When you go to the St. Albert Public Library, the walls will distract you from the books. You can thank the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA) for that.
The AFA brings some of the province’s best art to Albertans in their very own communities. Along the River Road, the new show here, features paintings by Katherine Braid and photographs by Mark Freeman.
Shane Golby, the curator for the program in this area, explained it’s an important way of getting culture to reach the people.
“We have practically every library, every school, every small museum … on our mailing list,” he said, thrilled to have this program reach this city. “We love having new venues use the program and getting the artwork out to as many people as we can. It’s great that the St. Albert Public Library has come on board.”
According to the show’s preamble, the country’s history is tied to the flow of our waterways, with the North Saskatchewan River being part of the most important waterway system in western Canada. What the two artists have done is created a kind of trip through time along that river to look at what was and what has become at the same time.
Katherine Braid’s works are a series of acrylic washes on average sized masonite panels. Starting from copies of archival photographs of pioneers and other scenes of the old west, she then painted over the original images to create a kind of false authenticity, like what colourized black and white movies look like. The scenes themselves are fascinating but the technique quickly proves itself to be repetitive and draws more interest away from the content. They reminded me of little murals and maybe they would have done much better in grand scale as actual murals on the sides of buildings.
Mark Freeman’s photographs, on the other hand, are really intriguing, thoughtful and thought provoking stories with rich visuals. Everyone Gets Their Hands Dirty in this Town shows a worker’s glove sitting in a pool swirled with the soft rainbows of a gasoline spill. Within a Musket Shot> shows the Fort Augustus and Edmonton House monument at the mouth of the Sturgeon River. Sounds like a great heritage moment except that some kind of oil refinery features prominently in the background. Freeman’s modern story of the river is more complex and well worth the treasure hunt around the library to find. There are maps available at the help desks if needed. Sadly, there isn’t enough wall space so four pieces didn’t even make it up, and one of Freeman’s photos ended up behind the coffee machine on the second floor — not exactly a prime viewing location.
