erik edson——other stories · printmaker and installation artist erik edson is known for work...

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Erik Edson——Other Stories

Other Stories instation, Owens Art Gallery 2018

In Arcadia 2012

Erik Edson——Other Stories

Owens Art GalleryMount Allison University20 October to 10 December 2017

Confederation Centre Art Gallery24 February to 5 May 2018

Curator: Pan WendtGuest-writer: Emily Falvey

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Edson, Erik, 1968–[Works. Selections]Erik Edson : other stories / curated by Pan

Wendt ; guest-writer, Emily Falvey.

Catalogue of a touring exhibition held at the Owens Art Gallery from October 20 to December 10, 2017, and at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery from February 24 to May 5, 2018.

ISBN 978-0-88828-257-6 (softcover)

1. Edson, Erik, 1968– --Exhibitions. 2. Exhibition catalogs--I. Falvey, Emily, 1975–, writer of added commentary II. Wendt, Pan, 1971–, organizer III. Owens Art Gallery, issuing body, host institution IV. Confederation Centre Art Gallery, issuing body, host institution V. Title. VI. Title: Other stories.

N6549.E38A4 2018 709.2 C20189038896

Foreword 7Gemey Kelly

Curator’s Notes 9Pan Wendt

On the Nature of Artifice 11Emily Falvey

Afterword 45Kevin Rice

List of Works 47

Artist’s Acknowledgments 51

Biographies 53

Credits 54

Contents

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Foreword

This exhibition and accompanying publication are the result of a collaboration between the Owens Art Gallery and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery to present the work of Sackville artist Erik Edson in both our communities. I want to thank Kevin Rice, Director of Confederation Centre Art Gallery, for his continued interest in sharing projects such as these with the Owens. The exhibition curator Pan Wendt, whose idea this was in the first place, has offered us an extended and nuanced look at Erik Edson’s practice, bringing his artwork forward to audiences for the attention it richly deserves.

The collaborative spirit which has informed the project from the start has also included our writer, Emily Falvey, whose essay on Erik’s work is published here. I want to thank Emily sincerely for her wonderful text, and for her intelligence, insight and humour as she reflects on the meanings and implications in Erik’s work.

Sincere thanks to the the staff of the Owens Art Gallery, and to our funders, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of New Brunswick, and Mount Allison University for making this exhibition and publication possible.

Finally, I want to thank Erik Edson for his friendship and generosity throughout all the phases of the project, and for bringing us a body of work that is in equal parts engaging and mysterious. It has been a complete pleasure.

Gemey KellyDirector/CuratorOwens Art Gallery

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This exhibition presents Sackville-based Erik Edson’s latest large-scale installation ruins (2017), alongside a selection of work that spans almost two decades of the artist’s career. Initially known as a printmaker, Edson’s practice expanded into sculpture and installation informed by the qualities of his original medium, in particular the way printmaking reproduces images by means of a process that inevitably involves translation. For Edson, neither looking at nor making pictures are neutral, let alone natural experiences, and through use of found images, stage-set like formats, and other tactics that draw attention to the act of viewing, he demonstrates how our visual experiences are embedded both in the habits of the body, and in a circulating web of imagery. Edson places further emphasis on partial, or allegorical relationships to his subject matter through use of devices such as a doubling shadow, a concealing orifice, or an opaque silhouette. He often focuses on the natural world, so often the site of human fantasies of pure experience, and yet the subject of perhaps the most richly-developed visual cultural archive of all, the myths attached to animals and the landscape. Edson’s nature fictions, his ‘other stories’ share with myths a timeless inevitability, as well as reference to the past, and yet they do not partake of the illusory, the grandiose or the romantic. Instead they are familiar even as they involve enigmatic combinations; they inhabit everyday experience, and employ vernacular imagery and materials; they share open secrets.

