Shotgun-Review.ca

Wall Drawings

2011-08-10T07:48:28Z

The viewer is acknowledged immediately in the Brazilian artist Iran do Espirito Santo's exhibition Wall Drawings at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery. Acting like a buffer zone through which one leaves the outside world and enters a new space, En Passant is a physical work, painted directly on the walls, which fills the gallery from cement floor to high ceiling with the minimal yet encompassing perceptual field of a flawless, vertical grey scale. Realized by a team of artists, the silent, large-scale work strikes the viewer with a commanding sense of natural light despite the windowless gallery interior. As one walks through the empty space, activated only by the painted walls on either side, the curtain or scrim-like façade of the grey scale begins to take on the illusion of a concave, scalloped surface. Our eyes' reconciliation of light next to dark causes an optical effect whereby the same shade will appear lighter next to a dark field and darker next to a light one. When an unvarying grey is placed between lighter and darker shades, it appears to us as a gradient, which in turn creates the illusion of a curved surface. Photo: M.N. Hutchinson Curator Wayne Baerwaldt describes how the work unfolds as the viewer engages with the optical effect: "In a flush of shifting illusions the reflected information exceeds its own space and becomes part of the viewer's without being seen as the property of either." The work makes us question to what extent the material reality of the work (columns of flat, uniform paint) is altered by the senses (the perception of a curved surface) and what the artist wishes to say here about perception and the nature of reality. Wall Drawings hints at something beyond the surface when it begins to take on layers of space before our eyes. The exhibition exists completely on the surface of the gallery walls, and barely touches the surface of representation in its images of a fence, window, brick wall, glass or tape. Because of this simplicity and limited reference material, the viewer is tempted to move beyond the surface reading, to question the artist's motivations. Photo: M.N. Hutchinson Growing up in Brazil in the 1960s when inflation was high and disparity increasing between rich and poor, the artist would have witnessed the sleek new surfaces of modernist architecture appearing amidst buildings from an older world. Brazil's rapid growth during this time is exemplified most pointedly in its capital, Brasilia, built over four years starting in 1956. Brasilia has the highest population internationally for a city established after 1900. The regularity and simplicity of modernist architecture alluded to in the geometrical precision and minimalism of Santo's work stands for an idealism and pragmatism that would have stood in stark contrast to Brazil's heterogeneous history. Santo's concentration on the rift between perception and reality, surprise and contradiction, and his questioning of representation, illusion and surface suggests that Brazil's rapid modernization in the late-20th century largely shaped his conceptual practice. Espirito Santo is known for his sculpture as well as his wall drawings and often explores the same images in both mediums. Contradiction between perception and reality is at the fore in a sculpture entitled Restless 25 (2005). Panels of colorless crystal were treated with sandblasting and mirror finishes so that a long single panel looked as if it were composed of separate pieces of glass. Espirito Santo recreates this piece at the Kerr Gallery in Rest (1996/2011), now using varying shades of light-green latex paint directly on the wall to depict overlapping pieces of plate glass leaning against it at slight angles. With the latter work, the illusion is doubled as we perceive overlapping 3-D objects within a 2-D surface, rather than within another object. Referencing fresco painting and sgraffito wall-décor, Espirito Santo's practice of adding spatial dimension to flat surfaces is a theme that runs throughout Wall Drawings. Such virtual spaces created through optical illusion posit that experience is not always the same as reality. Some ideas, such as the perception of overlapping plates of glass, exist only a posteriori, after and through experience. Photo: M.N. Hutchinson En Passant 8, if it can be said to represent anything, evokes a moving shadow: perhaps a person walking by a wall. The image of shadows on the wall, also present in Elín Hansdóttir's work Peripheral (2007), calls to mind Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Plato considered the nature of everyday reality as an illusion that philosophers saw past, into the realm of truth or true forms. The cave dwellers in the allegory take reality to be shadows on the cave wall, when reality is in fact the objects casting the shadows as they move in front of a fire. With En Passant, Santo reiterates Plato's Theory of Forms by calling attention to the illusive nature of perception, and to the fact that reality or truth (i.e. the actual flatness of the wall works) exists for us only in concept, as we cannot ever "see" it that way through the senses alone. Espirito Santo does not tell us which version of "reality" is truer or preferred -- the realm of pure thought or that of experience -- but he does suggest that a work of art exists only through experience. His work also suggests that man-made artifices can approximate the ideal forms found in thought alone, as in the perfectly aligned bricks represented in Extension (1997). The more general and universal the works are, the more they become associated with ideal concepts. And one way to make these works more universal is to abstract them from materiality as much as possible. The idea of a purely mental art was elicited in the work of the Light and Space artists coming out of California in the 1960s, such as Robert Irwin and John McCracken. McCracken expresses his desire to reach a form of art that moves away from material existence: "I was always primarily interested in form alone, but then to make a form, you have to make it out of something... you don't have anything there for your perceptions to grapple with unless you make it out of a material. However, if you make it out of metal, or stone, or wood, or whatever, then you have something that to my mind may overemphasize the physical aspect and therefore be difficult to perceive as purely mental. An important thought behind this is that all things are essentially mental -- that matter, while quite real on the one hand, is on the other hand composed of energy, and in turn, of pure thought." Photo: M.N. Hutchinson Santo's works take us a step further than Irwin's light installations or McCracken's painted reflective surfaces. Rather than simply proposing that artists can make the material world approach ideal forms, Santo reminds us of our subjectivity when faced with perfection. Because a silent, formless world would be torturous to our senses, we move in sensation and thought beyond these perfect surfaces to see layers of space and meaning.

Home (In)Security

2011-06-03T19:43:30Z

Sylvia Ziemann's exhibition Home (In)security at TRUCK Gallery easily lured me in, as I am a sucker for dim lighting and dollhouses. Despite the peaceful and charming façade all is not well in this neighbourhood. Five miniature house-like structures and a "peep box", sit on plinths throughout the gallery space. Mounted on the walls are three partial houses, a corner bedroom and a doll. Upon closer examination each one reveals a number of unexpected and sinister qualities.

