Summer exhibition of emerging visual artists

Everybody attending a visual arts exhibition interprets the works in different ways, and half the fun comes from comparing notes.

In a first of its kind, the Art Gallery of St. Albert’s Art Rental and Sales Gallery is building an exhibit of more than 15 emerging artists from the greater regional area.

That translates into 51 diverse two-dimensional pieces created from assorted materials such as digital drawing, spray painting, hand-pulled prints and more traditional oil and watercolours.

The visual arts exhibition runs July 6 to Aug. 19.

“At any given time, the Art Rental and Sales Gallery represents about 40 local and regional artists and that’s about 250 works. But our space is limited,” said Pam Gendron, Rental and Sales Gallery associate and exhibit curator.

“We wanted to diversify and look at emerging artists and present different definitions, different people and different ways of looking at things.”

The price point for the new pieces range from Carly Greene’s $100 Mind Your Step silkscreen to Gabriel Esteban Molina’s $2,000 Untitled V, a digital print on aluminum.

“Gabriel Esteban Molina sells very well in the United Kingdom, but he’s not known here. His digital prints on aluminum play with pixels. His abstract images confuse the eye into seeing something they haven’t seen before,” Gendron noted.

Mandy Gibb, instead, focuses more on the duality between man and nature. She notes the lack of balance between the two in an oil on Mylar titled Mayerthorpe Bridge Fire and a mixed media of Bikini Atoll, an American nuclear testing site.

Every single artist sees the world differently. For instance, St. Albert’s Rhonda Vickers’ wonderful watercolours of rockscapes are serene solitudes in bold colours.

Kaida Kobylka’s oils use photography and abstraction to portray strangeness and inconsistency with memory and nostalgia, whereas St. Albert artist Melanie Liles’ copperleaf pieces evoke “a visceral reaction to pieces,” said Gendron.

Robyn Hamel’s copperplate etchings are motivated by the landscape of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) while Krista Hamilton’s mixed media inspirations are drawn from Edmonton’s University of Alberta Farm and the Saskatchewan River Valley.

Maril Murray uses her art to do more than beautify and educate. She donates half her proceeds to the food bank.

“She’s very philanthropic, just like her approach to art. It’s about surface and colour. She makes beauty and shares it with people in an incredible way.”

Every work hanging on the gallery walls is for sale. Unlike traditional gallery exhibits where sold pieces are left on the wall until the exhibition is complete, a buyer can walk away with a new work of art immediately.

“If you want it, I will take it off the wall and wrap it up right there.”

On the Thursday opening night, art patrons will also have the opportunity to vote for their favourite artist.

The opening night reception runs from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.