Oddment #3 comes from downtown Calgary AB – a public art installation outside The Bow Building.
It’s a striking piece of architecture, and the work chosen for it no less so.
I took this shot from inside the sculpture – there are two doors at the base of the work that allow people to walk right through it.
An interesting perspective on the downtown skyline, and the seemingly constant construction of office towers in the core of that city.
This past Sunday at the Silver Skate Festival was the second day of the “Fires of Fear” sculpture event.
This day was devoted to the creation of a collaborative work – one sculpture, made by all of us, to be committed to the flames on the Sunday night.
The day’s work was quite a bit more challenging than I (and my colleagues) had hoped … fact of the matter was, the weather conspired against us a bit. It turned chilly and windy on the Sunday, so we were all thoroughly bundled up against the chill, and seeking out hot coffee and soup frequently! This was happier news for the artists creating snow sculptures and for the skaters and skiers to be sure … but my hands were not terribly happy – or cooperative – in the cold. Still, there’s something to be said for adversity bringing people together – we all worked hard to get the sculpture finished early so we could take a long warm-up break before the night time burn!
For this sculpture, we took another page from the curator’s folktale narrative and created a giant wolf … in the folktale for which our sculptures were made, wolves were (logically enough) something that the villagers feared, but they were also denizens of an alternate reality, a world of magic and possibility and adventure. So, it seemed only fitting that we close the “Fires of Fear” by creating one of these lovely beasts!
And here are some photos of our day’s work, and the final, spectacular burn that night:
I feel really fortunate to have been able to participate in this wonderful event. I worked with some lovely people, had a ridiculous amount of fun making work, and I got to play with fire!
What more could I ask??
Had an absolutely tremendous time at the Silver Skate Festival this past weekend!
Wonderful bunch of other artists to work with, and the festival itself is really quite an event – a great blend of sport and cultural events (there are events going on this week too, culminating in weekend celebrations and closing). My thanks and congrats to everyone involved in the festival – well done!
One of the things I found so inspiring about the festival was the curatorial focus we were given as participants; it’s all well and good to get a bunch of artist to make work, but having a thematic/narrative frame for our efforts really made things happen. As artists, we were actually ‘characters’ in a story, so we were contributing to (and connecting with) the theatre and storytelling going on in other parts of the festival site.
I’ve always liked the idea of committing the things we most want to release to the transformative power of fire; such a process provides a deep level of engagement with change in so many ways. And there’s a fascination with fire and the spectacle of it - the beauty, power, danger – that has a the capacity to draw people in that other things do not. It’s visceral, immediate on many levels simultaneously.
There’s alos something incredibly liberating about creating something that you know will be irrevocably changed/transformed shortly after its completion. I won’t say the sculptures we made were destroyed – they weren’t, really, in the grand scheme of things. Not at all – the fire changed them tremendously on one level, but what could not be altered by the fire was the participation by each of us in the entire process: the making, and the sharing of that making was to me the real art here.
Still – the things we did make were pretty great all on their own! I was really fascinated by the range of work produced: we each took the idea of creating an effigy of something fearful in completely different directions.
Here are some images from the Saturday “build and burn” – there were six artist-teams each producing a separate sculpture on the first day:
And then … we got to do it all again on Sunday! Part 2 to follow ….
I went down to the Silver Skate Festival site this afternoon, to check out how things were developing, and to see where the fire sculptures are going to be made Saturday and Sunday.
I think it’s going to be a fantastic weekend!
There are some beautiful snow sculptures on site already, and there were artists working hard on more as I walked around – and more were coming back to the site tonight to work, when the temperature drops. (Murphy’s Law: we have a warm spell – great for me, so I don’t freeze my hands making work this weekend, but not ideal for the snow sculpture artists!)
The fire sculpture area … there are six bundles like this, and each one will be transformed into a sculpture … to be burned tomorrow night
I’ve had a good look at the basic materials we are being provided, and I know about the rest coming tomorrow – and it looks like what I have planned will work just fine (phew~!)
So … if you’re in Edmonton, Alberta – you should come by Hawrelak Park tomorrow and Sunday – I’ll be making a sculpture all day on both days from 9 am - 6pm, and then we will be setting them all alight at about 8 pm each night! Saturday all of the artists are making their own work, and on Sunday we are a single collaborative sculpture.
