating, she looked up, she saw a guy across the table—and she says ‘My god! That was my boyfriend when I was 12 years old!’ And they re-met, got married, and they’re still together.
Tina Cho: She stayed with me for a month, working there, and she made prints while she was there, and then had a show at the end. I had an apartment downtown, and SNAP was just up the street, it wasn’t very far, so it was the perfect location for her to stay. She did a lot mezzotint prints—small, very small—and then she gave a workshop on how to do mezzotint.
Kathy Ruckman: Malgorzata Zurakowska's visit to the city in December gave us not only a chance to look closely at her striking imagery, but also an interesting and informative interpretation of the mezzotint process. On the 12th and 19th of December, eleven artists from SNAP and the University of Alberta attended a mezzotint workshop; […] Zurakowska’s enthusiasm showed when she offered additional help on Wednesday the 16th to ensure motivation and progress between the two Saturdays. [2]
Above: Anne McMillan, mezzotint, drypoint, 1988
Marlene MacCallum: In the early winter of 1988 I received the first SNAP Newsletter. It contained a mezzotint print by Anne McMillan and the accompanying newsletter discussed a recent mezzotint workshop by Malgorzata Zurakowska. […] I produced the print for the second newsletter, a mezzotint/collagraph also influenced by the same workshop. The intimate scale required for the newsletter context was the catalyst for an image that took a close look at the surface of quietly ordinary objects; in this case, three pears. [3]
April Dean: Since 1988 SNAP has been commissioning and supporting the creation of new works by local, national and international artists and delivering those prints to the hands and homes of a growing audience. This program has been supported by our Sponsor Members, many of whom have been collecting our prints for many years and even some of whom have THE FULL COLLECTION. Marlene MacCallum is one of those dedicated Sponsor Members, and in fact is the member who pointed out to me that we were about to produce our 100th newsletter print. (Thank you Marlene!) [4]
Marlene MacCallum: So that’s a kind of ongoing project—an archive, a way to reach out to people, a way to get people to use the multiple, the potential of print, and to also have the written component. That has certainly expanded and become a much bigger part of it. I’m not claiming credit for that, but it happened during that time [during MacCallum’s time as president of the SNAP board]. I think my print was maybe third or fourth? And it was actually the first mezzotint that I did, it was shortly after Malgorzata had done her workshop.
Marlene MacCallum: In the early winter of 1988 I received the first SNAP Newsletter. It contained a mezzotint print by Anne McMillan and the accompanying newsletter discussed a recent mezzotint workshop by Malgorzata Zurakowska. […] I produced the print for the second newsletter, a mezzotint/collagraph also influenced by the same workshop. The intimate scale required for the newsletter context was the catalyst for an image that took a close look at the surface of quietly ordinary objects; in this case, three pears. [3]
April Dean: Since 1988 SNAP has been commissioning and supporting the creation of new works by local, national and international artists and delivering those prints to the hands and homes of a growing audience. This program has been supported by our Sponsor Members, many of whom have been collecting our prints for many years and even some of whom have THE FULL COLLECTION. Marlene MacCallum is one of those dedicated Sponsor Members, and in fact is the member who pointed out to me that we were about to produce our 100th newsletter print. (Thank you Marlene!) [4]
Marlene MacCallum: So that’s a kind of ongoing project—an archive, a way to reach out to people, a way to get people to use the multiple, the potential of print, and to also have the written component. That has certainly expanded and become a much bigger part of it. I’m not claiming credit for that, but it happened during that time [during MacCallum’s time as president of the SNAP board]. I think my print was maybe third or fourth? And it was actually the first mezzotint that I did, it was shortly after Malgorzata had done her workshop.
Above: Marlene MacCallum, Domestic Perspective, drypoint, relief, 1986
Deborah Root: MacCallum is interested in the movement between domestic space and the natural world: domestic space is where we live, in private, and where we are meant to feel most secure (although this is an illusion for many). Although domestic space can appear more stable than the undomesticated wilderness, where we are aware of seasonal changes and cycles of decay, our built environments are also always transforming, as personal situations change and physical structures break down. [5]
Annik Foreman: She uses objects from around her home as subjects, often returning to images of glasses or bowls of water, pears and a glass body form. She is aiming at a connection between the transparent bowls of water and the transparent form of a human body. [6]
Marlene MacCallum: If I was going to characterize my work it wouldn’t necessarily be just to identify the use of the domestic or the interior, but rather it is a question of how do we construct our internal realities? How do we process and proceed? Our minds are big busy things, so having some of these constraints—what do you have, what are you going to do with it—are useful focusing elements. It also relates to the nature of the space there when SNAP was formed. It was a contrast in terms of the UofA—the range of equipment and the scale, the size that could easily be accommodated at the UofA, whereas at SNAP it was more fundamental, in terms of the straightforwardness and the smaller scale of the presses. I know for me, knowing that there was a certain type of press and certain scale options available, those weren’t the parameters that determined content, but they did determine certain relationships with making, which was one of the things that led me to work very directly with drypoint. The parameters that are imposed are what is available, and what are you going to do within that context? How is that going to manifest in the work?