Photo: Rebecca Rowley

In one corner of the gallery grandma sleeps peacefully in her bed with a nightcap on her head and a lace-edged comforter to keep her warm, reminiscent of Little Red Riding Hood. The difference here is that grandma has a wolf skin rug beneath her bed and a partially open suitcase on the floor revealing a Nazi uniform. The stickers on the suitcase read Canada and Hamburg. The view outside the red tinted window is of a bombed out city. The image of a sweet little old lady is shattered.

Photo: Rebecca Rowley

Further along the wall hangs a doll dressed in the garb of a child suicide bomber, with a black scarf wrapped around its head and neck and the now familiar bombs strapped across its chest and waist. It stares like a defiant teenager at the viewer. Domestic terrorism comes to mind. Three wall-mounted house facades appear normal on the outside with plants, a bike, mail, gardening implements, chairs, etc. Typical of any neighbourhood, two yards are tidy and one is unkempt. Peeking inside the illuminated windows reveals tiny videos of a variety of scenarios. One shows a person with a black balaclava standing in front of a closet nervously looking from side to side; another shows a woman knitting on the couch and then checking on prisoners tied up in her closet; the third shows a woman in the kitchen washing her hands, putting on an apron and then proceeding to make two Molotov cocktails. A shed is perched on a plinth. We see some gardening tools and a door leading down to a bunker with brick lined walls, a mattress, cup and a plate.

Photo: Rebecca Rowley

The other four houses in the exhibition are of various shapes and sizes. Some have windows with tightly shut curtains forcing you to look through particular windows and some reveal the interior of the house in its entirety. All tell an unexpected story of violence, fear or sadness. The voyeuristic viewer is enchanted by the morning routine of what appears to be a business woman until she puts on her balaclava and picks up her assault rifle before she heads out the door. The television in a house with a child's room filled with toys, books and an empty bassinet shows someone trudging through the snow and leaving a bundled baby on a doorstep. A pair of feet gingerly step down a flight of stairs in a house with a living room that appears to be recently vacated and a basement filled with plastic garbage bags.

Photo: Rebecca Rowley

The final piece in the exhibition is a peep show. A grey wooden box with headphones beckons for you to come closer and watch through a security peephole- a recorded image of U.S. President George Bush repeating the phrase "pouring more troops" is accompanied by hand clapping. The common theme is television violence, particularly that found during news broadcasts, and how it invades our homes, families and psyches. All family members and neighbours are brought under suspicion in this delightful body of work. Ziemann has meticulously created a subtly nightmarish scenario in each piece. The viewer will be rewarded with a rich and thought-provoking experience if he or she can spend the same time, patience, and attention to detail examining the exhibition as the artist did creating it. Only a mother would think to juxtapose home with the insidious qualities of the little illuminated box that sits innocently in most of our homes.

Megan Dyck's Line Dance

2011-03-13T05:47:32Z

The latest installation to be exhibited at Untitled Arts Society is a series of wall drawings which were crafted excruciatingly over the short period of a week. Once you have traversed a downtown alley off 4th street and made your way up a never-ending stairwell, you find the gallery at Untitled Art Society, surrounded by artists' studios and administrative offices. Upon entering the gallery, there is a mixture of activity presented upon the white walls. Using pencil, ink, paint, and water, Calgary-artist Megan Dyck has created an appealing and visually-stimulating choreography of shape, texture and line throughout the gallery space. Untitled Art Society's gallery can be a challenging spot to work in because it is comprised of many long narrow passageways. Dyck's past work has been geared towards physically dimensional pieces, and since the space does not allow for much in the way of large-scale sculptures, she has found another way to describe her ideas about movement and space. Dyck has maintained a sculptural and dimensional feel in this show, translating her ideas about sculpture into flattened drawings. Photo: Aran Wilkinson Blanc These painted forms represent a variety of movements, from bustling and frenzied motions to a gentle sloping and swaying dance. The figures are at times complicated and confusing, yet they can also transform into something strangely soothing. The contrasts continue throughout the show and the work constantly engages with the viewer. The images seem to reach out and almost envelop parts of your body; their twisting and spiraling almost allows you to catch a slight breeze off their movements. The willful choreography of the show is evidenced though the repetitive steps within the different group formations. The movement of line is a reflection of bodies interacting with other bodies; perhaps people dancing, limbs rotating, heads swaying or ankles twisting. The shapes also morph into other various abstract forms found in nature, from snakes, tails and tongues to silk ribbons or candy pieces. All of these elements are a part of one congruent dance. Photo: Sarah van Sloten The wall drawings encourage the audience to consider the space in which they occupy, and how the audience might interact with the illusionary- or suggested- three dimensional spaces. The paintings are particularly interesting in that they occupy a relatively little amount of space on on the wall, yet they allude to a sense that one may actually be able to walk through the drawn structures as if they were real sculptures. These drawings of columns, lines and ribbons through space are entirely physically flat, but by spatial reckoning and consideration, Dyck illuminates a three-dimensional sensation. The spaces between the ink and pencil used on the wall are also important. This white space- this negative space- is not simply left alone to its own devices. Dyck's inclusion of these "in-between" spaces leads the viewer to question why she values them, and why she is presenting them in such a manor. The large scale of these wall works accompanied by the detail in many spots suggests a deep caring in creating them, as well as a large commitment to spending time within this specific space to produce them. There is an honesty in the strokes of ink and the pencil lines, which are not graphic and clean, but instead very fluid and free. The unpainted areas are so stark that they seem to pop out amongst the moving figures. Dyck seems to understand that the negative areas are not simply blank spots; they can also be the key in imagining the forms as three dimensional. These sections are chasms, holes, and entirely new spaces to be discovered. Photo: Aran Wilkinson Blanc

