Open Spaces: Windows to a View
Open Spaces: Windows to a View
This program offers local and regional artists an opportunity to showcase their art in a highly visible downtown location while working with a professional guest curator. The program, which began in 2009, celebrates the diversity and quality of works by regional artists, while enlivening the Centre Street LRT platform on 7 Avenue between 1 Street S.E. and Centre Street.
If you have any questions or would like your work exhibited, contact publicart@calgary.ca
Current exhibition
Queer Films Saved Us (2021) - Kevin Allen
The Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival premiered in Calgary on June 17, 1999, and has become a treasured annual event ever since. The LGBTQ2 Festival has a history of engaging talented local artists to design its festival poster. Over the years, Fairy Tales accumulated a backlog of visually iconic posters that served as both marketing vehicle and artwork. This is a curated retrospective of those beautiful posters. They assert—on the walls, streets, and bulletin boards of Calgary—that queer people were here and always have been. The 2021 Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival, produced by the Calgary Queer Arts Society runs May 13 - 30, 2021.
Seeing ourselves represented on the big screen was alchemy and moved LGBTQ2 rights forward when public funding for queer cultural events was considered controversial. Festival organizers routinely got harassing phone calls and hateful mail but kept going defiantly.
Fairy Tales posters would paper the streets every year at festival time, asserting that we were here too—claiming space in our city. This exhibition is a retrospective of those assertions: stylized, beautiful and proud.
About the artist
Kevin Allen is the Research Lead of the Calgary Gay History Project, a research collective working to uncover and preserve stories from Calgary’s LGBTQ2 past. The Project achieved national recognition at the Governor General’s History Awards, and its research has been covered in both local and national media. Kevin was the inaugural Historian in Residence at the Calgary Central Library in November 2018, where he launched his local bestselling book, Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary. Kevin was one of the founders of the Fairy Tales Queer Film Festival.
Past exhibits
Artist: Alice Helwig
Exhibition year: 2009
Title: Chronicles of Stephen Ave
Artist: Vincent T. Joachim
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: "Chronicles of Stephen Ave," is a photo project which began in July 2008. The artist has taken more than 2000 pictures in this year long project. Audiences are invited to view a photo story that documents the street with candid, documentary and humorous elements.
Artist: Mandy Stobo
Exhibition year: 2009
Title: Shifting Terrain
Artist: Vera Parlac
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: In Shifting Terrain, Parlac engages the viewer through movement and its intricate geometry.
Artist: Christine Nagel
Exhibition year: 2009
Artist: Billie Rae Busby
Exhibition year: 2009
Artist: Nikki Gour
Exhibition year: 2009
Artist: Peter Greendale
Exhibition year: 2009
Title: Birdhouse
Artist: Julie Chapdelaine
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: By creating multi-dimensional environments and interfacing elements from both urban and prairie, she explores how they might shape one another into something that is unique to our place.
Artist: In-Definite Arts Society
Exhibition year: 2009
Artist: Judy Ueda
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Artist: Marjan Eggermont
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Marjan has used 4060 monopoly houses to display Calgary's 2008 homeless count.
Artist: Roxanne Driediger
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Driediger’s collection of two-dimensional painted works for OPEN SPACES addresses ideas about community, identity and cultural diversity from a Calgary woman's perspective. The playful and approachable works address ideas about contemporary costuming and everyday social performance in an effort to define attitude and character that is distinctly Calgarian.
Artist: Erin Belanger
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Artist: Daniel J. Kirk
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Title: Rush Hour
Artist: Terry Reynoldson
Exhibition year: 2010 – 2011
Project description: A dynamic installation about our shared experiences with others, both physical and emotional.
Title: The 12
Artist: Doug Driediger
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: The 12 depicts friends and family with attributes assigned to the original Twelve Apostles. Consisting of twelve portraits painted in the style of icon paintings, this vibrant display will change over the course of the exhibition run rotating each month with four new portraits.
Title: Calgary Dream Log
Artist: Sarah Fuller
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Sarah Fuller combines the dreams submitted by Calgarians into a stream of conscious text to create a collaborative narrative of one night's dreaming in our city. Focusing on the transcription of events and emotions, Fuller uses text to explore the cognitive processes connected to dreams.
