Closing Reception

September 25, 6-9 PM

Artist in Attendance

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2001b 10 Ave SW September 2026 (Composition for Sunalta Arts Building) is a piano and paper-based study of the building that houses The Bows, Emmedia, TRUCK Contemporary Art, West Village Theatre, and QuickDraw Animation Society. Responding to potential demolition and dissolution of this artistic hub, discarded paper from the day-to-day operations of these centres is shredded and remade into new sheets, some of which are presented on their own while the rest are used along with a piano to compose music inside the gallery as a form of documentation.

The recycled paper is presented in three groups. First, a series of photograph-sized sheets of paper with collaged words, letters, and other recycled materials embedded into them use fragmented poetics to call back to the history of their source material. Following these pages is a grid of sheets of recycled craft paper, laid out as a frame-by-frame animation, which incipiently imply temporality as the viewer finally confronts the larger sheets of paper on the third wall, which are used to compose music. 

The score will be produced within the gallery as an ongoing public performance throughout the duration of the exhibition. The artist will work on the score inside the gallery throughout the month, allowing visitors to witness the score being written and the installation gradually transforming over the course of the exhibition. The composition process will involve walks in and around the building, during which the recycled paper will be used to record measurements, observations, and spontaneous conversations, all of which will be translated into musical language to guide the final composition. By the end of the exhibition, the installation will function as both musical score and performance documentation, readable from left to right across the wall. 

In observation of the precarity faced by Calgary arts centres and their workers due to non-negotiable barriers such as redevelopment, this exhibition aims to proactively collect and preserve artistic activity through transformation of disposed materials. While waste is generally meant to be obscured, this exhibition leans into the aesthetics of the discarded and rotten, with the imperfect paper often appearing mold-like and inchoate. Like the spores of fungi, sound can trespass and take root in places which might otherwise be inaccessible. Drawing upon a range of feminist art historiographers from Linda Nochlin to Ariella Azoulay, discarded, peripheral materials are taken and reconstructed, or re-membered (Smiley 66), into spectres of their original forms. The composition of music within the space is inspired by the work of John Cage and Mark Fisher; the piano, which is electric, is used to gather information about the building in order to create a record of a place before it disappears. The production of a song, rather than a text, to document the space is an invitation to viewers to contend with how one might utilize such a document - the song can be heard at the closing reception and the score will be distributed, thus allowing visitors to either keep the song in their minds or learn to play it themselves. 

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Sources

Texts

The Sonic Image - Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Ariella Azoulay - Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

Linda Nochlin - Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Cherry Smiley "Our Stories Are Our Life Blood": Indigenous Feminist Memory and Storytelling as a Strategy for Social Change

https://calgaryartsdevelopment.com/news-information/reports-research/building-on-our-momentum
‍Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Yasmine, and Rommy González. Let’s become fungal!: Mycelium teachings and the arts: Based on conversations with Indigenous Wisdom Keepers, artists, curators, feminists, and mycologists. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023.

Cage, John. Notations. 1969.

Mark Fisher - The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology 

No Such Thing As Silence - John Cage’s 4’33 Kyle Gann

https://emmedia.ca/about-emmedia/news/future-space-direction-and-roadmap/ 

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Audio + Video

Mark Fisher’s DOCH lectures (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpyOonFtw4c

Conversations with Allen Otte: A Survey of Graphic Notation Works 

Times, Drones, & Arpeggios: The Magic of Minimalism

No Ideas But In Things - Alvin Lucier (Documentary)

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Marsel Reddick is an artist and writer based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary) whose practice engages with chance, affect, and speculative history. Through a variety of media such as animation, sculpture, textile, zine, and performance, he works to examine the ongoing and shifting entanglements between self and other to consider how identities are constructed, perceived, and transformed. Marsel often draws upon magical and divinatory practices inspired by tarot, Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus, with particular interest in marginalized artists who historically worked within these realms as acts of resistance and survival. Marsel currently writes for The Bows and Akimblog and has exhibited work at galleries such as Stride, Darling Fonderie, and Latitude 53.

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