In a city experiencing a time of such abundance, we commonly lament a cultural void, as if it came along naturally with prosperity. In conversations with the city’s exiles and in newspaper clippings, I’ve found a belief that a wealthy city is hostile to artists, and does not foster or influence them in any interesting way.
While use of this invented cultural vacancy as a discursive space was valuable, it is now confining.
All of these artists are, in some way, from Calgary. I was born here. We have made a new dialogue around painting in Calgary essential by reordering ideas of abundance and lack. Our work is not a direct critique of the general economic or political forces that created it, but is grown from the city's specific complexity of excesses and voids. We have escaped cynical mimicry and trite activism to make personal and purposeful objects out of painting's history.
We've digested both painting's history and each other’s practices from afar to work it up as influence in our own studios to be at once as dripping, excessive and ridiculous as the city itself, and as clean, slick and manufactured as a postcard from it.
Without easy access to the physical artifacts of art history or each others’ work, a shared imagination was built between us that sustained very inward practices in a city that looks perpetually outward.
