Lethbridge has several art shows opening on Saturday night. 
The Southern Alberta Art Gallery features the opening receptions for new exhibitions from Kyla Mallett and Gareth Long, Nov. 19. The opening reception begins at 8 p.m.
Vancouver based artist Kyla Mallett’s exhbitions include “Helping Yourself”. Plus there will be works from her 2010 project “How to See and Read The Aura and Have You Experienced the Auric Energy Field,” which is inspired by “a parapsychology/new-age healing book she collected during her research,” according to the Southern Alberta Art Gallery website.
For this exhibition she employs UV-sensitive screen printing inks to create multicoloured works, which fluctuate with the daylight, causing the viewer to see more or less of the text depending on the time of day they encounter the work.
She will also present a new body of work including dozens of diagrams and schematics from her self-help-collection which is installed as a constellation within the gallery. They will be stripped of the accompanying text. What remains is a set of homogenous forms (intersecting and clustering circles, triangles and star-shapes in particular), as floating signifiers.
Kyla Mallett completed her MFA at UBC in 2004 and her BFA at Emily Carr in 2000. She has received critical attention for both national and international exhibits over the past decade, having exhibited at such institutions as the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Presentation House Gallery, Artspeak, ThreeWalls in Chicago, and the Mount St. Vincent University Gallery in Halifax. Mallett is an Assistant Professor in Visual Art and Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University.
Her work consistently deals with the intersection of language and the social realm, utilizing pseudo-anthropological strategies of research, collecting and archiving. She has often focused on transgressive activities in such cultural arenas as adolescence, girlhood, feminism, academia and art, using interview/statistical research, installation, photography, sound and video.
Toronto born, New York based artist Gareth Long is also opening “Never Odd or Even.”
According to the SAAG “Untitled (Stories) is a set of lenticular prints accompanied by the book series Books (Untitled) that pivots around a disjunction between the oeuvre of the late American author J.D. Salinger and the design of his books. ”
The unfinished novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert is the central point around which the other works in the exhibition revolve. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Invented Desk for Copying, a suite of two-sided desk sculptures form the core of these, alongside related projects The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas and a journal/ artist book entitled Who Invented the Desk?.”
Gareth Long was born in Toronto, Canada. He holds a BA in Visual Studies and Classical Civilizations from the University of Toronto and an MFA from Yale University. Long has held solo exhibitions at Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto, Kate Werble Gallery, New York; and TORRI, Paris. His work has been shown at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Montreal; Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto; Flat Time House, London; Wiels, Brussels; Artists Space, New York; Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; and MoMA PS1, New York.
In 2011 his work will be shown in a number of exhibitions, including ones at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK. 
The opening reception is at 8 p.m., Nov. 19. Admission is free. Both exhibitions run from Nov. 19-Jan. 8.
There are also new exhibitions at the Trinon Gallery where Edward Bader and Peter Greendale’s new exhibition Paradise Lost opens Nov. 19 at 7 p.m.. The reception runs from 7-10 p.m. at the gallery, 104 5 St S.
Edward Bader is a Lethbridge born artist who is inspired by comic books, commercial illustration and traditional fine art. He has been teaching at Grande Prairie Regional College since 2008, teaching drawing, contemporary art history and digital media. His work is included in the Alberta Foundation For the Arts Collection, the Canada Council Art Bank, the University of Lethbridge and the City of Calgary, plus many private collections.
Peter Greendale is a Calgary area artist who has shown throughout western Canada, and whose works are included in the Kelowna Art Gallery, the Alberta Art Foundation and the Grant MacEwan College Public Collections.
Cate Currie also has an exhibition at the Blueprint Gallery.
If you missed last weekend’s opening reception of the opening of the Textile Surface Guild’s new exhibition at the Bowman Arts Centre, that runs until Jan. 7. It features some interesting pieces from members of Lethbridge’s Textile Surface Guild, which is celebrating their thirtieth anniversary this year.
