The Works Art and Design Festival returns for its 40th anniversary
For the next 11 days, more than 100 artists will transform indoor and outdoor spaces around Edmonton into galleries as a celebration of design and creativity.
Each artist will create vibrant, colourful and interactive art exhibits that will be on display at Churchill Square and surrounding areas.
'You're going to see a lot of tree sculptures, some flower sculptures, some garden pieces and a lot of very nature-influenced work,' said Amber Rooke, the festival's executive artistic director.
The festival has partnered with more than 18 galleries, venues and events including the Ortona Diaspora group exhibition, Co*Lab and SNAP.
This year features returning artwork and the addition of 13 new projects. Exhibits are intended to engage people's senses, including sight, sound and smell.
The festival will also host food and art venders, exhibitions of all sizes, interactive workshops and live music performances.
The event is free and it runs until Canada Day.
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CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
To capture the ups and downs of motherhood, this artist makes a self-portrait every day
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Jennex says as soon as she showed some of the paintings to fellow artist Meghan Macdonald, the small works on paper became something bigger, and the proverbial lock on her journal was blown off completely. "I think that something I have always admired about Alice is that she is really great at maintaining some kind of practice that feeds her art practice," says Macdonald. "When I first met Alice, she was really quite disciplined at keeping a journal every day, making these observations about herself and the world around her that I think was important to her work as an artist and as a painter." Macdonald adds that she liked the work so much that she encouraged Jennex to mount the work as an exhibition. What she found most interesting was how it explored the intersection of Jennex's art practice and her parenting, "and how at this stage," Macdonald says,"these two aspects of her identity are really bleeding together." 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"What she chose to share is this glimpse into that daily labor and the experiences that she's having in motherhood, which are at times very joyful, but there's also fears and there's sorrows too," she says. She adds that the works in Chromatic States feel, to her, like Jennex working out a way to both adapt to motherhood while also retaining important parts of her old self. "I don't know if this is how she feels," Macdonald says, "but I see it as a way to keep a strong hold on herself — who [Jennex] is, who she was before children — and bringing that self into her new life as a mother, while so many elements of herself and things around her are changing." While time and material constraints — using minimal supplies so they'd be in easy reach while managing her children's needs — created guardrails around Jennex's project, it's a classic case of constraints forcing creativity. "Motherhood is providing the structure for this work… I need a structure, and that structure is really metaphorical in resembling life as a parent," she says. "There's just not all the options available to me right now, and it makes me be very particular and specific and work within that routine." Though the point, initially, was for Jennex to keep track of herself and her life in the midst of the busy-ness of raising a family, the exhibition turns the personal into the universal. Jennex says that she wants to challenge the idea of mothers as "stoic and natural at nurturing" and instead depict the aspects of motherhood that moms are reluctant to talk about. "You're like, 'Whoa, where's like, the raw, real, gritty, moments?' that I think are really there but we feel like we're going to be judged, so we don't want to share them." She says that ultimately, she hopes people "can connect to that raw emotion," and that while she may be the portrait subject, the show is "not meant to just be about myself," but rather about the experience of motherhood broadly. "I hope it might just help someone else feel seen or acknowledge a struggle or something they've met and worked through," she says.
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