Pan Wendt, CuratorConfederation Centre Art Gallery

Curator’s Notes

Sunset 2006–08

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The most comic animals are the most serious—monkeys, for example, and parrots.—Charles Baudelaire, On the Essence of Laughter, 1855

There is something funny going on here—something eerie, but also vaguely comic. A shadow floats over a field of brilliant yellow, its imagery shifting like a moving oil slick. At first glance, it seems like a pastoral landscape, backlit or floating like phosephenes behind your eyes. Gradually, other forms begin to emerge: an ear, an eye, a side of beef, a hawk’s predatory shadow, the gables and chimney of a farm house, a cloud pocked with plastic googly eyes, a Little Trees automotive freshener riddled with pink tongues. This jumble of images is absurd, intriguing, and edged with a peculiar aura of doom. The looming grandiosity of the landscape, silhouetted ominously against an artificial sunshine of yellow acrylic house paint, is at odds with the quaintness of the imagery, which calls to mind children’s stories and Toile de Jouy, just as its constituent materials—cardboard, found pieces of fabric, a pattern of hand-printed polka dots—seem out of phase with the scene’s apparent aesthetic aspirations. There is a temptation to reduce this opposition to a conflict between the sublime and the beautiful, but such a manoeuvre merely turns a blind eye to the actual source of unease. There is something funny going on here, and it is uncertain if this oddness springs from whimsical caprice or the darker regions of disgust.

Printmaker and installation artist Erik Edson is known for work that explores the paradoxical space between art and the natural world, and the installation described above is his most recent foray into this terrain. Aptly titled ruins (2017), it combines printmaking techniques with those of mural painting, set design, and installation art and includes a wide range of art-historical and pop-cultural references. Subtly interweaving diverse artistic styles and aesthetic categories, such as the picturesque, the fantastic, and the surreal, it brilliantly maps out connections between landscape art, capitalist visual regimes, spectatorship technologies (magic lanterns, panoramas, mise en scène), the history of European ornament, and the commodity form.

Although the dominant feature of ruins is undoubtedly its mercurial landscape of found images and materials, the installation also includes two architectural structures—a semi-enclosure made from unfinished drywall with hand-cut windows in the shape of simple, geometrical forms (a circle, a

On the Nature of Artifice1

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square, and a triangle) and a set of stairs terminating in a lookout platform. Depending on its location, the installation may also include additional elements. For example, when it was presented at the Owens Art Gallery, it was separated from the rest of the exhibition by an empty gallery wall. Using the configuration of works hanging on the other side as a template, Edson marked out a series of rectangular shadows, whose outlines he recorded in grey paint. As a gesture, it cleverly connected the two bodies of work, while also playing on the tension between the idea of painting as a window—on the world or the human imagination—and the physical opacity of the medium, which covers rather than exposes. Whatever its final configuration, the installation clearly emphasizes the viewer’s role as a spectator. This is a common thread in Edson’s work, which often involves squinting into peepholes or navigating props and other structures. In ruins, for example, one peers at the darkling landscape through the windows in the drywall structure, or ascends the platform to gaze out upon it, as if upon a sublime vista. Art critic John Murchie once aptly characterized this artistic strategy as “the enforced consciousness of looking and perhaps seeing.”3 By thus emphasizing the visual technologies and social practices used to carve landscapes from material reality—windows, single vanishing-point perspective, tourist photography, surveillance, individualism as an ideal rooted in notions of private property, to name only a few—Edson reminds us that what we see as nature is, in fact, often a highly mediated construct, one that actively conceals its roots in social and ecological inequality.4

ruins anchors the two-part survey exhibition Erik Edson: Other Stories, a joint undertaking of the Owens Art Gallery and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Although the exhibition essentially distils twenty years of Edson’s artistic practice into a single narrative, it is not a typical retrospective. Instead, works have been organized into a cohesive meditation on art, allegory, commodity culture, and what Jason W. Moore calls Cheap Nature.5 In Harbinger (2006–08), for example, the viewer encounters a falcon decoy covered in moss-like, green flocking, a material that calls to mind AstroTurf and vintage kitsch ornaments. The bird appears to be suspended—or perhaps nested—in a silver pail, and a cable running through the top of its head terminates mysteriously in a concert amplifier, which emits the soft sound of running water. Upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the pail is, in fact, a kind of fountain in which water continuously circulates. While this may at first seem like a chance encounter of objects worthy of Lautremont, the work is actually a subtle, yet deliberate critique of humanist conceptions of art and nature. Instead of presenting the viewer with a clear opposition between human artifice and

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the natural world, Edson reconfigures ‘nature’ as an ideological construct that functions—much like a decoy—as an illusion of the real. Harbinger, whose title means both a person who initiates a new method or technology and something that foreshadows a future event, thus enacts a dialogue between two different kinds of simulation. On the one hand, there is the water in the pail, which is caught in a highly artificial loop typical of fountains and other affectations of human-made ‘natural’ oases; on the other, there is the sound of the water that runs through the amplifier, which is supposed to enhance our aural experience. Instead of augmenting the sound of the running water, however, Edson has set the volume of the speaker as close as possible to its actual decibel level, almost negating the machine’s function. A kind of echo is thus produced, one in which the classic humanist dichotomy between nature and culture collapses into a game of mirrors.

