Fire Season – Upcoming exhibition and opening reception

 

“Fire Season” is the 2nd in a series of exhibitions pairing an artist from the Gallery’s permanent collection with an artist with ties to Northern Alberta.

Throughout his life, Beaverlodge-born artist Robert Guest (1938 – 2017) spent many summers working in fire lookout towers translating “his memories of forest fires, moonlit nights, and the changing seasons into a living visual record of Alberta’s Peace Country.”* The wildfire paintings included in “Fire Season” span from the 1960s – 2010s, showcasing over 40 years of his fascination with the subject. The paintings are representational and small-scale, yielding an almost photo-journalistic point of view.

Artist Megan Green grew up in Fort McMurray. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, her work elicits questions of class, socioeconomic value, personal narrative and kitsch surrounding the ‘tar-sands.’ With a nuanced approach often missed by popular media, Green unravels the complexities of the human experience living and working in an extraction-based community. Much of Green’s work in “Fire Season” is based on the 2016 Horse River wildfire, which devastated Fort McMurray and surrounding communities at an almost surreal scale.

Running from June 19th – September 28th, this exhibition intentionally occupies 2025’s wildfire season, holding space for our collective anticipated anxieties and projections.

Curated by Jessica Groome

View more of Megan Green’s artwork at @megangreen_art

*Alberta Foundation for the Arts bio of Robert Guest

 

We acknowledge the support of the Province of Alberta through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Media sponsor: M3M Marketing (@m3mmarketing).