Dear Alan

Small unidentifiable spheres dot the ground at almost regular intervals, and various tropical birds hold court in the sky, while an elderly cowboy extends his lasso, which like the snake, is curiously straight, in the direction of three surprised looking cattle. The horizon is obscured by undulating hills, and a strange melange of deciduous trees and cacti—both in morphing shades of green, from neon to forest—push through the arid ground throughout the composition. A surreal tour de force, and indeed, a conceptually compelling meditation upon the strangeness of landscape, Alan’s drawing serves as the launching point of Dear Alan; it speaks to a persistent interest in issues pertaining to landscape, methodologies of collecting, and mythologies of Alberta, writ large.

Dear Alan brings together a dizzying number of landscapes from the AFA permanent collection, displayed in a digital gallery, salon style.

Rather than present works within a cohesive curatorial theme, based on typical modes of exhibition-making that rely on continuities such as concept, form, or historical period, this exhibition seeks instead to show varied, and at times disparate, artistic approaches to landscape representation, across time and medium

—a curatorial methodology that speaks to an impulse to approach art through a productive un-knowing—a state of wonder—that eschews the reliance upon expertise in a given area of research.

Like the permanent collection itself, which in all institutions shifts and morphs with changing leadership, access to funds, and artistic vision...

Dear Alan chronicles the ebbs and flows of the AFA’s ever-changing collecting ethos and the evolving artistic and political sensibilities in Alberta more broadly.

The exhibition includes: out of focus lawns bisected by boring sidewalk slabs;

an Alberta highway as a crystal blue river;

ghost towns and haunted hotels tucked into rocky coulees;

the sun, 25 million years from now, as a red Supergiant;

mountains that dance;

a farmer’s field as homemade quilt;

two trees, twins, upon which a brother, now gone, carved his initials;

the unremarkable light on a rare overcast day;

a pink river;

a river made of boats made of the river;

hot dogs—or are they pill capsules?—in snow;

a sky of fire, maybe the red Supergiant, again;

the way sunlight still pushes through a snowy sky;

can you see the outlines of mountains at night?;

pipelines can look beautiful even if their existence is violent;

a purple river;

the tips of mountains poking through low clouds, unseeable from most vantage points;

the sunset as an amoeba;

that cowboy by the lake;

a snoozing or playing pup;

a place where water flows two ways;

another horse;

quiet; the way the land cried when we broke her;

and to listen to her when she tells us where to find water.

Dear Alan, thank you for reminding us, that all around, there is wonder in this place.