Syntax by Aaren Madden

When I first met Nicholas Waissbluth, he was weaving the screen for his architectural installation, Fields of Play between two trees, and preoccupied with the possibility of running out of rope before he had achieved the size and shape of screen he desired. I asked him what his aim was with the project; if his main goal was, to put things highly technically, “muck about with perception”. He said yes, but perception of just one thing: the movement of a C-Train. The projected image of the train’s movement through space as it is reconfigured on the rope screen (which, incidentally, was of perfect size without need for a rope run) did accomplish that goal. So did Jennifer Thorogood’s vertiginous Built By Numbers and Dominique Cheng’s The Purge.

The proof was in watching the reactions of passersby. A young couple with a toddler approached Built by Numbers head-on, bemused then delighted when confronted with the images of their feet at eye level. The toddler danced and bobbed, mom and dad slid from side to side, watching themselves manipulate space as if in a funhouse. Others walked back and forth at various paces, trying to keep balance, or laid right down on the platform to see a convoluted reflection of the surrounding space. Many people engaged fully with the space, the reflections and the structure.

People were more curious about – and perhaps bewildered by –  Waissbluth’s screen. Those who saw the late-night projection of the passing C-Train got the full effect of his intention, but the rope stretched across the trees demanded notice – eyebrows were raised, steps slowed and heads turned to the incongruity of the bright white rope stretching like a sideways hammock between the rough bark of the trees. Viewers were perplexed, something Dominique Cheng commented on as being one of the most interesting aspects of the piece. It’s true: people may not have known exactly what they were dealing with, but it pulled them in and gave pause, suggested a different – more conscious, perhaps – experience of a typically-silent particle of public space.

Cheng’s The Purge made similar suggestions. I hoped to find someone seated under the structure’s sheltering reach, but pouring rain kept most people simply walking and looking as I did. What I did see was compelling: some brows furrowed in seeming concern, some once again bemused, some thoughtful, following each frond of pipe to its conclusion, trying to make sense of the structure – just as on a daily basis, to varying degrees and in varying consciousnesses, all of us negotiate the architectural spaces that surround us.

While we try to make sense of our built environment, passages – points of physical and  cognitive entry – become the resting places where individual cadences emerge. This is where we can create our own syntax for a spatial vernacular that is, as reactions to these projects were (and each of our relationships to the city remains), personal but shared. By ‘mucking about’ with perception, with our understanding of the visual language of architecture and the continuing transformation of public space as these three works did, there is the potential to see the quotidian spaces of downtown Calgary as language that is often shifting and sometimes evasive in meaning, but other times verging on poetry.

-- Aaren Madden