DETAILS

With Nothing You Starve, With a Little You Survive - group exhibition
Alberta College of Art & Design
Tuesday, June 29 - Sunday, September 19

More in: Visual Arts

It’s a little tough to wrap your head around — a museum and its contents are on display inside an art gallery. Yet it’s billed as an “offsite storage and documentation facility.” Finally, the museum isn’t an actual museum, but rather is run out of a rented house. Confused yet?

Context is crucial for an exhibition like this, and since the gallery doesn’t do a great job of explaining it, here it goes:

Mounting frustrations over the lack of a contemporary art museum in Calgary resulted in Alberta College of Art and Design grads Heather Kai Smith and Bree Zorel starting one up themselves, inside their rented house — the Contemporary Art Museum of Calgary, or CAM. Cramming local art in every corner of their house and plastering it on the walls, the DIY esthetic is obvious, with artwork from more than a dozen artists cluttered amongst furniture and piles of books.

All of this is in a 20-plus-minute video tour of the house, going room-to-room to show its contents. Then there are floor plans, framed on the gallery walls, all drawn and coloured with pencil crayons. Everything on display is a celebration of the homemade, trying to pass as official. Once you get it, it’s not as meta-post-modern as it sounds, just rather charming.

The “permanent collection,” featuring mostly Calgary artists, is surprisingly small, consisting of standard fare paintings, sculptures, woodwork and handmade toys. But it becomes clear that what’s on display is no longer the artwork itself, but the museum and its conception.

Artifacts from the CAM house are behind glass, labelled with the precise detail of an archeological dig, including letters asking Neil Young for funding to the “Official Stapler of the Museum.” The entire project borders on gimmick, but it’s such a labour of love, you can’t help but admire it. Everything is handmade, handwritten, hand-labelled, and with just the right amount of humour to pass muster.

The other half of the gallery contains various short films, maintaining the low-budget, but deep personal flavour of the exhibition. Only two could be remotely labelled as linear narratives, though still skewed, such as Andrea Mann’s story of creativity and discovery through a love of eggs.

Two shorts are overtly sexual, including Wendy Lupypciw’s raunchy encounter with a fax machine. The other, METAVIDEO, features a Spanish fellow in his boxers, passionately describing scene by scene the epic porno he hopes to make, dancing and enacting scenes to illustrate his intent. Once he’s done, you’ve effectively conjured up the whole raunchy show in your head, making his film already unnecessary. Amusing, but light.

Caitlind R.C. Brown’s The Disappearance of Marty Starlight remains the most atmospheric film of the set. Shot in beautifully grainy Super 8, it’s a cold and desolate meditation on the rural West, accompanied by Wayne Garrett's slow, eerie guitarwork that resembles an ambient rendition of spaghetti western soundtracks.

Though seemingly faint praise, Stefanie Wong’s short is the most visually striking haircut ever caught on film. Backlit amongst a pitch-black room and framed just so, every snip and spray is captured with startling clarity. Yes, it’s a tough sell, but it’s a fascinating watch.

Finally Ryan Sluggett and Chad VanGaalen’s animated works are both narratively puzzling, but technically stunning. Particularly VanGaalen’s. With a soundscape drone of blips and beeps, his sci-fi world mixes cut-outs, stencils, stop-motion and sculpting into a dizzying, hypnotic kaleidoscope of colour. It’s the longest film — 12 minutes — but flies by the quickest. Alone, it’s worth the price of admission, if there was a price for admission. It seems that with nothing, you still get to look.