The New Alchemists
Catherine Burgess and Blair Brennan
Curated by Dr. Caterina Pizanias

Amidst the socio-politically uncertain times that we live in and the proliferation of free floating images, words, and objects provided by fractured identities and deconstructed discourses of the art world, The New Alchemists exhibit seeks to reassert the right of the artist to make art that is ambiguous – based on memories, thought systems, and personal stories of everyday life. It showcases two senior Edmonton artists, Blair Brennan and Catherine Burgess, whose idiosyncratic approach to sculpture situates them at the forefront of art production for the 21st century.

• Curatorial Essay by Dr. Caterina Pizanias
• Blair Brennan, Artist Statemant
• Catherine Burgess, Artist Statemant

Exhibition date: November 22 to December 22, 2007

Dr. Caterina Pizanias will present a curator’s talk on Saturday, November 24, 1pm in the Gallery

Catherine Burgess

My sculpture uses the physical language of things to arrive at form and message. The process involved in its making is inseparable from its content.

Like most sculptors I know, I’m a scavenger, constantly looking for and gathering bits and pieces, old or new, things that attract me with their stored histories, or things I feel compelled to fabricate in response to images that float through my mind. There is a kind of alchemy already at work here. I’m unsure how meaning and form actually come together but I‘m aware that meaning inhabits form. Meaning is already present in the objects I search for, find, construct, reclaim, or modify.

This process of accumulation is my first action and is followed by a period of visual digestion (usually of a peripheral nature) in the studio. Relationships between and among these objects transpire in the background of my awareness. The second action involves creating new relationships by physically arranging these things. I look for specific proximities that lock in tensions to produce a communication or meaning. I find this act of recognition to be the most creative part of my process and works best when I don’t let myself think about the result.

I have found that thinking gets in the way of creating. My work is not theory-based. It is entirely experiential on a sub-conscious level. For me the thinking comes after the making when I’m trying to identify or interpret the significance of the relationships I’ve brought together. At this time I discern implication, which results in title choices, but admit that there must always be additional interpretations.

My process is dependant on my belief in the veneration of the sub-conscious. I find it contradictory that it has been labeled the sub-conscious when in fact I consider it to be my highest self and above my conscious brain activity. I know that my sub-conscious is my truth, incapable of falseness, and to allow it to emerge freely in the work is my intent. I believe the viewer can enter the work if they choose, carrying their own set of reference points, because sub-conscious meaning and symbolism share a collective or universal language, as well as a deeply personal one.

Biography
Catherine Burgess was born in Alberta in 1953. She has lived and made sculpture in Edmonton since graduating from the University of Alberta in 1975. During this time she has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions and been included in over sixty group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Great Britain. Her work is represented in twenty-five public collections across Canada.

Four Ways to be Round, 2007, Photo: Robert van Schalk

Where in the World, 2007, Photo: Robert van Schalk

Blair Brennan
What Must Be Done
(A makeshift statement)

It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
– Jorge Luis Borges; The prologue to El Otro, El Mismo.

Words are magic and words are tools. My father told me to use the right tool for the right job and a mot juste is a word-tool so right for the job that it transforms a sentence into an invocation. Despite Dad's advice, I have hammered nails with a wrench, I’ve whittled down words to shim up big ideas, and broken blades when a knife became an impromptu pry bar or screwdriver. I’ve hammered words into ill fitting spaces and have found poetry in the most unlikely places.

We will need dark tools and drop forged words because there is work to be done. We must take “pen in hand, as a sore shouldered and world weary field-man might take a scythe in hand, going forth with naught but the doomful vow of what must be done”, as author Nick Tosches suggests of Dante (in his novel “In the Hand of Dante”). Here are your tasks in order: Roll up your sleeves, sharpen the knives, fill the gas can, compile and distribute a new dictionary. Put on your coveralls and work gloves, heat the water, check the battery and radiator, learn to read Latin, and bundle those cut branches with old telephone cords. Heat the irons, sweep the floor, heal the lame and the blind, sharpen sticks, and straighten bent nails. Chop wood, write a poem, change a light bulb, cast a spell, and make lunch. Empty the rain barrel, work on a Holy Ghost building, cut the lawn, invent a noun resistant language, and light a candle. Dig a hole, get a tattoo, bring the dead back to life, recycle the newspapers or cut them up and rearrange the words. Kill and butcher a cow, tan the hide, and write something on that parchment that’s worth killing a cow for. Get your tools together and sort them for the work to be done, finish on time, save string, pray, and have the typewriter serviced.

Jackson Pollock said, “I am nature”. I'm not nature but I know what must be done when it gets in the way, and these are the tools I’ll need.

Blair Brennan
Fall 2007 

Biography
Blair Brennan was born, raised and, in all likelihood, will die in Edmonton. This is not some melancholic observation. It is merely a statement of fact and, simultaneously, an assertion of the importance of these factors on Brennan’s art work.

X Marks, 2003, Photo: Mark Freeman

Baiting Jonah, Trapping Cain, Haunting Ahab, 2007 (Detail)
Photo: Mark Freeman

gallery   Beth Pederson    Tony Baker