Joe Kelly and Jay Crocker at M:ST 5

2011-01-28T03:42:08Z

As we survey the intriguing collection of electronic do-dads that Jay Crocker and Joe Kelly have assembled prior to the "Manjello" performance in TRUCK's mainspace, Jay Crocker explains, "This is how we do things in Newfoundland." There is a cockpit-like set-up with blinking lights, switches, buttons, soundboard sliders, cords and foot pedals spread out on a table like a Radio Shack smorgasbord. Beside it stands a vintage 16mm film projector on a tripod, which has been altered to extend the looping film numerous feet behind it with various additions clamped onto it. I think of both a Rube Goldberg machine and the film Brazil with its nuevo/vintage mash-ups of hybrid technology. For those of you unfamiliar with these two local artists let me give you some background. Jay Crocker is a musical genius of extraordinary talent who has been involved for many years in the Calgary music scene performing in bands ranging from "Recipe For A Small Planet," to "Jay Crocker and the Electric Apes," and recently "NoMoreShapes" and "Ghostkeeper." Jay is a curious, adaptable, and experimental composer and instrumentalist. Joe Kelly is an installation artist and wizard with a gift for building outrageous contraptions out of unlikely materials and has presented his films and videos throughout the world. These two like-minded creative types ran into each other in the foothills of Alberta and discovered their common Newfoundland roots and a strong interest in reconfiguring technology. They have been collaborating on various projects for several years. Together at TRUCK as a part of the fifth Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival, they entertain and mesmerize the audience with "Manjello," a collaboration of film and sound created live. Photo of Joe Kelly courtesy of Cody Oliver The projector provides a staccato rhythmic base to which Jay adds sounds from his electronic gadgetry. Synthesized sounds, drum beats and note-like noises are produced by pressing buttons instead of piano keys, pushing soundboard sliders, and using pedals with hands instead of feet. Quiet and simple at first, the sound slowly builds in intensity and complexity until the room is pulsating and throbbing with acoustic vibrations. Joe stands at the projector, which loops a long piece of clear film. He deftly and meticulously drops highly pigmented ink onto handcrafted rubber stamp rollers that have been made especially for the purpose of printing animated images onto 16 mm film, creating a camera-less film. Pulsating hearts, walking figures, expanding circles, cup like rings, spirals and a variety of blobs, lines and marks appear, disappear and reappear on the small white rectangle projected onto the gallery wall. Images come and go with regularity as the film loops through the projector, each time with something new added and something old altered. The familiar rounded corners of old-fashioned films with the raggedy, dusty edges take me back to childhood and home movies, but the images feel more like a flashback. They remind me of the psychedelic projections of the 60's that were produced by placing large lenses filled with water onto overhead projectors and dropping coloured oil into them. Perhaps some electric Kool-Aid acid punch is in order. The images Joe creates begin fairly distinctly, but over time they blend as layers build up, becoming more abstract and dense, and the various images begin to interact. From a simple beginning, the sounds Jay provides as a soundtrack to the film build and layer into a pulsating, industrial, grinding mass of sound, which throbs in my chest and resonates in my skull. I imagine factories and hummingbird wings; sonar and grinding gears; frogs and UFO's; telegraphs and bad electrical connections; engines and dragonflies. Perhaps psychotropics wouldn't be a good idea after all with these intense and sometimes ominous sounds. My brain makes connections between what I am hearing and seeing. The synchronicity makes it seem that the entire performance was carefully planned even though I know it wasn't. Joe's images and Jay's sounds activate the audience's imagination to provide a scintillating and satisfying experience. What a trip! To view a previous version of "Manjello," without the group experience or the home movie qualities, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QUx83Si-AQ

Calgary's First Annual Zine Fair

2011-01-26T16:46:28Z

View imageCalgary's First Annual Zine Fair December 18th, 2010 On a chilly Saturday morning, zine-lovers and makers alike congregated at the Old Y Centre - a fluorescent-lit community centre with an excellent collection of coffee mugs. The Zine Tree Collective, a group of artists, activists and individuals, hosted the fair by donation from vendors - offering free admission at the door. A little over a dozen vendors touted their wares - as individual artists, representatives of a collective or alternative publishing distributor. To date - the Collective has worked on a 24-Hour Zine Challenge, Zine Workshops and an impressive Zine Library which they are actively seeking submissions and a permanent venue for. The Zine Tree Collective started out with artist and musician Samantha Trees upon her move to Calgary in 2007. An avid admirer of zines, Trees would generally give them away once she read them. While still wanting to promote the medium to the curious and unawares, she was without a collection and therefore had little to lend. After reading about other Canadian organizations like the Anchor Archive Zine Library (Halifax) and The Zine Library (Toronto) Trees decided to start a library herself. The Zine Tree Collective now has two other members: Sonia Edworthy, who helped start the Anchor Archive in Halifax and now lives in Calgary, and a former member of the Haymarket Collective (a group which facilitated the Haymarket Café, an Anarchist bookstore and social space). As a wholly DIY event, the venue was fit with a homemade vegan burrito stand - "The Confession Concession" - a project started by artists Sonia Edworthy and her partner Liz. Upon purchasing an excellent and surprisingly cheap burrito, a confession was requested from you - an anonymous gesture which Edworthy and her partner intend to eventually publish. The library, currently between locations, was on display at the fair: approximately 1500 zines and growing. The fair offered a chance to view the collection and also write-a-review to aid in its future cataloguing. The process, aptly titled "collaborative cataloguing", framed the festival quite nicely. The act of making, collecting and trading zines is in essence a collaborative act. Through each action, the artist is equally present and refreshingly active. A sense of mutual understanding of commodity is felt throughout the community of zine-appreciators. The methods of exchange in alternative publishing encourage collection and trade: many of the vendors sold zines "by donation", while others were priced between $5 and $10. In any case, you end up going home with a handful of fresh stock. Literary, art, music, gender studies, and political awareness niches were all represented. While the medium of zine-making is often considered a quick and fast way of publishing material and getting it out there - intimate examples of long term projects provided insight into the diaristic and neurotic qualities ample in alternative press. The Filling Station, a magazine which began its publishing in 1994, provided an example of a larger publication as well as representation of actively funded and independently published writers. Feedback Zine - a steadily produced music and noise publication offered intelligent reviews and off-the-radar content. Former Edmontonian Karlene Nicolajsen and her partner, Small Ghosts P&P carried a range of literary and poetry based publications - delicately string-bound and individually unique. While events like Expozine (Montreal), and even larger, The Alternative Press Expo (San Francisco) (produced by the glorious San Diego Comic-Con organizers) - indeed taunt our quaint existence here in good ol' Calgary Alberta, we can see keen beginnings in sight for The Zine Tree Collective. And, truthfully with the knowledge of these massively successful events, it did seem a challenge to put this festival together. But sipping from a NASA mug, with my vegan burrito, with a stack of freshly traded books, a few new friends, and a lot of good ideas, well, it just seemed to work.

