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Artists dream big in Okotoks Art Gallery exhibitions

Okotoks artist Lanhee Cho and Calgary artist Gary McMillan will have their work on display at the Okotoks Art Gallery starting Feb. 29.

Two southern Alberta artists who love to dream big are sharing their triumphs at the Okotoks Art Gallery the next few months.

Okotoks’ Lanhee Cho is bringing the area’s vivid prairie, foothills and mountain landscapes to the small gallery with her exhibit Prairie Dreams while Calgary’s Gary McMillan will have viewers entering an alternate universe in the large gallery with his exhibit Galapagos.

Cho’s oversized textured landscapes have been turning heads at events like Art on the Lawn and Art Works, as well as Art in the Hall at the Foothills Centennial Centre, Servus Credit Union and the Calgary Multicultural Centre.

Now she’s taken it to the next level with her own exhibit space in the Okotoks Art Gallery from Feb. 29 to April 4, five years after submitting an application for a showing.

“Finally I had a chance and I’m ready,” she said, beaming with pride. “The Okotoks Art Gallery has given me a big opportunity.”

Cho said she’s been inspired by the never-ending fields stretching into the horizon since moving to Okotoks in 2010 – a very different landscape from her home in South Korea.

“I love the prairie,” she said. “When I come here there were endless fields. The colours and all the layers are so beautiful.”

Having grown up in a poor family and being the eldest of four children, Cho didn’t have the opportunity to pursue education in art.

But that didn’t stop her from creating.

When her natural talent was discovered in her community, Cho was invited at the age of 16 to teach private art lessons to children.

Years later, while taking an English course in South Korea, Cho fell in love with her tutor. They moved to Okotoks 10 years ago.

Cho’s artistic focus rapidly shifted to her new surroundings and her modest living room became an art studio filled with multimedia paintings depicting the region’s breathtaking views from mountain and prairiescapes to rivers and flowers.

“It’s really inspiring and makes me happy,” Cho said of the area’s landscape. “The colours and all the layers are so beautiful.”

To create each piece, Cho puts oil to canvas and adds texture by dipping yarn in a plaster-like substance called gesso.

Cho selected 10 pieces for Prairie Dreams amongst her newest works, of which took up to two months each to complete.

Offering a very different artistic point of view is McMillan with his outer-worldly figures in Galapagos Feb. 29 to May 1.

Galapagos explores human diversity through an invented world of unclassified beings, natural relationship and social arrangements depicted via 14 acrylic paintings on wood panels and three lifelike sculptures made of corrugated cardboard.

“They’re colourful and charming and strange,” he said. “They’re cerebral and also sensory. Hopefully they give people a sense of curious wonder.”

The pieces were completed in 2018 and 2019.

“I’ve been working figuratively for some years and I moved towards figures that were a little more outer worldly as a metaphor for what goes on in our own society and our own assumptions we make about each other and different cultures,” said McMillan. “I wanted to explore that somehow. The best way would be to go to an alternate world and see if I can examine some of those issues that way.”

McMillan said he hopes people will get a sense of delight and wonder when viewing Galapagos, as well as a willingness to look at their own assumptions on how people do things in our own lives.

“It’s about differences and diversity and how we think about others,” he said. “We have all these embedded biases. It’s hard to challenge them because they’re so deeply imbedded. It’s always good to examine where we get ideas from and if they’re even valued ideas.”

In addition to the paintings and sculptures, McMillan wrote a series of field notes for each piece, similar to a daily journal.

“In each one there’s an observation of a fictitious explorer from some kind of vessel with a crew and captain aboard making notes and observations on what he’s seeing and also how it relates to his life amongst the crew and the people in the past,” he said. “It allows viewers to engage with the work in a way that might make it more sensible.

“You don’t usually see that in art shows. It’s almost like an illustrated narrative you can walk through, like a comic book as opposed to strictly visual art.”

To learn more about McMillan visit gmcmillanart.com. To learn more about Lanhee Cho visit lanhee.blogspot.com.

An opening reception with the opportunity to meet both artists takes place Feb. 29 from 1 to 3 p.m.

Tammy Rollie, OkotoksToday.ca




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