The gift season finds galleries scaling down their artworks

’Tis the season. As Vancouver grows in size and sophistication, so do its art collections. So, too, does the desire to buy art for others, modest and affordable works that can be held in the hand, placed on a bookshelf, or mounted above a desk or a bedside table. Commercial galleries are always in the business of selling, yes, but at this time of year, many of them scale down the size of their wares, targeting the growing numbers of Christmas shoppers interested in sharing original art with friends and family.

At the Malaspina Printmakers Gallery on Granville Island, artist Heather Aston and gallery coordinator Diana Lee are finalizing the salon-style hanging of the Christmas show of small framed original prints. As Aston applies the show’s title in vinyl text high on the gallery wall, she talks about the value of this seasonal impulse. “I’m giving two etchings as Christmas gifts this year,” she says, then adds with a quick laugh, “not mine!” (Three of her lively monotypes—floral still lifes and garden scenes—are included in the exhibition.) “Prints are especially good gifts for people who are starting collections.”

Carol Nymark, executive director of the Malaspina Printmakers Society, agrees, then adds that the growing trend of giving art is not limited to Christmastime. “One thing we’re discovering is that young people are buying prints as wedding gifts.” It’s a way of bestowing something enduring and meaningful, she explains. “Original prints are not a throwaway—they’re the authentic goods.” And authenticity, she emphasizes, is a big concern for clients.

Nymark also notes that the gallery, which helps support MPS’s printing facilities, workshops, and other creative and educational activities, has sold more art as gifts this year than ever before. This, she says, is despite the fact that a dip in the number of American visitors to Vancouver has had an impact on local shops and studios. “When economically the going gets tough, people turn to the beautiful things in life,” she says.

Here are some of those small-format beautiful things, displayed in exhibitions this December.

Deck the Walls

At the Malaspina Printmakers Gallery until January 14, 2007

This popular seasonal show of over 100 small and miniature works by some 60 member-artists has been a Malaspina tradition for over a decade. Look for a range of print media, from silk-screens, collagraphs, and reduction linocuts to photo-etchings, drypoints, and “spit bite” etchings. A lovely example of the latter process is Katie Dey’s Fish, executed with great delicacy and sensitivity.

The miniature format is especially conducive to whimsy, as seen in Tomoyo Ihaya’s Shooting Star and Mikolaj Smolinski’s Fox at the Edge of the Forest of Little Hands. Look, too, for the formal and textural subtleties of Jo-Ann Sheen’s collagraphic images of battered and weathered objects, titled Monument II, III, and IV. Ken Pattern’s carefully rendered litho, Amsterdam, is a canal scene in which road-dividing marks float in a surrealistic line down the middle of a waterway. Pat Beaton’s equally surreal little linocut, Greed, adds a cautionary note to this season of extravagant consumption.

First Encounter

At the Diane Farris Gallery until December 23

Subtitled An Exhibition of Small Works (With Children in Mind), this show features gallery artists and guests and aims to attract young eyes as well as old. Anticipating junior collectors, the show includes lots of animal paintings, such as cats by Xue Mo, polar bears by Judith Currelly, comic elephants by Robert Chaplin, and rows of stylized white bunnies by Sara Genn. And since children like to look at other children, check out Angela Grossmann’s mixed-media young girls wrapped in winter wear and Kathryn Jacobi’s glowing, gorgeously executed oil portrait of baby Michele O’Brian.

Art with a more satirical bite includes Cam MacDonald’s Liquidation series: generic cans wrapped in the artist’s own labels, proclaiming and illustrating revolting-looking and dubious-sounding seafood. MacDonald makes us gasp, laugh, then gasp again as he riffs on a doomsday scenario of oceans plundered to extinction.

small works

At the Bau-Xi Gallery until December 24

Hanging in the window of the Bau-Xi are three little sculptures by Magda Trzaski, each mounted in a museum box and each emanating equal amounts of charm and ghoulishness. Dated and numbered rather than named, they consist of mixed-media figurines with ceramic heads and fibre-wrapped wire bodies holding on to paper-covered Styrofoam balloons. They’re a bit reminiscent of the Royal Art Lodge’s cartoons and dolls and a bit suggestive of the current craze for ugly-beautiful toys, yet still distinctive and gorgeously made.

Other small works here range across style and medium, including Ian Martin’s photogravures, Mas Funo’s raku boxes, Tom Burrows’s polymer-resin panels, and a miniature etching by Joe Plaskett. Look, too, for lush-hued paintings, such as Sheri Bakes’s impressionist landscapes, Karen Yurkovich’s apples, Jamie Evrard’s dahlias, Bratsa Bonifacho’s words and letters, and Sylvia Tait’s partitioned abstractions. It’s a big assortment of small artworks, each more tempting than the next.

Mini-Masterworks

At the Spirit Wrestler Gallery

This wonderful show of miniature works by contemporary Maori, Inuit, and Northwest Coast artists has technically just been dismantled, but several of the exhibit’s precious objects remain in the gallery. They include an engraved gold bracelet by Lyle Wilson, a bronze eagle head by Dempsey Bob, a moon medallion by Fred Davis, two bird sculptures by Gordon Toi Hatfield, a couple of small ancestral portraits by Darcy Nicholas, and a tennis racket in serpentine and antler by Jamasee Padluq Pitseolak. Flip through the exhibition catalogue for the mini-wonders you missed—and then walk down Water Street to the Marion Scott Gallery for Art Forms ’06. This marvellous exhibition of small sculptures by Inuit artists runs to December 31.