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JULY 2026
Current is a new series of public art activations presented by The New Gallery (TNG), transforming the Bow River pathway into a flowing corridor of creativity. Connecting Calgary’s cultural landmarks and natural landscapes, these activations merge art, nature, and community through installation, performance, and interactive projects. It invites audiences to experience the city through the rhythm of the river and the energy of downtown life.
Presented by The New Gallery and supported by RISEUp Calgary, Current runs through July 1 – 30th, 2026.
Current brings together the works and creative processes of Calgary artists through installation, performance and socially engaged practice. At times ecological, social and deeply rooted in process, Current invites artists to slow down and work directly within the liminal space of the river's edge, the histories it holds, its riparian habitat, transition to the urban environment, and the material relations both carried and deposited.
Artist participation is site-specific, and interventions are simultaneously temporary, time-based and socially engaged. Current merges a formal outdoor exhibition program with musical and movement-based performance, installation, sound, participatory workshops and facilitated interdisciplinary tours.
Featured artists;
︎ Alexis Moerberg
︎ Mia + Eric
︎ August Klintberg
︎Hannah Dubois
︎Nahanni McKay
︎Soloman Chiniquay
︎Pam Tzeng
︎Melanie Kloetzel
︎ Mia + Eric
︎ August Klintberg
︎Hannah Dubois
︎Nahanni McKay
︎Soloman Chiniquay
︎Pam Tzeng
︎Melanie Kloetzel
︎ Caitlind r.c. Brown + Wayne Garrett
︎ Natasha Faye Jensen
︎ Yilu Xing & Phoenix Kefei Ning
(ING Collective)
︎ Julya Hajnocky
︎Jennifer Ireland
︎Jiajia Lee
︎Jordan Baylon
︎more coming soon...
︎ Natasha Faye Jensen
︎ Yilu Xing & Phoenix Kefei Ning
(ING Collective)
︎ Julya Hajnocky
︎Jennifer Ireland
︎Jiajia Lee
︎Jordan Baylon
︎more coming soon...
EVENTS, PERFORMANCES & ACTIVATIONS
Fathead Minnow
Beading Workshop
- Alexis Moerberg -Location: The New Gallery
208 Centre St S
Date: July 18, 2026
Participants will have the opportunity to make a beaded bag charm of a stylized Fathead minnow; this freshwater fish can be found throughout Alberta, including in the Bow river. A zine sharing information and reflections on the Fathead minnow will be available and participants are encouraged to reflect on their relationship with the waterways of Alberta and the beings that live there and share our home alongside us.
Alexis Moerman is an artist, writer, and science educator whose work largely explores the perceived/self-imposed separation between humans and the natural world. She primarily works with dry media while also pursuing work with traditional Indigenous art practices such as caribou fur tufting, quillwork, and beadwork using seeds from the wolf willow. Born and raised in Mohkinstsis, Moerman is of Cree and settler descent and a member of the Lac La Ronge Band who traces her Indigeneity matrilineally. She is interested in themes of (dis)connection, reciprocity, and community.
The Deep Dark
- Caitlind r.c. Brown + Wayne Garrett -Location: St. Patrick’s Island
Date: TBD
…all the darkness was suddenly dark in contrast with something else that wasn't darkness, namely light.
- Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
The Deep Dark is a spatial installation intended to illuminate the interspace between our sacred (and natural) environments and cultural constructs of darkness. Why do we fear the dark? Is darkness a presence or an absence? What separates real fears of nighttime from imaginary fears of things we cannot see? Using domestic doorways as an entry point, the installation invites you to move through ghostly architecture. As you pass through each illuminated frame, you are blinded by intense white light that overexposes your eyes. The darkness beyond is magnified, much darker than before (Nyctalopia). As your eyes adjust, the next illuminated door frame becomes visible in the distance, beckoning you onward. From an outward perspective, as viewers step through the gates, they can disappear completely.
Drawing from commonalities in the human experience of darkness as a physical and metaphysical entity, The Deep Dark offers light by which the darkness grows darker and disillusions the night.
The Deep Dark, Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, 2015
Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett are award-winning artists & collaborators based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis – a city near the Rocky Mountains in Western Canada. Caitlind & Wayne have worked together since 2010, developing an art practice that includes light art, sculptures, installations, public art, radio, artist-curation, urban interventions, environmental art, and collective actions. Caitlind & Wayne’s site-responsive public art projects can be visited in Calgary, Creston, Edmonton, and Toronto. Their works are exhibited extensively at museums, festivals, and galleries, nationally and internationally.
