By Gilbert A. Bouchard

It’s been a long 11 days for the Works Visual Arts Festival artistic co-ordinator Ryan McCourt

For starters, to McCourt and all the hard-working festival staff and volunteers, the festival’s official run time is only the tiniest tip-of-the-iceberg.

For them, this one-of-a-kind visual arts event that ends today is a year-long organizational process capped by a massive pre-event push to get Churchill Square and seven exhibition sites ready for the umpteen thousand art fans who troop through the downtown to pay their annual respects to the plastic arts. (an estimated 25,ooo viewers will visit the Exhibit Pavilion alone.)

“There’s an amazing amount of work needed to be put in by the staff to turn an unused retail space into a polished display venue,” notes McCourt, alluding in part to the 60,000-square-foot Exhibit Pavilion in the second level of the old Eaton’s store in Edmonton Centre West.

You wouldn’t guess it from the finished product, but the space is an improvement on the fixture littered, ill-lit space they initially encountered. More than just a production challenge, the nine-venue Exhibit Pavilion represented several ground-breaking changes to how the 13-year-old even programs art into the core.

First, the large main exhibit space and a tighter array of six art district venues ringing the Churchill Square nexus, coupled with a slightly shorter timeframe, ushered in a tighter, more focused festival experience. (Well, mainly tighter. The Exhibit Pavilion will remain open until Aug. 15 to accommodate visitors here to see the World’s.)

Second, the Exhibition Pavilion represented a big leap in programming philosophy for the festival. Curators were invited from all over the province to design brand-new shows or import an existing show into the pavilion space. The Works ended up only directly programming one venue–emerging artist Tony Baker’s one-person painting show in the Edmonton Art Gallery–a show McCourt personally curated.

Necessitating a loss of curatorial control for the festival on the one hand, the move broadened the scope an artistic discourse of the festival disproportionally–a reality obvious to even the most casual visitor to even one of the large survey-based exhibits.

“By inviting these other curators on board we were able to extend our reach into the community–they were able to contact literally dozens and dozens of artists via those extended contacts,” continues McCourt.

The risk seems to have paid off for the festival. Not only have the disparate venues attracted healthy head-counts, the buzz around the venues is heartening. Particular favourites of mine included the historically satisfying “Looking West” landscape show, a tour-de-force, up-to-the-minute sculpture survey show, and Catherine Crowston’s hyper-conceptual “Obsession” show.

It seemed to me that was some kind of meaningful esthetic pay-off for any and all who attended this year’s Works, be it the reluctant teen dragged down to the site by folks or friends attracted to the cheeky “Talk Nice” or someone like yours truly, who’s attending art shows all year-round.

In fact, the Works succeeds most when it goes broad with its programming, range of artists and thematic shows and events, which does seem to go against the grain of audience expectation.

But in the end, themes and program arcs can also be a double-edged sword, potentially costing you as many attenders as you gain and alienating you from the greater community.

No surprise that the Works turned to the Fringe Festival as a partial model for their 2001 programming (namely for the art district venue lottery selection). The Fringe isn’t only the crown jewel of Edmonton’s festival season; it also leans hard towards community-based anarchy in its non-juried program.

After all, who can argue with that kind of success and massive popularity?