One of the advantages of Edson’s approach to mediation is its subtlety. There is nothing very high-tech about the techniques he employs, which often rely upon the physical properties of the materials he uses. And yet, he is clearly interested in technology and its effects on the environment and our relationship with it. This is perhaps most evident in his work Sunset (2006–08), in which the outlines of a bucolic landscape—a rural community or perhaps a suburb—has been transformed into a theatre prop. The viewer is positioned on the ‘wrong’ side of this scenery, as if approaching it from backstage, with the structure’s framework, including the piece of wood propping it up, clearly visible. The back of the prop has been painted matte black, a treatment that also calls to mind chantourné pictures and magic lantern silhouettes. This breezy disclosure of artifice is at odds with the seeming verisimilitude of the pink sunset that appears to be setting somewhere between the prop and the gallery wall. One immediately assumes there is a fluorescent light concealed somewhere in the vicinity. Closer inspection reveals the effect to be nothing more complex than the reflection of a layer of neon pink house paint covering the hidden side of the prop. We are thus tricked into thinking one order of simulacra prevails, when it is, in fact, another.

For obvious reasons, there is a tendency to read Edson’s work as a commentary on our relationship with the ‘natural world’ and its non-human animal and plant inhabitants. In this context, emphasis is rightly placed on questions of mimesis, processed nature, abstraction from nature, the acculturation of nature, and what Wayne Baerwaldt refers to as the “expansive process of creating nature.”6 This tends to go hand in hand with references to fables, mythology, carnival, phantasmagoria, and the many other entertaining forms of deception and fantasy that are so clearly

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important to Edson’s practice. As curator Jan Allen notes, “Edson uses carnivalesque sleight-of-hand in which illusions are poorly disguised and traditional leaps of scale and cheesy materials produce a giddy aura.”7

While this line of inquiry has yielded some valuable insights, it also tends to presuppose the existence of an authentic, untouched, natural ‘Other’ hiding somewhere behind Edson’s unpretentious, yet clearly contrived installations and prints. Such a presupposition has, however, become increasingly dubious in the Age of Capital,8 whose logic has literally penetrated our DNA. It seems opportune, therefore, to consider Edson’s practice from a slightly different perspective, one that might be more suited to the current moment. Rather than seeking some lost connection to nature or the natural world, we will instead take a moment to consider the question of human exceptionalism—the belief that there are certain things that human beings do that render them naturally superior to other life forms. For it is perhaps under this rubric that we may best understand the relationship between art, the comic, and nature that Edson’s work seems to bring into alignment.

Traditionally, humanist discourse operates according to the assumption that human beings are categorically different from all other living creatures on Earth. Religious arguments supporting this assertion include the notion that ‘Man’ was created in the image of God, while secular ones focus on the human capacity for moral and rational thought. The idea that human beings are thus alienated from nature—be it through ‘the Fall of Man’, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the development of consciousness—means that artifice is usually upheld as uniquely human. A central tenant of this philosophical stance is, therefore, that animals do not make art. Karl Marx, for example, once famously noted: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.”9 Laurie Schneider Adams’ more recent introductory text The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction (1996, 2010) is surprisingly faithful to Marx’s perspective.10 “Spiders, unlike humans, are not inspired by aesthetic or narrative ideas,” she writes. “They neither observe the environment nor make a conscious choice to create the abstract geometry of their webs.”11

If humanism holds that animals do not make art, it also contends that they do not laugh. In his famous essay “On the Essence of Laughter,” Charles Baudelaire famously observed, “Laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority … For that matter, if man were to be banished from creation,

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there would be no such thing as the comic, for the animals do not hold themselves superior to the vegetables, nor the vegetables to the minerals.”12 Although such assertions remain surprisingly common, it should be noted that those working in the fields of animal studies, plant consciousness, and speculative philosophy have worked hard to refute them.13 What concerns us here, however, is not the veracity of such humanist claims, but rather the way that art and humour, as we generally understand them, continue to be rooted in the idea of human superiority—over nature, but also over other humans. And it is this notion of superiority that Edson’s work seems interested in undermining.