Caitlind & Wayne navigate the interspace between false dichotomies: light and dark, nature and culture, DIY and institutional, individual and collective. They engage deeply with social spaces, exploring the perimeter of what is and isn’t “allowed” in any given environment – always within the framework of practical mischief, being good neighbours, and sharing in an abundance of democratic possibilities. Whether working locally or internationally, in formal galleries or their own backyard, Caitlind & Wayne believe in art’s potential to create new understandings of the everyday, closing the distance between people, and building our human capacity for empathy and self-criticality in a complex world.
Hello Neighbours
- Mia + Eric -Date: July 10 + July 31, 2026
How well do you know the plants, animals, insects, and fungi you live next to?
Hello Neighbours is a participatory project that addresses the biodiversity crisis by giving people the chance to get to know their more-than-human neighbours. The project invites people to see themselves as part of a larger ecological community—and elevates the position of other beings to neighbour status. Without a shared verbal language, getting to know each other will require all of our senses, some unconventional ways of relating, skills of observation and patience.
We are Mia + Eric, an interdisciplinary artist duo from Calgary whose collaborative work moves between transdisciplinary research and community engagement. For nearly 20 years, we have worked across visual art, performance, writing, multi-species ethnography, and public policy to explore how people live together in relation to the environments, systems, and species that shape our shared world. Our practice is relational, site-responsive, and community-oriented. We approach art as a form of inquiry—a way of thinking with others, testing ideas in public, and transforming research into collective experience.
We grew out of Calgary’s artist-run and performance communities, where collaboration and experimentation shaped our independent approach to making work. Our practice moves slowly, by design, treating time, relationship, and process as our primary materials. The collaborations we build, the knowledge exchanged, and the networks of care that emerge through our projects are as integral to the work as any visual or performative outcome. Our process often unfolds over years, guided by listening, dialogue, and the specific needs of the people and environments we work with.
Since 2008, we’ve created 40 projects, joined 30 residencies, toured to over 40 cities and rural spaces, and produced more than a dozen publications. We work in contemporary performance and visual art contexts, including galleries, festivals, and post-secondary institutions. Our work has been presented at Arctic Arts Festival (Harstad, Norway), GIFT Festival (Gateshead, UK), Matchbox (Germany), Buenos Aires International Festival (Argentina), Kelowna Art Gallery (BC), University of Saskatchewan (SK), Contemporary Calgary, Esker Foundation, and the Art Gallery of Alberta, among others.
Our practice operates on two interconnected scales. The first includes touring and gallery-based works that share ideas publicly—such as In a Strange Place, Future Perfect, and Hello Neighbours. The second includes long-term, site-responsive research processes that unfold over years through residencies and community partnerships, including 3 WOODS, Brains, Strains + Other Domains, and No Longer Impossible. Each mode sustains the other: public works circulate ideas born of deep engagement, while durational projects deepen through the communities they reach.
Currently Artists-in-Residence at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, we are developing Brains, Strains + Other Domains, a multi-year research project exploring neurodivergence and the sensory, cognitive, and relational worlds of animals, plants, and fungi. In 2025 we founded The Entanglement Bureau, an arts-led ecological think tank that explores new frameworks for co-regulation and ethical interdependence between human and ecological systems. In 2027 we will publish Becoming Forest, a resource for artists and communities interested in socially engaged, ecologically informed practice.
We grew out of Calgary’s artist-run and performance communities, where collaboration and experimentation shaped our independent approach to making work. Our practice moves slowly, by design, treating time, relationship, and process as our primary materials. The collaborations we build, the knowledge exchanged, and the networks of care that emerge through our projects are as integral to the work as any visual or performative outcome. Our process often unfolds over years, guided by listening, dialogue, and the specific needs of the people and environments we work with.
Since 2008, we’ve created 40 projects, joined 30 residencies, toured to over 40 cities and rural spaces, and produced more than a dozen publications. We work in contemporary performance and visual art contexts, including galleries, festivals, and post-secondary institutions. Our work has been presented at Arctic Arts Festival (Harstad, Norway), GIFT Festival (Gateshead, UK), Matchbox (Germany), Buenos Aires International Festival (Argentina), Kelowna Art Gallery (BC), University of Saskatchewan (SK), Contemporary Calgary, Esker Foundation, and the Art Gallery of Alberta, among others.