Deborah Root: Our consciousness of an event can never fully apprehend that event, but the paradox is that we can only perceive the event via consciousness. MacCallum's work lays bare this paradox by delineating the limits of representation [through] unstable and shifting combinations and recombinations of image and text. Truth is always partial, and it moves. [7]
Marlene MacCallum: I remember people asking about how I was going to deal with the isolation of moving to Newfoundland and Labrador—I had also felt that moving from Montreal to Edmonton, which was relatively isolated compared to Montreal. I was sort of prepared for it being very different. But once I’m immersed in that new place, then I start to see more clearly what that new place has to offer. It was in ’93, and into ’94, when David Morrish and I—David and I were not partners then, but we are now—both identified that working in photogravure made a lot of sense. So we went down that path, and it was something I couldn’t have done on my own. One of the things about photogravure is having both photo and print knowledge is extremely helpful. When I had an exhibit at SNAP in ’97, another really important thing was that I realized how much I’d been given in terms of knowledge in Edmonton, both at the UofA and SNAP, and so that’s why I offered to do a workshop in photogravure; to continue that sharing of knowledge. Steve was there, so that was Steve’s interest. And of course he’s truly made it his own process in his own way.
Deborah Root: MacCallum is interested in the movement between domestic space and the natural world: domestic space is where we live, in private, and where we are meant to feel most secure (although this is an illusion for many). Although domestic space can appear more stable than the undomesticated wilderness, where we are aware of seasonal changes and cycles of decay, our built environments are also always transforming, as personal situations change and physical structures break down. [5]
Annik Foreman: She uses objects from around her home as subjects, often returning to images of glasses or bowls of water, pears and a glass body form. She is aiming at a connection between the transparent bowls of water and the transparent form of a human body. [6]
Marlene MacCallum: If I was going to characterize my work it wouldn’t necessarily be just to identify the use of the domestic or the interior, but rather it is a question of how do we construct our internal realities? How do we process and proceed? Our minds are big busy things, so having some of these constraints—what do you have, what are you going to do with it—are useful focusing elements. It also relates to the nature of the space there when SNAP was formed. It was a contrast in terms of the UofA—the range of equipment and the scale, the size that could easily be accommodated at the UofA, whereas at SNAP it was more fundamental, in terms of the straightforwardness and the smaller scale of the presses. I know for me, knowing that there was a certain type of press and certain scale options available, those weren’t the parameters that determined content, but they did determine certain relationships with making, which was one of the things that led me to work very directly with drypoint. The parameters that are imposed are what is available, and what are you going to do within that context? How is that going to manifest in the work?
Deborah Root: Our consciousness of an event can never fully apprehend that event, but the paradox is that we can only perceive the event via consciousness. MacCallum's work lays bare this paradox by delineating the limits of representation [through] unstable and shifting combinations and recombinations of image and text. Truth is always partial, and it moves. [7]
Marlene MacCallum: I remember people asking about how I was going to deal with the isolation of moving to Newfoundland and Labrador—I had also felt that moving from Montreal to Edmonton, which was relatively isolated compared to Montreal. I was sort of prepared for it being very different. But once I’m immersed in that new place, then I start to see more clearly what that new place has to offer. It was in ’93, and into ’94, when David Morrish and I—David and I were not partners then, but we are now—both identified that working in photogravure made a lot of sense. So we went down that path, and it was something I couldn’t have done on my own. One of the things about photogravure is having both photo and print knowledge is extremely helpful. When I had an exhibit at SNAP in ’97, another really important thing was that I realized how much I’d been given in terms of knowledge in Edmonton, both at the UofA and SNAP, and so that’s why I offered to do a workshop in photogravure; to continue that sharing of knowledge. Steve was there, so that was Steve’s interest. And of course he’s truly made it his own process in his own way.
Above: Steven Dixon, photogravure, 2023
Steven Dixon: In terms of my own kind of makeup, I was affected by magic realism pretty early, probably by the time I was 12, even though I may not have known that at the time. I did an undergraduate in painting and printmaking, but when I had access to facilities, then I slowly I started to work more photographically, even though I hadn’t really done that before.
