The Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden are ready to light up those long winter nights with the sixth annual Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden Winter Lights Festival and simultaneously show off the new Bunka Centre set to open Nov. 26 with the festival.

There are approximately 170,000 lights all over the Nikka Japanese Garden, reflecting the theme of Kamakura.

“It means igloo in Japanese,” said  Nikka Yuko Marketing and Events Manager Melanie Berdusco, noting there are five mini igloos that kids can crawl into. 

“Igloos bring people together,” Berdusco continued.

 Last year nearly 20,000 visitors  enjoyed the Winter lights festival in two months despite Covid 19 restrictions.

The Nikka  Yuko  just received a $90,000 grant from Travel Alberta to build an adult sized igloo featuring 360 projection system which will be  constructed by January.

Tourism Lethbridge has tapped into the talents of six Southern Alberta Artists to  promote six of Lethbridge’s  big tourist attractions.

“This is a celebration of our city, our attractions and our artists,” enthused Tourism Lethbridge Marketing  director  Stephen Braund.

 Tourism Lethbridge  commissioned  Leila Armstrong, Elizabeth Porter, Jarom Scott, Nato’yi’kina’soyi (Holy Light That Shines Bright/ Hali) Heavy Shield, Bryce Many Fingers-Singer and Eric Dyck to design ’20s and ’30s vintage travel posters for Fort Whoop Up, the Helen Schuler Nature Centre, the Nikka Yuko Japanese Gardens, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Galt Museum and City of Lethbridge respectively.

“We can do a second run of we need to,” Braund said, noting they make great Christmas gifts, so he hopes people will enjoy them.

“I would love to keep doing this each year, because there are a lot of artists and a lot of attractions in Lethbridge, he noted, adding Southern Alberta is  home to four UNESCO attractions ( Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, Writing on Stone Provincial Park, Dinosaur Provincial Park and  Waterton Glacier International Peace Park) and a lot of other attractions as well.

Artist and curator Jarom Scott, noted the Southern Alberta Art Gallery provided  suggestions for artists.

“ I love the style of old travel posters,” Scott said

“We reached out to the SAAG because they are the contact for visual artists,” Scott said.

“Some of them were simple like  Elizabeth Porter, who already works for the Helen Schuler Nature Centre/ But we had a really short list of artists to choose from,” Scott said.

“The Southern Alberta Art Gallery was  invaluable,” he said.

“ We’d like to do this every year, but it depends on  the budget because we paid our artists and it depends on how successful this program is,” he said, noting the artists expressed themselves and their feelings about local attractions through different techniques and approaches.

“ Each artist employed their own aesthetic,” he said, adding some of the artists were more familiar  than others with the needs and styles of commercial art, but but their own stamp on their own designs.

Bryce Many-Fingers -Singer embraces his love of history, particularly First Nations history on his Galt museum poster.

“I’m a history geek,” he told a crowd a of media at the media release.

“Red Crow was from here and Crowfoot married into the Siksiika nation,” he observed, adding he wanted the focus to be  the treaty signing of 1877. He drew a lot of inspiration from the Blackfoot exhibit at the Glenbow Museum, in Calgary, where he was studying art.

“I went to art school in Calgary, which was really exciting. I basically lived at the Glenbow museum. It was really exciting,” he said, adding he hopes his poster will inspire young folks as well as elders.

Elizabeth Porter, who has her art online under the name snowbringer, was inspired by her hikes in the coulees by the Helen Schuler Nature for her Helen Schuler poster.

“It’s really wonderful down there.  And things change so quickly, I wondered, what Could I do that was different. Then I stumbled and the deer was just right there framed by the trees, right in front of this beautiful new building and the light captured it perfectly,” she enthused.

Cartoonist Eric Dyck, author of popular cartoon  Slaughterhouse Slough,  designed his City of Lethbridge poster the same way he creates his cartoon, by doodling while talking to people.

Casa is going big  and going home this weekend. In addition to Christmas at Casa returning to a live event with six new art exhibits opening Saturday, Nov. 20.

“Thematically they’re big and they explore big, meaty subjects,” said Allied Arts Council Communications co-ordinator Kelaine Devine.

Lethbridge based artist and print-maker Kellen Spencer‘s “Between the Sidewalk and the Horizon” is in the main gallery. It explores the concept of home.

 The project began  as a documentative series of photographs of his home in Mount Pleasant in Calgary.

 The exhibit displays drawings and etching alongside  surreal elements of his photographic work exploring  the concept of home as an investment versus  places that hold family and  personal history.

“It’s a beautiful exploration of through photos and print making,” Devine said.

Czech Republic born, Lethbridge based Petra Malá Miller also explores the concept of home in her exhibit “ Living in the Zone.”

“It’s about the effects of radioactive fallout, but it’s actually uplifting rather than depressing,” Devine said.

 Cardston based artist Craig Talbot’s “Sky Palace” in the Passage Gallery looks at the concept of home in the terms of a futuristic Utopia.

“Many years ago, in the year 2021, the sacred trees were emancipated from humankind. The people of the Sky Palace re-planted the trees to create a new, healthy planet where the people of Earth Could have a chance to redeem themselves for poisoning the sacred trees,” Talbot summarizes in his artists statement.

“The world in the future has evolved into the Sky Palace,” Devine observed.

Recent U of L graduate Leah  Koutroumanos’ exhibit of watercolours “ Diary of Earthly Things” in the Casa  project space.

“Beauty and ambiguity are explored in my watercolours through contemplation of the ‘stumbled upon’ and an objects value, determined by its evanescence. I am describing the passing of time using static informal subject matter,” she writes in her artist statement.