>>PREVIEW
ARTCITY
Runs September 8 to 16
Check listings for venues and times
City life happens in little glimpses. A glass-walled tower sending reflections in a hundred directions, a headline lost in the shuffled papers of a C-Train commuter, a post layered with wads of gig posters, and increasingly, as Kym Pruesse notes in Accidental Audience: Urban Interventions by Artists, art projects are creeping up in unexpected places through the city, too. "They come into our lives by circumstance, accidentally encountered without brackets. Often we pass right by them; other times they penetrate the surface of our consciousness, puzzling our day, or surprising our routine."
The ArtCity Festival presents an opportunity to see the contemporary works of art and design that are infiltrating our everyday spaces. The spaces in question are the parking lots, plazas, walkways and streets that we are accustomed to moving through without pressing pause.
In previous years, ArtCity has been known for its notorious opening parties and sprawling visual arts exhibitions that kick off the visual arts season. But as available downtown office and retail space has dwindled, and the festival's design and architecture programs have grown in international attention, the focus has shifted from finding a space to house the local arts exhibitions towards squeezing urban interventions into more familiar locales. Enter this year's Festival, where ArtCity's program focuses on a suave bunch of artist-architect pairings in the PEEPSHOW pavilions, and a handful of ingenious video, sound and participation-based artworks. The pavilions are a growing collection of five temporary art venues by international designers and architects for specific sites around Calgary's core. As part of their design, they play host to different visual arts components each year. Then, the pavilions are strategically placed to get in our way, change our perspectives, or interrupt the flow of time, traffic and people as we move through the city.
The construction and esthetic of the pavilions is completely unlike a formal gallery space, instead, they're quite at home when plunked down as part of the urban mash-up downtown. Each pavilion is a discrete little structure designed to hold only one or two viewers at a time, and once inside, the frenetic pace of the city is stopped for a few refreshing moments. They become intermediary zones that challenge artists and audiences to investigate our urban spaces in new ways.
The "slow-down double-take effect" of an unexpected encounter with art is particularly evident in this year's new pavilion, Perpetual Tease Machine, designed by Russell Greenberg and Chris Beardsley. It is a glittery curtained-off enclosure that carves out a little piece of Eau Claire mall for contemplation. Inside the silver screen, visual artist Neil Brandhorst sets up a play of red, green and blue light where the shadows of the viewer will change various streams of the colour spectrum.
Other works employ audio installation as a space for layered meanings. Gary DiBenedetto is a musician who uses ceramic bells and recording equipment to create diffused electronic soundscapes. His work Ceramic will be exhibited in Art Central's atrium, and by amplifying the ominous, amorphous sound of the bells in an otherwise commercial space, the work could pose an interesting challenge to the art economics that exist there. Similarly, Charlotte White's work in the outdoor Cubes pavilion at Eau Claire Market takes the form of a sound installation, but multiplies the tech-quotient exponentially. Eternally Unfinished Attempt to Grasp Everything as it Happens (in only one language) uses multi-channel audio sourced and remixed from global statistics. The resulting sound certainly isn't elevator music or the top-40 that usually echoes through the cavernous interiors of most shopping centres. Instead, the slightly jarring audio collage raises questions about how global information is mediated and transmitted.
So, does a brief encounter with video art over lunch hour have the potential to shape new ideas about architecture and design? Taking a moment to experience one of the pavilions will hopefully spark new ways of interacting with and thinking about civic architectures, and this level of public awareness and discussion is especially crucial during times of urban development and expansion.
Odile Hénault is the professional advisor for the architectural design competition for our city's new Central Library and one of the jury members who will help to choose the winning design for ArtCity's 2006 pavilion. Her involvement, along with Randall Stout, is a key reason why local architect and PEEPSHOW organizer Colby Brygidyr is convinced that Calgary's level of intelligent dialogue about the importance of public art and architecture is on the rise. Aside from bringing new ideas to Calgary, their work will also have long-lasting impacts in Alberta: both of the internationally recognized practitioners are involved in developing major projects here.
With so many new buildings on the go in Calgary, Hénault believes that an event like PEEPSHOW can broaden perspectives on how "feelings of joy or wonder are expressed in architectural terms – they don’t have to be kept only for informal or temporary structures," she says. From the smallest public art intervention, to ultra-sleek new civic buildings, Brygidyr has noticed an increasing demand for good design in our cities. He stresses that the "idea of holding an architectural competition for the design of new buildings in Calgary and Edmonton is not foreign anymore," and for these dialogues to change the face of our city, now "it is up to the local architects, urban planners, city officials, and developers to take the lead." In fact, one of Hénault's goals in her work on the new Calgary Central Library is trying to create room for optimistic discussions about design and architecture.
So what actually happens when an unfamiliar structure appears in an otherwise familiar space? "In the case of the PEEPSHOW competitions, unnoticed – or unnoticeable – sites are suddenly brought to life thanks to the inventive minds of the various participants," she mentions. Once we're shaken out of our passive modes of viewing art as commodity and wallpaper, the social and political contexts of offsite programming can be more clearly addressed. Still, past incarnations of ArtCity have been more upfront about supporting truly challenging works that create criticality around their local sites. This year's Festival falls short of its potential to raise issues such as gentrification, urban sprawl and the threats that increasing development pose to low-income residents and to our local environment.
Several past Festivals have been marked by controversy over the experimental exhibitions in unexpected places – in 2003, three exhibits planned in partnership with Calgary Transit for installation on the downtown C-Train platforms were cancelled due to misunderstandings of their multi-layered critical content. Local architect/artist duo Andrew King and Angela Silver planned to project images of the Parthenon marbles as part of a site-specific lighting installation that engaged the platform, when city officials got in a huff about the depictions of figures from the ancient friezes. Also cancelled was a text installation by Toronto artist Kika Thorne, which offered C-Train directions in several different languages. Both projects were designed to expand public debate around use and access to the city's transportation systems, and in Thorne's case, Calgary Transit pulled the plug when the multi-lingual direction panels were deemed to be "too confusing" for passengers.
With a critical mass of artists, designers and architects spurring public debate and discussion, hopefully the outcomes of ArtCity 2006 are just as lively. The Festival's continued engagement with the accidental audience proves that we can have interesting, unexpected, and even controversial, encounters with public art, especially when contemporary artists take it to the streets.
For more info, dates, times and venues, check out the Festival Guide or www.art-city.ca. |
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