Our practice operates on two interconnected scales. The first includes touring and gallery-based works that share ideas publicly—such as In a Strange Place, Future Perfect, and Hello Neighbours. The second includes long-term, site-responsive research processes that unfold over years through residencies and community partnerships, including 3 WOODS, Brains, Strains + Other Domains, and No Longer Impossible. Each mode sustains the other: public works circulate ideas born of deep engagement, while durational projects deepen through the communities they reach.
Currently Artists-in-Residence at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, we are developing Brains, Strains + Other Domains, a multi-year research project exploring neurodivergence and the sensory, cognitive, and relational worlds of animals, plants, and fungi. In 2025 we founded The Entanglement Bureau, an arts-led ecological think tank that explores new frameworks for co-regulation and ethical interdependence between human and ecological systems. In 2027 we will publish Becoming Forest, a resource for artists and communities interested in socially engaged, ecologically informed practice.
Scenograph: Ghost River of the Elbow River
- Natasha Faye Jensen -Location: Elbow River Traverse
In Scenograph: Ghost River of the Elbow River, I explore the layered histories of Calgary through the landscape of the Glenmore Reservoir, which is fed by the Elbow River. Situated at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Calgary’s relationship to water has long shaped both its ecology and urban development. While the Bow River dominates the city’s landscape, the smaller Elbow River carries its own complex and often overlooked histories.
This research-led project examines how land and waterways are transformed through development and economic expansion, focusing specifically on the section of the Elbow River submerged following the construction of the Glenmore Dam in 1933. I became interested in the idea of the “ghost river” , a river that continues to exist beneath the surface, obscured but not erased. If we can no longer see the river, does it still exist? Can rivers function as palimpsests, holding traces of ecological memory, displacement, and human intervention?
Through archival research conducted at the Glenbow Western Research Centre at the University of Calgary, I investigate the histories embedded within this altered landscape. The project considers how acts of flooding, damming, and urban planning reshape not only the physical environment, but also collective memory and relationships to land.
As part of this inquiry, I am presenting a selection of drawings and text that brings together archival imagery, research, mapping, and speculative visual narratives. The reference of a scenographic is one that reimagines the submerged river as both a historical site and a living presence. By revisiting these hidden geographies, the work asks how we might better honour the histories of the land in order to foster greater care, responsibility, and reciprocity with the environments we inhabit today.
This research-led project examines how land and waterways are transformed through development and economic expansion, focusing specifically on the section of the Elbow River submerged following the construction of the Glenmore Dam in 1933. I became interested in the idea of the “ghost river” , a river that continues to exist beneath the surface, obscured but not erased. If we can no longer see the river, does it still exist? Can rivers function as palimpsests, holding traces of ecological memory, displacement, and human intervention?
Through archival research conducted at the Glenbow Western Research Centre at the University of Calgary, I investigate the histories embedded within this altered landscape. The project considers how acts of flooding, damming, and urban planning reshape not only the physical environment, but also collective memory and relationships to land.
As part of this inquiry, I am presenting a selection of drawings and text that brings together archival imagery, research, mapping, and speculative visual narratives. The reference of a scenographic is one that reimagines the submerged river as both a historical site and a living presence. By revisiting these hidden geographies, the work asks how we might better honour the histories of the land in order to foster greater care, responsibility, and reciprocity with the environments we inhabit today.
Natasha Faye Jensen is a dual Canadian and United Kingdom interdisciplinary artist from Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), located in Treaty 7 territory in Southern Alberta, Canada. Working across sculpture, collage, photography, and film, her research-driven practice examines the intersections of ecology, materiality, and colonial history, with a particular focus on cultivated landscapes as contested sites of power.
She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly the Alberta College of Art and Design) in 2013 and completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2020. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals across Canada, the United States, Finland, and the United Kingdom.
Jensen’s practice has been supported through grants from Calgary Arts Development, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Creative Scotland. She is the recipient of several awards, including the RSA Barns-Graham Travel Award (2020), the RBC Emerging Artist Award from the Mayor’s Lunch for Arts Champion and Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award from Creative Scotland.
