Exhibitions

January 23 - May 8, 2016

In the most classic sense, the word studio is defined as “room for study.” This exhibition was conceived as an opportunity to gather 20 select paintings in a new space with the aim to spark study – in the form of looking and conversation.

Five works on show have never before been exhibited in Canada. Fifteen of the paintings were made in the artist’s small one-room studio in his family home at 1 Eastview Crescent in North Toronto, while the remaining five were produced in his downtown Toronto Wolseley Street studio, where he would execute most of his very large paintings from 1968 until his death in January 1977.

January 23 - May 8, 2016

Colleen Heslin’s paintings resonate with the tension of material and gestural complexity. Successfully fusing thought and action, the work dismantles material hierarchy by providing equal space to art and craft. Considering formal abstraction and craft-based methods of mark making, Heslin’s work thoroughly explores colour, shape, and texture. Constructed out of hand-dyed and ink-stained fabric, the work acknowledges histories of photography and textiles, and finds connections with the Colour Field painters of the 1960s and 1970s.

April 11 - July 17, 2016

‘A Chicken in Every Pot or How to Cook Your Own Goose’ takes a critical yet humorous look at some of Calgary’s local histories and contemporary development in and around the neighbourhoods of Inglewood, Ramsay, and the Stampede Park. Utilizing the structure and aesthetics of a midway carnival game to both relate to and comment on a century of immigration to the city, economic growth, changing social mores, and contemporary values, ‘A Chicken in Every Pot or How to Cook Your Own Goose’ asks if you can’t beat the house, can you really build your own?

January 11 - April 3, 2016

Chromaphoria is an installation that investigates the effects of coloured light on interior space and visual perception. The illusory quality of additive colour mixing is the core concept behind this work: the use of various artificial light sources and light-reflecting surfaces produce a euphoric experience of constantly changing conditions of light and colour.

September 26 - December 20, 2015

Charlotte Moth’s multi-layered work demonstrates her interest in the relationships among photography, sculpture, architecture, memory, and history. Her in-depth research process and the conceptual fluidity of her work poetically interlace architectural projects, archival materials, notions of itinerancy, filmic and art historical references, as well as the objects and places that surround us. In addition to a selection of recent films, photographs, and sculptural works, Esker Foundation is pleased to present a co-commission of new work made in partnership with The Banff Centre, supported by a Paul D. Fleck Fellowship residency.

September 26 - December 20, 2015

Celia Perrin Sidarous’ photographic works present intuitively organized collages and sculptural assemblages that offer a gorgeous and considered way of looking at collected objects and how the visual language of photography and the studio transforms them. As striking arrangements of colour, form, and shape that reference histories of still life, interior arrangement, and display, Perrin Sidarous’ images also suggest the implicit associations and secret affinities between objects and materials.

May 23 - September 6, 2015

Mia Feuer is interested in the post-natural landscape, visible sites where human interaction – be it personal, social, political, or financial – has altered or is in the process of rapidly changing the land, and thus our relationship to it. Her work makes connections between our intense material dependency and the accelerated environmental impact this creates.

May 23 - September 6, 2015

Esker Foundation presents Kevin Schmidt’s A Sign in the Northwest Passage, the multivalent documentation of the creation, delivery, and subsequent search for a cedar billboard that Schmidt emblazoned with foreboding messages from the Book of Revelations and then placed on the steadily melting ice of the Northwest Passage. Blurring the boundaries between durational performance, land art and installation, A Sign in the Northwest Passage asks powerful questions about Arctic sovereignty, colonialism, climate change, and material dependencies, and ultimately bears witness to the unyielding destruction of a not-so-remote landscape.