Mark Strowbridge

Atom Deguire’s postcards will pounce on unsuspecting pedestrians in the city, forcing them to engage with art

The gallery is seen as a rarified space, one with crisp clean walls, pools of hay-coloured light lovingly and carefully angled over a painting or sculpture. This month, however, Truck Gallery looks more like a garage after a good spring cleaning — all bare walls, grey concrete floors and bouncing echoes.

“Base Camp” — running for the month of July — and the exhibitions’s four participating artists, Alexandre David, Atom Deguire, Michael Fernandes and Ashley Neece, are taking art out of the sanctuary and into the streets in an effort to make a statement about art and its relationship to public space.

“It plays off the idea of a mountaineer’s base camp,” says Renato Vitic, director of Truck, drawing an image of the four artists as urban explorers in an expansive landscape. “It’s where you prepare for the endeavour you’re facing. The artists involved in the exhibition will be using this space as a staging area for the events that happen outside of the space. It’s a great idea for Calgary, where the idea of the public commons is perhaps being challenged.”

There is a wide variety of work in the exhibition. Deguire has already deployed his postcards featuring the Rocky Mountains on the front and messages on the back, which are also on display in the gallery. David has set up a sculpture in the gallery that folds out to make seating (viewers can sign out one of the sculptures, which are attached to wheels, and set up their own seating area anywhere in the city). Fernandes has been walking the streets with an engaging sign, talking to people.

To cap off the exhibition at the end of the month, Neece will be putting up simple manilla posters around the city with coloured text featuring phrases about living in the moment.

Turning the gallery inside out, says Vitic, is an important challenge to the ideology of an artist-run centre. People will come into the gallery to check out what is going on, but, most importantly, he says, it brings the audience into the art-making process by having the public interact with the actual exhibition outside the gallery.

“It’s about that encounter with the individual,” says Vitic. “It’s less of a passive relationship to the artwork where you go into a museum you see a beautiful painting and you absorb it and then you walk away from it. With these works, it’s a much more active relationship — it’s a relationship of participation. You have to encounter the works.”

The random encounter is at the heart of Deguire’s postcards. “Base Camp,” says Deguire, has pushed him conceptually, yet he feels at home, considering a lot of his work has to do with the link between the outdoors and the gallery.

His postcards use the iconic images of the Rocky Mountains on the front, while on the back, he stamps messages such as “You have a long history” and “Magic can be found here.” The unaddressed and unsigned postcards are distributed in mostly pedestrian areas of the city, where people can randomly encounter the pieces without even knowing they’re art.

“They make a statement about public space and freedom,” he says. “Everything today is about security and we’re losing free public space. It gets back to the whole idea of people feeling overly threatened. I’m working in public space and questioning that cultural shift.”

Deguire has set up an office space of his work in the corner of the gallery as an interactive installation, documenting how his postcards are made. He enjoys the idea that people can experience the work outside the gallery as well as inside. It’s a relationship that Vitic also sees as important.

“It’s not just simply programming works off-site in opposition to works in the gallery,” he says, “but building a direct relationship between the two. That’s the idea.”

Michael Fernandes’s contribution personifies that relationship. He will be walking the streets carrying a sign saying, “If you don’t see it, ask for it.” The same statement adorns the wall of the gallery.

“I saw it in a store a long time ago” he says. “There is something warm about it — an attempt there to reach out. There’s a lot of empathy in it.”

The ambiguity inherent in the statement is something he hopes will propel people to ask him about it, to start conversations about how they interpret the statement. These chance encounters form the basis of his contribution — to engage with life, with the audience.

“Just to function in art is not interesting to me. The more work I do, the more I attempt to seek out society on different levels,” he says. “I’m curious about what it is we don’t see, what we’re asking. Not everyone’s carrying a [physical] sign, but we are on some levels — whether through our clothing, styles, or interests or the way we carry ourselves. Something there’s readable.”

In the end, says Vitic, “Base Camp” is where the analysis takes place: The artists go out in the public space with their work and collect the data on how their works have been received and how they, themselves, have been altered in their creative approaches.

“It’s a living model of art-making,” says Vitic. “It’s not like an archeologist or art historian where they’ll dig up some idea about an art work; it’s more like biology, where we’re dealing with living systems that change as we observe them.”