Agnieszka Matejko: The images Dixon was hunting for with his camera lens were simple, every day traces of human activity, places that once hummed with life and that now stand decrepit and silent. [8]
Steven Dixon: I view the world as a vast document that contains a fragile record of all activity. Although this record is difficult to decipher, and a universal acceptance of the meaning of even one small part impossible, the desire to gain understanding is intense. As time passes, the record changes, things lose their integrity and they fragment into parts to become new objects. It is the process and the result of the passage of time and the subsequent ambiguity that capture my imagination and fuel my activities. [9]
Agnieszka Matejko: As he continues to explain the inspiration behind his art, a light goes off in my head, and I begin to understand why these works seemed so enigmatic. Behind every image of industrial decay, of abandoned and lonely sites, lies a hidden message that hovers like some ancient, still undeciphered writing. Only the message isn't in writing; it’s in the countless marks, scratches and signs of human labour that Dixon conveys with hyper-realistic detail. “Look, even the trowel marks [in the wall] are visible. Something someone did 75 years ago and it’s fixed,” he enthusiastically explains. Then, as I look at his prints with newly gained understanding, Dixon adds, “People live their lives thinking that they haven't left a mark. Everyone has left a mark. We don’t often know how to understand it. [In my work] I draw meaning from small gestures.” [10]
Marlene MacCallum: Interestingly, I got an email out of the blue four months ago from someone who had been at one of the workshops that we’d done in Brazil [during the SNAP-sponsored exhibit ‘Edmonton Prints: Brazil’]. She had found my work through the web, and so she kind of made this connection to say hi—she remembered us, she remembered our show. So I think some of those projects SNAP was involved in probably established long term links that are still there. That was also my first experience of going to a show in a place that was away, and it was very important in that way. The range of work that was in the show, and the ambition of the project in terms of it touring, us going, us doing workshops… We went to Campinas and Brasilia, as well as San Paulo. And I have a cousin who lives in San Paulo, so we were staying in my cousin’s extremely beautiful home.
Walter Jule: We spent ten days in Chaca la Flora, through somebody that was a relative of Marlene’s, because External Affairs would only give us money to go down there if we went to both openings. We went to one, and then we had to spend ten days in this gated community, waiting for the next opening. And then the embassy sent the show to the wrong city! So the opening at the next museum had to be postponed. International exhibitions… that’s the way it goes.
Steven Dixon: In terms of my own kind of makeup, I was affected by magic realism pretty early, probably by the time I was 12, even though I may not have known that at the time. I did an undergraduate in painting and printmaking, but when I had access to facilities, then I slowly I started to work more photographically, even though I hadn’t really done that before.
Agnieszka Matejko: The images Dixon was hunting for with his camera lens were simple, every day traces of human activity, places that once hummed with life and that now stand decrepit and silent. [8]
Steven Dixon: I view the world as a vast document that contains a fragile record of all activity. Although this record is difficult to decipher, and a universal acceptance of the meaning of even one small part impossible, the desire to gain understanding is intense. As time passes, the record changes, things lose their integrity and they fragment into parts to become new objects. It is the process and the result of the passage of time and the subsequent ambiguity that capture my imagination and fuel my activities. [9]
Agnieszka Matejko: As he continues to explain the inspiration behind his art, a light goes off in my head, and I begin to understand why these works seemed so enigmatic. Behind every image of industrial decay, of abandoned and lonely sites, lies a hidden message that hovers like some ancient, still undeciphered writing. Only the message isn't in writing; it’s in the countless marks, scratches and signs of human labour that Dixon conveys with hyper-realistic detail. “Look, even the trowel marks [in the wall] are visible. Something someone did 75 years ago and it’s fixed,” he enthusiastically explains. Then, as I look at his prints with newly gained understanding, Dixon adds, “People live their lives thinking that they haven't left a mark. Everyone has left a mark. We don’t often know how to understand it. [In my work] I draw meaning from small gestures.” [10]
Marlene MacCallum: Interestingly, I got an email out of the blue four months ago from someone who had been at one of the workshops that we’d done in Brazil [during the SNAP-sponsored exhibit ‘Edmonton Prints: Brazil’]. She had found my work through the web, and so she kind of made this connection to say hi—she remembered us, she remembered our show. So I think some of those projects SNAP was involved in probably established long term links that are still there. That was also my first experience of going to a show in a place that was away, and it was very important in that way. The range of work that was in the show, and the ambition of the project in terms of it touring, us going, us doing workshops… We went to Campinas and Brasilia, as well as San Paulo. And I have a cousin who lives in San Paulo, so we were staying in my cousin’s extremely beautiful home.
Walter Jule: We spent ten days in Chaca la Flora, through somebody that was a relative of Marlene’s, because External Affairs would only give us money to go down there if we went to both openings. We went to one, and then we had to spend ten days in this gated community, waiting for the next opening. And then the embassy sent the show to the wrong city! So the opening at the next museum had to be postponed. International exhibitions… that’s the way it goes.
