Open Spaces: Windows to a View
Open Spaces: Windows to a View Exhibition space for Canadian artists
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
Special Thymes - Les Ramsay
A series of new paintings by Métis artist Les Ramsay titled "Special Thymes" displays current and ancient conversations that coalesce and coexist.
This suite of works reflects images of organic states of fractured evolution, text, and figure that float and mingle in lucid landscapes. Ramsay creates his works by recycling the excess of everyday ideas and domestic objects using constructive and deconstructive strategies.
With a layered multi-media studio practice, Ramsay draws inspiration from domestic craft, textiles, folk art, and digital drawing, forming groups of large oil paintings, fabric assemblages, sculptures, and framed needlepoint.
About the artist
Les Ramsay was born in Vancouver and currently lives and works in the Tla'amin Nation in Qathet Region on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia.
He received his BFA at Emily Carr University with a six-month exchange at the Universitat de Bellas Artes in Valencia, Spain in 2007. He also completed his MFA in Painting at Concordia University in 2015.
His art has been exhibited in Canada, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and the United States.
Past exhibits
2020 - 2021
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
Title: Queer Films Saved Us
Artist: Kevin Allen
Exhibition year: 2021
Project description: 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.
2016 - 2019
Title: 1923 Voyage…well, part of
Artist: John & Lou
Exhibition year: 2016
Project description: In 1982, John Will bought a box of negatives at a garage sale belonging to local resident Louis W. Shulman, which chronicled Lou’s travel from Vancouver to Yokohama in 1923. Will scratched text onto the negatives, enlarged the images, and printed them in colour resulting in a semifictional recounting of the journey.
Title: Mourn
Artist: Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter
Exhibition year: 2017
Project description: Mourn is a two-piece installation that consists of a line of beaded text that reads “you can mourn someone who is still alive” and a painting of a ghost. These two pieces work in conjunction to create a platform for the audience to consider their traumas and offer an affirmation to passersby. Mourn speaks to intergenerational trauma, seeks to communicate loss and acceptance, and considers the performative aspect of lamentation by situating the private into the public.
Title: Ekosi
Artist: Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal
Exhibition year: 2017 - 2018
Project description: Based on Cree teachings Cardinal has received, the work depicts the four stages of life. Four circular pieces are displayed two-by-two in two separate woven structures that comprise Ekosi. The title is a Cree word that can express "that's it; that's the end; alright; good-bye; amen; it is okay," although Cardinal’s usage tends more towards the literal English translation meaning “enough,” asking viewers to consider “what is enough?” The stages are represented by the four circles made of collaged images on a background of empty tea bags, which are woven into a web-like structure of artificial sinew attached directly to the wall by metal hooks.
Title: Grandma Kay: Portraits and Places in Fabric
Artist: Agnete Kay (Grandma Kay)
Exhibition year: 2018
Project description: The exhibition, Grandma Kay: Portraits and Places in Fabric features fourteen fabric works, machine sewn with the title hand-embroidered on the front of each work. Together they represent a small sampling of this prolific artist’s engagement with fabric and the art of appliqué.
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.
2012 - 2014
Title: Mapping 2013
Artist: Megan Conley
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: Mapping 2013 focuses on abstract contouring of the skull, topographic lines and mapping of the skin. My skin is the mask that covers the deformity that is hidden from society; the shape of my skull and its overall shape has been mediated by 25 plates and screws. I show this by combining many altered portraits that use topology and Cartesian systems, which allow me to take over the skin and own it on my own terms. Using these altered portraits and combining parts of the face/skin together allows me to create my own death masks. These masks are meant to speak to how I have lived the life of two different people, one repulsive and the now, attractive. These are the death masks of my grotesque identity.
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
Project description: My two-dimensional practice is an intuitive process that allows me to play within my own subconscious parameters of creating. These paintings and drawings are experimental even though the final pieces appear very measured and systematic. The hard-edged shapes create a form, which then becomes a character, whose colours I manipulate to create a fractured space. The shapes within the characters fall in and out of the canvas depending on where the viewers eye sits when presented with the work.
Title: Dragon
Artist: Brian Batista
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: This work showcases two dragons painting side by side in celebration of the year of the dragon. I draw artistic inspiration from a deep and profound curiosity in eastern spirituality and mysticism. I hope to transcend mere representational art to create a mystical experience.
Title: Harmony 2
Artist: Zuopeng Zhang
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: Harmony is at the heart of Eastern philosophy and is relected in all aspects of Chinese culture such as the arts, architecture, religion, politics, and health. Rather than being opposing forces, this philosophy is rooted in the notion that human beings are an integral part of nature, co-existing in harmony. When I first encountered the majestic and spectacular Rockies, and the expansive Prairies, I immersed in the endless meditation. I was compelled to create this series and highlight the natural harmony that exists in our everyday lives.
Title: Lovely
Artist: Dean Stanton
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: These images are based on creating and ‘old school’ kind of feeling for Calgarian’s to hopefully relate to. The backgrounds in each picture are of cool old objects I have collected in Calgary thrifts shops over the last 30 years, the illustrations in the foreground play with nostalgia and retro cartoons aesthetics.
