The exhibition currently on at the Harcourt House Gallery in downtown Edmonton is unusual for a few interesting reasons. First, all of the art in Becoming – including paintings, sketches and sculptures – features one person, Andrea Owen Lewis. The model is well known to several prominent local artists for her versatility, her expressiveness and her wholehearted enthusiasm for the artistic process and her role in it.
Another reason for why the show is unusual is that the model was quite pregnant during her poses.
For many models, a pregnancy might mean the end of a career. For Lewis, it opened up a rare and new opportunity to have some of her favourite collaborators preserve her nine-month transition into motherhood through the timelessness of art.
One of those fond and frequent collaborators is Sharon Moore-Foster. She gave high praise to Lewis for seizing that opportunity, and letting her be involved.
“Working with Andrea is always, always a great experience,” she began. “She’s an extremely warm and generous person. She often gets into difficult poses knowing that she has to maintain them for three hours. She actually deliberately will do this for you because she wants to facilitate the artistic experience.”
It is easy to see what Moore-Foster is talking about. The works run the gamut of styles, expressions and mediums, and it’s a dense show. The walls and podiums are packed with pregnant Andreas. Edmonton audiences are notoriously prudish, making it difficult enough to find any show that contains nude models. Here, the show is nothing but nudes, another tribute to Lewis.
That’s another good reason why Becoming is unusual: the model curated the show herself. That is practically unheard of in art circles.
Moore-Foster offers her thoughts. In her mind, the model might be the best person for the job because of the important perspective that only she can have.
“Andrea’s got a ‘heads up’ about life. We all have gifts. I suspect her gift is through modelling … and mentoring. She sees the work brewing and she facilitates the works through her body and her energy, at the same time she sees the artists drawing her and sculpting her. She can see all those viewpoints, all those different individual statements, all of the ways people were processing the information of the gift she was giving.”
One of the gifts that Lewis gave her this time was a renewed appreciation for Moore-Foster’s own experiences in motherhood.
“It brought me to a space that I recognized and enjoyed in my own pregnancy. There was an imprint in my body for what she was going through. That imprint in the artist’s soul keeps coming forward at different times. Your core – the things that are core to you that support all the things you love in life which make their way into your art – it brought me back to that kind of space that I had not sat in for awhile.”
Becoming runs until Saturday at the Harcourt House Gallery on the third floor at 10215 112 Street. Call 780-426-4180 or visit www.harcourthouse.ab.ca for more information.