ING Collective
- Yilu Xing and Phoenix Kefei Ning -Location: Chinatown
Date: July 17, 2026
ING is an artist collective by Yilu Xing and Phoenix Kefei Ning, working across communication design, printmaking, and public engagement. Our projects focus on connection, collective learning, and hands-on engagement. Using everyday life as inspiration, we are interested in responding to our surroundings through observation, conversation, and shared experiences in public spaces. Recent projects include public murals, printmaking, performance, video works, and community workshops that bring together artists, collaborators, and participants through collective making.
Yilu Xing is an artist-educator with a BFA from AUArts and an MFA from the University of Alberta, currently working in a non-profit art gallery in Calgary. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for her research on culinary traditions within immigrant families and how food nurtures connection and belonging. Her work explores food, care, and cultural memory through print, installation, and community-based projects. Xing’s practice emphasizes hands-on processes, collaboration, and the ways art builds community and shared learning.
https://www.yiluxing.ca/
Phoenix Kefei Ning is a Calgary-based graphic designer, illustrator, and emerging artist. She graduated from AUArts in 2026, majoring in Visual Communication Design. She explores the interplay of colour and shape to create visually engaging work and storytelling. She primarily works in digital formats while continuing to experiment with hands-on techniques. She contributes to numerous community-based and public art initiatives across Calgary, with a focus on making art more accessible and joyful for the public.
https://phoenixning.myportfolio.com/
and https://phoenixning.com/
https://www.yiluxing.ca/
Phoenix Kefei Ning is a Calgary-based graphic designer, illustrator, and emerging artist. She graduated from AUArts in 2026, majoring in Visual Communication Design. She explores the interplay of colour and shape to create visually engaging work and storytelling. She primarily works in digital formats while continuing to experiment with hands-on techniques. She contributes to numerous community-based and public art initiatives across Calgary, with a focus on making art more accessible and joyful for the public.
https://phoenixning.myportfolio.com/
and https://phoenixning.com/
Look There Listen Here
- August Klintberg -Location: Crossroads, East Village
Look There Listen Here uses public architecture and public space as a performative arena for disclosing private emotions. With this piece I want to examine how private needs and engagements deserve demonstration in public space, and also how public space might invade the private sphere in a meaningful way. The clear divide between desire and disinterest that my work lays out underscores the sort of ambivalence that I feel, and that I believe other people feel, when mapping out relationships and expectations for what humans might accomplish together.
August Klintberg (he/him, formerly Mark Clintberg) is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is an Associate Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, completed his PhD at Concordia University, and is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. His practice engages with antecedent artworks, architectures, and archives through installation,
works on paper, photography, artist’s multiples, and textiles. Collections holding his work include the National Gallery of Canada, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the Bank of Montreal Corporate Art Collection, and The Rooms, and he has created public artworks for Western Front, Edmonton Arts Council, the Walter Phillips Gallery, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Currently, in Montreal he has a permanent work installed in the lobby of the Humaniti complex, an ongoing installation on the façade of the Maison de la Culture, Côte-des-neiges, and is featured in the exhibition Génération XEROX at the Archives gaies du Québec.
Klintberg has been an artist in residence on Fogo Island, at Banff Centre, and La cité international des arts. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award.
works on paper, photography, artist’s multiples, and textiles. Collections holding his work include the National Gallery of Canada, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the Bank of Montreal Corporate Art Collection, and The Rooms, and he has created public artworks for Western Front, Edmonton Arts Council, the Walter Phillips Gallery, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Currently, in Montreal he has a permanent work installed in the lobby of the Humaniti complex, an ongoing installation on the façade of the Maison de la Culture, Côte-des-neiges, and is featured in the exhibition Génération XEROX at the Archives gaies du Québec.
Klintberg has been an artist in residence on Fogo Island, at Banff Centre, and La cité international des arts. In 2013 he was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award.
The Multi-Being Camera Project
- Julya Hajnocky -Location: Bow River Pathway
For this project with The New Gallery, I’ll be building a group of multi-aperture pinhole cameras that will be inspired by and in dialogue with the Bow River. Working along a stretch of Prince’s Island Park, these cameras will be loaded with black and white photo paper and will remain up for the month of June, making very long exposure images known as solargraphs. This park is an abundantly busy place in spring and summer, where humans and other animals like beavers, squirrels and birds, as well as plants, will be coming and going. These cameras will bear witness to these activities, but recording them on a different timescale than an ordinary snapshot.
