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.
Current exhibition
Weeping (2020) - Michaela Bridgemohan
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.
I entwine specific childhood memories in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) to echo the tumultuous relationship of my ambiguous brown body and the encounters that shaped it there. What are the tensions existing when mixed Black bodies are observed and do they shift when caught amidst a moment of lamentation? To be caught weeping does it harbour a moment of comfort and support for the subject or does it employ melancholia as a state of performance?
About the artist
Michaela Bridgemohan is an interdisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent. She grew up in Mohkinstsis - also known as Calgary - located on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 Land.
Bridgemohan’s artistic research confronts mixed-race criticism and the visual ambiguity surrounding Black mixed-race subjectivity. Her work was shown across Canada and Australia, in gallery exhibitions reflecting intersections of contemporary Blackness and Feminism. She received the Visual Arts and New Media Grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts in 2018 and has since been involved in numerous artist panels, publications and engagements.
Photo courtesy of Michaela Bridgemohan