As you may have heard, the Alberta College of Art and Design’s well-regarded Illingworth Kerr Gallery will not be filling the director/curator position once Wayne Baerwaldt retires in June. I won’t go too much into it (I did recently and briefly work at IKG), but the reaction to this news has underlined the fact that Calgary is becoming an art scene without curators. Esker Foundation curator Shauna Thompson, responding quickly and insightfully to the news of IKG’s restructuring, wondered aloud in her statement on social media what it means for a “historically culturally isolated city like Calgary to have even less exposure to international contemporary art, artists, and ideas.” 
Mia Feuer, An Unkindness
Established in 2012, The Esker Foundation is a private non-commercial gallery and now one of the few institutions in Calgary with curatorial leadership. Their spring/summer exhibition program features three concurrent solo exhibitions in the main space: Kevin Schmidt’s A Sign in the Northwest Passage, Mia Feuer’s Synthetic Seasons, and Guido van der Werve’s Nummers Vier, Acht, Veertien. Each exhibition, from Schmidt’s quest for a sign post lost at sea to Feuer enveloping and unnerving installations to van de Werve’s epic cinematic meditation on futility evoke expansive feelings of foreboding. It’s all very romantic though: the future is bleak, but it sure looks beautiful.
Feuer’s Synthetic Seasons features the striking and ambitious participatory work An Unkindness. This flat black skating rink is surfaced in ice made of an inky black polymer and suitable for actual skating with gear provided. While the environmental implications could be read as bit heavy handed (…skating on thin ice…), it is deliciously perverse to take a spin around a blackened ice rink (a most Canadian structure) in the summer heat of the home of the tar sands.
Esker Foundation: http://eskerfoundation.com/
Mia Feuer, Kevin Schmidt, & Guido van der Werve continue until September 6.
Sarah Todd is a curator currently based in Calgary. Formerly the curator of Media Arts at Western Front, she has also worked at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, XPACE Cultural Centre and The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Sarah has produced projects with a range of organizations including Vtape, Kunstverein Munchen, The Goethe Institute, The Pacific Cinematheque, Glenbow Museum and The Illingworth Kerr Gallery. She was formerly one of Akimblog’s Art + Tech correspondents and can be followed on Twitter @sarahannetodd.
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Mia Feuer, Kevin Schmidt, & Guido van der Werve at The Esker Foundation, Calgary
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