If you have the courage, you can actually climb onto ruins’ platform and inspect the view. This is unusual, as the structure has been painted a pristine white, and gallery etiquette has trained most of us not to interact with immaculate works of art. The legacy of Duchamp is, of course, this comic uncertainty, which hangs over any object found in an art gallery or museum. Alight, then, if you will, upon the stairs and revel—as a romantic might before the spectacle of a shipwreck—in the powers of your rational mind, which is blessed with the limitlessness of an idea no natural object could present. Prepare to be disappointed. Rather than a sublime experience—which Immanuel Kant famously conceived as a mental rift in which reason thinks the unthinkable (infinity, death, limitlessness), while imagination fails to provide it with a commensurate image—you will likely find yourself feeling a bit ridiculous. Indeed, the awkwardness of the situation, in which one feels elevated, not in spirit, but perhaps as an aesthetic object or maybe even as the butt of a joke, seems more in line with Henri Bergson’s important essay “Laughter,” in which he writes: “The comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art.”14 If we may understand “the worry of self-preservation” to be another way of saying the vagaries of the natural world, it is interesting to note that Bergson also aligns the comic with an eruption of material reality into the smooth workings of the social order, as when someone trips on a sidewalk or a person has an odd physical appearance. While Bergson associates such outbursts and eccentricities with “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,”15 nothing prevents us from also understanding it as something living encrusted upon the mechanical. The comic may thus be conceived as a kind of circuit that both estranges us from and brings us back into the fold of a shared culture.

Edson’s work sketches the contours of this circuit—a conceptual loop in which nature is an artificial, human construct and artifice is human nature.

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After all, the comic seriousness Baudelaire attributes to parrots and monkeys actually springs from their penchant for mimicry, a behavior that seems all too human to be acceptable. And yet, we ourselves are never more animalistic than when we laugh at these animals, emitting primate sounds, our whole bodies trembling. We may have created this loop, which both shuts out nature and creates it, but its effects on the world are no laughing matter. As a society, it allows us to capitalize grotesquely on everything ‘beneath us’, but especially those peoples with worldviews we dismiss as animistic, to say nothing of all the animals, vegetables, and minerals who, unlike us, do not hold themselves superior.

Emily FalveyMontreal, 2018

1 This essay employs the collective ‘we’ with the intent of fostering a sense of unity that may serve as the basis for political action. It should be acknowledged, however, that such a stylistic strategy runs the risk of flattening out socioeconomic inequalities rooted in racism, colonialism, classism, ableism, speciesism, and the hetero-normative. While I am unquestionably writing from a position of white cis privilege, my intention is not to speak for or over others, but rather to reinforce a sense of solidarity and collective responsibility that capitalist ideology works tirelessly to destroy.

2 John Murchie, “On the Nature of Things,” in Landscape Stories: Erik Edson, Lyndal Osborne, Rod Strickland (Chatham, ON: Thames Art Gallery et al., 2007), 19.

3 In Canada, for example, landscape painting has severed ideologically as a means of obscuring the primacy of the land’s original inhabitants—the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit—who are in turn frequently conflated with nature, which is seen as passive and thus exploitable.

4 Moore is referring to the accumulation strategy of the capitalist political economy, which relies upon cheap natural resources and, therefore, an ideology of nature’s inferiority. See Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 78–115.

5 Wayne Baerwaldt, “Ask the Dust: The Nature of Erik Edson’s dwelling,” in Erik Edson: dwelling (Sackville, NB: Owen Art Gallery), 2002.

6 Jan Allen, “The Nature of Nature: Seams & Surrogates in Erik Edson’s fable,” in fable: Erik Edson (Kingston, ON: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2004), 25.

7 The geological term for this—the Anthropocene—has been imported into the humanities and pop culture as a means of conceptualizing humanity’s devastating impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. It has been criticized, however, for obscuring the role that the capitalist political economy plays in this devastation. See Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, tans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 284.

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9 For an excellent critique of Adams’ book, see Govanni Aloi, Art & Animals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) and “Animal Studies and Art: Elephants in the Room,” a special editorial published in March 2015 as part of the “Beyond Animal Studies” Antennae publishing project 2015–16, http://www.antennae.org.uk/back-issues-2015/4589877799.