Artist: Diana Un-Jin Cho
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Artist: Calgary Clay Arts Association (Aldo Marchese, Connie Pike, Constance Cooper, Darlene Swan, John Robertson, Krista Gowland, Monika Smith and Susan Thorpe.)
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Artist: Barbara Hirst
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Title: Close/Lines
Artist: Jenna Swift
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project description: Jenna Swift's Close/Lines consists of eight jacket silhouettes, constructed to human scale from the accumulated by-products of her studio practice, as well as text fragments from periodicals and newspapers. Suspended from the ceiling with string and stitching, Jenna’s installation mimics the action played out before the window as the public fall into an uneven line along the train platform, and illustrates the fleeting nature of human relationships, brief and complex as those that transpire in the time between trains.
Title: Plastic Culture
Artist: Evaline Kolijn
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project description: Plastic Culture features ten colourful prints from her Plastic Fungus series and constructed organisms created from found synthetic objects such as yogurt containers. Referencing fungi, which are agents of decomposition, the artist brings attention to plastic as a problematic waste material. The installation as a whole is intended to make the viewer "more aware of the actual technological value of this material and be less thoughtless and wasteful with it."
Artist: Margot van Lindenberg
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Title: Shimmer & Shine
Artist: Nate McLeod & Cassandra Paul
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project description: Shimmer & Shine filled the Open Spaces window space with a floor‐to‐ceiling wall painting. Beams of color found within the painting draw the viewer’s eye to the center of the window, where a deer skull projects out from a circle of black cast acrylic. A thick layer of crystals has been grown upon the surface of the deer’s antlers using a simple process often taught in elementary school science classes.
Title: Beyond the Looking Glass
Artist: Roberta Murray
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project description: A series of pictorialist archival pigment photographs. This series of images, captured in the city of Calgary, question if reality can be distorted by how you look at the world. An individual perception determines what exists. Where one person perceives a nightmare, the other sees a dream.
Title: Mapping #1
Artist: Megan Conley
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Summary
Artist: Linda Carreiro & RICHard SMOLinski
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: A series of textual veils installed at varying depths throughout the space. Made from rice paper, the delicate text hangs vertically throughout the space, partially obscuring each other and casting elaborate and ominous shadows upon the wall and floor.
Title: GARY
Artist: Larissa Tiggelers
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Dragon
Artist: Brian Batista
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Harmony 2
Artist: Zuopeng Zhang
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Lovely
Artist: Dean Stanton
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Swag
Artist: Barbara Sutherland
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Title: Recent Acquisitions
Artist: Collin Zip
Exhibition year: 2019
Project description: Recent Acquisitions explores the fine line between theft and appropriation and questions the role of production in art making and collecting.
Title: Images of Wrapture
Artist: Molly Caldwell
Exhibition year: 2020
Project description: Images of Rapture explores the ecstatic in vapid: all that is ostentatious yet somehow joyful for it. The sticky sweetness of hair stuck in lip gloss. Flip through a glossy magazine, and rub the perfume ads on your wrist. The tactility, the gesture of scrolling through Instagram. Britney Spears, 'my loneliness is killing me…', your heart screaming along: me too. You want to live fancy? Baby believe me, it’s only a matter of time.
Title: Essential Oils (for Alberta)
Exhibition year: 2020
Artist: Alana Bartol
Project description: A series comprised of photographs that document the artist’s experiments with the enfleurage process. She used botanical (and other materials such as coffee beans and socks) from both communities that were donated, purchased or foraged.
Title: Land and Memory
Artist: Katherine Boyer, Tiffany Creyeke, Umer Farooq, Braden Gray, Mary Mattingly and Philip Vandermey
Exhibition year: 2020
Project description: From the horizon to the cartesian grid, this collection of articles reveals differing connections to place. Some with hopes for a new city. Others with new attempts to represent, to be heard. How is progress defined and how might planning better respond to cultural identifiers?
Title: Weeping
Artist: Michaela Bridgemohan
Exhibition year: 2020
Project description: Weeping is a contemplative body of work. It presents a series of drawings, mounted and etched onto wood, and handsewn oil-slick pillows that are all adorned with shells. By suspending these artworks, they are all prone to move and twirl based on how the air dictates them