2019 Exhibitions

Jeffrey Gibson: Time Carriers

September 28 - December 20, 2019

Opening reception: Friday 27 September, 6–10pm

‘Time Carriers’ conjures a vision of many hands providing a framework of support, a fluid utopia where trust and movement go hand in hand. It evokes a time frame that both unites and collapses present, past, and future into an undulating and responsive single unit, something that could best be described as community or family. This idea seems especially appropriate when considering Jeffrey Gibson’s work, as it has always pushed to create kinship among unlikely partners.

Gibson’s artwork intermingles elements of traditional Native American art, art historical references, craft, and pop culture. A wide range of both historic and contemporary Native American symbols and objects including powwow regalia, 19th century parfleche containers, and drums are seamlessly merged with elements from Modernist geometric abstraction, Minimalism, the pattern and decoration of traditional textile practices, as well as techno, rave, and club culture.

Jeffrey Gibson: To Name An Other

October 19, 2019

The performance is produced in partnership with Springboard Performance, the Fluid Festival and Esker Foundation, as part of Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition Time Carriers. Saturday 19 October, 3-4pm, free Atlantic Avenue Art Block Lobby In a special performance as part of >> read more

Nep Sidhu: Divine of Form, Formed in the Divine (Medicine for a Nightmare)

September 28 - December 20, 2019

curated by cheyanne turions

Opening reception: Friday 27 September, 6-10pm

Nep Sidhu is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is concerned with the reverberations of form, antiquity, myth, and history with an affinity for community. Through material investigations that use textiles, sculpture, video and sound, Sidhu’s work seeks moments of knowledge transfer.

Divine of Form, Formed in the Divine (Medicine for a Nightmare) examines how memories persist in the present, especially when related to personal and collective practices of resistance, resilience, and ritual. This mid-career survey is anchored by recent works that reflect upon Sikh histories, amongst other collectively formed and formative histories considered through collaborations with Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes and Nicholas Galanin, exploring how memorialization practices can transfigure grief and loss, and how they contribute to a writing of histories that speak back to power by celebrating cultural knowledge and practices.

Kablusiak: Qiniqtuaq

July 29 - October 20, 2019

Project Space

‘Qiniqtuaq’ (searching/looking) invites viewers to peer through a multi-eyed ghost sheet to witness a looping projection of a video collage screened in front of a piece of oil-stained cardboard. ‘Qiniqtuaq’ is meant to evoke a dream-like state imaging a hypothetical place and time; a representation of what is felt but not known. ‘Qiniqtuaq’ invites a presence of nostalgia, spectatorship, and diaspora.

Kablusiak is an Inuvialuk artist and curator based in Mohkinstsis and holds a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta University of the Arts, Calgary. They use art and humour as a coping mechanism to address cultural displacement. The lighthearted nature of their practice extends gestures of empathy and solidarity; these interests invite a reconsideration of the perceptions of contemporary Indigeneity.

May G N: Occlusion Field

May 6 - July 21, 2019

Project Space

‘Occlusion Field’ is a singular moment in time and space made of the stuff of trans defense mechanism: tattoos, liquid gender concepts, and hormonally transforming surfaces that come together to speak to an idiosyncrasy, a gestalt, a whole that transcends its constitutive parts. The Field is a shifting space of images and materials that represent the space between you and me. Beyond that space is me and you, respectively: two Occlusions who belie understanding, who promote narratives of deflection and anxiety. The Field, however, isn’t necessarily keen to divulge its disparate natures; it needs to be seen, first.

Presented in partnership with Untitled Art Society.

ᐊᕙᑖᓂᑦᑕᒪᐃᓐᓂᑦᓄᓇᑐᐃᓐᓇᓂᑦ Among All These Tundras

June 1 - August 30, 2019

Among All These Tundras, a title taken from the poem ‘My Home is in My Heart’ by famed Sámi writer Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, features contemporary art by Indigenous artists from around the circumpolar world. Together, their works politically and poetically express current Arctic concerns towards land, language, sovereignty and resurgence. Artists from throughout the circumpolar north share kinship with each other and their ancestors, love for their homelands, and respect for the land and its inhabitants.

CHANNEL 51: IGLOOLIK – Celebrating 30 Years of Inuit Video Art

June 1 - August 30, 2019

Esker Foundation is pleased to present selected films from the first large-scale tour of Igloolik Inuit video art from the Isuma and Arnait Women’s Video collective, a collection of over 40 works (short films, documentaries, and feature films) from 1987 to today. It is the product of a 30-year filmmaking practice rooted in Inuit values of consensus, working together, service to the community, and cultural authenticity. It is also a non-hierarchical collaborative artistic vision developed by eight celebrated video artists (six Inuit and two non-Inuit): Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik, Madeline Ivalu, Susan Avingaq, Mary Kunuk, Norman Cohn, and Marie- Hélène Cousineau.

This collection highlights the unique power of Inuit filmmaking: an approach that challenges individualistic notions of the “artist,” and centers itself in an ethical obligation to serve Inuit first through thoughtful self-representation. Beyond the immediate social effects of cultural production and cooperation, the work of Isuma and Arnait is also a model for how non-Indigenous artists can contribute to decolonial artistic practice.

Glenna Cardinal: mourning home

February 4 - April 28, 2019

Project Space

Through Cardinal’s beautifully crafted work that includes home furnishings, taxidermy, and rocks from the area around her former childhood home, Cardinal’s work explores themes of land and home, displacement and loss related to the construction Calgary’s Southwest Ring Road through >> read more

Neil Campbell: wheatfield

January 26 - May 12, 2019

One might say that the primary focus of Neil Campbell’s practice is perception. Sensory and sensational, his works are meticulously devised to address and influence the physical and phenomenological aspects of the act of viewing. Campbell’s geometric paintings and graphic interventions >> read more

Jeremy Shaw: Quantification Trilogy

January 26 - May 12, 2019

At the center of Shaw’s first solo show in Calgary are three para-fictional short films: ‘Quickeners’ (2014), ‘Liminals’ (2017), and ‘I Can See Forever’ (2018), the latter of which is making its Canadian installation premiere. This trilogy of thematically entangled works present marginalized societies of the future and their engagement in transcendental activities as potential tools towards evolution. Spiritual, subcultural, and scientific systems of belief and their accompanying ideologies crystalize around the abilities and limitations of the human form while Shaw’s amplified use of aural and visual effects aspires to incite similar phenomenological responses from the viewer.