By Gilbert Bouchard

Come the Works Visual Arts Festival, there’s nothing sweeter than stealing away from workplace and worries and lazing an afternoon away contemplating the art scene with like-minded friends.

Even if the stolen afternoon turns out to be a bit damp (ruling out Churchill Square and the siren song of the beer tent), you can always switch to an indoor venue–like the Edmonton Centre West Exhibit Pavilion.

The bevy of instant art critics who answered my call to spontaneous leisure include: Giuseppe Albi, visual artist and curator of the Works’ Art of CAD exhibit; Douglas Barbour, teacher, poet and author of the recently released Lyric/Anti-lyric, a collection of essays exploring Canadian and world poetry; Helen Ready, nurse and longtime fan of the arts; and Peter Ryan, emerging poet and one of the organizers of a recent Poetry Slam.

First Stop: the quirky “Obsession” show, filled with work by six western artists who use obsessive processes (working with thousands of beads or pinned-together rose petals) or obsessive behaviours (painting the same image over and over for a quarter century).

Artists working with obsessive processes universally appeal to our group. Mary Scott’s pieces–including odd little sculptures composed of strings of paint pierced by hundreds of safety pins–remind at least two members of the group of things aquatic. “It looks like something that you dragged up from the bottom of the sea,” says Ready, who was also completely taken by Laura Vickerson’s “mind-boggling” rose petal capes.

Artists working with obsessive behaviours had a slightly harder ride.

Barbour appreciated the formal discipline of Eric Cameron (who takes a small common object and coats it with a daily layer of white paint for decades on end to create his surreal objects) but thought his process just might be a tad too focused. “If I were him I’d want to introduce colour into the process, it’s almost unbearable in its purity,” noted Barbour. “The objects are beautiful as they are alien and it fascinates me how little he wants to step out of his original impulse.”

Second Stop: moving oer to Elizabeth Vander Zaag’s “Talk Nice”–a hyper-interactive video/software exhibit that features two virtual teenage girls who take it upon themselves to teach attenders how to “teen speak”.

The group seemed less than amused. Ryan (who had to be goaded by the group to chat with the girls) and Albi both fail in their attempt to sweet talk the avatars.

Ready just barely “wins” and invitation to the virtual party only to be left cold by the game’s use of contemporary teen slang.

Barbour drops a bombshell by asking the group if this project is actually art, underlining that he personally appreciates and values as art pop-culture works that are driven by a strong creative vision and narrative (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer which he “just loves”) as opposed to participant-driven reality shows or Talk Nice.

Albi says Talk Nice was designed to be critical of traditional esthetics and works well in forcing the viewer to appreciate its components (video, gender-based language exploration, computer software) in a different context. “Not only does it put all of that up for debate, it also really opens up the traditional museum exhibit to whole new forms.”

Third and Final Stop: gravitating over to “Sculpture, the Works: 2001” (a 30-piece strong survey show of Alberta sculpture). The group splits up, attracted individually to different works in the wildly eclectic exhibit.

Ryan, for example, is drawn to Ryan McCourt’s In the Studio, a work that he says “makes me want to play with it,” as if it were a guitar lying in the corner.

Both Barbour and Ready are drawn to Brent Irving’s untitled cast-lea Barbie dolls, an “ancient Egyptian chorus line” that reminds the two of them of artifacts they’d seen in the recent Syrian artifact exhibit at the Provincial Museum.

When asked about his opinion of Blair Brennan’s over-the-top “writing table,” Albi says he was “resisting reading too much into it” and is happy just to enjoy the piece’s overall shape and form.

“I’m actually more interested in the fact that there are three artists that use tables in their composition (Brennan, Susan Owen Kagan and Pierre Oberg) and just how they go about doing that.”