Jill Stanton, SUPERGARDEN, 2024. Photograph by Jacob Leblanc.

How can visual art activate possibilities for public engagement within the urban environment?  Jill Stanton’s Supergarden explores these possibilities with her larger-than-life art installations that have populated Churchill Square during this year’s The Works Art and Design Festival.   

Stanton is known for her site-specific works that incorporate both abstract and representative elements to generate new visual narratives and reflect the community, environment, and city in meaningful ways.  Her contribution to this year’s festival may remind people of Jonathan Monfries’ installation Canopy, which has appeared in The Works festival for the last two years. Combining functionality with aesthetics, his wooden structures revitalize public space by facilitating opportunities for people to congregate and converse with each other.   

Similarly, Stanton transforms downtown Edmonton’s urban environment by envisioning it as a positive space for public use, reflection, and enjoyment.  However, Stanton’s work differs from Monfries’ as her installations’ visual impact arises, in significant part, from their exaggeration of scale and proliferation of high contrast colour combinations.  Large flowers or plants such as the ones represented in Supergarden do not exist in reality, nor are they necessarily as colourful as those portrayed in her installation.  Nevertheless, these works are suitably evocative of real plants, such that people can experience the works in ways that are the most meaningful for them.  To facilitate people’s engagement, Stanton avoids adding many intricate details to the plants that she portrays and opts, instead, for a more suggestive style that leaves them open to people’s own interpretations and imaginations.  Including bold, clean lines as well as different gradations of colour, the works’ large scale also endows them with a fantasy-like quality, due to the visual contrast between their size and the people who view them.  This may peak people’s interest and allow them to transport themselves, albeit momentarily, into a different psychological space. 

Stanton’s choices of colour further contribute to each work’s impact.  By incorporating colours from different sides of the “colour wheel,” she creates high contrast colour combinations that will draw greater public attention and prompt people to take a second look.  For example, two of her installations include the complementary colours of orange and blue and purple and yellow. In stark contrast to the grey concrete of Churchill Square, these brightly painted sculptures encompass a range of different colours across the colour spectrum, which enliven and provide some much-needed vibrancy to the downtown core.  In doing so, they may also prompt people to consider the possibilities for building public spaces that are more people-centric and less disconnected from the natural environment. 

José Luis Torres, Trojan Horse, 2024. Photograph by Au7umn.

An integral part of a thriving capitalist economy is its reliance on the continual production, circulation, and consumption of goods.  Yet, such consumption depends on people who have the means to pay for these goods as well as for the goods’ planned obsolescence, which incentivizes and makes it necessary for people to purchase more.  Quebec-based artist José Luis Torres explores these types of issues in an unconventional manner with his contribution Trojan Horse to this year’s The Works Art and Design Festival.  

People may recall Torres’ work site-specific installations Canopy (2016) and Tangible (2019), both of which appeared in previous years of The Works festival.  Those installations are characterized by their colourfulness and incorporation of common objects, which make them more accessible for people to experience.   Similarly, Torres’ latest work Trojan Horse takes recognizable, everyday objects that people may not expect to find in art and transforming them into a colourful public spectacle.  Apart from the accompanying signage, Trojan Horse does not embody any conventional markers that would indicate it is a work of art, so people may walk by or through it initially without realizing what they are looking at.  At the same time, the installation is eye-catching due to its unlikely combination of recognizable items from people’s everyday contexts.   

With two grey shipping containers situated parallel to each other on the ground, two additional shipping containers sit on top of them and are angled upwards diagonally towards the sky, with their top ends open.  Emerging from these containers’ open ends is a proliferation of common objects, which almost appear as if they are spewing out of the two crates with great abandon.  Mimicking an archway, these items are bound together into a colourful arc that may remind one of a rainbow.  The objects are predominantly plastic in nature and the majority of them consist of chairs of various colours.  Other items in the installation include a ladder, a couple of boats, a portable basketball hoop, and yellow wooden planks.  

Chairs are one of the most ordinary and ubiquitous of domestic objects, while shipping containers are a recognizable object that symbolizes a capitalist economy that depends on the mass circulation of commodities to consumers around the world.  In a playful and parodic fashion, the sheer number of chairs and other objects in his installation accentuates the excessiveness of capitalist-driven production, pervasiveness of consumption, and people’s complicity with this economic system through their actions.  However, Torres conveys ideas such as these without being didactic.  By extricating items from the usual contexts in which they appear and combining them together unexpectedly, Torres makes his installation more approachable by reconstituting these objects in a playful and parodic fashion within a highly visible public space.  In doing so, Torres invites people to reflect on their relationships with the objects contained within the installation, through which they can draw their own conclusions about it.  

Colleen Ulliac’s There Are No Words exhibition at Edmonton City Hall. Photograph by Jacob Leblanc.

Collage creation has the potential to facilitate freeform and spontaneous explorations of imagery without being constrained by particular aesthetic techniques or conventions, through which serendipitous discoveries of meaning can emerge.  Challenging people's preconceptions and assumptions around various ideas, Colleen Ulliac’s There Are No Words encourages people to question what they see and make sense of the world around them in new ways. 

The impact of Ulliac’s eye-catching collages arises from her provocative juxtaposition of images from unexpected thematic and visual contexts, many of which people may not necessarily make connections among or associate with their day-to-day lives.  The World is one particularly striking collage that exemplifies her aesthetic approach in her other works.  Amidst images of eyes and hands, the work contains images that are suggestive of the built and natural environments.  These include a night sky with a brightly-lit moon, a stormy sky with lightning, butterflies and other insects, purple flowers, an office tower, and what appears to be an apartment building undergoing demolition.  Taken together, these seemingly disparate elements are artfully arranged to create a unified collage that features a man with a mask at the centre while all the other images swirl around him, as if he is rising above the chaos and directing all that is happening, much like a conductor leading a symphony orchestra.  

