Arts commons

ledge GALLERY

Come Find Me
Ryan Danny Owen

Exhibition dates: December 7 - March 1
Closing Reception: March 1, 7-10pm

‘Come Find Me’ is an experimental studio residency project documenting an encounter with a queer history with a proposition to stop and look closer. Using text work, photography, and a series of public actions, ‘Come Find Me’ acts as an invitation to seek an understanding of what has been. 

In Calgary, well-known cruising parks, or queer spaces, have become gentrified and the queer bodies that once sought those areas of pleasure or kinship have disappeared and become absent echoes in the space. This project provides an opportunity to research and compile a document of cruising locations and queer designated spaces within the city, which have faded away over time. ‘Come Find Me’ responds to this history and examines the rapid gentrification of Calgary, which each year further distances itself from the past. 

For this project, Ryan Danny Owen makes a series of automatic writing posters to be installed in both the gallery, as well as in public spaces, existing in endless copies to be taken by the public and also put up on various poster boards and walls across the city, as a means for a person to encounter a queer past, present, and future. Placed not only as reminders to a history with a potential to be lost, but also as a marker for the potential of new queer spaces to emerge. 

Window galleries

Oracles of Nature
Francis A Willey

Exhibition dates: December 7 - March 1
Closing Reception: March 1, 7-10pm

‘This series pays tribute to the divine woman, an indispensable condition of the highest beauty. Representing the oracle, the mother, or the feminine goddess, an iconographical figure offering spiritual guidance and healing. 

These seers appear as mystics in nature translated onto 35mm colour film, and each conveys the feminine as the oracle, the sister, the ghost, the warrior, and the elemental grandeur.

This diversity, strength, and wisdom are what profoundly inspires courage and freedom in this tumultuous world.

These Objects That I Have Unearthed From The Bottom Of My Drawer
Chelsea Yang - Smith

Exhibition dates: December 7 - March 1
Closing Reception: March 1, 7-10pm

This body of work is a continuation of personal research on the interstices of intimacy and technology from the lens of a millennial user. As technology continues to improve to better serve its user, it starts to replace old behaviours and mannerisms. For example, the introduction of Facebook “on this day” reminders, an algorithm designed to remind users of events and memories that occurred historically a year (or three) ago. The purpose of this algorithm is to inject personalized nostalgia into the viewer’s newsfeed, triggering an artificial moment of happiness and affection—that can also be shared with friends and family.

Similar to its digital counterpart (‘on this day’ reminders) the work draws metaphorical connections to memories and forgotten objects that collect at the bottom of a drawer. We understandably value these objects for their emotional significance and purpose in reminding us of the past. Using fragments of conversation, confessional text, and photographs, the work is an intentional effort to subvert this artificial intimacy and presents an honest form of nostalgia.

This dichotomy of virtual and physical, artificial and organic, is emphasized through the bodily creation of the work. The photographic processes involved utilize both analogue and digital, as each image is shot on a film camera and developed, digitally scanned and manipulated in Photoshop, and then reproduced as a large-scale physical print. 

+15 Community Galleries

Holding Still
Group Exhibition

Exhibition dates: December 7 - March 1
Closing Reception: March 1, 7-10pm

Holding Still is an exhibition that explores our collective imprinted knowledge, or ways of being, in relationship to nature. The stewardship patterns learned from past generations while remaining still are then transmitted to the next generation in a transformed and new way, to the point that in several generations whole new ecological systems exist. This group exhibition explores how artists negotiate their own relationship to the land based on their own value systems. ‘Holding Still’ was curated by Rocio Graham and participating artists include Julya Hajnoczky, Danielle Fry, Kate Mountford, and Rocio Graham.

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