STORYTELLERS
A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths (Reynolds Price, American author 1933 – 2011).
Who doesn’t love a good story? Our entire lives are bound by the relating of events: what happened? where did it happen? how did it happen? who did it happen to? how did it end? These are the questions, and it is the answers to these questions, that teach us; that guide our relationships with others; and that form the memories we either cherish…or that haunt us to the end of our days.
According to most historians and psychologists, storytelling – the conveying of events in words, images and sounds – is one of the things that define and bind humanity. Storytelling is a means for sharing and interpreting experiences and has been used for millennia for entertainment, education, cultural preservation and to instill moral values. Storytelling is found in all human cultures and, while most stories have been told orally or through written text, they have also been expressed in visual forms for thousands of years.
The relating of stories visually is called Narrative Art. In such artwork stories can be told either as a moment in an ongoing story or as a sequence of events unfolding over time. Such works may depict grand or important events or ideas, expressed through the genre of History Paintings, or be concerned with humble scenes or events from everyday life, articulated in Genre Scenes. Whatever the form of expression, however, such representations contain the literary elements of setting, character, and narrative point of view. Most importantly, however, to be considered an actual story or involve narrative a visual artwork must possess one crucial element: it must imply or actually portray action.
In 1971 the musician Rod Stewart released the album Every Picture tells a Story and to a large degree he is correct – every picture does, in one way or another, tell a story. With artworks drawn from the Collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition Storyteller explores the narratives related by artists and the various ways they have been portrayed.
Storytellers was curated by Shane Golby, Manager/Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta, Region 2 of the AFA Travelling Exhibition Program.
