As a visual artist of various stripes, Jenn Poburan has had her work in galleries and other public places. She recently did an art installation to promote the brand launch of the Ice District around the new downtown arena.
As a visual artist of various stripes, Jenn Poburan has had her work in galleries and other public places. She recently did an art installation to promote the brand launch of the Ice District around the new downtown arena.
Now, everyone can admire her supercalifragilistic art on the cover of the SupercaliFRINGEalistic guide for this year's Fringe Festival. She had done some work with the festival organizers last year and was invited to submit a design.
“That was a first!” she enthused. “I loved the theme and I've always loved Mary Poppins. It was a really fun little thing to apply for.”
The illustrative image shows a cartoony depiction of the magical nanny's be-feathered hat under the purple-y ribs of her glorious umbrella.
Poburan will also be doing some street and sidewalk chalk art to decorate the Fringe site during the theatrical festival. If you make it down there then you might just find yourself stepping on some of her most recent works.
“Chalk art has picked up for me, strangely enough,” she ended, noting her recent work with Edmonton's CITYlab earlier this summer. Her event, CITYchalk, decorated Centennial Plaza behind the Stanley A. Milner library downtown while engaging passersby in an open dialogue about how to enliven public spaces.
“I ended up doing an ‘Activate the City' kind of mural that incorporated some of the cool things that were done in Edmonton over the past year, like Crashed Ice and different festivals.”
The Fringe guide is $10 and can be purchased at participating Mac's Convenience Stores, Second Cup and Chapters-Indigo bookstores around Edmonton. There are three such locations in St. Albert. They are listed at www.fringetheatre.ca/program_guide_locations.php.
If you missed last week's ArtWalk event, there's still plenty of opportunity to check out all of the great art that will remain on display until the end of the month.
Vinyl Rock Café, for one, is featuring talented wood carver Russ Allen while Elevate Activewear will have the paintings of Québec artist Mali Lapointe on display. The 27-year-old artist now living in Edmonton creates colourful and heavily-contrasted portraits that can bear various interpretations depending on the viewer.
Meanwhile, down at the St. Albert Public Library, there's a TREX lurking about in the form of a Traveling Exhibit – hence the acronym TREX – thanks to the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
A Room with a View features genre paintings and NaÄŹve Art by a number of Alberta artists. TREX manager and curator Shane Golby explained in the program guide that rooms in art allow artists to express their own particular style and view.
“Serving as settings for narrative action, metaphors for psychological states, nostalgic representations, or exercises in mathematical precision and artistic proficiency, the representation of interior spaces, and the activities that occur in those spaces, has inspired artists throughout the ages,” he writes.
While many of the works can be seen as mundane, the objective is to highlight the everyday activities of regular people, demonstrating the joys and struggles of existence.
Artists represented by the exhibit include Hazel Litzgus, Maxwell Bates, Euphemia McNaught, Arpad Csanyi, Paul Murasko, and Doris Zaharichuk, among numerous others.
There is also an exhibit from the members of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. These handmade books challenge viewers to think outside of the box of what a book is and can be.
Further down the hallway still in St. Albert Place, the Musée Héritage Museum has a joint show by Peter Ivens and St. Albert's own Barbara Shore as well.
