Comic Sense: a Ludic Exploration of 3 Contemporary Comics

Comic Sense: a Ludic Exploration of 3 Contemporary Comics

August 29 – September 23, 2023

FAB Gallery
Second Floor

Opening Reception

University of Alberta faculty, staff, students and invited guests
Thursday Sept 14
7:00–9:00pm
FAB Gallery 

Curated By:

Chris Reyns-Chikuma

Featuring Works by:

• Bettina Egger
• Bharat Murthy
• Adrien Veczan

About the Show:

Comic Sense exhibits 3 contemporary “comics”, each published in a different format: graphic narrative book, comic strip, and comic “book”-magazine. These 3 comics ask questions about: the definitions of art and comics, the history of appropriation of comics by Art, AI’s creative powers in particular for the generation of comics, the notions of copy and original, and the meaning of art’s aura in a contemporary consumerist context. They occupy the 3 spaces of the gallery according to their topic: as usual the walls, but also the floor and the ceiling.

About the Artists:

Bettina Egger was born in Innsbruck (Austria, EU) in 1981 and studied comics in Austria and France. She published several books in different genres and styles from the 64-p. album A la Recherche du monstre (in Search of the Monster, 2016) to a drawn interview of comic artist Emmanuel Guibert (Entretien avec Emmanuel Guibert, 2018) and Un Voyage en Transsibérien (A Trip on the Transsiberian train, 2015). After teaching at the U. of A. in 2022-23, she is now a professor in Salzburg (Austria). This graphic narrative was published in French in 2022 by French publisher Jarjille and narrates her 3-week stay with a team of Austrian archeologists excavating a lost and not-yet-well-known civilization, the Urartu (9th-6th C BCE). In the book, among other things, she establishes parallels between archeology and ‘comicsology’.

Bharath Murthy was born in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) in 1978. He studied painting at the M.S. University of Baroda; then worked as a filmmaker and comics author. He taught film direction at FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) in Pune between 2012 and 2018. “The Vanished Path: A Graphic Travelogue” (HarperCollins, 2015) is his first book-length comic. He also edits and publishes comics in India under the Comix India label. This double comic strip specifically produced for a special issue on Documentary Comics (in Alternative francophone in 2022) tells two short quest-for-truth narratives that merge by the end to lead to a new kind of enlightenment and eliminate the binaries of our conventional ways of thinking ([fe]male genders, human-animal, machine-human).

Adrien Veczan was born in Québec (Canada) in 1980 and is an artist and photographer. He graduated with high honours from Seneca College at York University in 2009. He was an acclaimed photojournalist before becoming a renowned advertising photographer. His first solo exhibition Telephone (2015) was followed by Whyte Avenue (2017) and Intermission (2021) at the Saddlery Gallery. In 2018, he personally built and established Veczan Studio in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Adrien regularly travels to New York and London. This photo-graphic narrative is his first book and is a challenge to both the world of comics by using photos instead of drawing to narrate a story, and to the world of art by emphasizing the question of originality.

About the Curator:

Chris Reyns-Chikuma is a professor at the UofA in the MLCS Department in the Faculty of Arts. He teaches Francophone Cultures and Comp. Lit. He published several books and over 60 articles and chapters on various topics (mostly on literature and comics-BD). He co-curated several exhibitions, the most recent one being Comics Sans at AGA in Edmonton (June-Sept. 2022).

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