It’s going to be exciting!
I am hoping to get some good photos of the process (and the final conflagration) over the weekend – so if I get some good shots, you’ll see them here!
Have a great weekend (I know I will)!
I am really looking forward to the launch of this project – from the looks of what’s been posted in the last while at the project website, there’s some great food for thought and discussion in the work being developed. I’m hoping to be able to catch Kendal Henry’s talk on the Saturday as well, as I think he will have some valuable insights regarding Edmonton as a whole, and ‘The Quarters’/Downtown East as it heads into redevelopment mode in earnest. I think there’s some thoughtful, and thought-provoking work in this public art project, and it will be very interesting indeed to see how the individual works are greeted by the area residents and by the wider population.
I was speaking with a friend about this project yesterday – and the relationship between art making, urban ‘renewal’, and the whole (problematic) notion of the ‘creative class’ as popularized by Richard Florida. The cycle is quite familiar by now: old neighbourhoods in a city’s core are hollowed out by business and residential migration due to suburban sprawl; there’s a rise in crime and social problems in the old neighbourhood, and property values drop; artists and other creatives move in (because they can afford to live and have studio/work space here); moves to revitalize the area begin, since the artists have made the area more viable; development takes over, property values soar … there’s some gentrification that goes on, and the artists move out be cause they can no longer afford space. Lather, rinse, repeat. Some of this has gone on in ‘The Quarters’ over the last few years.
… Not all bad (to my mind, we could do with fewer peep shows and crack houses for sure), but far from ideal in many ways. But that little summary of ‘progress’ leaves many factors out of the picture:
- What about the long-time residents of the area in question? How will they be treated, and what place will they have in the redevelopment? There tends to be a perception of core neighbourhoods that they are wastelands inhabited only by ‘undesirables’ and rife with violence and crime. But these are established neighbourhoods, in which people have lived and raised families … just like their (now) more affluent counterparts farther afield in the same city. It could be argued that these people are the real creative class – they carve out lives and raise families in less than ideal circumstances. What of them? Will development improve their quality of life, or will it make life more difficult financially and socially?
- What about the already marginalized members of the population currently living in the area? How will their needs be properly addressed in the face of profitable, upscale housing and the potential for profit for developers? All well and good to tear down places like the York Hotel – but the people who lived there still need a place to live - preferably one that’s safe. Erasing spaces in which ‘street people’ of various types congregate and/or stay doesn’t make them - or the underlying issues they face has humans – go away.
- Who really profits from this type of redevelopment … and who is being exploited in the process? How much do initiatives of this sort reinforce structures of social and economic inequality? Does it really improve the lot of artists in the long run? Who really benefits most from the vanguard of people willing to move into an area because they can’t afford space to do what they do best otherwise?
The work being presented in the Dirt City Dream City project looks at these (and many related) issues, from a variety of perspectives. These are conversations that need to be started, continued, debated … and it is my hope that the work being presented will begin some of that. The many assumptions about race, class, gender, (and on and on) inherent in the push to redevelopment of urban core neighbourhoods need to be made transparent; perhaps some of them could even be set aside in time, if we’re lucky.
It remains to be seen if any of the young artists involved in Dream City Dirt City will be able to afford to live in the area and maintain an active practice once ‘revitalization’ is complete of course … but that’s perhaps a conversation for another day.
I’ve been buried in my studio a good deal lately, and while the focus and discipline that comes with having long and consistent hours making work is fantastic in many ways, it can also lead to losing touch with the wider context of that process: the world behind the studio doors, and how much it is enriched when art of all sorts is presented.
A few things have provoked this consideration of late: anticipating the upcoming installations and performances for Dirt City, Dream City; making work for fast & dirty’s Curiosities exhibition – and seeing the response to the work in all three locations over the course of the weekend; getting 21st Century Nesting Practices installed outside and in the stairwell at Harcourt House; and finally, coming across a delightful piece of work installed on 104 street this past weekend, right in the middle of the bustle of the weekly Farmer’s Market.
I’ll start with the last one first:
The work in question, attached to a tree on 104th Street this past Saturday.
