Tammi Campbell: Dear Agnes
September 22 - December 21, 2018
‘Dear Agnes’ is a series of visual letters that serve as Tammi Campbell’s wordless communion with Saskatchewan-born modernist artist Agnes Martin. Beginning in 2010, Campbell would start each day in her Saskatoon studio by drawing a different variation of a grid in graphite on Japanese rag paper. Campbell would then write the salutation “Dear Agnes” in the top left corner, fold the drawing twice like a letter, and then store it in sequence. Campbell completed her last letter to Martin on 31 December 2017. This near-daily practice has led to over 1,000 drawings, the final three months of which will be on view at Esker.
Sarah Stevenson: Nothing Hidden
September 22 - December 21, 2018
For the past 30 years, Sarah Stevenson has been making sculptural work that considers and defines space in the most simple and elegant of ways. Like drawings in air, wire and string are arranged into bilateral and almost symmetrical forms and are suspended from the ceiling like a weightless bloom of jellyfish or floating microscopic particles.
Alana Bartol & Mia Rushton + Eric Moschopedis: a hint of perennial magic lingers in its fingertips
August 6 - October 28, 2018
Project Space
a hint of perennial magic lingers in its fingertips is a site-specific project that examines native and non-native weed species in relation to urban development in the community of Inglewood. Soil and seeds of native and invasive weed species were collected from the construction site across from the Esker and elsewhere in the neighbourhood. These seeds will be grown in the Esker Project Space throughout the exhibition. In this work, the artists hope to create a conversation about land use, notions of progress, and the de/naturalization process of invasive species. Throughout the process, they will ask what remediation, reconciliation, and reclamation mean in this context. Their research will explore the distribution of plants in relation to development, the perception of various plants in the neighbourhood, and phytoremediation as an actual or symbolic process.
Anna Torma: Book of Abandoned Details
May 26 - September 2, 2018
Anna Torma was born in Tarnaörs, Hungary in 1952 and graduated with a degree in Textile Art and Design from the Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Budapest in 1979. She has been an exhibiting artist since that time and has produced a body of extremely skilled and exquisitely detailed large-scale hand embroidered wall hangings and collages. She immigrated to Canada in 1988, and has lived and worked in Baie Verte, New Brunswick since 2002. This exhibition will feature new and major works produced over the past five years.
Vanessa Brown: The Witching Hour
May 26 - September 2, 2018
Vanessa Brown works in the space between strength and fragility through an alchemical fusing of steel, pigment, and glass – sculpture flirting with painting, a symbolic narrative collage, form as gesture or character. This exhibition brings together new installations and recent works, ranging in scale from grand to intimate. It is a proposal in material, colour, light, and sound; a coming-into-being, an invitation into an emotively charmed circle.
Jolie Bird: 1597; Harmonious Frequencies
May 7 - July 29, 2018
Project Space
‘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.
Kapwani Kiwanga: A wall is just a wall (and nothing more at all)
February 3 - May 6, 2018
In this new body of work, Kapwani Kiwanga delves into disciplinary architecture and deconstructs the physical and psychological qualities of different built environments including schools, prisons, hospitals and mental health facilities.
The exhibition Kapwani Kiwanga, ‘A wall is just a wall (and nothing more at all)’ is organized and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. The exhibition is curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi, Assistant Curator, The Power Plant. It was sponsored by TD Bank Group.
Support for the development and production of new works for the exhibition provided by Esker Foundation.
DaveandJenn: Paradise for an in-between time
January 29 - April 29, 2018
Project Space
DaveandJenn, also sometimes, known as David John Foy and Jennifer Saleik, have been working together since 2004. Their varied practice weaves a long view of both human and natural histories together with the more closed off realms of private spectacles and inner landscapes. For Esker’s Project Space, DaveandJenn will install a multi-layered, saturated, and shimmering oasis in the middle of Calgary’s winter, where predators stalk and prey glow in the hot sun.
Veronica Verkley: Second Nature: FERAL
October 30, 2017 - January 21, 2018
Project Space
This work by Veronica Verkley, reads as a time-lapse shot over several years, but in reality, it is a stop motion animation shot over many months, with the ruin and decay painstakingly animated by hand. From destruction, there emerges a transformative beauty: the house becomes uninhabitable to some, but in its decay, it becomes refuge for others.
Postcommodity: A Very Long Line
September 16 - December 22, 2017
‘A Very Long Line’ is a four-channel video installation that employs the image and idea of the fence demarcating the U.S.-Mexico border between Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. Camera pans of the Sonoran Desert shot through the border fence blur past viewers on all sides, at varying speeds, amid a jarring, dissonant soundtrack composed by the artists.