From Artcity
The Artcity Festival of Art, Design and Architecture is known to kick off the visual arts season with a bang, and this year is no exception. Well, in a manner of speaking. The sheer number of events over the course of the festival is staggering, but the performances, projects and exhibitions themselves are more gently meditative and subtle than in recent years.
The always-mutable festival programming is announced by an open-ended theme, “That’s It.” The abbreviated phrase could refer to: an exclamation of an exciting idea as it forms, questioning something that lacks, pronouncing the end of an era, or pointing out the simplicity of a thing, as in, “yup, that’s all there is to it.” If last year’s fest was all about Calgary’s boom, “That’s It” might signal a time to cool our collective jets, especially if stalled and cancelled condo developments can be taken as a litmus of the economic climate.
Last year, Scott Rogers participated in an Arbour Lake Sghool project that gave flight to hundreds of balloons inscribed with the word “BOOM!” The busted balloon was an obvious metaphor for a looming economic downturn. For his Towers exhibition, opening September 5 at The New Gallery, he has cut up stacks of condo guides and reconfigured them into new wall collages. The exhibition is decidedly more contemplative of our city’s recent breakneck-paced real estate development and boom-and-bust cycles, complete with a reading and discussion group on gentrification. Sami Rintala would be a perfect addition to Rogers’s well-rounded discussion. His keynote architecture lecture promises to infuse the critique of conspicuous consumption and environmental degradation that’s so prevalent in architecture with an almost poetic spirit. Graphic novelist Chester Brown and conceptual artist Janice Kerbel round out Artcity’s not-to-be-missed keynote lecture series.
Megan Morman’s Calgary Super Bingo is an art project that actually encourages driving around the city, bucking the current art-world interest in all things sustainable, urban and walkable. Hop in the car for a pleasure drive in the name of art before the price of gas is too high! With bingo cards available for pickup at a host of artist-run centres around town, Morman’s Calgary-specific game is half nostalgic scavenger hunt and half driving tour of some of the city’s more overlooked areas. For those on the walking kick, the artist leads a walking tour beginning at Olympic Plaza at 1 p.m. on Saturday, September 6.
Social art projects are big on the agenda this year, with an ode to communal public reading by The Social Evolution Research Gang (SERG) and a choral singalong orchestrated by Jennifer Delos Reyes as an ode to festival director Wednesday Lupypciw. A special edition artist’s project by Jason de Haan will make its appearance in the ultimate places of informal socializing: bars and pubs. These simple gestures are not grandiose (certainly not on the scale of Artcity’s previous interest in building breathtaking pavilions or doing large-scale public interventions) but instead are aimed at creating group participation and shared experience of a specific moment or event. Relational art is alternately considered to be a hot topic and a somewhat boring relative of performance art, but regardless of this debate these works express the gentleness of the festival program to a T.
With these time-based projects ready to breeze through town, Calgarians can also expect to see the festival unveil a new series of fetish-objects for the art community. Petite Enveloppe Urbaine is the site for works by a great roster of Albertan artists including Mary Anne McTrowe, Daniel Wong and Mireille Perron, among others, and you can even request a free copy to be mailed to you. “Mail art” by any other name would be as sweet, and in this case the project comes to Calgary courtesy of the nine-by-six-inch exhibition in an envelope initiated by Centre du recherché urbaine de Montreal. A book titled That’s It is a welcome archive of a festival that’s so often over in a flash. These enduring documents are a welcome notion for the festival that’s too soon off-the-radar come October, that rebrands itself every year, and does the important work of constantly shapeshifting into new formats, spaces and political terrains.
The Artcity Festival of Art, Design and Architecture takes place from September 6 to 14. Visit www.artcityfestival.com for more information on venues and events.