Above: Reception for the exhibit "Edmonton Prints: Brazil" at the National Theatre Gallery, Brasilia; photos by Walter Jule
Lyndal Osborne: [In May of 1991], Edmonton print artists Karen Dugas, Liz Ingram, Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne had the opportunity to visit Poland, a country poised on the brink of cultural and economic change. […] The initial invitation came from Izabella Gustowska, instructor at the Poznan Academy of Art (Izabella and Krystyna Piotrowska were artists in residence at the UofA Department of Art and Design in 1988). [11]
Izabella Gustowska: I remember how I worked at night in a large graphic studio in Edmonton, colouring Secret I, II, III red and listening, for several nights on end, to the same tape with W. A. Mozart’s music from the movie Amadeus and how from then on piano concerto in E-K482, has had the same effect on me as the mechanism of conditioning had on Pavlov’s dog. And how I need Mozart to become Pavlov’s dog from time to time. [12]
Lyndal Osborne: Then came an invitation from Witold Skulicz, director of the Polish International Triennial of Graphic Arts, to exhibit in Krakow's triennial celebrations. The exhibitions were only two weeks and 350km apart, permitting us to attend both. [13]
Nick Dobson: We were understandably delighted when four of Edmonton’s most successful and creative artists approached us about sponsoring the exhibition of their work in Krakow. [14]
Lyndal Osborne: SNAP applied for and received a grant from Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism to produce an illustrated catalogue with Polish and English text. Bernd Hildebrandt, at very short notice, designed an excellent catalogue entitled Inside Out: Four Artists from Edmonton. […] To compliment our show, […] Izabella presented a catalogue entitled Grafika, May '91. It contained illustrations and artists’ statements, and an English translation which had been painstakingly worked out with her English instructor. [15]
Izabella Gustowska: Works of the artists who are the leading figures of the artistic life at the Graphic Art Center of the Edmonton University can now be seen in Poznan. They are Lyndal Osbourne, who practices coloured lithography inspired by nature. […] Karen Dugas with self-figure and the world of destruction, in big-size aquatints based on light contrasts. Walter Jule with his big-size lithography and serigraphs inspired by Zen philosophy. […] Liz Ingram with coloured, big sized etchings and aquatints using photography. [16]
April Dean: In revisiting Liz Ingram's intaglio prints from the 1980s I am struck by a sense of timelessness and pulled into a visual depth that is at once very specific and also vast and molecular——an ineffable visual description of what it means to inhabit a human body and feel undeniably that you are also of the world outside that body. Building up rich and complex surfaces through the application of multiple print processes and multiple plates, these early intaglio works are the beginning of Ingram's decades long affinity for combining photographic and handmade marks. The combination and layering of images and marks produces a sense of urgency and perpetual material motion that is evident throughout her prolific body of work. When asked about these early works, Ingram described a vivid scene of crawling on her stomach through the bush with her camera——developing an enduring intimacy with the flora and fauna of her family lakeside retreat at Obed Lake, a place that has inspired and informed her artistic practice for over forty years. Ingram uses the mysterious and indexically indirect matrices of printmaking to evoke a critical interconnectedness of humans and the natural world we inhabit. [17]
Susan Menzies: Liz Ingram's prints look like some flashlit nocturnal encounter somewhere between a subterranean lake and an alchemist's lab, with stray bits of ravine floor, with pools of mercury or sulphurous cave walls. Is this a picture of the printmaker as crazed spelunker/mad scientist skulking with a camera through the underbrush of Lake Obed? Not quite. But Ingram is able to transform chance scraps of organic debris, light and the raw materials of printmaking into documents that suggest the elusive, spiritual and primal. What might easily become sentimental, clichéd or mystical to the point of flakiness, she handles with dexterity and the complexity of contradictions. Her prints illuminate, yet obscure, the incidents they record: their subject is not the twigs and eddies depicted but the flux of interaction and the forces of growth and decay. [18]
Liz Ingram: I started using my own body, and the ideas of the physical and the ephemeral. The elements that come from photography, from parts of my body, for me they are more like triggers. To have something that triggers something that’s familiar even if you don’t know what it is. A familiarity, and a recognition. And then that leads to feeling, I suppose, but without a specific name.
