By Mike Berezowsky

Three months after the Big Things landed outside the Provincial Museum, it appears they’ll be there to stay a little longer than expected.

The North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop exhibit was scheduled to run until the end of September. However, the show might be held over until next spring because of the public response.

Museum officials want to keep the nine large steel abstract sculptures on the grounds longer, and are awaiting approval from the province, says the workshop’s Ryan McCourt.

“The context of it being at a museum was much more appropriate than having it at the Law Courts or outside the Shaw Conference Centre,” he explains. “This way, you’re getting an audience that’s already looking for some sort of cultural experience.”

The outdoor exhibit features the works of seven Edmonton artists, including McCourt, Mark Bellows, Andrew French, Ken Macklin, Royden Mills, Susan Owen Kagan and University of Alberta professor of sculpture Peter Hide.

All of the artists have at one time studied under Hide. “He’s the person to go to if you want to make sculptures,” says McCourt. “We’re influenced by him, but we’re also influenced by all art and every other thing that exists out there in the world.”

For example, one of McCourt’s sculptures, The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For, combines influences of early surrealist painter Georgio de Chirico with representations of physical objects.

The tall object features abstract images of a desk in front of a window and a curtain.

“That was in my mind as I was making it,” McCourt says. While sculptures are static objects, McCourt’s piece appears to be active, as the name suggests.

He invites people to let the sculptures tell viewers what they’re about. All of the pieces are on sale and available for other exhibits, though Edmonton has few galleries large enough.

“It’s all about getting the viewer to stop and look at this thing that is different and let it affect them. Whatever effect they come up with is up to them, really.”

Hide challenges his beginning students to find the “front” of a sculpture, says McCourt.

“It forces the viewer to make the decision: ‘There’s this thing, totally unique, I don’t know what it’s supposed to be, but you’re telling me it has a front and a back.”

Abstract sculpture is often challenging for viewers because the shapes and objects created often aren’t familiar, McCourt says.

“A tree is really a bizarre thing to even accept. It doesn’t look like anything else other than what it is, and that’s the same with sculpture. It doesn’t look like anything else, necessarily, but it is a unique object.”

Sculptures should be viewed differently than paintings, because they exist in the three-dimensional world, suggests McCourt.

“A painting relies on illusion to suggest there’s this other world that exists through the frame,” he explains. “Sculpture doesn’t have that luxury of being in some sort of illusory space. It exists in the same world as cars and people. So it really has to declare itself through its uniqueness.”