There’s a preconceived notion of what a gallery can be: a closed-off exhibition of prestige meant for the educated few. However, this traditional idea of gallery space has long been fading; how we interact with and conceive of art has changed, and we now value diverse perspectives more than ever.
“When I walk through this world, everything is a potential gallery, right?” says Sanja Lukač, Senior Curator, Visual & Media Arts at Werklund Centre.
The Werklund Centre’s halls function as a major pedestrian artery during peak showtimes; they connect six performing arts venues, integrate into the +15 network, and guide patrons from their parking spot to their theatre seat. The exhibitions on display in these otherwise liminal stretches are the centre’s contribution to making gallery spaces that are more multimedia, engaging, and accessible.
“Gallery, for me, is an invitation to experience whatever that artist is trying to say about the world,” says Lukač.
Audio-visual pieces are becoming more and more common in art exhibitions, and they’re fields ripe with new kinds of art-driven experiences. Werklund Centre features a rotating soundscape in its +15 walkway. One of the few of its kind in the country, the multichannel system has been used to immerse people in music-backed scenes, elemental forces, and bustling metropolises.
“It's a really exciting space that sound artists, and artists who use sound, get really excited about,” says Lukač. “It attracts a lot of really interesting local, national and international artists.”
Werklund Centre also programs a selection of short films, utilizing a set of screens scattered along its gallery network. Known as the Micro Cinema exhibition, a new set of pieces is cycled in every three months. These are drawn from artists' participation in the centre’s programming, as well as from collaborations with other local organizations, such as the Calgary International Film Festival.
“I would describe the Micro Cinema as a space that is not a traditional cinema, that is public, accessible by everyone, and that also happens to be small in the way that it displays the film,” says Celina Vides, CIFF’s industry and programming associate. “You don't need to take [the films] in when they started… You can kind of come into them, wherever they are and take something from them, whether you've seen the beginning or are seeing the end.”
The Ledge Gallery and the Lightbox Studio at Werklund Centre are dynamic exhibitions that challenge the static-ness of traditional gallery spaces. Both are left in the hands of resident artists and have seen a healthy variety of activations. They’ve been used as showcases for artists creating everything from paintings and textiles to music.
“These spaces have been recording studios, dance studios –– they've really been whatever the artist needs them to be. We're here to support and facilitate what they need to produce when they're here, what they need to share when they're here, and how they want to inspire people,” says Lukač. “I have one rule in the galleries, and it's ‘you can't start a fire…’ unless you need to, and then we'll figure out how to start a fire.”
As an emerging artist, before she moved on to programming the galleries, Lukač used the Lightbox Studio for her photography work. The Lightbox Studio is a versatile workspace with a large window inviting in looks from those passing by. Ironically, Lukač turned the space into an environmental darkroom. KC Bae, a local artist with a fascination for perishable arts, turned the same space into a makeshift cafe wherein they painted patrons using coffee on iced sugar cookies.
“People got to not just touch art… but they got to eat it, destroy it, and not even necessarily take it home with them, but take it home with them in their stomachs,” says KC. “How do I create an art exhibition where it's not just a one-time and you're done? Of course, there will be people who just see it one time and that's it, but I wanted to create something where someone was able to be a part of the narrative.”
Erçan Tāmati Cairns, a Māori painter and the Lightbox Studio’s most recent resident artist, took it upon himself to paint a mural directly onto the glass of the space’s sole window. In doing this, Cairns was able to experiment with painting in a reversed layer order than he typically does on the palette. After the more private artist creatively gave himself a partition to work behind, Cairns got to work on painting for his finalized exhibition.
“I've never painted on the street before, and this is pretty close to doing exactly that… All the art in this building on the wall is displayed through glass,” says Cairns. “I've only ever really shown work once it's finished. The only people who have seen my work from start to finish are people that I know, my close friends, family, mentors –– having the public with them feels very real.”
While Cairns’ residency draws towards its close, Yu Chen prepares the Ledge Gallery for her own engaging exhibit. Similar in format to the Lightbox Studio, the Ledge Gallery is much larger and provides ample opportunities for an artist to segment the space into multiple activations at once. Whereas most of Chen’s work revolves around reimaging motifs and themes of her Han Chinese culture using Western painting styles, she plans to use the space as a studio to paint 10 live portraits of other artists in their own traditional cultural regalia.
“I got to know a lot of people from different backgrounds, and I know that lots of us were having lots of difficult times when we first immigrated here. We were feeling homesick,” says Chen. ” This will be a good chance for me not only to introduce my culture to other people, but also I can learn about their culture. I realized that if I wanted to promote my culture, why wouldn't I learn about other people's culture too?”
Chen’s concept for her exhibition touches on a crucial part of what makes a gallery: It’s all about situating the stories artists are telling and the ideas they’re exploring. No matter what kind of pieces or spaces make up a gallery, it’s all about creating a space for something meaningful to be said and talked about, whether the audience is theatre-goers or visiting school children. Over the May to October period, the more traditionally set +15 Gallery in Werklund Centre featured an exhibition from IndigeSTEAM, wherein mixed-media pieces convey an interplay between indigenous storytelling, arts, and sciences.
“The cluster of the +15 Galleries, for me, is a really unique opportunity to work in partnership with communities and organizations,” says Lukač. “'It’s really about listening. For me, it's like, what does the community need? What do artists need? Who are we engaging with? Who lives here? It's a lot of different factors. What stories are we telling? What stories are we not telling?”
While highlighting the galleries within Werklund Centre’s walls well illustrates a new concept of what a gallery space can be comprised of, you can also point to collaborations the centre has taken part in across the city; from artistic embellishments on the construction hoarding surrounding the Olympic Plaza Transformation site just outside Werklund’s doors, to the centre’s video collaborations featured on the platform-facing screens of the TELUS Sky building. The gallery space is only continuing to bleed from brush to canvas.
“What's been really exciting in the last few years is thinking about space, and growing space, and losing space, even getting outside of our building,” says Lukač. “Taking all that space and finding ways to activate it is really exciting for me… I think that's honestly what our communities need, just more ways to see themselves publicly, through their art, sharing their stories.”