Marytka Kosinski: It is characteristic of Elizabeth Ingram that she does not point out a specific reality, but conveys a sense of the variability and fluctuation of life. She accomplishes this through her unique way of exploiting light. This light appears as a flash which shatters the darkness or reveals itself as colour. It is this light which brings forth the richness of the surface of matter and helps us celebrate the sensual materiality of life. […] Her images draw the viewer with an invitation to meditate in silence. Such a compelling invitation is of an immense value in our frantic world of rushing from nowhere to nowhere. [19]
April Dean: While ecological concerns and themes of climate crisis have become a prevailing discourse in contemporary Canadian art, Ingram has always viewed ideas of our separateness from nature as false. Ingram's images place the human body, water, light and air in transition or transformation; all sensually and materially connected permeable parts of the same system. [20]
Lyndal Osborne: [In May of 1991], Edmonton print artists Karen Dugas, Liz Ingram, Walter Jule and Lyndal Osborne had the opportunity to visit Poland, a country poised on the brink of cultural and economic change. […] The initial invitation came from Izabella Gustowska, instructor at the Poznan Academy of Art (Izabella and Krystyna Piotrowska were artists in residence at the UofA Department of Art and Design in 1988). [11]
Izabella Gustowska: I remember how I worked at night in a large graphic studio in Edmonton, colouring Secret I, II, III red and listening, for several nights on end, to the same tape with W. A. Mozart’s music from the movie Amadeus and how from then on piano concerto in E-K482, has had the same effect on me as the mechanism of conditioning had on Pavlov’s dog. And how I need Mozart to become Pavlov’s dog from time to time. [12]
Lyndal Osborne: Then came an invitation from Witold Skulicz, director of the Polish International Triennial of Graphic Arts, to exhibit in Krakow's triennial celebrations. The exhibitions were only two weeks and 350km apart, permitting us to attend both. [13]
Nick Dobson: We were understandably delighted when four of Edmonton’s most successful and creative artists approached us about sponsoring the exhibition of their work in Krakow. [14]
Lyndal Osborne: SNAP applied for and received a grant from Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism to produce an illustrated catalogue with Polish and English text. Bernd Hildebrandt, at very short notice, designed an excellent catalogue entitled Inside Out: Four Artists from Edmonton. […] To compliment our show, […] Izabella presented a catalogue entitled Grafika, May '91. It contained illustrations and artists’ statements, and an English translation which had been painstakingly worked out with her English instructor. [15]
Izabella Gustowska: Works of the artists who are the leading figures of the artistic life at the Graphic Art Center of the Edmonton University can now be seen in Poznan. They are Lyndal Osbourne, who practices coloured lithography inspired by nature. […] Karen Dugas with self-figure and the world of destruction, in big-size aquatints based on light contrasts. Walter Jule with his big-size lithography and serigraphs inspired by Zen philosophy. […] Liz Ingram with coloured, big sized etchings and aquatints using photography. [16]
April Dean: In revisiting Liz Ingram's intaglio prints from the 1980s I am struck by a sense of timelessness and pulled into a visual depth that is at once very specific and also vast and molecular——an ineffable visual description of what it means to inhabit a human body and feel undeniably that you are also of the world outside that body. Building up rich and complex surfaces through the application of multiple print processes and multiple plates, these early intaglio works are the beginning of Ingram's decades long affinity for combining photographic and handmade marks. The combination and layering of images and marks produces a sense of urgency and perpetual material motion that is evident throughout her prolific body of work. When asked about these early works, Ingram described a vivid scene of crawling on her stomach through the bush with her camera——developing an enduring intimacy with the flora and fauna of her family lakeside retreat at Obed Lake, a place that has inspired and informed her artistic practice for over forty years. Ingram uses the mysterious and indexically indirect matrices of printmaking to evoke a critical interconnectedness of humans and the natural world we inhabit. [17]
Susan Menzies: Liz Ingram's prints look like some flashlit nocturnal encounter somewhere between a subterranean lake and an alchemist's lab, with stray bits of ravine floor, with pools of mercury or sulphurous cave walls. Is this a picture of the printmaker as crazed spelunker/mad scientist skulking with a camera through the underbrush of Lake Obed? Not quite. But Ingram is able to transform chance scraps of organic debris, light and the raw materials of printmaking into documents that suggest the elusive, spiritual and primal. What might easily become sentimental, clichéd or mystical to the point of flakiness, she handles with dexterity and the complexity of contradictions. Her prints illuminate, yet obscure, the incidents they record: their subject is not the twigs and eddies depicted but the flux of interaction and the forces of growth and decay. [18]
Liz Ingram: I started using my own body, and the ideas of the physical and the ephemeral. The elements that come from photography, from parts of my body, for me they are more like triggers. To have something that triggers something that’s familiar even if you don’t know what it is. A familiarity, and a recognition. And then that leads to feeling, I suppose, but without a specific name.
Marytka Kosinski: It is characteristic of Elizabeth Ingram that she does not point out a specific reality, but conveys a sense of the variability and fluctuation of life. She accomplishes this through her unique way of exploiting light. This light appears as a flash which shatters the darkness or reveals itself as colour. It is this light which brings forth the richness of the surface of matter and helps us celebrate the sensual materiality of life. […] Her images draw the viewer with an invitation to meditate in silence. Such a compelling invitation is of an immense value in our frantic world of rushing from nowhere to nowhere. [19]
April Dean: While ecological concerns and themes of climate crisis have become a prevailing discourse in contemporary Canadian art, Ingram has always viewed ideas of our separateness from nature as false. Ingram's images place the human body, water, light and air in transition or transformation; all sensually and materially connected permeable parts of the same system. [20]
Above: Karen Dugas, The awakening, photointaglio, lithography, 1997
Bente Roed: Coming from Ontario to Alberta, [Karen Dugas] found this new natural environment “sparse, barren, and cold” and the sealed buildings in Edmonton with their lack of fresh air and their regulated, controlled heat alien. She considers that many people resent having to live in environments controlled by others, where the air is impure; where temperature and light are not adjusted to needs.
