Operated by the Calgary Contemporary Arts Society

March 22, 2007 to May 4, 2007

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Three Definitions of the Sublime:
Susan Fraser-Hughes, Helena Hadala and Louise Pagé

The exhibition Three Definitions of the Sublime brings together the work of three very gifted women artists from Calgary.

Susan Fraser-Hughes’s large charcoal drawings are most obviously sublime in the eighteenth century sense, but her works on glass open up a new kind of experience that could only be of its own time. Premonitions of the emotional power of Louise Pagé’s huge paintings can be found in the writings of Edmund Burke, though their roots are in twentieth century abstraction, and her constellations of small three-dimensional forms extend the concept still further. Helena Hadala’s art owes as much to Japanese influence as to the abstract sublime of the last century. She, too, presents new kinds of three-dimensional structures alongside multi-layered pictorial works.

The sense of the sublime evoked by the art of Helena Hadala, Susan Fraser-Hughes and Louise Pagé is very different and their works are very different, but all are agreed that showing together under the banner of the “Sublime” will elicit new shades of meaning from their individual contributions and help identify the more subtle links that bond them together as artists and as people. We can anticipate an emotionally powerful and conceptually challenging exhibition of exquisite aesthetic refinement.

Eric Cameron, RCA
Guest Curator

Eric Cameron, RCA, is a Calgary-based artist and a Professor of Art at the University of Calgary. Cameron is a recipient of the 2004 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

List of Images (left to right, top to bottom):

1. Helena Hadala, Winter Reflection #3, 2006-07, frosted Mylar, sumi ink, watercolour, oil pastel, china maker