Upon opening the sticky door to the Stride Gallery I realized the space was empty, as if I had accidentally visited in between exhibitions. Rogers was inside the seemingly bare space and invited me in explaining that he was just 'doing some patch up work' in one corner of the room where I thought maybe there was a small object that he was kneeling over. After peaking around him I still couldn't see anything that he could be fusing with. Following his invitation, I closed the door from the harsh outdoors of the bright Calgary afternoon and was suddenly immersed in a pitch dark gallery space with glowing crisp lines forming a framework that highlighted all the contours and details of the space that I had been totally unable to perceive in my first scan of the gallery. What was invisible upon my tentative entrance into the space was at once revealed and demanding my attention.

Wireframe installation Image courtesy of Stride Art Gallery Association.

In Wireframe, the gallery becomes the artistic focus through Rogers' organization of the space: highly reflective photo-luminescent tape running along the baseboards, tracing the chequered ceiling pattern, announcing the pipes protruding from the ceiling and walls, bringing attention to the electrical sockets and the few small holes to be found along the wooden floor boards. From these basic tracings that created an astounding effect of illumination while at the same time maintaining a pitch dark environment, there was a disappointing lack of detail that came from what Rogers chose to indicate with his tape and what I would hope could have been parsed from the unique character of the space (assuming the space is unique enough to require this sort of activity). In fact, my questioning of the amount of detail that was presented through the tape's decided placements comes out of a short discussion I had with Rogers in the space (after blindly reaching out to shake hands and introduce myself to him as he held a glowing grocery bag of extra tape he had been using for patch-ups; floating eerily in the abyss). There were a couple of random pieces of tape - one located on the ceiling, a couple along the walls - which Rogers said represented points of damage to the surface of the gallery's interior. With so few notable points of damage, which I argue would also be the potential points of interest, I ask myself what else is at play in Wireframe, other than the creation of a cool immersive video game? The points of damage - such as the small holes in the walls and the floors - were created from previous exhibition installations that required some destructive and permanent interventions into the space. Although it's fun to peer into the floral-shaped cut-outs in the floor, these qualities reminded me of other older gallery spaces I had visited that also had mysterious holes through their floors and walls, which I always assumed had been created by former proprietors (like convenience store owners or salons aestheticians) who needed to run a cord for an appliance into whatever access point lay below. So if these indications aren't towards difference and uniqueness, they instead may offer memories of sameness.

By calling attention to the architecture and the scratches on the wall, Rogers told me that he wanted to record and present the history of the use of the Stride Gallery main space. If the space isn't necessarily that interesting, with few notable narratives, then why make it the focus? If the action of highlighting the character of the gallery is also to waste the space or to comment on the history of the space's use by invasive physical objects, there needs to be more involved than the action of highlighting the baseboards, the doorway and a couple holes in the floorboards. My inclinations towards discussions of institutional critique or site-specific installation fall flat with this example, although I cannot deny the visceral pleasure of the immersive video game environment that Rogers mentions within his artist statement along with the indications towards other spaces that I have visited that I found interesting because of their imperfections, no matter how subtle.