10 Laurie Schneider Adams, The Methodologies of Art: An Introduction (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), 14.

11 More recently, French literary theorist Alain Vaillant has put forward an anthropocentric theory of art and laughter, which ties them both to humanity’s ability to liberate itself from the exigencies of ‘reality’ and play with representations. Alain Vaillant, “Le rire de l’artiste,” paper given at No Joke/Sans blague, Max Stern Symposium, organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2 April 2016.

12 See, in particular, Giovanni Aloi, ed., Antennae: A Decade of Art and the Non-Human (Billdal, Sweeden: Förlaget 284 and AntennaeProjects, 2017) and Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us About Politics? (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).

13 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), 10.

14 Ibid., 18.

Other Stories installation, Confederation Centre Art Gallery 2018

southpaw 2003

dwelling (detail) 2000–01


L to R: Scenery 2002; Legend 1997–98; Flag 1999


L to R: Legend 1997–98; Flag 1999; 3 in the Key 2014


L to R: Legend 1997–98; Flag 1999; 3 in the Key 2014

3 in the Key 2014 Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Scenery 2002 Confederation Centre Art Gallery

ruins (detail) Owens Art Gallery 2017

ruins (detail) Owens Art Gallery 2017"

ruins (detail) Owens Art Gallery 2017

L to R: goat 2011–17; Shadow 2004; Watcher 2016; In Arcadia 2012

curtain 2016

Harbinger (detail) 2006–08

!Harbinger (detail) 2006–08

bare 2003

bare 2003 Halfway 2016

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The roles of public galleries are evolving—partly challenged by digital transformation and the prolific sharing of publications and images, and partly by the diverse form of work produced by contemporary artists. Erik Edson’s exhibition reminds us that artists are conscious of their changing role in image publication, viewer engagement, and interaction with art. Edson grapples with questions of representation and at times confounds our viewing experiences to ensure multiple readings of his representations of how we experience nature.

Edson’s earlier work, Scenery (a stage-set-like, layered, landscape complete with a wooden crate, a long orange electrical power cord, and cricket sounds) seemed to await the actors; 3 in the Key, the expansive mossy green fabric hung on the wall and extending onto the gallery floor like the “paint” of a basketball court sans players; or the massive 2017 installation ruins with its encompassing black landscape of hills and trees with surreal pink tongues silhouetted against a glowing yellow sky, transformed the gallery and entwined and blended tropes of representation. Edson’s work impressed me with its ability to transform our viewing experience, with its ambiguity, and with the diversity of forms used in his works. The transformation of image to print and print to installation with multiple vantage points or apertures, created plenty of room for the audiences to be active in considering the often playful work— both physically and visually.

I want to express my very sincere appreciation to Erik Edson for spending more than a week installing the exhibition in Charlottetown, for his easygoing, helpful, diligent, and professional manner. I must thank Pan Wendt for his curatorial expertise and the staff at Owen’s and CCAG for their professional contributions to the installations and public programming.

Lastly, I want to recognize Gemey Kelly, Director of the Owen’s Art Gallery for initiating this co-production. Having recently announced her retirement from the Owen’s, I want to acknowledge her long-standing leadership in the visual arts; her commitment to community engagement; and, of course, her scholarship. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Gemey and the Owen’s through loans, touring exhibitions and in this co-production of Other Stories. Thank you Gemey!

Kevin RiceDirector, Confederation Centre Art Gallery

Afterword

ruins 2017silkscreen printed and found fabric on support, with viewing platform and wall 54 ́× 20 ́gallery space

Sunset 2006–08painted plywood construction11́ × 5´ Collection of the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison UniversityPurchased with funds from the Ruth Lockhart Eisenhauer Art Fund

Harbinger 2006–08water-pump, microphone, amplifier, and modified objectsdimensions variable

Halfway 2016printed and found fabric on supports;installation variable

Watcher 2016printed and found fabric on support18´́ × 24´́

curtain 2016printed fabric on support28´́ × 32´́

goat 2011–17woodblock print on found fabric42´́ × 44´́

Hoodwinked 2016printed and found fabric on support42´́ × 48´́

In Arcadia 2012etching and gum transfer on paper36´́ × 48´́Collection of the New Brunswick Art Bank

