Cityspace Conversations by Aaren Madden

Over the course of a day, the northwest corner of Olympic Plaza gave way to a set of architectural exercises, all reflections of this year’s Peepshow theme: apostrophe, the phenomenon of spatial collapse. By happy accident, the installations exist within close range of one another, and contrast in form and material as much as they create a coherent microcosm of different spatial experiences that extrapolate into downtown Calgary itself.

Standing next to Jennifer Thorogood on the simple plywood platform she has constructed, I look directly ahead, eye-level – at my feet. A wooden frame supports two mirrors set at angles to reverse the viewer’s reflection; look down and you will see the tops of trees, a patch of sky. Walk across and be confronted with a jarringly new perception of your own body moving through built form.

The elegantly simple piece, titled Built By Numbers, yields a strong visceral reaction, an unexpected vertigo. It contains what Thorogood describes as an intimacy, stemming from her interest in private experiences of public space. Intimacy combined with disorientation generates a concentration of experience that leads to a certain vulnerability. In turn, that vulnerability gets reinvested into the piece as a consideration of wood-frame construction, a naked structure that, while humble and ubiquitous, demands and creates experience. A few blocks away, the impossibly deep hole that will be filled by Norman Foster’s Encana Towers elicits its own vertigo. Seen fresh from the experience of Built by Numbers, it echoes a formal vulnerability in the cross-sectional exposure of its underground parking levels, its structural secrets exposed for the moment. Space is reconfigured, convoluted and experienced on a personal level, like a secret revealed.

Across the pathway, Dominique Cheng’s The Purge is organic in both process and product. It became, for him, “like a charette;” its evolution was as spontaneous and instinctive and his reaction to the material. His impromptu choices of man-made pvc piping and plastic zip-ties should hold no connection to nature, but the way in which he has connected long lengths of pipe, woven and extended them through each other and over a fence separating a parking lot from the park, there is a strong sense of the relentless growth of vines belonging to some oversized vegetation. A great tension erupts when the curving pipes reach out and seem to engulf a nearby tree, even as they create a sheltering canopy. There is a question about which elements will prevail – natural or manmade – and how the piece will be received by passersby. Threat or shelter, a place to linger or avoid?

Dominique tells me that an interesting afterthought occurred to him when surveying the finished work, how the piping is, to him, reminiscent of the bamboo poles used as structural reinforcement in Asia. The notion of armature is very present in The Purge, but one that is subservient to the processes of natural decay. There is a sense of elapsed time in Cheng’s installation that suggests we imagine how it would be if the rebar emerging from the concrete pillars seen in so many city construction sites were organic and left to wilt. The tension between natural and man-made elements of the cityscape is further heightened.

Like Cheng, but to different effect, Nicholas Waissbluth incorporates weaving into his piece, titled Fields of Play. Lengths of black and white rope stretch between two trees and form a multilayered screen, throwing the surface into relief and suggesting perspective. In the foyer next to the Glenbow Museum, two of his large monoprints have a similar effect, in that fragments of line and colour create perspectival depth. All at once, the aerial view of a city rises from the shards of colour. After dark, when images of moving C-trains are projected onto the rope screen, relief also deepens as fragmented light shifts from one layer to another. Dimensions are pulled together and apart, space is collapsed and expanded, and as actual C-trains rumble past and then fade from earshot, sound and therefore the passage of time become intrinsic in the work.

Standing at the site in daylight, cast a glance back toward the retreating surfaces of the hyperbolic staircase that is the Calgary Municipal Building and you will see a fragmentation of the Calgary Tower’s reflection cast back in uncannily similar fashion.

Even as they address the same theme and use simple and eternal building methods – weaving, wood frame, the tying together of poles – these three studies in space, structure and perception invoke shelter, pause and movement – all ways we more subtly interact with more quotidian architecture on a daily basis. How they converse with Calgary’s build environs invites new considerations of the city space as it exists today.

-- Aaren Madden