Inside IDEAL
One year ago, IDEAL Artspace sprung up in the ramshackle Ideal Rentals building on the corner of 17th Avenue and First Street S.W. The former gas station building was abandoned for a few years and then, seemingly out of nowhere, artist-curatorial team Erik Olson and Erica Brisson fixed up the space and opened their doors as a new artist-run centre. The opening of the space, along with 809 Gallery and Carpet ’n’ Toast Gallery seemed to signal a new wave of artist-run activity in Calgary, even as independent local artists and established centres Stride, Truck and The New Gallery were feeling the crush of gentrification.
The “ramshackle space” captured the imagination of the Montreal pair in 2007, when Olson returned to Calgary after several years away. In his search for a studio space amidst the booming downtown core, Olson was forced to try and see the potential for studio spaces in vacant and industrial spaces.
Olson expressed interest in renting studio space from the owners of the Old Draper Grocery on 17th Avenue but was turned down because the tiny white-washed store was being torn down. Instead, they offered Olson the Ideal Rentals building. Olson and Brisson quickly gutted the space and renovated it to become a studio space and a gallery. After one year of operation they’ve held more than 14 exhibitions and events in IDEAL Artspace. The space will close in September, as the building has inadequate heating for winter and will eventually be demolished to make way for a condo development.
The pair moved to Alberta to attend and work at The Banff Centre, and they attribute their early connection to Calgary to the spirit of communal artistic creation that happens at the centre. As the relationships with artists in Banff “built momentum, we were able to access the Calgary art scene, which we were unfamiliar with,” says Olson. “We really wanted to create a space that was a collaboration with artists, where we were doing curatorial work, publicity and installation together with local artists.” The pair describes IDEAL as being a way that they can learn about the city and its artists, and contribute something that was much needed to the arts community.
IDEAL’s programming mandate has been shaped by the desire to create a dialogue with “artists who were really interested in the building itself.” They’ve since co-ordinated exhibitions with The Arbour Lake Sghool, Truck, Sled Island Art and Design festival, many independent artists and tackled issues of gentrification, community building and mobile culture. Brisson has lent a strong curatorial hand to the space, as she’s interested in its marginal identities as “an office, auto shop, parking lot,” and sees that each artist has “a unique way of reading the idiosyncratic nature of the space.”
Brisson hails from Toronto and more recently, Montreal, where she established her interest in site-specific exhibitions. “There is an abundance of weird empty spaces there that led to a culture of intervention,” she says. Artists could freely mount independent exhibitions outside of major gallery spaces. “IDEAL looks like an industrial haunted house, and in cities, these weird old buildings become like the forests: a free space for exploration, that really captures our [collective] imaginations,” she says.
They’re also inspired by spaces in other cities like a meat locker in Chicago’s meatpacking district and a garment factory in Montreal that’s been converted into an arts space. Locally, the ways that 809 Gallery and Arbour Lake Sghool are working within their neighbourhoods strikes the pair as equally innovative additions to Calgary’s culture. “It is necessary for a healthy city to have a spectrum of different art spaces, from the heavyweight institutions right to the tiny garage spaces when people show art. There are a few major potholes in the Calgary scene,” says Olson. Even as outsiders, the fact that Calgary lacks a civic art gallery or an institute of contemporary art leaves a big gap in the community. Calgary’s artist-run centres and independent initiatives such as IDEAL Artspace have often been the art community’s way to circumvent to this problem.
Olson and Brisson’s reflections on a year of vigorous artistic activity at IDEAL Artspace is metered by their mutual understanding that “the space was always intended to be an ephemeral project.” The last exhibition at IDEAL Artspace will take place in September.
This is the first in a series of interviews with Calgary artists, designers and politicians about their work and ideas about arts and culture in our city.
