By Maureen Fenniak

There were no big surprises at the annual member show of the Edmonton Contemporary Artists Society, but given the events of last week (described by one CNN newscaster as the moment when “the possible becomes the unimaginable”) the expected was fine with me. As ECAS senior member Graham Peacock explained to me, the society’s mandate isn’t to shock, titillate or irritate; it’s to foster the production and appreciation of quality work.

Abstraction has strong roots in Edmonton, which was enough of a hotbed of abstract art activity in the 1970s to attract the attention of modern art luminaries like Clement Greenberg and Sir Anthony Caro. And while Edmonton is still home to an unusually large number of artists working in this tradition–many of whom have achieved international reputations–their practice has been neglected to the margins.

Hence the decision of artists still working in the formalist tradition to take matters into their own hands and organize an annual exhibition of work the art-going public might not otherwise have access to. And while there’s nothing radically experimental in this year’s show, there’s certainly enough variety and a strong commitment to materials on display.

In particular, steel sculpture has room to breathe in the cavernous space of the Strathcona Arts Barns, as do Peacock’s own monumental-sized paintings, created through a labour-intensive process of pouring, cutting and collage. Peacock’s paintings really do look like nothing else you’ve ever seen. With its blistered surface, and groovy whorls of colour that bleed into bubbles and veins, the painting in this show looks like a topographical map that’s melting off the wall.

Hailing a scab

Dennis Panylyk’s giant painting (bewilderingly titled “Kursk: All Stop/Good Quiet”) features great molting scabs of iridescent blue paint that are literally peeling off the surface. That may sound hideous (and I will admit I ordinarily hate this kind of painting), but the physicality of Panylyk’s paint creates an arresting, aggressive materiality. You can’t help but be aware of how much time it must take to construct these objects–and while I’m not suggesting Panylyk should be given an “E” for effort, Panylyk’s visible production process effects a compelling sense of time congealed into a few square feet of space.

Ryan McCourt’s massive and yet elegant and lyrical metal sculpture is one of the strongest pieces in the show. Happily, there’s enough space in the Arts Barns to allow you to walk around it and appreciate the way McCourt’s bowls, orbs and circles emitting coils and rings of light and shadow seem to rest in effortlessly logical and confident balance.

Many of the curatorial decisions in the exhibition don’t make a lot of sense. What, for instance, prompted the decision to hang Anne Clark’s abstract striations of colour beside a murky blue landscape? The show contains several other similarly incompatible juxtapositions and the result is predictably unhappy.

Nevertheless, there are many worthwhile moments here. I’m thinking of Royden Mills’ steel sculpture, Giuseppe Albi’s acrylic “weavings” and Mitchel Smith’s intriguing and idiosyncratic hieroglyphs rendered in beeswax. I was reminded on numerous occasions during my walk-through of the exhibition that depth (perceptual and conceptual) is just another surface, accessible to the degree that the artist is able to render it visible.

ECAS Ninth Annual Exhibition

Arts Barns – To September 29