New Shotgun-Review.ca editorial team

2011-01-20T20:09:16Z

We'd like to extend a warm thanks to our new editorial team at Shotgun-Review.ca, Mikhel Proulx and Andrea Williamson, who have been managing the site for the last few months. Mikhel Proulx is an artist and cultural worker living between Berlin and Banff. His writing work spans art criticism, cultural politics and media theory. His forthcoming publication on Milton Kandborg is the most comprehensive monograph on the Danish-Canadian painter to date. Andrea Williamson is a visual artist and writer who is interested in pretty much anything that ends in -ology, and particularly in reconfiguring languages and definitions to describe social situations and relationships. She is currently lost in stimulating conversations at the Banff Centre and adding to her list of books to read. www.andreawilliamson.com This duo of Alberta-based cultural workers has taken over the majority of coordination duties behind the scenes, and will continue to work with writers and develop the site. Please contact them with story pitches. A big thank you to all of the writers who have worked with discussed, collaborated and written with us over the last few years. Best of luck, and as always, we'll continue to look forward to reading your posts. With sincere thanks, Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch Founding co-editors

You Sunk My Battleship! Battleship Down, new work by Randy Niessen.

2010-09-05T16:42:16Z

The children's game Battleship is played on grids. Two players endeavour to sink the ships of their opponent by guessing their location on the grid. My first glance at Randy Niessen's installation Battleship Down brought an instant association with this game. Housed in Truck gallery's +15 window space Niessen has used wood, paint and yarn to create his own rendition of a sinking Battleship. It is a striking work not only for its bright, clean, minimalist composition but equally for the artist's skilled use of the space. Perhaps one of the most important markers of success in a site specific installation, Niessen has treated this space like one of his materials. The display window nature of this location poses some interesting challenges. With Battleship Down the artist has monopolized on these challenges. He has utilized the flattening effect of the display window to further a conversation about dimensionality and perception that he began in earlier works. Prior to his venture into the world of site specific installations, Niessen's art was two dimensional. He explored surface representations of the grid using paint and print making. His recent work is a fascinating departure. Venturing into an exploration of three dimensional spaces, Niessen has focused on creating installations that seem to defy the laws of physics. Still inspired by the grid these works are a culmination of print, paint and sculptural elements. A true departure from a surface presentation of line, Niessen's pieces explode off of the wall with strips of yarn representing bright streams of colour. In Battleship Down he has used his two dimensional art to reverse this effect, his painted marks reach from the floor, to the wall, to the ceiling and he has carried some of his mark making onto the glass itself. The result is an illusory flattening of the space. Standing back from the work, the trim around the window becomes like a picture frame. The glass has another effect as well; its presence prohibits the viewer from interacting with the work in a physical way something that has been a strong element in Niessen's previous installations. To respond to this challenge the artist has taken a new direction. The sculptural elements in his past installations were simple geometrics. Here, he has replaced these with a very literal representation of a ship. The lines of yarn are orange, red and yellow representing the flames of an explosion. The paint stretching out from beneath the ship is blue representing water. He has in effect created a new way for the viewer to interact with the work, narrative. Is this a piece about a children's game? Is it a commentary on war? Perhaps Niessen is commenting on the explosive demise of an overtaxed system? There may be something here about gender, this battleship is certainly a strong masculine image and it is intriguing that the artist has combined this with such a maternal medium, yarn. Regardless of how the viewer reads this scene their imagination has been engaged. They have a new way to peruse Niessen's work. Battleship Down will remain in Truck's +15 space until September 29, 2010. All Images courtesy of the artist.

Figure in a Mountain Landscape (Reprise)

2010-08-04T02:56:06Z

Visual Arts Thematic Residency, The Banff Centre May 10 - June 18, 2010 Faculty: Silke Otto-Knapp Guest Faculty: Geoffrey Farmer, Stefan Kalmár, Tom McDonough, Jan Verwoert I assumed the Figure in a Mountain Landscape (Reprise) residency at The Banff Centre would be based on outdated concerns toward contemporary art practice; filled with artists who uncritically support landscape art as a relevant thematic. My approach is cynical, as someone having moved from Toronto to a small rural situation, in asking: who cares about landscape in the critical contemporary art world? Considering that The Banff Centre is located in a national park, it is the default to expect that the environment would prove to be a prevalent subject matter in people's work because of the overpowering presence of nature at every turn. When I think nature art, I think realistic depictions, lamentations of the detrimental effects of oil spills, deforestation, etc., discussions of constructed environments, or explorations of the dichotomy of urban vs. rural. It turns out that the interpretation of nature is much looser than I would have expected. All the residencies at The Banff Centre, including FIAML, are rather self-directed and contextually (content-ually) discursive. Even while operating within an overall thematic, different artists and their practices are equally accommodated and encouraged. One artist I spoke with at the beginning of the FIAML residency assumed he would end up painting watercolour mountainscapes before he arrived at the Centre -thinking "well, what else is there to do?", or maybe also considering my question "what else could possibly be expected?" During his time in the residency he continued with his own practice and supplemented it with hikes, trees trunk sculptures and on-site audio recordings in the woods that all informed his ongoing work. The very name of this residency implies a comfortable home within the Rocky Mountain setting; you wouldn't find this residency in an urban environment because it couldn't fulfil its own expectations.

FIAML group hike, Mount Yamnuska. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.

