REVIEWS:

Edmonton Airports Commission Article in Vue Magazine
Arrivals and Departures by Agnieszka Matejko
Liz Ingram and Walter Jule have created airport art that belongs in a gallery

It’s finally happened! The main arrivals hall at the Edmonton International Airport is complete. I began to think that it was under permanent renovation, that the construction crew had long eloped to Hawaii and that we were walk down those claustrophobic, plywood-lined hallways forever. “They must be hand-carving the modern version of the Taj Mahal behind those partitions,” I thought.

Well, the long-awaited result is no Taj Mahal. When I walked into the new arrivals hall for the first time, I wondered if it were still under construction. Metal beams are everywhere—presumably the result of the latest architectural fad. A colossal globe hovers above the passengers like a giant meteorite. It too seems strangely unfinished, as if the designer ran out of patience or paint. The one truly exciting feature of our new arrivals hall is that the architects included art. And it isn’t just safe prairie landscape stuff. Instead, the architects went out on the limb and commissioned two of our most well-known local printmakers, Liz Ingram and Walter Jule, to create two challenging, contemporary, mural-sized pieces on opposing folded metal partitions. Their works, entitled Touching Water: Anticipation and Memory (Ingram) and A Walk in the Prairie Landscape: All Pats are Irredeemable (Jule), are among the most expressive pieces I have ever seen in a public space. This is no elevator-music version of art, the kind most airports specialize in. These artworks run deep.

Ingram’s collage of fingers running through cool green water takes us into some deep inner space far removed from the stressful ambience of an airport. “When I started to think about this project, I wanted to work on something that was really inspirational to me,” Ingram explains. “I decided to work with hands in water because of how universal the experience of playing with water is.” She still recalls the thrill of watching monsoon rains in India, where she spent her childhood. “I remember going out into the flooded streets. I remember being really excited.” Even her parents’ worries could not keep her from the water. She simply had to run the water through her fingers, or float little boats and sticks upon it. Ingram relives that experience in one of the two images for the airport (the artwork forms an accordion so two separate images are melded together). “I photographed my hands playing in a boreal forest stream,” she explains. “When you are hiking in the mountains and you run across a stream, what do you do? You put you put your hands in it.”

For her second image (which emerges as we walk around the “accordion”), Ingram photographed two children’s hands reaching out toward each other across a body of water. “I wanted it to provoke a sense of longing, anticipation,” she explains. “They reach as if they were about to meet.” She believes that that’s exactly the feeling arriving passengers will experience as they walk into the hall. As these passengers walk past Ingram’s print and pause for a moment to view it from the front, the two pairs of hands come together as if in a gesture of warm greeting.

Touching Water is one of those rare public artworks that do not pander to what many public commissions disrespectfully assume is the unsophisticated taste of the public. Ingram’s work shows that you can create a “decorative” work, and yet easily access an international audience. Maybe that’s because she has chosen such a universal theme. “I think it’s an element that’s soothing for everyone because we are made up of 98 per cent water,” Ingram says. “It’s because it’s internal and external, the rippling, the flow—it’s something that we understand and experience intuitively just because it’s in us.”

From the moment I first saw Walter Jule’s work many years ago as a student in the U of A Department of Fine Art (where he teaches printmaking) I sensed an enigma. I knew he was conveying something important in his work, but I was a lowly student and he was a well-known instructor and so I dared not approach him. So it was with a bit of not-so-well-hidden delight that a few months ago I found myself teaching a course scheduled at the same time as his. As I occasionally ran into him in the hallways I tried to initiate a conversation. The weather, the trials of grading, the lack of air in the building seemed like good ice-breakers. But to my amazement and delight, no matter what trivial subject I brought up, Jule would respond in an utterly unexpected way. Somehow he turned every fleeting hallway chat into a memorable discourse on life, history, philosophy or time. That was when I first gleaned some understanding of the mysterious quality in his work. There is nothing in Jule’s character or in his art that smacks of the superficial. Everything has profound symbolic and personal significance. To speak to him or to see his work is to see a richer, more eloquent world unfold.

“Nowadays we travel all around the world,” he says animatedly. “One of the themes of the traveller is that they are trying to discover something new or recapture something from the past.” But to Jule it’s not that simple. “We say, ‘I have been to Paris,’ but all we have really experienced is our Paris. There is the sense of the concrete, external world, but we always view it from a veil of attitude, feeling, conditioning. In my work, I have always been interested in trying to combine elements that seem to come from the world we all see and elements that are symbolic of our inner reality.”

For the airport commission, Jule has drawn on his deepest interests, (entirely avoiding the temptation to dumb down his work to make it more “accessible” to the public). He takes the viewer on a symbolic flight across a prairie landscape. Gently rolling hills and valleys unfold before us, seeming at once familiar and yet strangely foreign. This puzzling aerial view is, in fact, made from one of the most recognizable materials: plain paper. To create this print Jule dampened sheets of paper and pinned them to a wall, allowing the paper to warp as it dries around shapes. “When the wrinkles do something unexpected, open-ended, then I take a photograph,” he says enthusiastically. The perplexing effect we can see in the airport commission is of a microscopic, momentary event becoming a vast landscape.

“My piece is kind of pushy,” laughs Jule, who delights in confounding the viewer’s senses. “Don’t fall asleep!” he adds with a solemn smile. “The more you realize the transient nature of perception the more you realize that your perception is absolutely unique. When you die, that Paris dies, too.”

Liz Ingram and Walter Jule’s work is on permanent display at the Edmonton International Airport.


Additional Reviews


human/nature excerpt by Amy Gogarty from the catalogue human/nature, 2004

human/nature essay by Amy Gogarty from the catalogue human/nature, 2004

human/nature review Vue Magazine, at the Lando Gallery 2004, by Agnieszka Matejko