List of Works

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bare 2003woodblock print on paper43´́ × 82´́

Shadow 2004woodblock print on paper52´́ × 42´́

Additional artworks in Confederation Centre Installation

Chest 2004woodblock print on paper88´́ × 96´́

Renovation 2004woodblock print on paper89´́ × 110´́

southpaw 2003woodblock print on paper42´́ × 69´́

Pastoral 2009intaglio and silkscreen on paper32´́ × 44´́

Muskrat 2005woodblock and silkscreen on paper21´́ × 15´́

giant 2009lithography, intaglio, and silkscreen on paper22´́ × 30´́

spire 2011intaglio, silkscreen, and relief on paper28´́ × 33.5´́

harbinger 2004woodblock and silkscreen on paper15´́ × 22´́

Legend 1997–98stencil printed tarpaulin12 ×́ 16´

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Porthole 2016modified blanket and fabric construction42´́ × 93´́

3 in the Key 2014fabric curtains12 ×́ 25´

Solitaire 2013printed and found fabric with intaglio on paper120´́ × 56´́ + 18´́ × 26´́

Scenery 2002fabric on support, sandbags, pushcart, power cord and sounddimensions variableCollection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

Dwelling 2000–01freestanding false wall, toy animals, light and shadowdimensions variable

Flag 1999nylon fabric flag78´́ × 54´́

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I would like to thank Pan Wendt and Gemey Kelly for initiating this exhibition. Their curation, confidence and encouragement for what became Other Stories is deeply appreciated. My thanks also to Emily Falvey for agreeing to write the catalogue essay and for her thoughtful conversations around the exhibition.

For their expertise, patience and consideration installing these works, I am grateful to Roxie Ibbitson, Ben Kinder, and Jill McCrea. My special thanks to many others for their support: Andrea Mortson, Karen and Steve Edson, Karen and Wayne Mortson, Kevin Rice, John Murchie, Bucky Buckler, Luther and Dashiel Edson, my colleagues in the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University, and The Owens Art Gallery and The Confederation Centre Art Gallery teams for their generosity and commitment to the practice of contemporary artists from the Maritimes and across Canada.

Other Stories was made with assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts and artsnb. EE

Artist’s Acknowledgments

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Erik Edson (b. 1968, Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian print and installation artist who received a Masters of Visual Art from The University of Windsor and his Bachelor of Fine Art Queen’s University, Kingston. Edson is a recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Creation grants from the New Brunswick Arts Board. He is a Professor of Fine Art, teaching in Printmaking and Drawing at Mount Allison University. His practice engages printmaking as a primary creative media and uses installation to expand and explore these concerns.

Edson won the Canadian Printmaking Competition, was a finalist and second prize winner in the Open Studio National Printmaking Awards, and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. His works is in the collections of: The Canada Council Art Bank, The New Brunswick Art Bank, and the Whitney Museum, among other public, corporate, and private collections.

Emily Falvey is an independent curator, art critic, and editor based in Montreal. A doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal, she is also a laureate of the Bourse Michel de la Chenelière (2017) and the Joan Yvonne Lowndes Award (2009).

Emily Falvey would like to thank Erik Edson, Gemey Kelly, and John Murchie for their mentorship and for supporting her critical writing practice from the beginning. She would also like to thank Deborah Margo for putting this essay on the right track.

Pan Wendt is a curator, critic, and art historian based in Charlottetown, PEI. He studied art history at Williams College and Yale University, with a research focus on international modern and contemporary art. While working independently, he organized exhibitions at venues in Canada and the United States, and published widely. Since 2010 he has been Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

Biographies

“On the Nature of Artifice”© Emily Falvey and the Owens Art Gallery

ISBN 978-0-88828-257-6

Owens Art GalleryMount Allison UniversitySackville, New BrunswickE4L 1E1506.364.2576www.mta.ca/owens

Confederation Centre Art Gallery145 Richmond StreetCharlottetown, PE C1A 1J1902.628.6142https://confederationcentre.com/venues/-art-gallery/

Owens Art Gallery photography: Roger SmithConfederation Centre Art Gallery photography:

Jean Sebastien Duchesne Design: RobertTombsPrinting: The Lowe-Martin Group

OwensArtGalleryMountAllisonUniversitytheOwens/

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erik edson——other stories · printmaker and installation artist erik edson is known for work...

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