FIAML was also a painting residency, in that all participants founded their practice in this medium on their applications - a priori intentions, possibly based on their pre-conceptions of the tradition of landscape art. The majority of the participating artists did paint, although many ended up with work that was much more multi-media and multi-disciplinary by the end of the six weeks. This shift occurs regularly at the Centre and is indicative of these residents being located in an institution that can accommodate sculpture, print-making, ceramics, metal casting, and anything else their hearts desire. Because of this, artists either broaden or dilute, to both successful and, well, diluted ends. After talking to many artists within this residency and in others residencies, their initial, pre-proposals were often something distant from what they ended up accomplishing during their weeks at the Centre. What FIAML concluded for me is that the participating artists within the residency were supporting the Centre's legacy by following institutionally prompted interests in nature, landscape, a concept of 'place' as far as urban vs. rural, the emboldening of landscape art, and the dis/replacement of the figure in art. The Banff Centre's visual arts' legacy, since its foundation in 1933, is tied to its facilitation of artist practices that are invested in representing the grandeur of nature and our relationship with it. Within an institution that has built its identity in direct connection to its contextual environment, visual arts residencies that are associated and premised on a 'return to nature' will inevitably continue to be supported, despite some deviations. Everyone comes from both rural and urban communities at any given time during their travels, and not to give concession to the urban over the local or vice versa, but what can one expect from an arts centre located deep within a Canadian national park, except this exact ideological privilege? My consideration of landscape painting as anachronistic is based in undergraduate Canadian art history courses where I was beaten over the head with the long standing tradition of landscape painting. Since European contact in the 15th century, we can trace the development from map making, to territory marking, to recording Westward pioneer progress, to the Group of Seven as the pinnacle of many people's understanding of Canadian art. Although rather dull and normalized, is not something to be easily dismissed. Recently, I was reading a catalogue essay on the work of Iain Baxter&, Products, Place & Phenomenon, where his work is compared to that of Gerard Richter in relation to both artists' approaches to landscape as a critical foundation to modernity. Curator Robert McKaskell quotes Richter in defence of his landscape work, saying "...though these pictures are motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia, in other words - the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality." This makes sense when considering a re-evaluation of landscape painting in a contemporary art context, which is possibly the goal of The Banff Centre by continuing to host a painting and landscape residency; nostalgia mixed with the establishment of a subversive turn through maintaining a vice grip on a tradition that is essentially being yawned at. Within the same breathe, McKaskell quotes critic Nancy Shaw who describes Baxter&'s work as "reflecting the industry of landscape." A consideration of landscape painting as a significant component of Canadian cultural economy explains its persistence at the Centre: beating a dead horse that continues to bleed money.

FIAML group hike, Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.

This art residency theme persists because of its cachet and because of its employ of subversiveness grown out of its inability to quit, despite shifts in outside opinions and trajectories. This can be compared with a belief in the nobility of painters who continue in a medium that has been considered deceased at one point or another. These artists are participating in a longstanding and agreeable theme that at the same time must be defended. Nature means being somewhere different than you are normally, recalling opposition and otherness. This comes out of the Romanticist period when artists depicted nature as sublime, spiritual and pure in order to counter the burgeoning industrialization and hustle and bustle of cities. For artists nowadays, particularly younger artists, they are required to work in a city and be connected to a community - dealers, shows, curators, other artists - in order to establish themselves by continuing to exhibit and make additions to their resumes. The Banff Centre, promoted as an escape to nature, is a break from the standard/urbanized art world. Truth is, people consider it as a break from the other aspects of their lives too, taking the opportunity to indulge in drinking, drugs and sex, which could also be considered as a sort of return to primal or natural behaviour. Often considered as a subversive lifestyle (the artist vs. the conservative), it has now become also a bit outdated. The residencies are not retreats, but continuations of other predictable traditions.

FIAML group hike, Stanley Glacier in Kootenay National Park. Image courtesy of Jewel Shaw.

From these conditions, assuming one is relieved from normal responsibilities during one's time at The Banff Centre, I believe that the resident artists (me included) have a perverted conception of what this form of nature and isolation is supposed to mean. What can nature mean to people who are trapped in perpetual and overpowering urban existences? Because our contemporary sense of irony trumps our feelings of nostalgia, observed from my own experience and from others', the continuation of residencies on the themes of a nature retreat and landscape art have to be re-evaluated. Although landscape art has a legacy of being the normalized popular theme in Canadian art history, it is now something that can be considered as politically oppositional to the mainstream. I don't think that landscape painting is the new radical, but that it requires continued focus through a method that doesn't continue to consider it as a staple of Canadian art practice; retreat or no retreat. Reference: McKaskell, Robert. Iain Baxter: Products, Place, Phenomenon. Art Gallery of Windsor, 1998.

Institutions Engendered: Mixed Signals & GenderBlender

2010-06-28T04:11:13Z

Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports
Curated by Christopher Bedford
Art Gallery of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
April 30, 2010 - September 4, 2010

Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports has come to Calgary, and it has brought no mixed signals: it is an unambiguous failure.

Currently at the AGC -an institution that has come to be loathed by many artists and cultural-workers in the area- it is a poorly mounted canned exhibition initiated by Wexner curator and former university footballer Christopher Bedford for iCI (Independent Curators International).

The institution has managed to sidestep the multiple coups and attempts to inject some criticality into the corporate agenda that the gallery (and the city) has become emblematic of. Regrettably, the travelling exhibition currently housed there offers no exception.

Ostensibly an attempt to contest a clichéd macho image of the virile, strong, straight sportsman, the exhibit in reality promotes an essentialist, uncritical and ultimately backwards ideology. The critical rigour was as flaccid as Mark Bradford's sack of (collaged soccer) balls, which hung in the corner on the main floor.

Individually, the artworks weren't all bad. In the context, however, the rich body of work that is Catherine Opie's Football Landscapes was flattened into well-lit promo-shots for beer-league tryouts. They are vivid, dark images of sportsmen in play that attempt to map a terrain of masculine aggression.

Catherine Opie Football Landscape #5, (Juneau vs. Douglas, Juneau, Alaska), 2007 Chromogenic print 48 x 64 in. (121.9 x 162.6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

With the exception of instances of heroic failure, no alternate to masculine stereotypes is presented in the show.

In Marco Rios' performance video (Moving Equilibrium, 2006), wherein the artist-cum-weightlifter just barely benches a giant spirit level above his head, we are given no interchange of the typical typecast male. This is also the case in Joe Sola's St. Henry Composition from 2001, where the artist displays his own lack of prowess, agility, strength and speed though a series of futile football drills.


Marco Rios Moving Equilibrium, 2006 Single-channel video with sound 5 mins., 3 secs. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton, Santa Monica	Joe Sola Saint Henry Composition, 2001 Single-channel video with sound 5 mins., 7 secs. Courtesy of Bespoke Gallery, New York, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH

Is the most profound curatorial insight a mere reversal of our most common stereotype of the male sex? No simple diametric portrait of masculine superiority can unravel the patriarchal ideologies that Bedford affirms the exhibition interrogates.

Indeed, the show did little to offer an alternative to the "typically aggressive, hyper-competitive and emotionally undemonstrative" man (as the didactic handout declares).

