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While Calgary’s activist and cultural communities are certainly talking about gentrification of our core and rapidly changing civic landscapes, Scott Rogers tackles these topics directly in his exhibition at TNG.
Just as current developments are clad with temporary plywood walls and advertising panels, Rogers has erected two walls that block off the view of the gallery. They announce “TOWERS: Coming Soon” and create a barrier that mimics a condo construction site. City pedestrians will be familiar with these devices that block public sidewalks and force walkers to navigate around the construction of privately owned buildings.
Squeeze through this little crack between the boards, and the construction on the other side of the wall reveals itself as a chaotic installation of structures. Condo magazines are used as raw materials for buildings manipulated in every possible shape: rolled into tubes, cutouts collaged onto the walls, folded and stacked, taped together into tall columns. Scraps are swept into piles on the floor.
The condo guides themselves advertise an idealized standard of urban living that is out of reach for many Calgarians, not to mention inner-city residents or young artists and cultural workers like Rogers. The magazine’s target audience is those who are within the economic bracket that can afford a six-figure condo, so he really has no place reading the guides for their intended purpose. Instead, stealing massive stacks of these guides to cut up for the exhibition is a hilariously brazen gesture.
Rogers’s flimsy paper structures suggest that condos are merely facades, and the construction boom is about to crash. The defiled magazines tap into anxieties that condos are cheaply fabricated, don’t measure up to their own branding as upscale habitats for the urban elite and won’t maintain their market value. Their shitty construction uses visible tape, glue and string to hint that they’re ready to tumble down around our feet at any moment.
While the idea of making architectural sculptures out of condo mags is exciting conceptual territory, the installation itself is a total mish-mash of disparate constructions that don’t solidify into a cohesive exhibition. The gallery unfortunately looks like the result of an art school exercise in which each student was given a stack of magazines and a set of parameters to follow: Must be made of magazines; Must turn the two-dimensional page into a three-dimensional structure; Must be ready to collapse at any moment.
Of course, all these elements create an anti-esthetic that is intended to critique bad planning practices, wastefulness and disposable culture. Garbage has featured prominently in the works of many artists who comment on our culture’s propensity for over-consumption. Donna Akrey followed a similar construction model for her exhibition, havenwoodpointegreenterrace.inc, at TRUCK Gallery in 2003. She collected wood scraps and building materials from the ‘burbs and used them to fabricate miniature houses that colonized the gallery floor. However what if Rogers’s installation was slick instead of sloppy? Would riffing off meticulously crafted architectural models or an airbrushed spokes-couple from a condo advert offer a different critical perspective?
The panels at the front of the exhibition also play on The New Gallery’s mandate as a non-profit public organization and the perceived exclusivity of the gallery spaces. Still, the gallery has relatively little agency in Calgary’s boom and bust cycles. TNG has been forced out of its space twice. In the early ’90s, TNG and fellow artist-run centre Stride Gallery occupied a prominent building in the then up-and-coming design district along 11th Avenue S.W., until they were forced out by rising rents. In 2007, TNG relocated to Eau Claire Market because its long-time home at Sixth St. and Ninth Ave. was being demolished to make room for the Penny Lane redevelopment.
The issues raised by TOWERS are well placed at The New Gallery. TNG has a great history of panel discussions and think tanks on similar topics, and Rogers’s revival of this critical spirit is the most welcome aspect of the project. He hosted a reading group in conjunction with the exhibition and invited people to engage with issues of gentrification and boom-and-bust cycles in his work through a variety of news articles, essays and discussions. One evening, drop-in participants of the reading group offered experiences from their own work in the cultural field and beyond. Ironically, CBC news reported that construction on a major condo development on the corner of 10th Ave, and Fourth St. was cancelled on the very same day. Members of the reading group arrived charged up by this news.
Getting together and thinking about how art, economics and politics are so intertwined is one of the strongest parts of TNG’s history. Perhaps it will be TOWERS that tips the balance towards encouraging a comprehensive home-grown critique of the effects of economic growth and gentrification on arts and culture communities in Calgary.
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