The Southern Alberta Art Gallery features two very innovative and imaginative exhibits running until April 12.
Sackville New Brunswick artist Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel and Antonia Hirsch’s “Negative Space.”
Secret Citadel explores male friendships by featuring five massive intricately detailed dioramas and films.
“ It’s quite an expansive project,” descri
bed SAAG spokesperson Nicole Hembroff.
“ The two guys are represented by a cougar and a bison,” she said.
“It’s basically about male friendships and the stages they go through,” she explained.
The dioramas are very detailed.
The first one that catches the eye is a giant mountain with two houses on wither side of it. When you look inside there is a detailed model of a band room, wood shop and other man cave related rooms.
An animated film shows out of one of the houses and onto the east wall of the SAAG main gallery.
Directly behind that is a darker diorama of a car and bus crash, with filmed flames shining onto the floor. On top of that are two more models of the characters houses.
“ It’s about a car crash which was the artists’ fault,” she said.
“It is about the decay of friendship,” Hembroff said adding the artist created the exhibit over four years.
The rest of the room is dominated by a massive set of bleachers, complete with graffiti on the steps.
inside the bleachers is a diorama of a school gym dominated by a wrestling ring and locker room.
The animated film shows the two characters wrestling with each other.
The costumes of the cougar and bison are against the north wall of the bleachers.
The other diorama is to the right as soon as you enter the gallery.
It is diorama based on a giant player piano. Inside is a bar reminiscent of the TV show Cheers. The films from that is of the two characters playing darts.
And, as a bonus, if you put money in the slot, you can hear an original piece of music composed by the artist for this exhibit.
Figures of a bison and a cougar represent Patterson and a childhood friend who moved away. The animals are central characters throughout the loose, yet highly complex narrative that is a point of connection for all the works in the exhibition. The Mountain, recreates the childhood homes of the young friends. Viewers can peer inside tiny windows to see rooms decorated as Patterson remembers them from the 1980s, with furniture and flooring made from tiny Popsicle sticks, and scraps of fabric used for carpet and curtains.
Grudge Match is comprised of a set of gymnasium bleachers, scenes of high school sports are played out in the projection. Viewers are invited to sit on the first three rows of the bleachers to watch the animation. Two charred bunk beds are joined to form Camp Wakonda, which is populated with dramatic scenes from Patterson's memory including a school bus crash and tiny projected flames. 
Player Piano Waltz is a functioning player piano that represents the completed transformation to manhood. A modified cylinder plays Patterson's own composition, which is activated along with projections when viewers deposit a dollar coin. Atop the piano is a model building in which the bison and cougar now enact the pastimes of adulthood.
The last part of the exhibit is a 30 minute film called the Secret Citadel combining animation and puppetry, which can be seen in a separate room on the west side of the SAAG main gallery. The film plays continuously and brings together the many scenes within each sculpture, and evokes the vulnerabilities of friendship and of loneliness, love and loss.
Graeme Patterson lives in Sackville, New Brunswick. Since graduating from NSCAD in 2002 his work has shown nationally and internationally including several solo exhibitions at significant Canadian art galleries. Some of his recent accomplishments include; 2012 Canada Council for the Arts Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (media arts), Atlantic finalist for the 2014 and 2009 Sobey Art Award, finalist for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award, and a 2011 Juno award nomination for album package of the year.
“Graeme Patterson: Secret Citadel” is co-produced by the Art Gallery of Hamilton (AGH) and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (AGNS) and is co-curated by Melissa Bennett, Curator of Contemporary Art, AGH and Sarah Fillmore, Chief Curator, AGNS. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the city of Lethbridge.
The other exhibit at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery is Berlin based artist Antonia Hirsch’s “ Negative Space” which explores negative space through images of an asteroid in the near-earth asteroid 433 Eros that is part of the Amor group of asteroids.
Much of this exhibit in the upper gallery is a multi-media exhibit based around the asteroid, but in which is a video of a potato which resembles the asteroid.
“It is about perception os space. Space refers not just to outer space,” Hembroff said.
There is also a photo of the actual asteroid but additional effects are seen through the use of shiny black, concave, reflective “claude glass” which was often used by landscape painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, who who paint the reflection of the landscapes as seen through the Claude glass
The other piece exploring the concept of negative space incorporates shiny black iPads and iPhone covers.
“ It’s how a lot of people look a the world today — through their iPhones and iPads,” Hembroff observed.
Taking up a history of reflection, Negative Space questions how we and our devices - both historical and present day - favour the image over the "real."
Hirsch is a Berlin based artist, writer and editor. Her work has been exhibited at the Salzburger Kunstverein; the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Toronto; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Tramway, Glasgow; and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others, and is held in the public collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, National Gallery of Canada, and Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach.
Both exhibits run until April 12 a the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.