Brian Jungen's now-familiar sports-equipment-cum-aboriginal-artifacts could offer a departure from this homogeneity - an insight, perchance, into the links between athletic aggression, commerce and colonialism - but is left decidedly flat without contextualization, and through its proximity to the vapidly ironic non-advertisement advertisements of Hank Willis Thomas.


Brian Jungen Prototype for New Understanding #12, 2002 Nike Air Jordans 23 x 11 x 12 in. (58.4 x 27.9 x 30.5 cm) Collection of Ruth and William True, Seattle	Hank Willis Thomas Something to Stand on: The Third Leg, 2007 Polyurethane coating on MDF 49 x 41 x ¾ in. (124.5 x 104.1 x 1.9 cm) Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

As I leave the building, truly let down, a bridal party lumbers in as the attendant evacuates people from the gallery booked for the photo shoot. "It's one of our most successful services - we'll even take the work off the walls", I'm told.
GenderBlender the Sugar Shack Art Salon Calgary, Alberta, Canada Sunday, 13 June 2010 Full disclosure: I had artwork in this show. My enthusiasm about the place is bolstered only in part through my participation with it: I'll keep the following unbiased, as lauding as it sounds. Opened within the last year on the site of an old homesteaders' shanty in Mount Pleasant, the Sugar Shack is part vanity-gallery, part shop of horrors, and part monthly exhibition space where touch-and-go programming lends an experimental flavour to the rustic gallery. It's one of several artist-run spaces that have cropped up in recent months, alongside the CAM, Local Library , Comrade Sound and Pith. As such, it faces funding issues, legal constraints and an antagonistic (even hostile) conservative public, while eagerly promoting alternative artistic activity in a city that's begging for it. On a budget a miniscule fraction to that of the AGC (my artist fee was a rubber nipple. Really.), GenderBlender was able to outperform Mixed Signals immensely. Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's 2002 video, Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature, mines the lesbian ecosystem through fieldwork, public outreach and a hilarity that thinly masks a vehement critique of sexism and homophobia.
Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Lesbian Park Rangers, 2008. Photo: Don Lee, Banff Centre

Wednesday Lupypciw's emotionally variegated video work practices a type of Queer vernacular, or perverse nostalgia.
An edit of a seemingly constant documentation of her quotidian (if deranged) life, it is a private world we're given only calculatedly voyeuristic glimpses into.

Still from Wednesday Lupypciw's ICKKFAXX 2010, courtesy of the Artist

M.N. Hutchinson's grotesque self-portrait photography seeks an ontology outside of binary gender. It opts instead for a type of self-invented manifestation where both the self and the image are called into question.

Detail of M.N. Hutchinson's Fuck Gender: I'm an Autosexual, courtesy of the Artist

Lisa Brawn's & Michal Lavi's I Liked You Better Before -a short film starring the dashing Allison Sears- is a superb narrative about a travelling plastic surgeon who, in the manner of a carnival sideshow, beautifies paying customers in the notorious Bambi Media Machine (reformatted for the film as the Mobile Surgical Beautification Unit). Calgarians will be familiar with Brawn's meticulous woodcut portraits: here she extends her scrupulous craft into this hilarious video.

Production shot from I Liked You Better Before Directed by Michal Lavi
Photo: Frank Lee

GenderBlender was truly Queer in its representation of wildly diverse modes of art-making, and through the creation of a carnivalesque experience. Smalique's endurance psychedelic-storytelling -a perverted fairytale tableau-vivant that was as anything but straight- was told from atop a crescent moon hung low in the front yard. Baroness Von Wienerstrudel and Baron Von Beaverhausen (aka Keith Murray and Jamie Tea) hosted a tranny croquet tournament replete, even, with mini cucumber-sandwiches in a mad-hatterish spectacle.


Smalique, Photo: Linda M. Cunningham	Baroness Von Wienerstrudel and Baron Von Beaverhausen, Photo: Angela Inglis

In the face of a dominant corporatist Calgarian culture that is indifferent, at best, GenderBlender proves that local artists and thinkers are invested in a rich discourse of gender, sex and sexuality, and are paving new roads and exhibition models to have their voices heard. Of this, there are no mixed signals.

Mikhel Proulx

*update Comrade Sound may soon be stricken from the list of active cultural venues: read Peter Hemminger's report for FFWD

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Tricia Middleton: Midnight Gallery Rambles

2010-06-03T19:28:25Z

Tricia Middleton's installation Midnight Gallery Rambles seemed to exist in a state of simultaneous sedimentation and erosion. Where the boundaries of these forces divided was virtually indistinguishable. In this sense her work took on a generative quality, but one inflected by a wry between-ness. Perhaps this coy wink developed from the question of whether destruction is its own kind of becoming. Midnight Gallery Rambles was an environment and an exhibition, and it addressed the gallery as both a set and a venue. A series of sculptures and video installations and architectural structures cohabited together, staking territories for their own crumbly activities. The temporary space of SAAG was coloured by red and blue lights, but remained dark and theatrical. Spray foam, bed sheets, drywall, glitter, and latex paint roiled in various stages of growth, collapse, and re-growth. Projections and monitors animated false walls and swaddling piles with the documents of their own making. The accoutrements, tools and packing material of the gallery were implicated in the formation of these caddywompus creations. Yet many of the works were discrete and self-contained, seemingly sufficient in themselves. The result was an exhibition that intertwined the history of its own materials and forms with the architectural space, the artist-as-performer, and the audience. As I rambled my way through the Rambles I considered that this exhibition did not exist as static and complete at any one moment. The large scaffold structure in the centre of the gallery was a particularly good example of this quality. I thought it might droop and bend while I watched; its own unstable materiality implicated in its demise. It was this sense of slow collapse that somehow prolonged the experience of the exhibition itself. In this way the installation existed in a register of geologic time as well as immediate presence. Like a glacier that gradually calves ice, the scaffold was destined to soon crumble: a building site serac that would inevitably melt and disperse and become some other thing again. Through this realization gallery visitors were confronted by each work's own duration, experiencing the exhibition as an ensemble of others with life-spans all their own. Undeniably, the cornerstone of the exhibition (and the work that compelled me most) was the visceral and intellectually puzzling architectural form built in the back part of the gallery. Combining performance-for-video, projection and installation, the work consisted of a long false wall built from drywall that was scattered all around with pink sparkly detritus. Shoes, sledge hammers and various cotton candy-coloured trash created a mise-en-scene of dilapidation. Large candles dripped wax down the piles of crud with an ironic elegiac sensibility. Behind the customized crumbling of the wall were stored all manner of gallery packing material and presentation objects. An enormous roll of bubble wrap, a teetering tower of plinths, cardboard boxes, folding chairs and little entomorphic packing peanuts all crammed in together. One part of the wall on the left-hand side was hacked through, revealing the gallery junk behind. Perhaps this was a nod to Michael Asher, but in this case institutional critique seemed subverted in the very contrivance of its staging. A wall erected simply to be torn apart. On the right-hand side of this same wall large violently hacked holes and oozing streams of painted fabric emanated. One of the holes contained rear-projected videos on an ornately patterned screen (made from another bed sheet, I believe). At first, one witnessed a strange scene in the projection - ethereal and almost unrecognizable. A female figure entered the field and began to hack with a pick axe into what is revealed to be a wall. After she hacks for a while it becomes apparent that the video being witnessed was shot during the making (unmaking?) of the wall in which the projection is presented. The ruin became a cinema documenting its own destruction. After seeing this work, it appeared that the whole exhibition was not what it appeared to be. The auratic was acted by the spectre of itself. This actress/artist was a crumbling facade: an apparition of a being that never was, a ghost that hallucinated itself. As witnesses (makers and unmakers as well) the audience teetered at the precipice, waiting for a break from the cycle of formation and erosion, only to find that the cycle was more like a whirlpool.