Detail view of the work …
I have to admit total ignorance as to the source of this delightful piece of interactive public art; I don’t know who made it, where it came from, where it went at the end of the day, what will become of all the love notes inserted into it. And for me, that’s a great part of the magic of the work … . I was also really taken with the essence of the work as an open invitation to all comers to stop, step outside the usual protective barriers we all wear for a moment, and take a small risk. I found this gesture refreshing - a small moment to delight in, and a place to actively respond to the twinned calls of community and compassion that can be so singularly lacking in urban environments.
A little bit of the same thing has been going on with the nests I have installed at Harcourt House … I have seen people stop. Look. Look again. Smile. Point them out to friends or colleagues in their walk past, especially over the usual hours of office lunch times. Just a moment, just a glance, but the work has been offered freely to any individuals coming across it – and it has allowed people (however briefly) to enjoy a moment in the day that is outside of the ordinary. It has created space for whoever wants it, an opportunity to step away. Interestingly, one of the nests has become part of my studio routine in a very practical way: I’ve taken to putting a large nest out on the Annex sign when I’m in the studio working … a variety of hanging out my shingle, I suppose. People seem to note when it’s out on the sign – and when it isn’t. Nice to know people notice :).
… outside the Annex …
Curiosities functioned in a similar fashion to the aforementioned work: it presented the unexpected in an unusual way. When art is taken out of a gallery/white cube context and presented in mundane public places like the street, it disrupts a set of conventions and narratives about authority and taste and privilege - it generates conversations in new ways and makes room for more people to experience art in ways that are much less intimidating than formal, institutional settings often are.
The Curiosities van on Whyte Avenue …
People looking at the work in the Van. Photo: Kyla Tichkowsky.
Dirt City Dream City is, of course, exploring ideas about engagement and community – and the role of art in those processes – on a much larger level. The thing I keep coming back to with the entire project is how diverse the responses to the neighbourhood are – how many ways the artists involved are both engaging with the spaces in ‘The Quarters’ and how those actions (installations, performances, billboards, sculptures, gardens …) offer all kinds f different opportunities for both the residents and the larger community to explore what they think and feel about the area, and the many changes that are beginning to take place. I am really excited to see all of these projects come together in the next little while – and to walk through the neighbourhood and see what people do with them – how they respond, and to what.
The thread that binds all of these ‘acts of art’ together is their essentially transitory nature. A day, a weekend, a period of weeks or months … all of this work has its time in the public eye, and then it passes into memory for those that saw and experienced it. This brings a vitality and urgency to the experience of viewing public work of this sort, and - to my mind at least – it is in this vitality and seeming randomness that the real power of presenting work in this general fashion resides. The inherent rejection of authority and permanence seems to afford greater freedom to really engage with the work, and that in turn creates deeper engagement in the environment, in the community as a whole – for at least a little while – but maybe for longer.
In the end, it seems to me that art of this type can do so much on the streets of this city: provoke thought, raise controversy, bring diverse people together in unexpected ways … and there’s value too in simply provoking a smile. Making someone look up and notice something different. Unexplained. New.
Edmonton has a nickname of fairly recent creation: Dirt City. The resonances are multiple, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons the name has gained a fair bit of traction in local circles, including the arts community here. Edmonton is Dirt City in many ways – the moniker speaks to the history of farming in the area to be sure, but also to the blue collar/industrial/oil patch foundation of the boom-town economy. It also, less metaphorically, addresses the locally infamous ‘annual reveal’ of the detritus temporarily concealed by the (seemingly) endless winters: the dirt and garbage left behind by careless people, crews of sanders and graders on the streets. The flip side of this view of Edmonton is the notion that it is a place of potential and growth – a place that can foster change and creativity, and the dreams that go with that kind of vision. A place that perhaps has ‘gritty’ aspects to its history, but is in transition, has the ‘dirt’ from which things can grow; a place actively engaged in the process of reinventing itself… Including the eastern portion of the downtown core, now dubbed ‘The Quarters’ as the city begins a several-years-long attempt to redevelop and revitalize what has become over the last 40 years an economically and socially depressed area.
From the tensions and contradictions inherent in these competing views came Dirt City-Dream City, a transitory public art project supported by the Public Art program of the Edmonton Arts Council. The EAC brought in Kendal Henry as curator for this project (more info on Kendal here and here), and the and the artists selected for the project spent the first week of May in workshops, walking tours, and discussions, gathering information from various sources about the area, and developing their work around these resources. The art projects in Dirt City-Dream City will be presented in various locations in The Quarters/Downtown East section of Edmonton this July.
