Fine Arts Faculty from the University of Saskatchewan
Reception: Saturday, March 25th, 2:00pm
March 25th to April 20th
Art Placement is pleased to host an exhibition highlighting the work of the Faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Saskatchewan. Faculty in the Art Department have been influential in Saskatoon’s artistic community since art classes were first offered on campus. To this day, they remain a critical nexus around which much of the city’s artistic identity revolves and evolves, inspiring the next generation of artists, while connecting and collaborating with colleagues across the country and around the world. As this exhibition highlights, the current Faculty make work that is diverse in media as well as approach; they cross disciplinary boundaries with ease, and incorporate new technologies into work in both traditional and emergent media. Individually, they have exhibited nationally and internationally, and their works have been collected by prestigious institutions across Canada. It is a special treat for us to present their works together for the first time since 2010. Featuring new and recent work by Jennifer Crane, Graham Fowler, Allyson Glenn, John Graham, Mary Longman, Alison Norlen, Tim Nowlin, and Susan Shantz.

Jennifer Crane is a lens-based artist who joined the Department of Art and Art History in 2005. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Photography Area. Her teaching covers a range of processes in both chemical and digital methods, small and large format cameras. She specializes in large-scale digital printing, historical processes, pinhole imagery and stereo photography. The overall research vision of her work is to investigate the relationship between the body and the lens in both historical and contemporary images and old and new technologies. Through the creation of still photography, video installations, performance, and fictional photographic archives her work engages the themes of memory, narrative, authenticity and archival practice, employing historical, analogue and digital processes. She has exhibited her work in galleries throughout Canada. Recent exhibitions include: “Dear Edward” (2012) Mann Art Gallery, Prince Albert, SK. “Still Films” (2011) Yukon Arts Centre, Whitehorse, Yukon, “Coming and Going” (2011) Artist By Artist Exhibition, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon SK., “Becoming” (2007) Paved Arts, Saskatoon, SK. “Fairytales and Fishwives” (2006) Gallery 44, Toronto, ON., “Seafarers and Fishwives” (2005) La Central Powerhouse Galerie, Montreal, QC.

Graham Fowler is a Professor in Painting and Drawing at the University of Saskatchewan, a position which he has held since 1989. His painting practice revolves loosely around the subject of landscape in painting, as understood from a contemporary perspective. Fowler’s paintings explore the tension between landscape as a neutral, aesthetic subject, and its inherent instability as a site “where meaning and interpretation remain in flux.” Noted for the astonishing intensity and luminosity of his oils on canvas, the complex matrix of alternating strokes in Fowler’s work produces a vibration that visually communicates the dynamic fluidity of his subjects. Fowler's paintings have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions at public museums and commercial galleries throughout Canada, in Saskatoon, Edmonton, Vancouver, Halifax, Kamloops, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto, and internationally in the United States and the United Kingdom. His paintings are also included in numerous public, corporate, and private collections in Canada and abroad.

Allyson Glenn is an Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing, who came to the University of Saskatchewan in 2010. Working in oil on canvas, Glenn’s work combines the tradition of painting with a contemporary worldview and modern technology. Her work is notable for its thick and luscious paint handling, which stylistically references the traditions of realism, impressionism, and abstract expressionism. With an analytical approach to composition, her carefully structured surfaces are developed through dozens of preliminary drawings and sketches, as well as digital manipulation of photographic source material. In terms of content, Glenn’s paintings explore a range of contemporary subjects including social conflict, isolation, culture, and identity, as well as time, narrative, and metaphor. Glenn’s paintings have been exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally in the United States, Switzerland, India, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom.