Karen Dugas: I couldn't make direct contact with either the tall buildings, or the immense landscape devoid of tall trees, buildings, and old hills. […] My earlier work responded to my alienation from nature caused by the artificial surroundings. […] These images are strong social comments about the urban setting in which we live. [21]
Soren Nygard: While she was still a student, Dugas spent nights exploring the miles of service tunnels which circulate heat and power to the buildings on the University of Alberta campus. “During the winter, the whole place is kept alive by the tunnels—the machines,” she says, “but most people don't know they exist.” Prints from this period depict an oneiric world of eerie silence, where boilers and walls of pipes have been jostled into a translucent futurist dance by a jerky motion of the camera. [22]
Karen Dugas: My work for some years now, has dealt with identity and the environment, searching for a resolution. Shifting cultural landscapes and belief systems have caused havoc and challenge on the international stage. My work notices these changes. Two figures of the same likeness create a shadow or a light depending on their proximity, accepting gut, beauty, paradox, redemption, illumination, clarity and issues of mutual reliance. [23]
Madeleine Sauvé: Blues, greys, dark greens and stale yellows bring a density that stifle[s] the movement of each image. […] In many cases the pairs of figures appear to be holding up the space. The figures lean tentatively against the walls, surrendering to the space with folded bodies and hands that meet the wall flatly in defence. [24]
Jetske Sybesma: Her insistence on tactile experience, layering a dynamic profusion of brushstrokes with the photographic reality of figures and crumbling matter, evolves a complex inner response to concrete visual experience. These images transform the objective realm of human perception into the subjective realm of the mind. [25]
Soren Nygard: She is struggling through her work and the intense self-observation it demands to understand the conditioning that too often determines our feelings and responses. Central to her belief is the conviction that the culprit is not the evermore mechanically determined social environment but the self. For Dugas, the final blinding light of the apocalypse does not signal the destruction of the phenomenal world but the destruction of our illusions about it and, hence, about ourselves. [26]
Marytka Kosinski: This community of artists, in spite of their diversity, represent certain common features. All of them are involved in a constant search and experimentation with the medium, and are not interested in developing a particular style. Each of them in his/her own way is searching for excellence. Secondly, with few exceptions they work on prints of large size and third, most of them use manipulated photographic imagery extensively. They are all interested in spatial illusion often created by light or colour. Also, to varying degrees, they keep their work at a certain distance from their own personal emotions. [27]
Lawrence Smith: Contemporary Canadian prints […] express a dominant mood of complexity, puzzlement, half-lights, unease. Liz Ingram, Bonnie Sheckter, Walter Jule, Carl Heywood, and Karen Dugas are just a few such printmakers. The uncertainties of the expressive surface in the mixing of media seem precisely what was needed to enable this school of printmaking. [28]
Mary-Beth Laviolette: In addition, Edmonton print artists of the day have a preference for large-scale prints, for combining printmaking techniques, and, in some cases, for layering multiple images or fragmented elements that shift between the representational and the abstract, giving much of their work a sense that more than one concept permeates each piece. [29]
Bente Roed: It was possible to identify an ‘Edmonton look,’ generally characterized by use of abstract imagery, photomechanical processes, subdued colours, and the techniques of lithography and serigraphy, often combined. [30]
Gary Shaffer: The resulting prints often possess a sleekness or smoothness of surface associated with photographs rather than marks made by hand. [31]
Jim Simpson: Where the images are not ephemeral, laconic, or downright baffling, they are as often as not fragmentary, shadowy or ambiguous. At times the prevalent aloofness is tantalizing, […] most of the time it is irritating, not only because of the nagging feeling one has that all this virtuosity must have some meaning, but also because such inherently potent means should prove to be so elusive. [32]
Marc Siegner: We joke about this: it has to be dark, it’s kind of a mixture between Polish and Japanese, there’s some fuzzy object just by the horizon and there’s a shadow projected—you can’t quite make out what the object is.
Steven Dixon: Yeah, it’s like people come in working in full colour and leave working in grey. But I think that’s just because they’re sensitive to the environment, and let’s be honest: this isn’t a tropical place, right? It’s pretty hard to see colour out there. And I think you’re deeply effected by your environment, so what do you expect?
Marytka Kosinski: They are deeply affected by the particular environment in which they live, the vast space of the country, the cultural isolation and the emptiness. They are all responding to these circumstances consciously or subconsciously and these elements are reflected in their imagery as well in their cultural/social activities. [33]
April Dean: I mean, the ‘UofA school,’ I’d say in a larger way, is internationally recognized. Printmakers around the world can look at a print and say ‘that’s a UofA grad.’ And I think that’s changed exceptionally over time, but oh yeah, there’s an aesthetic.
Diane Shantz: I’m not convinced there are many changes in the students coming out of the university now as opposed to when I was in school. Then, as now, it has usually been a case of working singularly, of just wanting to get on with your own work in your own way. But I think that very isolation we have is both our greatest strength and weakness. I mean, young artists are getting ideas from looking at magazines instead of seeing the actual work. On the other hand, we may be more focused, not as caught up in the latest thing in Toronto, or wherever. Look at how isolation has worked for Quebec. But I do think we have to be more active, more political, to have more contact, be communicative. [34]
Bente Roed: Coming from Ontario to Alberta, [Karen Dugas] found this new natural environment “sparse, barren, and cold” and the sealed buildings in Edmonton with their lack of fresh air and their regulated, controlled heat alien. She considers that many people resent having to live in environments controlled by others, where the air is impure; where temperature and light are not adjusted to needs.
