Alvaro Arce, who has lived in Sherwood Park since 2013, submitted two pieces, a painting titled “The Long Pause” and some steampunk bottles, for the Making Art in the Age of the Coronavirus window exhibit at Gallery@501. Photo Supplied
What better way to encapsulate the emotions of the pandemic than through art.
Gallery@501’s window exhibition, called Making Art in the Age of the Coronavirus, features work by local members artists created in the last six to eight months during COVID-19.
Some artists channeled their anxiety, while others created art that dealt directly with the pandemic, and some pieces were created as a way to escape reality.
Artist Alvaro Arce, who has lived in Sherwood Park since 2013, said the pandemic inspired his pieces.
“The painting is very dark surrealism and the other is some steampunk bottles,” Arce said. “During the lockdown, I was at home and I started fixing things and I found pieces of TVs, fans, and other things and took them apart and applied them to the bottles and painted them.”
The painting, which is a mixed media piece done on wood, is called The Long Pause.
Arce said he wanted to get the feeling across that things are strange and somewhat beyond real in life right now.
Sherwood Park artist Ken Duncan etched his single-celled organisms creations in leather.
Another local artist featured in the exhibition took a very different approach to the piece he submitted.
“The pandemic sort of lit a fire that had been bubbling around in the back of my mind. I was in Victoria a few years ago and spotted a book by Ernst Haeckel, a biologist from the time of Darwin and he was studying single-celled organisms and was drawing these things,” Ken Duncan, who’s lived in Sherwood Park for two years. “I saw it and I thought these things are fascinating with their forms, shapes, the way they work, the similarities, and I was studying the book for a couple of years and I sat down one day and was inspired to create my own single-celled organisms.”
Duncan said he started by painting them with watercolour but then decided to try another medium.
“I thought they would work well on leather. I took four or five of the designs and carved them onto a round piece of leather and mounted it onto a lazy-Susan,” Duncan said. “I worked on it for an hour here, a half-hour there for a month to six weeks.”
Duncan said they’re not copies of other microorganisms but ones he has created using real microorganisms as a guide.
The piece Onward and Upward created by local artist Jamie Panych is aimed at uplifting people during the pandemic. Photo Supplied
Another artist featured in the exhibition has a bit more traditional art piece in the show.
“It started off as a mixed-media project with the onward and upward theme I have for my paintings that is more spiritual and uplifting. It was something I was working on that I thought would fit into the COVID exhibition,” Jamie Panych, who has lived in the county since 1996.
The piece, which is called Onward and Upward, is aimed at uplifting people, according to Panych.
“It is a mixed-media piece representing a landscape with the sun breaking through the stormy clouds. I built up the mixed-media for the storminess and as you go upward into the painting it is calmer and the sun is breaking through,” Panych said. “There is also a dove in it that is a representation of hope as well. There is also a lion in there but he is hard to make out because I didn’t want him too in your face but I wanted to show bravery in trying times.”
Gallery@501 said the exhibit, which is set to showcase until Sunday, Oct. 25, is to show off the incredible talent in the community.
