Legacy Gallery exhibit offers art, with honours

When it comes to showcasing the University Art Collections, the pieces on permanent display across campus are really only the tip of the artistic iceberg. There’s the art that rotates through the various exhibits at both downtown’s Legacy Gallery and the McPherson Library’s Maltwood Prints and Drawings Gallery, for instance, but there is also the work done by the acclaimed artists who hold honorary degrees from the university. And while many of these are household names—Jack Shadbolt, E.J. Hughes, Robert Bateman, Mary Pratt—their work isn’t regularly seen around UVic.

Hughes with Hughes: Mary Jo presents EJ—but there’s no relation (photo: Colton Hash)

Enter Legacy Art Gallery director Mary Jo Hughes, who has just opened the 50th anniversary exhibit Honoris Causa: Artist Honorary Degree Recipients. Running through to March 2013, Honoris Causa showcases more than 25 prominent artists, living and dead, who have received honorary UVic degrees over the past half-century.

“One of the advantages of an exhibit like this is that it allows us to showcase work from the university collection not usually seen,” says Hughes. “Mfanwy Pavelic‘s painting of Katherine Hepburn, or Ted Grant’s photograph of Pierre Trudeau sliding down a bannister—which isn’t what you’d usually think of as art, but it’s a great example of his photojournalism.”

But while honours have been bestowed on a number of artists—including influential professors like Pat Martin Bates, who helped established UVic’s reputation as a visual arts institution, and Writing department co-founder Robin Skelton—earning an honorary degree is not just a question of contributing to Canadian art, but also to the community at large.

Robert Bateman’s piece (left) fits nicely with Mfanwy Pavelic’s portrait of Katherine Hepburn at the Legacy (photo: Colton Hash)

“Robert Bateman is a really good example of that. People love his highly realistic work of wildlife and nature, but he’s also dedicated to the environment and does a lot of work towards that.” To underscore that point, the Bateman on display features an image of a dead porpoise trapped in a gill net. “It’s quite the statement,” says Hughes. (As part of the exhibit, Robert Bateman will give a talk about art and environmentalism at 2pm  Sunday, January 27, at the Legacy.)

Riedel (left), Vance and Hughes bring Michael Snow’s “Walking Women” to life (photo: Colton Hash)

Also on display are works by Carole Sabiston, Robert Davidson, Bill Reid, Ted Harrison, Susan Point, Fenwick Lansdowne, Michael Snow and Fleming Jorgensen, among many others. It’s an impressive list, to be sure, but is there anything Hughes is particularly excited about showing?

“The E.J. Hughes, because he’s one of my favourite B.C. artists,” she says. “It’s a painting of Ladysmith harbour, and is very impressive. It was down in the vault and I hadn’t seen it before, but it’s a really lovely example of his work—he’s not over-stylizing things, it’s just a straightforward approach that reflects his love of Vancouver Island.”

UVic students help hang the current exhibit (photo: Colton Hash)

Still relatively new to her position, exhibit curator Hughes credits Legacy colleagues Caroline Riedel and Cindy Vance with helping to familiarize her with the more than 27,000 pieces in the University Art Collections, which are stored in three different locations.

“The whole planning this year was about celebrating UVic,” she explains. “Our first exhibition was about the development of our collection in general, and this one celebrates the tradition of honouring people in our community who do great things.” Better still, says Hughes, about 90 percent of the work is pulled from UVic’s own collection. “Exhibits like this allow us to dip into the collection with a different lens,” she concludes. “Every time you choose a different theme, you pull out different things—it’s like throwing a net in the ocean.”

Honoris Causa: Artist Honorary Degree Recipients continues to March 9, 2013 at the Legacy Gallery, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, at 630 Yates Street.

Visual Arts grad earns honourable mention in RBC competition

Department of Visual Arts MFA graduate Katie Lyle was named an honourable mention winner in the 14th Annual RBC Canadian Painting Competition recently. As well as national exposure, Lyle picked up a cheque for $15,000 for her oil painting, “White Night,” which will be added to RBC’s 4,000-work corporate art collection.

Katie Lyle’s “White Night”

As reported in the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail, among other media outlets, 15 finalists were chosen in June this year, five each from of the three regions (western, central and eastern) into which the prize is split. The winners were announced in Toronto on November 29, with Toronto’s Vanessa Maltese named the overall winner;  Montreal artist Betino Assa was also named honourable mention. Maltese earns $25,000 for winning the top spot.

“Through this competition, we have helped launch the careers of many of today’s successful visual artists and are excited to continue to discover and promote promising new talent from across the country,” RBC’s curator Robin Anthony said in a news release.

Lyle’s winning painting came from a series of intimate female portraits. “My recent paintings focus less on cultural archetypes and more on images I filter on a daily basis,” she said on the RBC’s website. “The gaze, the arch of an eyebrow, or the path of a nose can all be points or forms from which to generate an image.” Now based in Vancouver, Lyle has recently exhibited at Deluge Contemporary here in Victoria and Art Metropole in Toronto. She is the curatorial assistant at Western Front.

Chisholm’s RBC entry

But Lyle wasn’t the only artist with UVic connections in the running for the RBC prize this year—Visual Arts sessional instructor Thomas Chisholm was also a finalist, and painting professor Sandra Meigs was on the jury. This was the second RBC shortlist in a row on which Chisholm has appeared, this time with a piece titled Interference 1 (2012).

“I love painting, and of all the arts it’s the one I’m most drawn to,” Adam Gopnik, the keynote speaker at this year’s RBC Canadian Painting Competition ceremony, told the Globe. “I’m well aware there’s this sense that painting is a dying form and that the beatific vision is now available in a video installation in a darkened room with an enigmatic track playing alongside it and a long explanation of how the enigmatic track and the video together do something or other to this or that for the construction of reality. And I have no reason to think that’s not a completely authentic aesthetic experience; it’s just that I vibrate to painting.”

Gopnik, art critic for The New Yorker, was raised in Montreal and was a juror in the 2011 Sobey Art Award, and is quite familiar with Canadian art. “You can make the case that painting is actually the single most relevant thing we have right now. … We live in a civilization where the idea of craft, the idea of the artisanal, of the thing made with skill that the rest of us can’t do at all, is simultaneously deprecated—‘It’s not important’—and hugely valued individually. … We continue to be drawn to painting because we recognize it represents [like a chef cooking on a TV show] that enviable excellence of craft, the transmission of lived experience through the prism of a particular sensibility. … It’s one-on-one communication in a world of million-on-million communication.”