Art Gallery - Montageries

Montageries

Artists from the AFA Collections

Kay Angliss, Carol Breen, Chris Cran, Mark Dicey, Robert Dmytruk,

John K. Esler, Les Graff, John Hall, Alex Janvier, Brenda Jones-Smith,

George Littlechild, Harry Kiyooka, Luke Lindoe, Janet Mitchell,

Marion Nicoll, Katie Ohe, John Snow, Kenneth Sturdy, Wendy Toogood

Montageries is not a term you will find in a dictionary. Rather, it is a combination of

‘montage’ and ‘memories’ with the meanings of the two packed up into one word. One

online dictionary describes a montage as being “any combination of disparate elements

that forms or is felt to form a unified whole, single image, etc.” And, according to the

same dictionary source, the word memories is a plural form of ‘memory’ – recalling

impressions and facts, embodying remembrance, and recollections of times past.

This exhibition features a concise selection of nineteen artworks from over 8,000 objects

of visual art held in the extensive permanent collection of the Alberta Foundation for the

Arts (AFA). Compositionally, each of the artworks selected were created by uniting many

varied components – montages of sorts – metaphorically highlighting that every artwork

stands as a small part of a much larger whole (the AFA collection). Multi-layered and

complex, the works included in Montageries are flashes of memory and times past that

we can now take a moment to reflect on and remember as we commemorate the

fiftieth anniversary of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ permanent collection in the

year 2022.