Title: Sway
Artist: Barbara Sutherland
Exhibition year: 2012-2014
Project description: Sway is comprised of two ceiling mounted sculptural forms made from thread, cloth, steel, and motors. One of the objects represents over 20 years of accumulation of remnants, cast of clothes, quilting fabric, upholstery material, and yardages that I’ve collected and stored. They are both a self-portrait and narrative, and have been arranged in chronological order around the hoop. The other object, of identical form, is made from a neutral coloured cloth and thread, existing as a ghost or counterpoint to the colourful work.
2010 - 2012
Title: Heaven and Earth X
Artist: Judy Ueda
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Heaven and Earth is about wide open or limitless space, it is also about a sense of stability and calmness or something you have always known; like going back to a favourite spot you used to go to as a child.
Title: My Life on the Island of Misbelief
Artist: Marjan Eggermont
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Eggermont’s work puts Calgary’s homeless statistics in visual form, featuring 4,060 Monopoly houses representing each homeless person in 2008.
Title: Dress Up
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.
Title: These Three Kings
Artist: Erin Belanger
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Belanger seeks to stimulate collective memory through the narratives created by camp culture and imagery. These familiar signifiers allow for ease of personal association. The ‘great history’ stimulates individual identification and therefore provides a sense of place and comfort to us; assuring us that though death is a certainty, we may not be entirely erased.
Title: urbanized BuY-productZ
Artist: Daniel J. Kirk
Exhibition year: 2010 - 2011
Project description: Urban centres evolve and grow, they consume and they provide and it is somewhere within the idea of an urban centre in which the work forms context. This work is based upon an ongoing dialogue surrounding the ideas and definitions of Graffiti, Vandalism, Community, Urbanization, and Waste.
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.
Title: Chogak Chogak
Artist: Diana Un-Jin Cho
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project description: For the space Cho created an installation inspired by the Bow River, that’s slow flow gives a sense of calmness and serenity, which is what she wants to capture and convey to the bustling people of downtown. The goal is to deliver a minute of tranquility and a spiritual lift to the commuters of the LRT after a long and stressful day at work
Title: Urban Wild
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
Project description: A collection of work by urban clay artists investigates tensions and dynamic aspects of “wild” within an urban environment. Cities have organic junctions and interactions with the “wild.” Sometimes planned, sometimes not, but we are often surprised.
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir
Title: Floating City
Artist: Barbara Hirst
Exhibition year: 2011 - 2012
Project Description: Floating City is part of a series of paintings that was inspire by the views along the canals of quiet neighborhoods in the northern district of Cannaregio, Venice, where I spent many hours painting, sketching, photographing, and working on intaglio plates. Within the ripples of the lagoon, I could easily imagine the palazzos in their former glory.
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
Project description: This window acts as a metaphor of reversed roles: with our increasing urban sprawl, we have to looks inside a window rather than outside to see the beauty of nature. Inspired by the mythical beauty of lush flora these artworks are presented to share the delicate balance and splendor found in the botanical world: our green gardens as ultimate means of survival. There is less and less open space to enjoy the beauty and nourishment of nature. How odd to have to protect nature and enclose it like some commodity in a window!
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.
2009 - 2010
Artist: Alice Helwig
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: A. S. Helwig utilizes techniques such as collage, texturing, glazing, and underpainting to explore the prairie landscape. Themes of alienation, awe, personal epiphanies, and prayerfulness emerge. The fleeting moment transcends itself to reveal that feeling, the truth, which we intuitively understand but find difficult to articulate. These are visual poems which insinuate the eternal into our understanding of the immediate.
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
Project description: Stobo explores perception and personal associations of the viewer by approaching a single topic in three different styles of execution.
Title: Shifting Terrain
Artist: Vera Parlac
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: In Shifting Terrain, Parlac engages the viewer through movement and its intricate geometry.
Title: : “The Pyres” With Drawings; Five Elements from the Birdhouse Project
Artist: Christine Nagel
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: With this work, Nagel’s intention was to create a sense of space and a sense of place that is familiar to Calgarians living amidst the prairies. Interfacing elements from both urban and prairie environments to explore how they might shape on another.
Title: Land Titles
Artist: Billie Rae Busby
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: Billie Rae is a non traditional landscape artist and is inspired by both the terrain of the Canadian Prairies and urban cityscapes, seeking to reconcile the solitude of the prairies and the visual complexity of modern cities.
Title: The Value of Art
Artist: Nikki Gour
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: Gour’s work questions the value placed on art by using Canadian Coins in her work with a mirror, inspired by Mr. John Holden’s speech “The value of Culture”.
Title: Horizon
Artist: Peter Greendale
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: The work presented focuses on the concept as horizon as a metaphor for what awaits us in the future. The site specific installation is critical to it’s understanding Situated directly across from a busy impersonal train station, the drawing takes us to a private personal space where we can contemplate that which lies ahead.
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.
Title: Exploring Creativity
Artist: In-Definite Arts Society
Exhibition year: 2009
Project description: For the Exploring Creativity exhibition, In-Definite Arts’ artists find common ground in their shared commitment to exploring elements of community, creativity, and culture through their diverse art practices. Join us as we take a playful look at what it means to be creative.