Ultimately my hope is that these works are an invitation to imagine how other beings, with all of their different ranges of sensory strategies, might experience the world. By working together with each species, and their neighbours and kin, I'm attempting to offer an alternative perspective, one where we can envision the more-than-human as equals, pushing back against the hierarchical and colonial worldviews that have allowed Western society to engage in destructive and extractive behaviours that harm all living beings on the planet. Perhaps by putting ourselves in the shoes of these beings, we can move through the world with greater care and empathy.
Ultimately my hope is that these works are an invitation to imagine how other beings, with all of their different ranges of sensory strategies, might experience the world. By working together with each species, and their neighbours and kin, I'm attempting to offer an alternative perspective, one where we can envision the more-than-human as equals, pushing back against the hierarchical and colonial worldviews that have allowed Western society to engage in destructive and extractive behaviours that harm all living beings on the planet. Perhaps by putting ourselves in the shoes of these beings, we can move through the world with greater care and empathy.
Julya Hajnoczky was born in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, and raised by hippie parents, surrounded by unruly houseplants, bookishness and art supplies, with CBC radio playing softly, constantly, in the background. Inevitably as a result, she grew up to be an artist. A current MFA candidate at Emily Carr University, her practice includes digital and analog photography, and seeks to inspire curiosity about the perspectives of our more-than-human neighbours. Julya has completed artist residencies at Terra Nova National Park, the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, and the Empire of Dirt. Her work has been acquired by public and private collections including the Canada Council Art Bank and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and was recently published in National Geographic Magazine.
Hannah Dubois
Clay/Rock/River Correspondence #1–3 are part of an ongoing experimental body of ceramic work exploring relationships between maker, material, and place, and the possibility of making these intersections visible. Each sculpture is first hand-built using Plainsman clay, manufactured in Medicine Hat, Alberta, from materials mined across Canada and the United States. The forms are then disrupted through the impact of rocks from my personal collection, primarily gathered on Hornby Island, British Columbia. Materially, the rocks and clay are kin; through touch, they remind one another of their shared lineage despite their differing physical states. In their meeting, the rocks gently remind the clay of what it once was, leaving abstract traces of this dialogue across the surface.
When I moved to Calgary in September, the Bow River welcomed me. Its enduring presence and ever-shifting shores have grounded and comforted me as I adapted to a new city, climate, and community. While the Bow shapes Calgary’s urban landscape, it is also continually shaped by its human neighbours. In these sculptures, I am interested in how these reciprocal forces—the river’s current carving rock and landscape, alongside the urban, infrastructural, and human interventions that shape its course – affect its path and presence.
For my contribution to Current I extend my collaboration with clay and rock to include the river itself. Throughout July, the sculptures will make their home among their rock ancestors on the river’s edge in Prince’s Island Park. As the current shifts around my sculptural intrusions, will it erode its own marks alongside those of the rocks and myself? Hopefully, these experimental works become site-specific records both of the river's adaptation to the objects we place in its way, and of its enduring power to shape landscape and life at its edge.
Hannah Dubois (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist from so-called Vancouver, BC. Working across ceramics, drawing, photography, film, and weaving, her practice centres processes of material correspondence; how bodies, materials, and environments imprint upon one another. She received a BFA from Simon Fraser University and is a current MFA candidate at the Alberta University of the Arts, where her research investigates the ways that settler-colonial legacies shape human and more-than-human relational systems.
Wapta ispa oh na agateya mâwanino
- Soloman Chiniquay -
Sol is a documentary photographer and filmmaker living between xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səl̓ilwətaɁɬ territory and his homelands of Treaty 7 territory. His lens-based work explores the ways he is welcomed to witness expressions of Indigeneity, creating imagery that attempts to show, in sometimes raw ways, the land and the people on it, the ways people use and connect to the land, and the artifacts they leave on it.
Sol has worked on film productions such as The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and documentary shorts Joe Buffalo and Be Long, and is a founding member of The Stoney Nakoda AV Club. In 2020 he published the photography book Wahiâba O-zaza Ta-pa, with poems by jaz whitford, Yujin Aspen Kim and DEBBY FRIDAY.
Sol also tries to incorporate teaching and education in the projects he is involved in. He also teaches photography workshops at various high schools and community organizations throughout Canada.