Exploding Flatness: New Work by Nate McLeod and Cassandra Paul

2010-05-11T03:12:15Z

If one were to drop an open chest full of toy building blocks on the moon, the imminent ramifications of gravity could cause a reaction much like that which appears to be occurring within TRUCK's plus fifteen window space. Technicolor Dreambox, a collaborative installation by Nate McLeod and Cassandra Paul, comprises an abundance of colorful three-dimensional shapes, appearing to have erupted from a wooden cube situated in the lower left portion of the gallery. An invasion of multicolored rectangles, cubes, and triangles, along with pseudo shapes of various sizes enliven the white vitrine as they appear to ascend outwards from the cube; gravitating into empty space in a diagonal trajectory. Although a devised hanging system for the suspended objects is inevitably present, it is not blatantly visible, or easy to detect. Rather, these blocks of color sit transfixed; suspended in open air like the shards of glass in a freeze frame of a vase being struck by a bullet. Drawing from rectilinear forms and playing off of architectural spaces, both McLeod and Paul are interested in merging the flat and the three dimensional in their respective practices. Paul's use of geometric shapes is derived from her interpretations of junk piles found in rural Alberta, which contain varied debris from old buildings. Utilizing absurd perspective, incomplete depictions of objects, and bursting masses, Paul's work strives to offer new ways of perceiving the banal and unsightly through layering synthetically colored, hardedge geometric forms. McLeod similarly applies hardedge painting within his intricate installations. Adhering abstract configurations of wooden shapes to the wall, he reinterprets the fluid gradients formed by the cast shadows of these objects, emulating them through crisply painted bands of color. McLeod extends these lines off of the wall, using wood and paper to create a three-dimensional drawing, which resides both on a flat surface, and in the surrounding space. From several feet away, the entire installation virtually appears as a completely flat, abstract field of shapes. Yet when approached from either side, the dimensionality of the work becomes available as the exaggerated perspective of the forms creates the illusion that the shapes are shooting out of the gallery. Mimicking the floating objects, there are also paintings of three-dimensional shapes painted on the back wall. Curiously, these paintings also appear to be floating in the space surrounding the other hanging objects, despite the fact that they are flat. This illusion is afforded by the integration of bright discordant colors, which contrast the dominantly pastel-colored shapes. When placed next to each other, the subdued tints and vivid hues vibrate; making some sides of shapes appear to pop forward, and forcing others to recede. This push-pull effect prompts a subtly distorted reading of the shape's positioning in space.

Jean-Pierre Gauthier: Machines at Play

2010-05-07T00:36:11Z

Upon entering the Prairie Art Gallery, I see three Uncertainty Makers, which Quebec-born artist Jean-Pierre Gauthier has become quite well known for. Next to them is a geometric network of metal tubes suspended just above the floor from a system of mechanized pulleys at the ceiling of the exhibition space. Moving across the gallery, I trigger the motion sensor attached to the controls of the machine, causing the tubes to undulate randomly. The tubes clank and rattle. Initially, the impression I get from the exhibition is of some sort of pseudo-life. It's as if the machines lay in wait, only becoming active when an external body comes within a certain range. However, this notion seems best taken as a clue to a more specific insight about the viewer's relation to and experience of these works of art. Continuing through the exhibition, I discover in an auxiliary room a large collection of items mounted to a curved apparatus made of metal tubing. Some of the items, which include glass bottles, scrap wood, cable ties and wire brushes - all actuated by small motors - are connected via contact microphones and meters of colourfully coated wires to a multi-track sound mixer with its volume faders subject to mechanized variation. Other objects are mounted on or in speakers. By virtue of the automated mixer, different noise-making items are allowed to connect with their corresponding speaker, as if to add their two-cents to what at times is a cacophony, and others, a murmur. The particular sense of pseudo-life that Gauthier's kinetic sculptures generate has, in part, to do with a display of personality. Admittedly, my perception imbues these machines with personality. But in the aim of avoiding a completely human-centric bias, they don't exclusively respond to the presence of people. Any solid object that is large enough to trigger the motion sensors will elicit recognition from the machines. For example, a floor-cleaning machine brought into the gallery is acknowledged by Gauthier's machines as much as the person operating it is. The difference is that the kinetic sculptures are on exhibit for people, who may or may not appreciate them; yet in such an instance, the floor-cleaning machine shares in something on the order of solidarity with the other machines on display as art objects. Additionally, my recognition of personality traits in these machines is aided by the title of the exhibition: Machines at Play. Initially, the clever thing about this title is that machines are typically designed for work. But what does it mean when a machine is designed for play? Disregarding machines that are designed for people to play with, consider this: the machines in the exhibition are designed as kinetic sculptures. Though Gauthier declares that the machines are at play, the purpose they are to fulfil - their work, so to speak - is to be on display in the art gallery as kinetic sculptures. As a result, the title of the exhibition provides a subtle, surprising point of complexity regarding the roles that the viewer, artist, and art occupy. To recall Marcel Duchamp's famous description of the creative act, art consists of two poles - a gesture of art is initiated by an artist on one side and it is completed by the viewer on the other, who passes a judgement on the art, which completes the significance generally attributed or denied to a work of art. Duchamp explicitly refers to the media involved as "inert"*. The artistic gesture that Gauthier makes with his kinetic sculptures involves the medium almost to the point of collaboration. This might be said of any artist working with kinetic sculpture; however, Gauthier embraces this collaboration from the outset. He designs his machines to play - their work is to play. Rather than passively occupying the gallery space, these sculptures dynamically convey Gauthier's artistic gesture, on his behalf. * Duchamp, Marcel. "The Creative Act." Session on the Creative Act. Houston, Texas. 1957. Speech. http://www.iaaa.nl/cursusAA&AI/duchamp.html

