Currently on view at Esker Foundation and curated by Christine Conley, Terms of Engagement is an exhibition featuring work by three previous participants of the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP): Dick Averns, who was deployed with armed forces to conflict zones in Egypt and Israel in 2009; nichola feldman-kiss, who was situated as part of a peacekeeping mission in Sudan in 2011; and Adrian Stimson, who was in residence with Forward Operating Base Ma`sum Ghar and Kandahar in Afghanistan. 
Adrian Stimson
Calgary based-artist (and former Akimblog correspondent) Averns’ video Fervent Prayer includes footage shot from a taxi that reveal masses of religious practitioners crowding a contested site in Jerusalem. The black-clad individuals were unmistakably as uniformly dressed as the military personnel depicted elsewhere in the gallery. Stimson rendered a massive Chinook helicopter with charcoal on a nearby wall. The vehicle’s designation (and the work’s eponymous title) recalled numerous other arrogated location or brand names. In Calgary, we have Chinook Mall and Deerfoot Trail, Cherokee Jeeps and Crowfoot Liquor Store. I always find it difficult to determine if these naming conventions occur out of respect for indigenous culture or if they’re furthering colonialist appropriations and completely obfuscating the context of the original namesake. A similar confusion must arise when considering the Canadian military presence in countries thousands of kilometers away. 
nichola fledman-kiss
At the crux of the cochlearly-shaped gallery, nichola feldman-kiss’s until the story of the hunt is told by the lion / facing horror and the possibility of shame sprawls throughout the final room. Hugely elaborate, the installation consists of sixty-one digital photos displayed on the floor and walls. Discarded ammunition, vulture carcasses, and several human skeletons can be made out in the images; however, they mostly feature subjects lying upon dead grass. I feel like I have never seen a skeleton portrayed this way outside of a video game. Behind me, and part of a separate work, a computer-ish voice quietly states the number of estimated casualties in various unfamiliar foreign lands.
I leave the gallery feeling almost completely desensitized but not unaffected by the overwhelming display of militarized murder and neo-colonialist activity: so many dusty ruins and unintimate uniforms blurring together across disparate political boundaries. However, there are also poignant moments that append the clichéd ways we are fed world news. It occurs to me that ignorance – more so than carpet bombing and forced national borders – is still humanity’s greatest sin, and artists (like these three) should continue take it upon themselves, as ambassadors to the public realm, to work in whatever ways they can to expel that ignorance.
Esker Foundation: http://eskerfoundation.com/
Terms of Engagement continues until December 14.
Steven Cottingham is another artist. Based in Calgary, he studied in New York and has recently exhibited in Havana, Glasgow, Fredericton, and Vancouver. Currently he is writing, as so many have done before, a book about love and art. He can be followed on Twitter @artcriticsm.
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Terms of Engagement at Esker Foundation
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