By Marc Country

Alberta’s artistic community is dizzyingly diverse. Exhibiting artists in our vast province range from Sunday painters to international art stars; unknown avant-gardes, tenured has-beens, and all the in-betweens each try to express their own understanding of this puzzle we call “art”. In fact, to even speak of Alberta’s artists as a community is somewhat misleading. The inherent diversity in artistic goals and practice inevitably leads artists to form separate camps, each having little, if anything, to do with the others.

The Alberta Society of Artists, however, attempts to bring together professional artists from across the province, regardless of differences in their various styles and objectives. In celebration of their 70th anniversary, the Society Artists presents Bridging a New Century, at the University Hospital’s McMullen Gallery until August 19.

Familiar with some of the recent output of ASA members (Barbara Paterson’s monument to the Famous Five, an the Society’s tarot-card themed show of last year are two notable examples), I approached this exhibition with apprehension. Thankfully, I discovered Bridging a New Century is not thematic in focus so much as it is an attempt to show the best work submitted by current members, and as such, was selected by jury. (A retrospective component of early members work, shown at the original Red Deer venue of this traveling exhibit, is unfortunately not included here.)

Apparently, another goal of this exhibition was to show as much work as could possibly fit in the space. Approximately 50 works are crammed into the tiny McMullen. A richly textural little pastel by Carol Huggler of Calgary is stuffed ungraciously into a corner and shouted-down by the pictures hung immediately around it. An edit by half would have surely made the better works even stronger, while the worse would hardly be missed by any but the artists who contributed them.

Among the many lowlights here are works that are gimmicky or kitschy, or are sweetly sincere but poorly executed.

Most of the rest of the work here does not quite sink to this level, but merely suffers from a simple lack of ambition on the part of the artists. Most of the artistic terrain here has been mapped out by the trailblazers of past generations, yet these contemporary artists seem satisfied to meekly follow along this well-worn path. Many of these painters exhibit technical competence, but little else beyond that, content to offer pictures that are blandly pretty at best.

Some works come off ahead of the rest. Splash of Red by Calgary’s Jean Pilch, is a captivatingly crafted little landscape. Morry Katz of Lethbridge offers the simple, successful photograph Aspens in Snow. Simon Y.S. Wong of Calgary blends Chinese, Native, and western art traditions in his Sunday Afternoon, appropriating these towards his own effective ends. Edmonton artist Lou P. Cole’s Metamorphous surprisingly adds up to more than the sum of its little pink blossoms. Lois Bauman of Bragg Creek presents perhaps the most full-fledged artwork in the show, High in Alberta’s Whaleback. This image of a gnarled tree bursting from its rocky outcrop owes much to Cézanne, and seems to rely on inspired observation, not kitschy sentimentality, for its effect.

One can certainly understand why an amateur artist might wish to be part of the Alberta Society of Artists. There’s the effortless association with historically important artists of the past, opportunities to participate in exhibitions organized for the members, and the Society’s relationship with the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (and the level of funding that goes with it… check out the slick exhibition catalogue booklet and hardcover ASA history book that accompany the show).

For an organization that purports to represent professional artists in Alberta, however, the work at the McMullen tells a different story. Professional art in this province is ambitious and challenging, and is, sadly, mostly absent from this showing of the best of the ASA, our “official” society of artists.