Medalta’s artists-in-residence show on now

By Chris Brown on May 12, 2018.

cbrown@medicinehatnews.com @MHNBrown

Medalta’s artists-in-residence program is a hot ticket, and so is the resulting exhibition.

The works by the current quintet have been on display at Medalta since May 1, and the opening reception will take place on May 17.

“It’s really a unique program in that it’s artists from all over the world that apply to come to Medicine Hat,” says curator Safira Lachapelle. “It’s great for our community to have these artists here.”

The accepted artists spend a year living and working in the community.

“We’ll see in some of the artists this time around where they are inspired by the Medicine Hat landscape and they’re using the things that they find here to tell that story,” Lachapelle says of the pieces in the exhibition, noting all the pieces are for sale.

The opening reception takes place from 6-8 p.m. and there is no admission cost. Refreshments will be served and all ages are welcome. The exhibition is on display until July 14.

LaChapelle took some time this week to offer a brief description of each of the five exhibitions that make up the larger show.

Kristin Ayla Murray — Kristin is basically creating her own kind of engineering marvels that are inspired by relics that you would see lying around on farms. She’s kind of created little patterns and designs for machines that, they’re so well done you almost think these machines might have existed 100 years ago but they’re really tongue-in-cheek. They’re not actual machines that serve any purpose. But they’re reminiscent of that.

Lauren Balderama — Lauren has been exploring patterns and poetry and through creating these different patterns and shapes using ceramics she’s looking back on different memories and times in her life to tell a story through her installation. It’s playful and fun, reminiscent of childhood games.

Tyler Loeffler — For the past few years he’s been travelling up to 14 hours to spend the weekends with his partner and really the whole exhibition is a story of that time on the road and the meeting between a boy and a girl and by telling that story he’s exploring female and male forms. So on one side of the gallery he’s got more angular male forms and on the other side he’s got more curvy female forms. And then he’s done an installation of plates using highway signage that he’s seen over his travels.

Carlos Rojas — Carlos was born in Mexico and moved to Quebec and then to Calgary and his while exhibition is exploring migration but through the eyes of a doll. And so there were German dolls that were very expensive and only available to wealthier families and Mexican artists used that form, that mould, to create these dolls using paper so they were available to more children for very little cost. So he’s used moulds that he’s found here at Medalta and he’s telling different stories through the pictures that he’s put on these dolls. Stories that are personal to him but also stories that are historically significant in talking about the different immigration stories in history.

Olivia Rozema — Olivia in this exhibition created large and small scale sculptures and those are inspired by a roadkill rabbit that she buried and photographed over I’d say a 200-day period and used the different times of decay as her inspiration to create the sculptures. If you actually look at each sculpture it’ll have a tag on it and it will tell you what day of decay that actual piece came from or was inspired by.

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