Happenings at Banff

The person next to ReBecca is Jorie Adams. She is a special person. While she was heading up the music & sound department at The Centre, she suggested Articulation apply for a residency & gave us all of the information & contacts required. So we owe her a great deal. She has since retired & is enjoying working a few days a week in a quilt store while she pursues her textile passion. We invited her to have lunch with us one day and showed her our studios & our work up in the Other Gallery. One of Articulation's strengths is the active support from people such as Jorie.


We all attended Flossie Peitsch's Staged Four where she had modified parts of her installation in the Other Gallery & her studio was open for viewing. Darren Miller had composed music from the sounds pieces in the installation made when struck. Chris Chafe played the celletto & this was added to the music that was played over speakers placed around the gallery. Flossie used a soft mallet to keep suspended fluorescent tubes & strips of plastic moving & so making moving reflections on to the wall. She called it All Things Temporary Time-Lapse Installation and Soundscape.

I enjoyed the informal, graffiti-like dialogue that went on on a flip chart kept outside a meeting room. This week's one was a battle between the different art disciplines.
This was typical of the stimulation found throughout The Banff Centre. There was so much to see, do & hear; so many people to talk to and learn from; so many services & support to enable the artist to work on her own thing -time management turned out to be a much bigger issue than I had planned on having to deal with for the month while in residence.

Banff March 25

I have put in a few more hours on Woman Mountain. The red triangles are feminine, the blue/green triangles are masculine.

We attended Sandra Hawkins' (aqua shirt) artist reception. She has been on a self-directed residency in Glyde Hall this month. She has been working with her journals & photographs from her time working in the Arctic.

We also attended Flossie's talk about her 'All Things Temporary' installation, a collection of materials she found on campus that people had thrown out. She arranged the items into a number of compositions in her studio. Today she added sound, which added another dimension to her work.

Banff March 20

Yesterday morning, when we were in the dining room, we saw performance art. A person was standing with a bag over her head & a sign on her front, that read 'Failed Artist'. Even though the room was a buzz with conversation about her there was no interaction with her and she was ignored.

This morning she was there again with a different sign, 'Great Artist'. This time people shook her hand, danced with her & gave her a big hug. Most of the interaction was with non-artists, mainly people who work for a bank.
The artist, Flossie Peitsch, said she felt personally the different effects the 2 signs had on the way she felt.

We have just finished 4 intensive days with Martha Cole, which proved to be invaluable because of all we learnt about ourselves, our group and life as an artist.

Martha works on her own work for a change, on the last night when we watched a movie in our studio in the woods. We had popcorn to celebrate. This morning, after breakfast, Martha and Vickie left for Calgary and the airport so Martha can return to Saskatchewan.

Banff March 13

Flossie Peitsch from Sydney, Australia, began her self-directed residency in The Centre this week. We invited her to visit us in the woods. We had lots of fabric we could give her to get her started on her project.

She generously gave us her time to listen to each of us talk about our work and offered feedback to help us along in the work's development.

As a group we have decided we are ready to learn how to self critique and our work needs to be critiqued by others outside the group who are qualified. So Flossie's arrival is timely.