Karen Dugas: I couldn't make direct contact with either the tall buildings, or the immense landscape devoid of tall trees, buildings, and old hills. […] My earlier work responded to my alienation from nature caused by the artificial surroundings. […] These images are strong social comments about the urban setting in which we live. [21]
Soren Nygard: While she was still a student, Dugas spent nights exploring the miles of service tunnels which circulate heat and power to the buildings on the University of Alberta campus. “During the winter, the whole place is kept alive by the tunnels—the machines,” she says, “but most people don't know they exist.” Prints from this period depict an oneiric world of eerie silence, where boilers and walls of pipes have been jostled into a translucent futurist dance by a jerky motion of the camera. [22]
Karen Dugas: My work for some years now, has dealt with identity and the environment, searching for a resolution. Shifting cultural landscapes and belief systems have caused havoc and challenge on the international stage. My work notices these changes. Two figures of the same likeness create a shadow or a light depending on their proximity, accepting gut, beauty, paradox, redemption, illumination, clarity and issues of mutual reliance. [23]
Madeleine Sauvé: Blues, greys, dark greens and stale yellows bring a density that stifle[s] the movement of each image. […] In many cases the pairs of figures appear to be holding up the space. The figures lean tentatively against the walls, surrendering to the space with folded bodies and hands that meet the wall flatly in defence. [24]
Jetske Sybesma: Her insistence on tactile experience, layering a dynamic profusion of brushstrokes with the photographic reality of figures and crumbling matter, evolves a complex inner response to concrete visual experience. These images transform the objective realm of human perception into the subjective realm of the mind. [25]
Soren Nygard: She is struggling through her work and the intense self-observation it demands to understand the conditioning that too often determines our feelings and responses. Central to her belief is the conviction that the culprit is not the evermore mechanically determined social environment but the self. For Dugas, the final blinding light of the apocalypse does not signal the destruction of the phenomenal world but the destruction of our illusions about it and, hence, about ourselves. [26]
Marytka Kosinski: This community of artists, in spite of their diversity, represent certain common features. All of them are involved in a constant search and experimentation with the medium, and are not interested in developing a particular style. Each of them in his/her own way is searching for excellence. Secondly, with few exceptions they work on prints of large size and third, most of them use manipulated photographic imagery extensively. They are all interested in spatial illusion often created by light or colour. Also, to varying degrees, they keep their work at a certain distance from their own personal emotions. [27]
Lawrence Smith: Contemporary Canadian prints […] express a dominant mood of complexity, puzzlement, half-lights, unease. Liz Ingram, Bonnie Sheckter, Walter Jule, Carl Heywood, and Karen Dugas are just a few such printmakers. The uncertainties of the expressive surface in the mixing of media seem precisely what was needed to enable this school of printmaking. [28]
Mary-Beth Laviolette: In addition, Edmonton print artists of the day have a preference for large-scale prints, for combining printmaking techniques, and, in some cases, for layering multiple images or fragmented elements that shift between the representational and the abstract, giving much of their work a sense that more than one concept permeates each piece. [29]
Bente Roed: It was possible to identify an ‘Edmonton look,’ generally characterized by use of abstract imagery, photomechanical processes, subdued colours, and the techniques of lithography and serigraphy, often combined. [30]
Gary Shaffer: The resulting prints often possess a sleekness or smoothness of surface associated with photographs rather than marks made by hand. [31]
Jim Simpson: Where the images are not ephemeral, laconic, or downright baffling, they are as often as not fragmentary, shadowy or ambiguous. At times the prevalent aloofness is tantalizing, […] most of the time it is irritating, not only because of the nagging feeling one has that all this virtuosity must have some meaning, but also because such inherently potent means should prove to be so elusive. [32]
Marc Siegner: We joke about this: it has to be dark, it’s kind of a mixture between Polish and Japanese, there’s some fuzzy object just by the horizon and there’s a shadow projected—you can’t quite make out what the object is.
Steven Dixon: Yeah, it’s like people come in working in full colour and leave working in grey. But I think that’s just because they’re sensitive to the environment, and let’s be honest: this isn’t a tropical place, right? It’s pretty hard to see colour out there. And I think you’re deeply effected by your environment, so what do you expect?
Marytka Kosinski: They are deeply affected by the particular environment in which they live, the vast space of the country, the cultural isolation and the emptiness. They are all responding to these circumstances consciously or subconsciously and these elements are reflected in their imagery as well in their cultural/social activities. [33]
April Dean: I mean, the ‘UofA school,’ I’d say in a larger way, is internationally recognized. Printmakers around the world can look at a print and say ‘that’s a UofA grad.’ And I think that’s changed exceptionally over time, but oh yeah, there’s an aesthetic.
