Selections from Art Now, Vera Saltzman & Gary McMillan

The fourth annual Art Now Saskatchewan Fine Art Fair took place this year from September 19^th to 22^nd and BlackFlash was there to experience the work and programming put on by the team at SaskGalleries. Two notable artists showing their work at the fair were painter Gary McMillan and photographer Vera Saltzman. Both artists spoke at the fair, and were kind enough to sit down with me and give more insight into their practice.

Calgary artist Gary McMillan thrives on the strange, and his current work depicts the nature of surreal humanoid figures through a strange model of realism. McMillan spoke to the audience at Art Now about the four Power Zones, a methodology McMillan uses to break down the art historical category demarcating realism from surrealism. McMillan is producing work that is charged with historical and cultural content that speaks to social science and how we communicate and interact with one another.

McMillan’s humanoid beings seen in the series Galapagos are visual representations of how we socially identify each other and how we form judgments, categories, and hierarchies. Within these vignetted, the figures gender and race are unreadable, therefore dismantling any structures or power dynamics. Any implication is simply based on the viewer’s own assumption. During his talk at Art Now, McMillan gave the audience an example: “an assumption of an image where children are playing could actually be that of children hunting, or running away from something dangerous.” McMillan asserts that active viewing and reading of an artwork is necessary to find the truth.

McMillan’s work expresses where he does and does not belong in society and social discourse. Through his work McMillan is trying to understand people, all while making sense of his own privilege and where contextually his work can respectfully elicit human emotion and feeling.

Based in Fort Qu’Appelle Saskatchewan, Vera Saltzman came to photography later in life, after spending years working in business. While studying at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa, Saltzman was instructed to forgo the instantaneous nature of digital photography for an education in film photography. This curriculum was instilled with the perspective that the medium would inherently allow for Saltzman to slow down, conceptualize, and create work that is thoughtful, meaningful, and a reflection of her own expression.

Saltzman’s subject matter often references community, personal geography, and melancholy. Saltzman has an innate sense of composition, utilizing her subject and the square of medium format film to create an aesthetic that is intentionally unsaturated and calculated. Saltzman’s work may read as documentary, but she does not subscribe to this notion. An integral aspect of Saltzman’s work is post-processing. This act alone removes Saltzman from the documentary canon as she believes documentary is linked with the journalistic approach of unedited and non-manipulated­ images. While her work is meant to highlight and focus on the subject, Saltzman is strictly extracting the emotion that the work is meant to invoke through its subject and aesthetic.

Selected images from Saltzman’s series O Human Child are currently featured in Prairie Portraits, an exhibition at Slate Fine Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan. The exhibition runs until October 26^th, 2019 and also features work from Joe Fafard and Karen Holden.