Articles

Unique partnership takes art to new heights
Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald
Published: Sunday, March 02, 2008

An unprecedented collaboration between artists from the Canadian north and south took place this week in the prep studio of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art & Design.

Shuvinai Ashoona, a graphic artist from Cape Dorset, and John Noestheden, an artist from Regina who works in several mediums, are the first Inuit and non-Inuit artists to work together on a contemporary art project.

They met in Calgary this week to design a banner that will be displayed in Basel, Switzerland during Euro 2008, the European football championships, and Art Basel, Europe's leading art fair. Their six- by 103-metre banner will be part of the public art project, Stadthimmel or City Sky, which will appear above the streets of the Swiss city from May 20 to Aug. 17.

The artists were brought together by Wayne Baerwaldt, director/curator of programs at the Kerr Gallery, who was invited to recommend two Canadian artists to take part in the project by its organizer Klaus Littmann.

Although Ashoona and Noestheden were meeting for the first time, they liked each other immediately and quickly got down to work. Their poetic design for the banner integrates a landscape of summer berries and plants, duck eggs, rocks and multiple horizons, drawn by Ashoona, with a skyscape of celestial bodies that include stars, galaxies and a comet, conceived by Noestheden.

The landscape, which recalls the place where Ashoona camped and fished with her family in the summer months, is "made out of clouds and volcanic eruptions that used to happen around the old times far, far away," Ashoona says. "The clouds came down and turned into rocks.

"I thought of our outpost camp and what volcanic eruptions and earthquakes did to our areas there. We had our fun times there. I loved it there."

When she is drawing, Ashoona says she is thinking "mostly about the landscape I have been walking on or where I used to walk around, but not actually seeing them the way they are."

The celestial events in Noestheden's sky are enlarged from drawings by the 15th-century German astronomer Peter Appian and contemporary star guides for amateur astronomers.

"I have been learning how to to respond to Shuvinai's work," Noestheden said Wednesday. "That's a very challenging way to think about one's art work. So when she said that she was doing a landscape, it made total sense to me that my work would have to deal with the upper part of the landscape, which is what I do anyway. I deal with the universe and the stars and those natural phenomena.

"Shuvinai is working with the phenomena of landscape. She talks about the clouds that came down and became rocks, the volcanoes; she has several horizons and outcroppings. My phenomena deal with a different playfulness with the universe because I'm inventing stars. Just as Shuvinai is inventing landscapes from her memory, I'm inventing my shapes from star diagrams that I excavate from books; I play with them and I alter them through photomechanical processes."

Although the two artists have different backgrounds and styles, he said, "in the end we are both artists and though we each have a different approach, it turns out to be quite similar. What's happened, from my point of view, is that we've got this extraordinary, opulent, imaginary landscape/skyscape because even though I'm using found images, it's all invented."

The banner image will be printed in colour with an inkjet printer on a vinyl mesh material and suspended horizontally above the heads of pedestrians walking along Streitgasse, a short street that connects two main areas of Basel. Baerwaldt chose the location for the high volume of street traffic that will ensure visibility for the banner.

Two ACAD students will assist in preparing the digital image that will be sent to the printer.

"This is what the school should be about," says Baerwaldt, taking on experimental projects and showing students how artworks make it out into the real world.

ntousley@theherald.canwest.com