Nicholas Wade, gifts (installation view), 2022. Image courtesy of Blaine Campbell.
gifts | NICHOLAS WADE
18.02.2022 to 24.04.2022
Opening Reception | February 18 at 7 PM
Reflecting back on his decades as a teacher and a creative practitioner, Nicholas Wade rediscovered gifts received from students, friends, and fellow artists. Below, Wade describes how the arrangement of these gifts in the library context along with the names of their creators provokes a consideration of the importance of giving in a micro economy of creative energy:
As a four and five-year old I regularly accompanied my mother to the Kingston Public Library. This was one of my first museum experiences; that of a book collection on polished oak shelves, paste-waxed green battleship linoleum floors, polished brass handrails and dozens of reliquaries with stuffed birds, mostly native to Eastern Ontario and some, I would soon discover, becoming rare.
The gifts in this exhibition have come to me in many forms in 40-plus years, from former students, past and present friends, and associates. I am in daily contemplation of how many of these people are no longer among us.
So many of these gifts came to me from the creative energies of people who I have encountered… from each person’s “gift”, which is embodied in their thought processes, social presence, aesthetic philosophy, creative energies, thoughtful generosity, and in some cases, their specific consideration of some aspect of my character or consideration of my aesthetic bias or my pleasure among things. Many things evoke ongoing (sometimes both welcomed, and difficult) self–reflection.
I have always welcomed obvious and obscure correspondences between things… things “material” and things “linguistic”; often pairing them in such a way as to pull some new thought from a “this is like this?” proposal… hoping for some vortex of association or image.
I am presenting these gifts in a “reliquary mode”, in order to stimulate correspondences between and among things which have until now, remained singular in their embedded state in haphazard storage through many years.
I realize that I have been thinking about these and the “person of origin” only individually as I encounter them either daily or as I search, usually for other materials, through this body of objects and records, I have brought them all from what it bemuses me to call, “a great distance.”
I am assembling these gifts providing only the first name of the giver, in order to name the gift in a way that assists me in my reach without insisting on meaning. My key assumption is that the artifact, drawing, photograph , or the ”thing” is in some sense the outline of an action or actions. A newer thought may also emerge from combining/pairing intonation, forms, memory and image as I set these small constellations.
how inviting things are… when we are still on the brink of tongues, we must learn how to swim, we hear things singing, all is hieroglyph, and we don’t know how to read yet… how foreign and near they are, the things, we don’t yet know how to name them, but we call them…1
1 Hélèn Cixous, L’Heure de Clarice Lispector, Paris: des femmes, 1989. P.72.
SAAG Art Library Project: In 2020, the Gallery began presenting exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Art Library. The Art Library Project features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the Gallery’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.
Nicholas Wade retired from 18 years of teaching at the University of Lethbridge Art Department in 2011. He has since been working in Lethbridge and at a home studio on the top of the Niagara Escarpment overlooking Georgian Bay in Ontario.
In 2000 and 2005, his work was included in the Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art as well as in an exhibition in 2005 at the Ottawa Art Gallery to celebrate Alberta’s centenary year. In 2014, he was represented at the 90th anniversary of the Art Gallery of Alberta’s 90 x 90: Celebrating Art in Alberta exhibition. He curated an exhibition of the work of Susan Fraser Hughes and Eric Cameron in February of that year. He also showed new paintings at the Trianon Gallery in September 2014. In 2015, his work was shown at the Latcham Gallery north of Toronto, curated by Chai Duncan. He showed recent 3D work at the Esplanade Art Gallery in November 2017 and at Casa in Lethbridge in March of 2018. His work is represented in many private collections as well as the Province of Nova Scotia art collection, the Ontario Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canada Council Art Bank.
This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.
Thank you to our volunteers and sponsors who assisted with this exhibition.
Victoria Lasalle
Dominique Marcil
Ian Thompson