By Gilbert Bouchard

Edmonton has a long, colourful history as an internationally important sculpture capital, a legacy that continues to this day as evidenced by two shows currently on display at the Works Visual Arts Festival.

In fact, the raison d’etre of one exhibit, “Sculpture, The Works: 2001” (curated by teacher and sculptor Royden Mills), is to create a survey show of “human-scaled sculpture” representing a diverse section of 30 professional artists from the Capital City area privileging up-to-the-moment work.

The handsome catalogue produced for this show talks about opening a window to the studios of our Edmonton sculptors via a self-selected body of work.

In short, Mills has ceded a huge amount of traditional curatorial power (the right to select individual pieces of work and the catalogue text that describes the pieces) but did so with the aim of minimizing distance and guaranteeing the highest possible immediacy and relevancy from the assembled artists and opening up an intimate virtual conversation between art and art-goer.

This is a radical tactic, but one that powerfully affirms the here-and-now of doing (and viewing) art in Edmonton.

As for the quality of the assembled participants, I personally would find it hard to imagine creating an artistic roll-call that could be more complete and a body of work as entertaining and esthetically pleasing.

The body of artists include very recognizable names (Mills, Alan Reynolds, Clay Ellis, Isla Burns and Sandra Bromley) to more neophyte members of the sculpting fold (emerging artists like Mark Bellows and Ryan McCourt).

The work itself ranges as widely across the sculptural landscape as the roster of its creators.

The public can enjoy fine examples of more traditional found-object metal sculpture (what most of us envision when we imagine Edmonton sculpture) to work edging deeply into mixed-media installation (like Blair Brennan’s totally quirky, totally cool Writing Desk, which I can only describe as a prosaic writing desk crossed with a mediaeval torture chamber).