September 17–December 18, 2016
Opening: September 16, 2016, 6–10pm
Esker Foundation
444, 1011 9th Ave SE
Calgary, AB
Cedric & Jim Bomford: The Traveller
The Traveller takes early settler infrastructure as its foundation; in particular, the eccentric machines and technologies that were designed to perform a specific task, and which would often be discarded or recycled into something else once the job was complete. Integral to Cedric and Jim Bomford’s process is a performative building process, which incidentally replicates (and critiques) the absurdity of building machines to build, or move, or make more machines. The ingenuity and improvisational nature of early Canadian infrastructure offers a productive space to reflect on, and actively contribute to, conversations about nation building.
Cedric Bomford would like to thank The Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for supporting the production of The Traveller.
Jasmina Cibic: Tear Down and Rebuild
Working between London and Ljubljana, Jasmina Cibic is among a new generation of Slovenian artists whose practice, although acutely conscious of a specific national political, cultural, and artistic lineage, creates a very distinctive language of its own.
Cibic’s work focuses on the mechanisms that assist in the creation of (trans)national myths. Esker Foundation is pleased to present several works of Cibic’s, including Tear Down and Rebuild (2015) and The Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured (2015).
Bringing together film, sculpture, performance, collage, and installation into complex and multilayered projects, the core of Jasmina Cibic’s practice addresses how visual language, art, architecture, and political rhetoric are deployed and instrumentalised by political regimes as soft power strategies in the enterprise of nation building.
Larissa Fassler: CIVIC. CENTRE.
For Larissa Fassler, observing, describing, and naming are strategies to make different realities visible, an approach she believes leads to a deeper understanding of a place, or that counters assumptions, blindness, or even refusals to see reality. For the past ten years, Fassler has been making map-drawing hybrids and objects of urban spaces that comfortably exist between models, sculptures, and relational actions. Her work is developed using a self-mapping exercise, walking, counting, and note taking, often charting the same territory multiple times, which generates a series of interpretations of the same space that differ in precision, dimensions, and proportions. These notations are then transcribed or modeled to activate each layer of architectural detail, advertising slogan, conversation, action, or census-like observations of highly complex public sites.
CIVIC. CENTRE. brings together four bodies of work: Les Halles, where fragments of Paris’s Le Forum des Halles (1979–2011) are rebuilt in miniature with its stains, scratches, dark corners, and empty storefronts replicated with precision; Gare du Nord, a number of paintings and sculptures that examine the migration, regulation, and architectural legacy of Paris’s Gare du Nord train station; Palace/Palace, an investigation into the demolition of the Palast der Republik and the planned reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss, and a new series developed out of Fassler’s observation of the public and semi-public zones of Calgary’s civic downtown. This is Larissa Fassler’s first major exhibition in Canada.
In the Project Space
Caitlin Thompson: Dandy Lines
July 25–October 23
Dandy Lines is an exhibition of cosmic country embroidery that references Western fashion through the cyclical, transformative theories of craftwork and animation. It revisits the histories of the decorative and brings to the surface tensions between labour and identity, the body and the psyche. Decoration and surface adornment also act as an extension of the boundaries of the body: designs and symbols project outward and reflect an interior identity. By combining the Romantic era dandy of nature and individualism with the New Romantic notion of the unnatural, Western identity is here presented as a mythic space of continual transformation.
Contact
Aeryn Twidle: atwidle [at] eskerfoundation.com, T +1 (403) 930 2499
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