Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, Art Gallery

Exhibition dates: January 20 - March 10
Opening Reception: February 1, 7:00 PM

Dianne Bos
The Sleeping Green

Internationally exhibiting artist Dianne Bos references a famous World War I poem for the title of this exhibition which consists of extraordinary photographs taken in ‘no-man’s land’ between the trenches on the Western Front. Travelling through France and Belgium in 2014, Bos used a variety of vintage and pinhole cameras, including a 100 year old camera, to photograph the land a century after the Great War. In her Calgary studio, Bos incorporated objects from the battle sites – such as rocks, leaves, and a bullet – in the printing process. By scattering these over the paper during printing, as well as dodging, burning, and overlaying maps of stars, she produces layers of imagery that convey the emotional depth of these extraordinary landscapes. As Bos says, these works “make the invisible visible” and they represent far more than just depicting the physical features of the land as it appears today. In this way The Sleeping Green is not about the war itself but rather explores how a terrible historical event has become part of the fabric of our collective imagination. Curated By Josephine Mills and organized by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery.

Wes Bell
On the Line

Bell, a successful New York fashion photographer recently returned to Medicine Hat, shows his impressive capabilities in fine art photography with these dramatic, emotionally resonant images, shot and printed using traditional analogue processes rather than digital. Plastic bags caught on fences, trees entangled with wire and stairs leading nowhere are rendered in richly textured black and white prints, of which The Washington Post’s Director of Photography, MaryAnne Golon, writes: “There is beauty, loss and poetry in every frame. Loss and remembrance are universal and Bell makes those emotions accessible and visible.” Bell has exhibited his work in England, the USA, Hungary and Japan, and won the 2017 Bronze Award in the Royal Photographic Society International Photography Exhibition, London, UK.

Gallery hours: Daily, 10AM - 5PM

www.esplanade.ca

401 1 St SE, Medicine Hat
Alberta T1A 8W2
Canada