Found in 2012 by Jim and Susan Hill, Esker Foundation is a free contemporary art gallery located in the Inglewood neighbourhood. Jim built the building and uses the rent from the tenants to sustain the gallery. It is a state of the art, humidity controlled space and it reminds me of the museums I have visited in New York City. In my opinion, it is one of the best places to see curated contemporary art in Calgary (and it has free parking!).
I was invited to preview Esker Foundation's Summer Exhibitions which features Vanessa Brown's 'The Witching Hour', Anna Torma's 'Book of Abandoned Details' and Jolie Bird 's '1597; Harmonious Frequencies'. The exhibit officially opens tonight from 6-10pm!
Vanessa Brown - 'The Witching Hour'
"Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, glass, and textile. Her work is hybrid and multidimensional: sculpture flirting with painting, symbolic narrative collage, a physical gestalt of states of consciousness. The Witching Hour brings together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale from larger-than-life to intimate. It is a proposal in material, colour, light, and sound; an invitation into an emotively charmed circle where magic, fantasy, and humour offer coded strategies to consider material histories, our connection to the natural and supernatural worlds, and gendered systems of labour, communication, and value."
Anna Torma - Book of Abandoned Details
"As a descendant of generations of skilled needleworkers and embroiderers, Anna Torma produces work that is both rooted in a deep Hungarian textile tradition and is also part of a vibrant contemporary practice connected to radical feminist avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 70s, which reclaimed craft and fibre-based work as urgent and political fine art practices. Through the synthesis of techniques such as embroidery, drawing, collaging, dyeing, free-hand quilting, appliqué, and photo transfer, Torma’s work offers us an extraordinary world in which the domestic and the fantastic collide in lush imagery drawn from familial history, books and literature, real and imagined places, mythology and folklore, flora and fauna, and personal and cultural memory.
Jolie Bird - 1597; Harmonious Frequencies
"1597; Harmonious Frequencies is a performance-based installation to be implemented in the Project Space over the course of twelve weeks. Working within a clean and minimal space, the artist will create an 8-foot diameter representation of the Fibonacci Sequence, which references the golden ratio found throughout nature. The pattern is made up of 1,597 dots configured in two sets of spirals that radiate in opposite directions. Each dot is created by wrapping a golden thread around itself and adhering it to the wall. The performance of labour and the arrangement of the artist’s tools are precise and considered; the monotonous nature of the action is physically challenging and requires self-discipline to achieve a consistent and high level of craftsmanship throughout the project.