RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting brings together artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives, methodologies, and aesthetic languages. Featuring 27 artists living and working across Canada, the US, and the UK, the exhibition explores the multiple and complex meanings of the idea of the diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed in painting. First presented at the PHI Foundation, Montréal in 2020, we are proud to be able to extend this important exhibition and bring the work of these exceptional artists to Calgary. RELATIONS publication.

Until 10 October Artist Talk: Molly JF Caldwell - Thursday 5 August, 6pm This site-specific installation is a love letter to Penelope, a mythical figure from Homer’s Odyssey. Piously waiting for her husband to return from the Trojan War, Penelope repeatedly wove, unraveled, and rewove a tapestry to avoid her scores of suitors. Through her own textile-based practice, Caldwell considers multiple readings of Penelope’s labour; is it an utterance of her autonomy and power, or a visual manifestation of her subservience? With One Hand Tied Behind My Back reflects Caldwell’s ongoing research on the complexities and contradictions of labour, care, gender, and sexuality.

Spring Exhibition 2021  Fin Simonetti: An Appeal to Heaven  

Fin Simonetti works with sculpture, installation, and drawing to investigate the uneasy terrain among our desire for security, states of fragility and vulnerability, and the sensorial, emotional, and psychological relationships we have to objects, bodies, and spaces. Her work adopts forms and imagery with corporal, visceral resonance that poetically undermine our senses of familiarity and ease.

An Appeal to Heaven presents recent works in carved stone and stained glass that, through paradoxical relationships between form and material, connect to themes of emergency, protection, and control.

Image Credit: Installation view of Fin Simonetti's exhibition An Appeal to Heaven, Esker Foundation, Calgary. 23 January to 26 June, 2021. Photo by: John Dean.    

Three Solo Exhibitions Open this Fall at Esker Foundation

26 September – 19 December: Liz Magor, One Bedroom Apartment; Samuel Roy-Bois, Presences; Jon Sasaki Killing One Bird with Half a Stone; In the Project Space: Kasia Sosnowski, SNEEK-E-PEEP’N, until 31 January 2021.

A New Digital Art Publishing Project

Esker Foundation is pleased to announce the digital launch of Permanent Collection. permanentcollection.eskerfoundation.com

KATIE OHE 25 January –  6 September, 2020 Esker Foundation is pleased to present an in-depth look at Katie Ohe’s sculptural practice and her unparalleled approach to material, form, space, and movement. This eponymous exhibition—her largest and most comprehensive solo exhibition to date—traces the development of work through six decades of Ohe’s remarkable sculptural practice. Over the years Katie Ohe has been a catalyzing force in Calgary’s art community as an artist, mentor, teacher, supporter, and builder. One of Alberta’s most important artistic figures, she has made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary art in the province and her innovative approaches to material, form, movement, and participation have been a meaningful influence for generations. Katie Ohe Biograhy Katie Ohe: The Kiyooka Ohe Arts Centre