Past Exhibition
Retrospective: Celebrating 50 years of of Art Making
Alice Crawley
April 2005
This exhibition gathers work from private and public collections throughout Ontario and provides an opportunity to glimpse the lifetime effort of an artmaking career: the growth and development of an artist, who stayed within the regional context, explored the avant-garde conventions of the day but followed her own specific course of inquiry. That inquiry saw her designing and painting the stage sets for the first production of the Shaw Festival, honing her consummate drawing skills and investigating sculpture, the medium in which she would realize her potential for provoking the sublime and challenging the obvious.
Her sculptural prowess draws heavily upon the juxtaposition of a common format or familiar object and the unconventional material used in its construction. For example, the hexagonal forms comprising a honeycomb, rendered in urethane soaked silk, expand the prosaic into an ethereal translucence of fragile rigidity. This play between the temporal nature of structure and her affinity for material and its transformative power imbues a speculation of ritual or totemic value to the sculptural form.
From 1950 to the present day Alice has been actively engaged in concerns and issues around art and contemporary artmaking practice. As a founding member of one of Canada’s longest standing artist-run centres, the Niagara Artists’ Company in St. Catherines, she played a significant role in the area’s art community: exhibiting gained her much recognition in her efforts to confront the world as a woman, an artist, a parent and a breadwinner.
This exhibition will travel later in the year to the Niagara Artists’ Company and then on to the Grimsby Public Art Gallery. Made possible through the support of the Ontario Arts Council's Touring and Collaboration Program.