These are exciting times for all of the members of the Visual Arts Studio Association of St. Albert. They have all finally settled into their studios, had a few ArtWalk events and generally just been lapping up the attention and enjoying their new space.

Now, it’s time for the grand opening to let everybody celebrate and what better time than during an open house on the occasion of Alberta’s Culture Days.

Next weekend, the 60-plus members of VASA are inviting everyone to stop by and check out what they’ve been up to.

Carla Beerens is certainly thrilled about the opportunity, even if it means hundreds of people tromping through her personal space.

“It’s not too bad. There’s a little bit of trepidation, but having done all of the ArtWalks over the summer, we’re getting a little more comfortable with being inundated with people,” she remarked with a laugh.

One doesn’t have to stretch the memory much to remember a few months back at the old Studio Gallery location on Perron Street. Show openings, albeit popular, could never fit many visitors in at the same time. Beerens boasts that their shows now can pull in crowds of hundreds.

“We figured that for our last ArtWalk we must have had 400 people through, and we maybe had four before.”

On such a special occasion as this grand opening, she admitted that it’s all she or any other artist can do to prepare. She doesn’t have anything special in mind, just to be there and be ready for the deluge of guests.

“We have so much going on that there’s not much we can do that we can put on aside from that, especially on Saturday,” she explained, referring to the guest speakers, presentations and demonstrations on the itinerary. “I think most of us are just planning to get through it.”

From Open House to Story House

Samantha Williams-Chapelsky is one of the newer members of VASA and her Culture Days weekend is going to be even busier, thanks to her Story House show at the gallery in the Stanley Milner Library in downtown Edmonton.

“They’re a series of clay sculptures. I draw pictures in the heads of these imaginative little houses, whether they have little clay tiles or some weird markings on the side … I’m basically taking my imagination as a starting point for someone else’s imagination to take off.”

Each house comes with a little black notebook where viewers can write their own stories about the house inside. These pieces have travelled around to different shows over the last year, accumulating a lot of creativity from young and old along the way.

“They all have a nice book full of adults’ and children’s stories, I think age 80 was the oldest one I looked at, and age four was one of the youngest.”

For the last weekend of her month-long exhibit, she will be guiding an interactive mural where members of the public can add their names to a 1.5 metre by 2.1 metre painting of the city of Edmonton’s skyline (4 to 8 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 28). Then on Saturday she will be giving an artist talk on her story house works at the library (2 to 3 p.m. on Sept. 29).

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