Two shows and one gallery lead to success

It might take a bit of effort to find the VAAA Gallery down a side street in downtown Edmonton. You likely won't get lost until you walk into the space itself on the third floor of the Harcourt House Arts Centre.

When you see the work on the walls, you might just lose yourself in thought.

The gallery just opened two new shows to a solid crowd on Thursday evening. Each exhibit is unique and distinct from the other but they both have a common effect: a meditative exploration of patterns somewhat based on nature.

It's easy to see the calm lakes and burbling brooks in Kathryn Manry's Water series but haven't you sometimes seen weird shapes and transcendental patterns in the rough randomness of the wild?

The Nature of Water is in Gallery B, the side room off the main area, Gallery A, which features Robert Dmytruk's Accumulated Perception. His works are like variations on a theme, several large and bright contour maps of an imaginary world. Each piece is festooned with some deft brushwork and symbols that recall the details in Jeff Holmwood's multicoloured blown glass pieces.

Dmytruk himself describes his style as "the joy of painting."

"That's the way I explore, the way I discover, the way I create … I don't approach painting with the end in mind. I explore and let things happen on the surface and react to them."

At first the viewer is uncertain how to look at them. Each comes across as a vibrant but jumbled grid, a loose affiliation of line and shape with nothing straight or easy to define. Soon thereafter the viewer has a sensation of being in an airplane flying over a cartoon landscape where the plots of land are marked off with waving roads and squiggly crops.

Dmytruk called this a critique on the human need to make straight lines out of a bumpy world just to understand it.

"What you see is my vision of the world, and by that I mean the way we order it, the way we control it. We control chaos. It's untamed and we try to tame it. I think it's essential for humans to have a sense of order to feel comfortable."

Water

That doesn't necessarily mean his series is uncomfortable but if comfort and relaxation are what you're looking for, Manry has it. Both artists have a good sense of energy but Manry takes the viewer to the world of refraction while urging us to ponder a natural resource.

Her numerous scenes take the viewer to places like a shoreline or peering over the side of a boat. She reveals details like how it's estimated that there are 1.3 billion litres of water on the planet and the United Nations says each person needs 50 litres every day but 40 per cent of the world's population doesn't have access.

That gives these compositions something concrete to bounce off. They are otherwise fair recreations and fluid abstractions, one that looks like an Alex Janvier piece melted into a puddle by Salvador Dali.

"The thing that connects the two [artists] is that they're both ardent observers," said gallery co-ordinator Sharon Moore-Foster. People could learn a lot about the practice of art from seeing end results like these, she said. To her, these shows are a teaching tool.

"When students are taking art and you try and let them know that, if you find something you're truly passionate about, then going deeper and deeper into the nature of it and the essence of it is a joyful ride. It's not homework."