Explore the next dimensions

There’s more than meets the eye in the new exhibit at the Visual Arts Studio Association. Rick Rogers and Pam Baergen have teamed up to create works that play with textures and a noticeable lack of a palette.

The first thing that the viewer will discover while attending Textural Dimensions is that much of the work is as white as an Alberta front lawn during an October snowstorm.

But there’s a lot of interesting art going on. Rick Rogers seems to be elaborating on a theme of geometric patterns supplemented by mixed media objects. Consider it conceptual art if you will with its unique designs and perhaps even more unique materials.

He explained that several of the pieces include crystals grown on hardware cloth using a super-saturated solution while many others include acrylic that has been cast in silicon or that has been poured over or around media like beads, fibres, textiles, and paper.

“The manufacturing of textural elements was often as exciting as creating compositions with them,” he said.

“Over the past couple of years, texture has been my muse! I have become more and more intrigued by the ability of texture to evoke a feeling, and to provide compelling contrasts, even within monochromatic works.”

Baergen, for her part, seems to be attempting her version of an artistic photo album. She calls them mixed media drawings, which seems to give short shrift to a full description. They’re certainly far more technical and meticulous than that, however.

“There’s a collage in the background and I’ve taken old paper tole planes,” she began, referring to an artform I hadn’t heard of. I realized that I was familiar with it once she offered a full explanation of the process of cutting out repetitions of a single image and then gluing them in layers.

“It was popular in the ’80s,” she admitted.

It’s sometimes called three-dimensional decoupage but those who practice it are more apt to call it frustratingly slow and patience-testingly detail oriented. It takes time. Lots of time. It also takes the ability to withstand the forces of enthusiasm and intuition that artists are known to rely on.

More than all that, it takes the kind of steady hands that would surely impress any astronaut. Each work must be painstakingly cut with scissors, razor blade or very sharp knife to the ultimate precision of the image’s outline.

And then, the artist does it again. And again. The same image is cut out repeatedly and exactingly, and then all of those images, sometimes 20 or more, are layered one of top of the other and glued together to give a three-dimensional effect. That is something that you must see for yourself.