I had the pleasure of speaking on May 4th to this group, as part of the information-workshop portion of the project. Chelsea Boos from the EAC asked me to discuss the photoshoot my colleague Marian Switzer and I did September 2011 at the now-demolished York Hotel. In the earlier history of the area, the York was a bustling place, host to travelers and weddings, like most any other hotel in a busy, growing urban downtown. Over time however, downtown Edmonton was economically gutted by suburban sprawl – much like virtually every city in North America – and although the western portion of the city’s core saw business development and construction, Downtown East (and the York along with it) continued to slide economically, and increasingly suffer from the social ills that plague such depressed urban areas.
When Marian and I shot the rooms at the York, the place had been closed for a bit over a year; the City had first revoked the tavern’s license to stem the rash of alcohol and drug-fueled incidents at the place, and then finally purchased the property and closed it in April of 2010. I had seen the interior in August 2010, when I was on staff at Latitude 53, and was instantly struck by the sense that the place was somehow frozen in time – in a state of suspended animation as though the inhabitants and patrons had just left, or could return at any moment. I wanted to explore that tension, the simultaneity of presence and absence, the way the place continued to hold fragmentary and disrupted narratives. The place and its strange intimacy haunted me for a year, but for several reasons, I wasn’t able to follow up on that first visit. Finally, in September of 2011, I had the time and opportunity to see about getting back into the space to see if I could capture some of what I experienced there over a year before. While there were some practical and logistic complications to working in the space, including some issues regarding personal safety, and a tight deadline to meet before the property was demolished – I wouldn’t have missed this opportunity, not for a moment. I think that the work Marian and I did there is solid, and we are starting to develop it into a really interesting body of work for exhibition.
What we found there was quite arresting, on a number of levels. The City had been unable to entirely secure the building after the hotel’s closure, so there had been considerable vandalism, principally to the walls in the hallways.
People who had no other option had also used some of the rooms as safe(r) spaces to bunk down at night (the merits of a locking door , a roof, and a bed cannot be underestimated when life is being lived on the street). In many ways (as squats go) it was a pretty good place. But what I found deeply interesting – and quite eerie – was the fact that a large number of the rooms in the York had remained virtually untouched since I’d last seen them in August 2010.
August 2010
… and in September 2011.
This was a liminal space on a number of levels: it hovered between being and non-being (in the sense that it was slated for demolition at the time we were working there); it was once a place some people called home (sometimes for years), but was also a place people often stayed for one night (or less); it was once a perfectly respectable hotel, that had become a haven for drug dealers and a site of prostitution and violent crime; what remained in many of the rooms spoke to both the ‘public’ and ‘private’ simultaneously (personal objects within the context of the nondescript and anonymous). These relationships are of course fluid, tenuous at best … but regardless of the shifting boundaries inherent in each room, each encounter with the space, Marian and I were faced with a consistent set of problems/questions: how to work in and with what we found there with respect? These rooms were peoples’ homes; we felt there was a responsibility to honour that fact, and try our best to document the space without being voyeuristic. We were conscious of the difference between our reality and the reality of the people who lived there before we came. We were also very aware of both the real loss that some of the residents felt with the hotel’s closing. And there was the fact that we ‘didn’t belong’ there – we weren’t part of that community, and so had to negotiate our place (and any right we had to be) there at that time – through the intersecting and contested narratives of race, gender, economics, and history. There are some excellent commentaries on some of the ideas and issues we confronted in working in this place - and with regard to DirtCity-Dream City as a whole here and here.
I encourage anyone reading this to investigate further - and tell me what you think about the artist’s role in such a place/space, and the artist’s responsibility to the larger community surrounding such a place. I leave you with hard questions (none of which have hard and fast answers that I have found yet – and all questions which the artists creating work for DirtCity-DreamCity face as well):
- what role does the artist play in creating work in and from such a space, when that artist is from ‘outside’?
- what responsibility doe the artist have to the inhabitants of such a place? to the people living in the vicinity? to the community as a whole?
- are there best practices that can be employed in approaching projects like this now and in the future?
- what is the purpose of art-making in such spaces – public or otherwise?
I look forward to comments, questions, challenges … and I leave you for tonight with two more images from the now demolished York; food for thought, I hope:
