From Prevaling Past

The City of Calgary White Hat Pledge:

“I, (speaker inserts his or her name), havin’ visited the only genuine Western city in Canada, namely Calgary, and havin’ been duly treated to exceptional amounts of heart-warmin’, hand-shakin’, tongue-loosenin’, back-slappin’, neighbour-lovin’ western spirit, do solemnly promise to spread this here brand of hospitality to all folks and critters who cross my trail hereafter. On the count of three, we will all raise our hats and give a loud ‘Yahoo!’”

It’s Stampede time, and the city is going absolutely hog wild. No one is standing still. Stride Gallery’s off-site summer exhibition is timed to coincide with the annual Stampede, and Alberta artist Donna White is stepping into the fray with a billboard project and exhibition, Prevailing Past, that uses the cowboy hat and Calgary architecture as symbols to examine civic identity. Stopping to see White’s billboards in the face of all the traffic on busy Ninth Ave. and Eighth St. S.W. is a dramatic gesture. The perfect vantage point to see Prevailing Past is along Eighth St. on the west side, or driving straight down Ninth towards the downtown core.

The meaning of White’s billboard is ambiguous in the face of the Stampede crowd’s dogged collective determination to get as wasted and as wild as humanly possible. The puking, caterwauling, ass-cheek flaunting crowd of mostly female Stampede-goers outside The Roadhouse bar doesn’t seem to notice the billboard from behind their beer goggles. However, they do provide a lot more entertainment than White’s stoic hat tossers.

The two characters pictured on White’s billboard are women dressed in dark denim, white long-sleeved dress shirts and conservative makeup. They’re photographed in the midst of three actions and, as the billboard rotates, the women are stuck in an endless animation of camping it up with the cowboy hat as their main prop. They lift their hats, toss them onto the pile, put them back on their heads and repeat. The pile of white hats at their feet is totally motionless beside the tornado of activity on Ninth Ave.

The cowboy hats that these ladies wear and then discard are made of folded and cut paper. Their hats are designed from one piece of cardstock printed on one side with a tiny pattern that is derived from two iconic Calgary buildings: Bankers Hall and the St. Louis Hotel. The photos are a binary of two very different Calgary ideals and time periods, perhaps pointing to the tension between these two symbols of old and new, poor and rich, dilapidated and shimmering. Large-scale photographs of each found “pattern” can be seen in situ at the Stride Gallery itself. But back to the hats: since the white hat has been used as a symbol of Calgary’s civic pride and Wild West spirit, what does this faux paper impersonation say about the white-hatting ritual that is bestowed upon dignitaries, oil barons and guests to the city?

The City of Calgary White Hat Pledge is also included in White’s exhibition text and, for a moment, it reads like a joke. This ridiculous text is so campy it could be straight out of a western flick recalling a time where men were men and they sat around campfires eating beans out of the can. With this image in mind, it seems just as awkward to put a cowboy hat (symbol of male conquest and, more recently, the entrepreneurship of the “New West”) on a woman’s head as it does for virtually anyone to actually speak the pledge out loud with any degree of seriousness. There is a certain emptiness in saying the pledge or donning a paper hat (or a cheap straw one, for that matter) once a year, and perhaps that’s what White is getting at.

The narrative can be unclear if you don’t catch the images at the right moment, or stop to linger and see all three panels rotate. Another billboard nearby depicts a much tougher, more charismatic woman riding a horse. It’s a view of the Calgary Stampede that’s in line with officially sanctioned western branding, and it doesn’t require the same determination to decipher. Thankfully, public intervention art in the form of billboards like White’s, as well as posters, stickers, graffiti and sculpture, are necessarily loaded with more content than is ever expected from advertising.

Unfortunately, the other exhibition site is merely an advertisement for the project, pointing pedestrians who actually stop to read the fine print in the direction of the billboard and the exhibition. This is a good thing: public advertising for art exhibitions that happen in public galleries is something that Calgary lacks, despite the fact that it’s routine in subway stations, streets and billboards in other cities. Still, after making a special trip specifically to see the site, seeing an advert pales in comparison to the billboard itself.

The exhibition at Stride Gallery features a large pile of paper hats, two photographs and an overbearingly huge didactic panel. The text details the artist’s experiences with graduate school, and explains aspects of her ideas not immediately related to Prevailing Past. What was the need for the large text? One gallery visitor wondered if the big didactic text was meant to explain the project to a less art-savvy audience that might have visited Stride in conjunction with Stampede?

This project is a worthwhile one, but its subtlety might be lost against the din of the annual madness that is the Calgary Stampede.