Emerging artists become legacy in final visual arts certificate gallery show

The Emerging Practices exhibit opened at the FAB gallery on Thursday June 22, showcasing the works of artists who’ve just graduated from the 2023 class of the visual arts certificate. The visual arts certificate is celebrating its final year being offered by online and continuing education, previously known as the faculty of extension. The students featured in the exhibition will be the last to participate in this program.

Fourteen artists have filled the gallery with pieces of traditional artistic subjects, namely still life and landscapes. However, the artists uniquely push the boundaries of classic painting practices as they experiment with mediums and play with stylistic choices.

Opening night on June 22 was bustling, filled with the excited faces and voices of proud friends and family. The atmosphere was a direct hint to the themes of warmth, memory, and connection in the artist’s works.

Depicting nostalgia, familiarity, and home

The featured artists’ practices might be emerging and unique, but their themes are familiar and comforting. Memory and childhood are explored in a variety of artistic genres, including landscapes, florals, and portraits that connect with the artists’ personal lives.

Featured artists Nicole Bedard and Patty Taverner play with the theme of universal familiarity. This can be seen in their painterly, dream-like brushstrokes that create vibrant scenes of florals and domestic spaces. Taverner depicts a scene of a flower vase on a kitchen table titled Last Days of Summer — a piece that evokes the exact feeling that the title suggests.

While Di Lu and Laura Querengesser portray less personal images of home, they still evoke familiarity and comfort. Their paintings of landscapes are reminiscent of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, lakes, and forests that many Albertan viewers know well.

Art across styles and mediums

Kevin Lander brings a unique addition to the paint-based mediums in this showing, featuring his screenprinting pieces Abstract Monoprint and Summer Nights. These playful works use vibrant colours in an impressionistic manner in both an abstract and a landscape scene, exemplifying Lander’s versatility.

Other artists, like Taverner in Last Days of Summer and Paula Kjosness in her piece Trailblazers, experiment with a multitude of mediums. They mix oil and acrylic paint with ink, water-colour, and photography in their work. This graduating class demonstrates that they know how to test limits, branching out to all corners of artistic genres and mediums while strengthening their practices in the process.

You can feel the effort and the care  from the artists in their work. Everyone brings their own background and experiences to their creative process. While they may be titled as “emergent,” this exhibition proves that they are adept and refined.

Adjacent to this exhibition, another display is honouring the past staff from the faculty of extension on the bottom floor of the FAB gallery. You can check out both the past and present artists from this program until July 15.