RBC Work Room: Dara Humniski and Sergio Serrano-Monument

#agaMonument

In the RBC Work Room, Dara Humniski and Sergio Serrano explore tradition, artifact, ruins, utopias and the space between art and design.

RBC Work Room is a studio-like working space that supports the development of collaborative contemporary art projects. Local artists conceive and produce their artworks in this public gallery space, ultimately realizing a finished exhibition. This project format encourages and supports creative experimentation while providing artists from the region with much-needed studio and presentation space. RBC Work Room exposes the creative practices of artists to the public, allowing gallery visitors to see the progressive development of the exhibition from beginning to end.

This second RBC Work Room project features Edmonton artists/designers Dara Humniski and Sergio Serrano working in residence for a creative development period of six weeks. Their finished exhibition, Monument, will be on display from November 24 to February 19, 2018.

Using the methodologies of design as a medium to examine our present moment and interrogate the customs of creation, Humniski and Serrano will inhabit RBC Work Room to make works on paper, print editions and ephemeral or temporary works in various scales. Created both individually and in partnership, the resulting works featured in Monument will echo themes of tradition and ritual, artifact and archives, ruins, monuments, utopias and explore the areas between art and design, nature and technology, the real and the imagined, truth and fabrication, the familiar and the unknown.

RBC Work Room is an extension of the RBC New Works Gallery, which features new artworks by Alberta artists. This project series continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting the work of Alberta artists.

Organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta and presented as a part of the Poole Centre of Design with the support of the RBC Emerging Artists Project.

Bios

Sergio Serrano

Sergio Serrano is a graphic designer and artist born in Mexico, now based in Edmonton. He received a BA in Design from the University of Alberta in 2009. His design client-work focuses mainly on the arts and education. Literature and mythology are recurring themes in his artwork, which explores the narratives humans create in order to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. He works in print media and book works, creating images and objects that feel both familiar and unknown. His work also deals with the communication and transformation of these narratives in language, content and form. Serrano’s artwork was presented in Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art and he has co-produced public art commissions for the City of Edmonton Civic Art Collection.

Photo credit: Allison Dragsten

Dara Humniski

Dara Humniski grew up in Edmonton, Alberta and completed Bachelor of Design in Industrial Design at the University of Alberta in 2004. MASS (2011) was her first major gallery installation, hand-painted on site in Manning Hall at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Her work is included in the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection and Canadian Centre for Austrian and European Studies at the University of Alberta. She has shown in both solo and group shows since 2005. Humniski is a multi-instrumentalist with a diverse background encompassing fine art, industrial design and carpentry. Using the natural world as a starting point, she experiments with scale and media to assemble fictional worlds with open-ended narratives that express things about the human condition. She is also a founding member of the Loyal Loot Collective.

Photo credit: Fish Griwkowsky

Oct 14, 2017 October 14, 2017 – February 19, 2018Feb 19, 2018