Open Tuning (WaveUp)

2010-04-01T23:00:22Z

Twice per year, the Art Gallery of Calgary organizes a guided walking tour of several art galleries in the city's downtown core. On Saturday, March 20, a balmy and blue-skied first day of spring, I joined a group of enthusiastic art lovers led by Jaime-Brett Sine, Manager of Public and Education Programs at AGC, and set out to see what Calgary's art scene had to offer. The tour was comprised mainly of visits to commercial galleries and after exhausting myself trying to explain the monetary value of minimalist painting to my not so art savvy companion ("Ok, so tell my why this costs $40,000!") it was a relief to finally arrive at TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary, a small and dynamic artist-run centre located in the heart of the city. TRUCK is an active presence in the Calgary art community aspiring to present innovative and experimental contemporary art to incite local dialogue. Their current show, Open Tuning (WaveUp) is an electronic installation by Halifax-based computer and creative electronics artist Stephen Kelly. The installation consists of four kinetic sculptures mounted with speakers and motors to produce mechanical movement and a variety of low humming and clicking noises. These four components are accompanied by two maps showing the location of buoys on the Alaskan and Canadian East coasts. Having a keen interest in new media and robotics I eagerly entered the small space of the TRUCK main gallery. As I moved into the room the noises became clearer and I could distinguish the various sounds of ocean waves coming through the speakers. Fisheries and Oceans Canada maintains several buoys in areas along the coast of Canada, which collect real-time ocean wave data available via the Internet. For Open Tuning (2008) Kelly draws on this service to obtain accurate, real-time information about ocean swells. This information is collected by a computer permanently connected to the Internet which acts as a main controller for the installation. This computer automatically downloads new buoy data every 15 minutes which is then analyzed by custom software designed by Kelly. The software translates wave characteristics into sounds that fluctuate in pitch, volume and timber in direct correspondence to the various characteristics of ocean swells; ocean waves are recreated as sound waves. These sound waves are projected into the gallery by the speakers mounted on the four kinetic components. Each speaker is connected to a motor which allows the speaker to be physically animated in a variety of ways. The speakers oscillate, vibrate, and swing side to side in real-time synchronicity with the ocean swells. When the sea is calm, the sounds are low in pitch and volume and the movement of the speakers is slow and subtle. When the sea is rough, the sounds are more varied in pitch and volume, and the movement of the speakers is faster and wider. Like many such immersive installation environments, the experience of the work is influenced by the viewer's previous experiences, preconceptions and state of mind during the interaction. I have never fully experienced interacting with the ocean; I found the bustle and chatter of the other members of the tour group distracting; I was drawn to the maps and their legible data and topographical markings; I was fascinated by the mechanical behavior of the kinetic sculptures independent of the sounds they were emitting or the corresponding ocean data that dictated their movement. Meanwhile my companion excitedly theorized about how the different movements of the machines must correspond with different forces and depth of waves; he was right. Having spent most of his life close to the ocean, Open Tuning allowed him to effortlessly connect to ocean waves even in the middle of landlocked Calgary Alberta. Mediation through virtual environments largely depends upon the ability of the viewer to reference, in some way, real world environments; as much as I enjoyed the computational and robotic environment of Open Tuning, for me, the mechanized experience of the ocean remained as abstract as minimalist painting.

De Anima: New Work by Maria Whiteman and Mit offen gelassenen Türen: Beyond an Entrance - The Work of Daniela Schlüter, FAB Gallery, Edmonton

2010-03-23T20:26:39Z

While institutions become known for the faculty they house, the insertion of new styles and aesthetics can often be a tough fit. The U of A certainly has a build up of modernist painters and steel sculptures along with a burgeoning art and design program and a world renowned printmaking program, and so it's with some amount of joy that the he two individual shows by new U of A Fine Arts faculty, De Anima by Maria Whiteman and Daniela Schlüter's beyond an entrance, demonstrate two completely different and contemporary aesthetics that share a foundation in print. Convening together at FAB Gallery with each artist putting forward their works and aesthetics to share with their new artistic communities, the show was organized by department Chair Betsy Boone, who is obviously trying to steer the department forward and emphasizing the artistic activity of her new hires. While Schlüter dominates the second floor with her vividly textured paintings of along with a video project and print samples, Whiteman's photographic rendering of the animal in our collective conscious linger below. With the addition of a fellow new hire at the U of A, Scott Smallwood from the Music Department, Whiteman's works come alive with the aural presence of the animal, which cannot be contained to a flat image. Although the audio and visual are not necessarily integrated, save for the lush long table of artificial grass and sounds where the experience opens up beyond standing in any particular space, the addition of Smallwood's wireless audio works were some of the most fascinating elements of the show and deserved more background information as to the what and why's of this collaboration. I can only think of past cross-faculty collaborations where printmakers and poetry professors came together, with both roles clearly active in each other's works, and as a new direction begins, I can only hope that collaborations will continue and be clarified. Exhibition runs March 2 - 27, 2010

Scott Rogers' "Wireframe"at Stride Gallery, 8 January - 13 February 2010

2010-02-26T23:45:44Z

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.