Diane Shantz: I’m not convinced there are many changes in the students coming out of the university now as opposed to when I was in school. Then, as now, it has usually been a case of working singularly, of just wanting to get on with your own work in your own way. But I think that very isolation we have is both our greatest strength and weakness. I mean, young artists are getting ideas from looking at magazines instead of seeing the actual work. On the other hand, we may be more focused, not as caught up in the latest thing in Toronto, or wherever. Look at how isolation has worked for Quebec. But I do think we have to be more active, more political, to have more contact, be communicative. [34]
Above: Sandra Rechico, Finishing Twice, drypoint, 1986
Above: Monica Tap, Behind the bus depot, Halifax, monotype, 1989
continue to part four...
***
Footnotes, part 3:
[1] Malgorzata Zurakowska, “Impressions under the sign of the Northern Lights,” in City of Northern Lights: Canadian Prints and the Edmonton School (Warsaw: Imprint Triennial, 2011) 4.
[2] Kathy Ruckman (?), “Mezzotint Workshop,” SNAP Newsletter, January/February 1988,1.
[3] Marlene MacCallum, “SNAP — 99 Prints Later,” SNAPLine, Winter 2014, 3.
[4] April Dean, “Executive Director’s Message,” SNAPLine, Winter 2014, 2.
[5] Deborah Root, “On Marlene MacCallum’s Shadow,” Impact Printmaking Journal, Autumn 2021, issue 4.
[6] Annik Foreman, “Bodies of water a human analogy,” Vue Weekly, April 3, 1997, 23.
[7] Deborah Root, “On Marlene MacCallum’s Shadow,” Impact Printmaking Journal, Autumn 2021, issue 4.
[8] Agnieszka Matejko, “Photographer Mines for Spare Inspiration,” Vue Weekly, June 1, 2006, 23.
[9] Steven Dixon, “Archaeological Images,” SNAP Newsletter, August 1995, 4.
[10] Agnieszka Matejko, “Photographer Mines for Spare Inspiration,” Vue Weekly, June 1, 2006, 23.
[11] Lyndal Osborne, “Poland: Three Weeks in Spring,” SNAP Newsletter, September 1991, 3.
[12] Izabella Gustowska, Izabella Gustowska: I Remember how… I Remember that… (Sopot: State Gallery of Art, 2015) 125.
[13] Lyndal Osborne, “Poland: Three Weeks in Spring,” SNAP Newsletter, September 1991, 3.
[14] Nick Dobson, in inside/out (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1991) 3.
[15] Lyndal Osborne, “Poland: Three Weeks in Spring,” SNAP Newsletter, September 1991, 3.
[16] Izabella Gustowska, statement from Grafika 91 reprinted in SNAP Newsletter, November 1991, 2.
[17] April Dean, entry for Liz Ingram in Rebellious, curated by Lindsey Sharman (Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2019) 57.
[18] Susan Menzies, “Liz Ingram,” SNAP Newsletter, August 1989, 1.
[19] Marytka Kosinski, “Elizabeth Ingram,” in 1989 Ljubljana Biennale 18 (Ljubljana: Ljublijana Biennale, 1989) 325.
[20] April Dean, entry for Liz Ingram in Rebellious, curated by Lindsey Sharman (Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2019) 57.
[21] Bente Roed, “What we see when we look,” Edmonton Bullet, vol. 4 no. 11, February 1, 1987, 9.
[22] Soren Nygard, “Karen Dugas in Ljubljana,” Print Voice: Precarious Balance (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990) 74.
[23] Karen Dugas, statement for Dualities, SNAP Gallery, 1999.
[24] Madeleine Sauvé, “Karen Dugas: Dualities,” seven.80, March 1999, 9.
[25] Jetske Sybesma, “Karen Dugas: Habits of Vision/Collages of Thought,” in inside/out (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1991) 22.
[26] Soren Nygard, “Karen Dugas in Ljubljana,” Print Voice: Precarious Balance (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990) 74.
[27] Marytka Kosinski, essay in Edmonton Prints: Brazil (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1988) unpaginated.
[28] Lawrence Smith, “Printmaking in Three Continents: A Question of Horizons,” in Lines of Site: Ideas, Forms and Materialities (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1999) 15-16.
[29] Mary-Beth Laviolette, An Alberta Art Chronicle (Canmore: Altitude Publishing, 2006), 180.
[30] Bente Roed Cochran, Contemporary Edmonton Prints (Edmonton: Edmonton Art Gallery, 1988) 9.
[31] Gary Shaffer, “Sightlines: International Symposium on Printmaking Presented in Canada,” California Printmaker, May 1998, 8.
[32] Jim Simpson, “Absence of cohesion afflicts two art shows,” Edmonton Journal, September 20, 1980, 18.
[33] Marytka Kosinski, essay in Edmonton Prints: Brazil (Edmonton: Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, 1988) unpaginated.
[34] Diane Shantz, quoted in Alan Kellogg, “Latitude 53 Offers Relief,” Edmonton Journal, January 10, 1991, C.