John Graham is an Assistant Professor and the Chair of Printmaking/Digital Media in the Department of Art and Art History. He is a multi-disciplinary artist who joined the University of Saskatchewan in 2014. His education includes a background in architecture as well as fine art and his art practice encapsulates an ever-diversifying range of media, including print, artist’s books, drawing, painting, multi-media installations, performance, poetry, and independent filmmaking. His experimental short films have been screened at over 100 international film festivals, gallery venues and awards ceremonies in 23 countries. He has participated in artist residencies throughout the world and he has been the recipient of multiple awards, grants, fellowships and prizes in visual art and film. His visual art has been widely exhibited in North America, Asia and Europe, and his work in all media can be found in numerous public and private collections including Loto-Quebec, National Bank of Canada, National Library of Canada, National Library of Quebec, New York Public Library, and Canada Council Art Bank. His films are in the collections of National Film Board of Canada, City of Ottawa, Ontario Arts Council, and Saskatchewan Arts Board.

Mary Longman is an Artist and Art Historian who joined the Department Faculty in 2007. Her teaching focuses on Contemporary Aboriginal Art History, National and International, though with a background in studio art and an active studio practice and exhibition schedule, she also regularly teaches in the areas of Sculpture and Drawing. Longman is an established artist who has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for nearly three decades. She works in many different mediums including mixed-media sculpture, installation, drawing, digital media and book illustration. Her works give visual representation to Aboriginal perspective, challenging colonial power structures through personal narratives that contradict official settler histories. Her fine art has been exhibited in prestigious galleries throughout Canada including the National Gallery of Canada, Museum of Civilization, Vancouver Art Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, Mendel Art Gallery, and McCord Museum. International venues include the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and the Hood Museum. Her works can also be found in the collections of the McKenzie Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Kamloops Art Gallery, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Canada Council for the Arts, and the University of Saskatchewan.

Alison Norlen joined the Department of Art and Art History in 1999 as a Professor in Painting and Drawing. With a background in painting, she is perhaps best known for her large-scale drawings, which have been exhibited nationally and collected by prestigious institutions like the National Gallery of Canada. Norlen frequently works in a diverse range of media and disciplines, from sculpture to architectural installations, and even fashion. Inspired by an interest in "cultural artifice", she researches "themed" sites such as the West Edmonton mall, Disneyland, Universal studios, Las Vegas, roadside attractions, circus, and carnival celebrations. She is both spectator and recorder of these places and events, an appreciative and critical voyeur translating her experiences through personal narrative and visual metaphor. She has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally in Brazil, Korea, Amsterdam, and the United States. She has received numerous project and travel grants from the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Manitoba Arts Council, and the Canada Council.

Tim Nowlin is the current Head of the Department of Art and Art History, where he has been a Professor since 1994, teaching classes in Painting and Drawing. His educational background is in traditional printmaking, though he has devoted the better part of his studio practice since the mid 1990s to painting. He has exhibited his paintings throughout Western Canada and abroad in Switzerland and Germany. Returning to his roots in printmaking, Nowlin’s most recent project explores digital printing in works that also incorporate his long-time interest in collage and bricolage. Speaking to memory and how new meanings are generated through the recombination of discarded elements, Nowlin has found digital technologies to be indispensable in exploring the possibilities of collage as a medium. In addition to his studio practice, administration and teaching duties, in 2015 and 2016 Nowlin served as Guest Lecturer and Visiting Artist at the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in Wuhan, China, an international exchange that will also continue in 2017.

Susan Shantz came to the Department of Art and Art History in 1990, where she teaches in the areas of Sculpture and Multi-media. Her artwork consists of mixed-media works, often sculptural in form, that explore embodied ways of knowing. She is interested in ritual and gesture, and the ways in which art arises from these and becomes a cultural performance. Her materials and processes of making are varied and derive from a range of conceptual concerns. Shantz’s practice is decidedly diverse and non-media specific. Though her work is often object-based and exists in space, the term sculpture itself is sometimes ill-equipped to encapsulate the nature of her work, which is more concerned with the exploration of process, materials, and ideas than formal structures. She has exhibited extensively throughout Canada since the mid 1980s, including major solo exhibitions at the Mendel Art Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, among others. Her work is included in numerous public collections in Canada.

Installation Images: