Dreaming Asleep, Dreaming Awake is a commemoration of 50 years of artist-run culture at The New Gallery (TNG). Originally founded as Clouds ‘N’ Water Gallery and Visual Production Society in 1975, the organization was conceived as a parallel space to the large institutions like museums that most emerging artists couldn’t access or exhibit in. It was a space for the experimental and the dreamy. Dreaming Asleep, Dreaming Awake is a collaborative exhibition featuring the work of Helen Arias, Jordan Baylon and Peter Moller reflecting on the histories of The New Gallery, and more broadly, the histories of the arts in Mohkínstsis. Through meetings, dinners, and cups of coffee, the artists have begun connecting the lineages between their practices, bridging the gap from The New Gallery’s founding to its present day.

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Helen Arias is a Venezuelan artist and designer creating in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. Through  collage, printmaking, performance and zinemaking, her practice engages themes of  violence, transformation, and grrrlhood. She is actively involved in the local independent art and music scene, organizing exhibitions, workshops, and performances through her  ongoing projects PERRA and Volatile Sex Pill. Grounded in the ethos of feminist punk and  DIY, her work twines personal experience with collective resistance, inviting you to  consider the politics of the body, identity, expression and community within subcultural  spaces and beyond.

Helen Arias’ body of work includes silkscreened and original collaged posters created for local shows and workshops organized through her projects PERRA and Volatile Sex Pill. Miscellaneous collages are scattered throughout, reminiscent of a teenage girl’s room. In her work, Arias explores womanhood and the experiences that shape it—violence, love, transformation, sisterhood. Shaped by her own experiences within the art and punk scene, Catholicism, Riot Grrrl, and her Latina heritage, Arias’ collages and posters allude to these influences through found imagery and text, vivid colours, and pattern.

By the window, volumes of the collaborative Volatile Sex Pill zine, alongside other zines independently created by the artist and her community, are available to be read. A large, colourful handmade quilt—originally made for the artist’s band to play in front of—serves as both a central visual element and a warning to people who threaten to harm the community. Sewn onto it are silkscreen patches made by the artist, and arranged diagonally are silkscreen prints proclaiming, “Sacred light beams from my cunt”, emphasizing the artist’s belief in a divine feminine power and connection to holy female icons like La Virgen María.

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Diwata Rings is a durational emergent ritual and ceremony consecrated to the care and tending of our artist-run community. As a nosey, doting self-appointed artist (h)aunty, I have had the sacred honour of witnessing the sharing of so many stories of fellow treaty-people trying to relate in a good way, and to live feeling like we belong to the land. I am deeply braided in gratitude and belonging to my many elders, teachers, my kapwa-body-kin, the more-than-human world, and my fellow ghosts of the colony. Right now, perhaps more than ever, I believe we need everyone to affirm the artist inside of themselves, and to renew our relations on the basis of that power and its transformative possibilities.

The sigils, prayers and altar components of this exhibition are an expansion and amplification of my own personal diasporic embodied ancestral practice, portals to the kapwa-body possibilities for self and community that we get to explore together in artist-run treaty-making.

As reflects the practical needs and care-discipline of my day-to-day life as a community worker, my ancestry and the complex realities of my system-location, my work is often improvised, provisional and meant to reflect a fractal resonance with my values of treaty-making at every scale and level. As guests reflect upon the stories shared in this exhibition and from their own experiences, the prayers collected will shape the sigils and the altar at intervals through the run, creating a kind of morphing mycelial spore-map of structures, patterns and shapes of relational connection. I hope this helps us see and care for ourselves and each other as we way-find the kinds of futures we want to imagine together.

Additionally, The New Gallery is launching a 50th Anniversary Publication of the same title, Dreaming Asleep, Dreaming Awake, that features writing by Jules de Guzman, Sikapinakii Lowhorn, Su Ying Strang, Winona Julian and Alexa Bunnell, and designed by Phoenix Ning. This publication celebrates The New Gallery's 50 years as an artist-run center, with texts that touch on archival memory, collaborative histories and  institutional knowledge vs. lived experiences.

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A series of free public outreach events will accompany the exhibition and publication launch in the coming months.

夢中夢醒

2025年8月22日 – 10月11日

展覽介紹

在 夢中夢醒 中，藝術家 Helen Arias、Jordan Baylon 與 Peter Moller 回應了 The New Gallery 以及莫辛西斯（Mohkínstsis，卡加利）藝術的歷史，追溯藝術譜系，並在本地藝術社群中建構跨世代的連結。

夢中夢醒 紀念 The New Gallery（TNG）五十年的藝術家自營文化。TNG 最初於 1975 年以 Clouds ‘N’ Water Gallery and Visual Production Society 名義成立，作為與大型機構（如博物館）相平行的空間，因為當時多數新興藝術家無法進入或在這些機構展出。這裡是一個屬於實驗與夢想的空間。夢中夢醒 是一個合作展覽，呈現 Helen Arias、Jordan Baylon 與 Peter Moller 的作品，回顧 The New Gallery 的歷史，更廣泛地回應 Mohkínstsis 的藝術發展。透過會面、聚餐與咖啡交流，藝術家們開始串連彼此實踐之間的譜系，連結從 TNG 創立到當代的時間脈絡。

此外，The New Gallery 也將推出一本同名的 五十週年出版物 夢中夢醒，由 Jules De Guzman、Sikapinakii Lowhorn、Su Ying Strang、Winona Julian 與 Alexa Bunnell 撰文，並由 Phoenix Ning 設計。此出版物慶祝 The New Gallery 作為藝術家自營空間的五十年歷程，透過文字探討檔案記憶、合作歷史，以及制度性知識與實際生活經驗之間的交織。

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