Sol has worked on film productions such as The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, and documentary shorts Joe Buffalo and Be Long, and is a founding member of The Stoney Nakoda AV Club. In 2020 he published the photography book Wahiâba O-zaza Ta-pa, with poems by jaz whitford, Yujin Aspen Kim and DEBBY FRIDAY.
Sol also tries to incorporate teaching and education in the projects he is involved in. He also teaches photography workshops at various high schools and community organizations throughout Canada.
Glacial Basin
- Nahanni McKay -
Nahanni McKay is a multidisciplinary artist based on Treaty 7 Territory, in Mînî Hrpa (Banff) and Mohkínstsis (Calgary). Nahanni is a member of Otipemisiwak (Métis Nation of Alberta) which deeply inspires her work. Producing sculptures, images and beadwork that takes the shape of spirits around her hometown in the Rocky Mountains.
Her work aims to discuss navigating the complex national park system not only as an Indigenous person but through the perspective of wildlife. Her work is closely related to the human impact of the natural environment by creating an unsettling artwork to be observed by the viewers. Nahanni is mesmerized by the beauty of her hometown and how the mountains attract a colonial desire to conquer this sacred place, turning nature into a commodity.
Her work aims to discuss navigating the complex national park system not only as an Indigenous person but through the perspective of wildlife. Her work is closely related to the human impact of the natural environment by creating an unsettling artwork to be observed by the viewers. Nahanni is mesmerized by the beauty of her hometown and how the mountains attract a colonial desire to conquer this sacred place, turning nature into a commodity.
Jennifer Ireland
Jennifer Ireland is a research based, multi-medium artist, working with curiosity and wonder; to re-imagine ways of knowing and ways of being with land. Ireland strives to make work that is mindful of situation, site, context, and access. This ethic is found in her work through materials and methods which are often light, sustainable and provisional. Ireland’s practice ranges from drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, to site-sensitive installation and performance. Each of their works strives to operate as speculative way-finding.
As a Treaty 7 person of settler descent, Ireland’s home is in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Canada, and they are grateful to be a Treaty 7 person and committed to the responsibilities thereof.
Ireland holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Calgary, studied drawing and sculpture at Alberta University of the Arts, and holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
As a Treaty 7 person of settler descent, Ireland’s home is in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, Canada, and they are grateful to be a Treaty 7 person and committed to the responsibilities thereof.
Ireland holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Calgary, studied drawing and sculpture at Alberta University of the Arts, and holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Vines
- Melanie Kloetzel -
VINES is a site-adaptive and ecosomatic practice and performance by Melanie Kloetzel (kloetzel&co.). Using a state-based durational approach, VINES explores how the human body can corporeally adapt to urban spaces by rigorously embodying growth patterns from climbing plants. VINES helps viewers and participants alike consider what it might mean to respectfully learn from and identify with plants as kinship species. Deeply informed by Indigenous concepts of relationality, the VINES practice and performance shows how humans can translate the movements of our plant kin into the human body, supporting the development of empathetic connections to more-than-human species.
VINES has been developed through research intensives in both Toronto and Calgary with initial dramaturgical support from Brandy Leary (Anandam Dance) and with support from Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Tonight's performance is produced by TRAction, an Indigenous and non-Indigenous led climate art collective based in Moh'kinsstis, with support from Calgary Arts Development.
VINES has enjoyed presentation at Contemporary Calgary Art Gallery in 2024, through the New Works Calgary season in 2025, and as part of the first Calgary Climate Week in 2026.
VINES has been developed through research intensives in both Toronto and Calgary with initial dramaturgical support from Brandy Leary (Anandam Dance) and with support from Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Tonight's performance is produced by TRAction, an Indigenous and non-Indigenous led climate art collective based in Moh'kinsstis, with support from Calgary Arts Development.
VINES has enjoyed presentation at Contemporary Calgary Art Gallery in 2024, through the New Works Calgary season in 2025, and as part of the first Calgary Climate Week in 2026.
& MORE DETAILS TO COME....
Current works with these concepts at the river’s edge in Moh’kins’tsis, Wîchîspa, Guts’ists’i and Calgary, a place of continued generational significance to the Nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy (the Siksika, the Piikani, and the Kainai), the Stoney Nakoda (the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and the Goodstoney), the Tsuu’tina First Nation and the Métis Nation within Alberta (Districts 5 and 6).
This programming is graciously funded by
