Montageries: The Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program

Drop by the library from June 29 to July 26 to view Montageries, a Travelling Exhibition from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Montageries is not a term you will find in a dictionary. Rather, it is a combination of ‘montage’ and ‘memories’ with the meanings of the two packed up into one word. One online dictionary describes a montage as being “any combination of disparate elements that forms or is felt to form a unified whole, single image, etc.” And, according to the same dictionary source, the word memories is a plural form of ‘memory’ – recalling impressions and facts, embodying remembrance, and recollections of times past.

This exhibition features a concise selection of nineteen artworks from over 8,000 objects of visual art held in the extensive permanent collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA). Compositionally, each of the artworks selected were created by uniting many varied components – montages of sorts –metaphorically highlighting that every artwork stands as a small part of a much larger whole (the AFA collection). Multi-layered and complex, the works included in Montageries are flashes of memory and times past that we can now take a moment to reflect on and remember as we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts’ permanent collection in the year 2022.

Since September 29, 1972 the he AFA Art Collection has annually acquired artworks from Alberta’s visual artists and is a continually evolving exemplification of the history, development, and achievements of our provincial visual arts community. Close contemplation while viewing the artworks in Montageries may reveal glimpses of Alberta’s art history but more importantly, it will encourage viewers to consider the ‘bigger picture’ of what each artwork might represent within the context of a fifty-years-young permanent art collection.

This exhibition was curated by Ashley Slemming and is being circulated by TREX SW through the Alberta Society of Artists.