Two new exhibitions are on display at the Okotoks Art Gallery.
On view until June 15 are Western Canada Landscapes by Okotoks artist Stephen Strand and The Keepers by Patricia Lortie.
Western Canada Landscapes is a body of imagery created by Strand, self-taught in digital graphics over the course of the pandemic shortly after he moved to Okotoks.
The familiar sights and scenery may jump off the walls to those who have walked the many pathways along the Sheep River.
Originally from Edmonton, the intra-Albertan transplant spent a year in Calgary before moving further south to Okotoks.
“We moved to Okotoks and just fell in love with it,” Strand said, adding he has found the features of the Sheep River’s pathways and greenways to be simply beautiful.
“Like the bridge, it’s a gorgeous bridge.”
Some pieces come not just from observation of the scenes of the Foothills region, but also the weather, including a tryptic piece showing the same scene as a typical Alberta flurry wears on.
“Last winter I was driving around, and it was snowing; I saw the grain bins just getting covered in more snow so I thought I would do a kind of trilogy,” Strand said, adding he doesn’t hinge his choice on popular place names, but simply what he finds beauty in.
“I was out hiking a couple years ago in the mountains of Kananaskis, and I saw a lake in the mountains and just turned it into an art piece – I don’t know the names of the mountains.”
The Keepers was created by Lortie with a combination of three-dimensional sculpture and flat imagery, as well as light projection in an interconnected experience.
“It’s really all about our relationship with nature and non-separation – the idea that we are a part of nature, not separate from it,” Lortie said. “Always from a place of peacefullness and comfort.”
The exhibition began with the 2D imagery before the sculptures filled in the blanks.
“I did the paintings first, then I was commissioned to do sculptures for a show; the curator said, ‘I need things to occupy the centre of the room,'” Lortie explained. “So I thought, ‘OK, well, I want to talk about communities and individuals.’
“This was at the beginning of COVID, so this individuality and the sense of community was floating around in my head so I thought I would use the forest as a metaphor for community and individuals.
“Trees share: they share nutrients, they share information and we see them as individuals but they are really just a big community.”
To this end, the trees were carved from recycled cardboard that had piled up from Lortie's online shopping during lockdown, with several sculpted tree trunks taking center stage in the main gallery, surrounded by illustrations of human figures mingling with nature, and a similar graphic projected onto the sculpture.
“I knew I was going to do this projection to introduce passing humans in the natural environment,” Lortie said. “So I did the drawings on canvas, without the intention of showing it, but then when it was all said and done, I thought people were really into looking at it in detail.”