Similarly striking juxtapositions of images appear in Sage and Dreamer, both of which connote impressions of the mythological, spiritual, and material.  Set against a backdrop of outer space and the earth, Sage features a wolf’s head that is rising out of a fire and is surrounded by silver balls and rockets blasting off into space.  In Dreamer, a deer is depicted among a layered background of colours that include the night sky, among which are images of candles, lightning, and what appear to be fundus photographs.  Other works such as Idol, Angel I, and Angel II raise questions around people’s expectations about idols and angels and their significance to our lives. 

Paradoxically, amidst the seemingly chaotic arrangement of imagery that characterizes each collage work, Ulliac’s selection and placement of these images evoke a sense of visual unity through her adept choice of colours, shapes, and styles.  Her works will stimulate ways of thinking that people may have never considered before and, in doing so, open up new possibilities for connections and meanings. 

Onlookers with Jason Fielding’s Hidden Realms exhibition at Edmonton City Hall, 2024. Photograph by Jacob LeBlanc.

The name of Jason Fielding’s exhibition, Hidden Realms, may imply the presence of unseen realities of which people are unaware, but that could be accessed by those who keep their minds open.  Deriving inspiration from elements within natural and human environments, Fielding’s graphite drawings reveal visually evocative, abstract landscapes that explore the interrelated themes of human society, nature, and industry.  

Avoiding hyper-realism, Fielding encourages people to interpret and ascribe their own meanings, based on how they perceive the drawings and what they bring to them from their own experiences.  For example, his work Planned Obsolescence depicts a limitless volume of rectangular objects that have been consigned to the trash.  Fielding’s rendering of these objects includes a minimal amount of detail, which makes them sufficiently ambiguous and not readily identifiable.  Upon closer inspection, some people may conclude that the drawing is representing discarded cell phones and smart phones, which are being rendered obsolete continually due to the ongoing production of new and more sophisticated models.  However, other people may interpret the drawing differently and identify the objects to be something else.  Regardless of what these objects are, this drawing’s representation of their sheer volume will stimulate reflection around the impact of human society on their surrounding environment and the extensiveness of waste that it generates. 

Fielding’s other works also explore the tenuous state of the natural environment and its troubled relationship with human society.  Pond depicts an aperture through which viewers can gaze upon a slice of nature, which visually accentuates the growing separation between humans and nature.  In this work, nature is also portrayed as an entity under threat, with its layered imposition of images suggestive of clouds, grass, and fire.  In Papillon, nature is disrupted by industrial development, with images suggestive of a butterfly’s wings being punctuated violently by a stake of wood that extends from one end of the drawing to the other as well as wood splinters that appear to burst forth from a black hole in the middle of its wings.  Shapeshifter conveys a more surreal atmosphere with its inclusion of bulbous and string-like elements that are suggestive of natural phenomena, but that have been warped or impeded by human development. 

The only colours in Fielding’s drawings are black, white, and varying gradations of grey, which connote an industrial-like atmosphere that appropriately complements the themes explored within them.  Taken as a whole, Hidden Realms encourages people to contemplate each drawing closely and consider their own relationships with the surrounding natural and built environments. 

Erika Germain, Detail of What Could This Ever Mean to You, Oil on canvas, 2021, 5’ x 5’. Don Wheaton Family YMCA, Edmonton AB. Photograph by Au7umn.

Upon initial viewing, what may strike people about Erika Germain’s Collected Translations is the expansive plethora of colours, lines, and objects that inhabit the coloured canvas of each work, which lack any conventional visual cues or signposts to guide people’s interpretations of them.  Instead, these works encourage people to approach them without preconceptions and to arrive at their own understandings about what they mean and how the images within each work relate to each other.  Prompting reflection, these works encourage open-ended articulations of meaning and points of significance that resonate with viewers. 

Erika Germain, Detail of Ever-Patterned Collapsing Grid, Oil on canvas, 2021, 6’ x 18’. Don Wheaton Family YMCA, Edmonton AB. Photograph by Au7umn.

Different layers of meaning emerge from Germain’s works, depending on whether each work is considered as one part of the entire series, as an individual entity with its own meanings, or as a collection of individual objects that occupy the same physical space.  The largest work in this exhibit is Ever-Patterned Collapsing Grid, a triptych consisting of three separate canvases that can be observed separately and together as a whole.  Its sheer enormity prevents one from viewing the whole work unless one were to step farther back; yet, doing so will cause the work’s finer details to become less distinct and meld into the background.  Closer inspection of specific areas within this painting, and others in this series, facilitates the emergence of new meanings among the shapes, lines, and colours when they are viewed in relation to each other. 

Erika Germain, Ever-Patterned Collapsing Grid, Oil on canvas, 2021, 6’ x 18’. Don Wheaton Family YMCA, Edmonton AB. Photograph by Au7umn.

The title of this series, Collected Translations, gestures towards the themes that Germain engages with.  She is interested in exploring how art can function as a form of visual translation and representation—evoking and embodying language in ways that extend beyond the confines of words, nurture new narratives of meaning, and open pathways for social connection.  Indeed, language can be regarded as a context-specific system of codified signs that become meaningful for people who subscribe to it and the shared sense of reality that it constructs.  Drawing upon textual sources for their inspiration, the “collected translations” in Germain’s works reimagine these in a visual manner and suggest possibilities for people to establish shared understandings and modes of connection, whereby the images themselves become a basis for language.  Although the act of translation may result in some loss or gap of understanding, it also opens possibilities for new meanings to emerge.