Celebration of the Bow River

In the summer of 2010, six Public Art events in Calgary gave citizens and visitors the opportunity to celebrate and reflect upon the precious Bow River.

Each event featured a different artist and gave people a chance to experience the Bow River and think about its importance as a life-sustaining resource. The Bow River is our most precious natural resource and our source of drinking water. The celebration highlighted our connection to the river and created opportunities for citizens to further appreciate and protect this resource.

For more information on the Celebration of the Bow River, please download the Celebration of the Bow River 2010 Art Catalogue or contact the Public Art Program.

Photo gallery

About the Artists

Cécile Belmont

By using simple means and techniques, my work asserts itself as a space where the fragile intensity of the human – with its emotions, desires, relationship with others and with reality – is put back into the center of thought.

My work is composed of various activities that influence each other and create a particular dynamic. The urban interventions, the performances, the clothing and the cut-paper installations act as locations for action that widen the possible dissemination of my images, placing them in different contexts and relationships to the audience – from the street into the gallery and from the gallery on to the street.

By confronting the individual and the collective, I question how to speak about the world through intimacy and how this intimacy receives the assaults of the external world. Resolutely inscribed in the reality which surrounds it, my work proposes an appropriation of public space and everyday life as a place for self-expression and encounter with the other.

http://www.cecilebelmont.com/

Derek Besant

 

My work hinges on an unorthodox use of materials and technology -  realizing hybrid forms relating to themes of memory, language, and the body as metaphor.

The dislocation of the figure often haunts my imagery and explores themes such as  sleep, dreams, migration, forgetting, falling, silence, reflection or submersion.  The physical / psyche balance is always in question.  My public art pieces always take on their own life within the setting they are integrated into.

Many exhibitions are constructed around the ephemeral underpinnings of a concept without answers... only questions.  Figures blur into oblivion, fall out of reach into nothing, leave their impressions in unmade motel bed sheets or sink below surfaces in poetic choreographed movements accompanied by strange soundscapes.

http://www.derekbesant.com

Lewis and Taggart

 

We see our work as a continuous homage to the theatrics of the human condition, aligning ourselves to a strand of conceptual art that values human experience over rational objectivism.

With the beginning of each new project, we establish a constellation of divergent starting points - often found within literature, myth, everyday anecdotes and historical archives - from which we strive to create new systems of storytelling.

Seeking to establish new connections between incongruous things, our practice allows for and embraces a cross-contamination of objects, drawing, photography, video and sound, whose narrative threads intertwine and conflate. We are specifically interested in how sculpture can function as a vehicle for ritual and transformation, and how modest and readily available materials can serve to monumentalize the poetics of existential pursuits.

http://www.lewisandtaggart.com

Laurent Louyer

 

Light is everywhere. I explore light and its interplay with art, architecture and space. Spaces become animated and transformed through visually unique and unexpected lighting.

I use a diverse array of lighting formats, technologies and materials that allow me to investigate social, historical and emotional characteristics of a place.  A narrative results, enabling the audience to interact, reflect and reconsider the illuminated spaces.

http://www.riveroflight.org

José Luis Torres

 

My work reaffirms the idea that there are no more borders relating to questions of space. The sculpture transforms the space that contains and surrounds nature and its elements.  For that, I explore concrete and aesthetic measures on the basis of two types of perceptions: one physical and tangible, the other mental and subjective.

Focused on the concepts of territory, memory and nomadic identity, my work takes the way of installation, halfway between sculpture and architecture.  My projects are developed on a specific site, in situ, and instigate relations among the elements that compose them, the place that accommodates them (or that they incorporate), and the public.

In this direction, I create environments where the visitor can experience space through a process of discoveries.  My practice creates perceptible relations in spaces, acting as a  source of inspiration and as a place of exploration and creation - as a laboratory.

Peter Von Tiesenhausen

 

Peter Von Tiesenhausen is well-known on the national art scene with his inventive and widely-praised environmental and site-specific works, carved wood sculptures, drawings and videos.

With his use of primarily organic materials and his frequent practice of abandoning his outdoor sculptures to the forces of nature, his work is frequently read as eco-art. This is only partly the case, since his themes probe the intrinsic relationship between humans and nature.

http://www.tiesenhausen.net

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