Enjoyed: Real Life and More at the Glenbow Museum

Over the holidays, I visited family in Calgary. While there, I had a chance to see the show Real Life at the Glenbow Museum. Now, it's been a long, looooooong time since I went to the Glenbow; typically when in town I've tried to hit up the commercial galleries and artist-run centres. The Glenbow just has more a reputation for historical and anthropological stuff than art stuff, a reputation further consolidated by its well-publicized and abrupt parting with contemporary-art proponent Jeffrey Spalding last year. In any case, since smaller galleries seemed to be on holiday break--and the Glenbow was hosting Real Life, comprised of some massive works by Ron Mueck, as well as work by Guy Ben-Ner, that I've never seen before--I decided to give it a whirl.

Real Life is a touring show organized by the National Gallery of Canada, so a lot of folks from coast to coast have likely seen it already. Still, I'll put my two cents in and say that I enjoyed it. This was one of those shows where supplementary material was really engaging--though the Mueck component only showed three sculptures, a vitrine of studies and (in particular) a video of Mueck at work seemed to really captivate visitors. The Ben-Ner stuff was also enjoyable, though it felt a bit too cute at times. I do envy the dude's ability to integrate his family time into his work--a nice device, that! A couple of the videos on view also have Youtube teasers:





There were a few other contemporary-art things going on at the Glenbow as well. More notes on that after the jump.


I looked at the show on Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas and thought the large manga-pictures installation looked really good. As usual, I had seen reproductions of this, but the wall-long scale worked really well in person. In terms of genre, I was reminded of one of the first big shows I ever went to see, Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre? at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, another attempt (albeit waaaaaay huger) to tell a story in pages and pictures, with the result then getting splayed big on the white wall. This memory likely applies to any book-turned-to-wall-work show, but nonetheless popped up here.

Though time was tight, I also scrambled to take a look at contemporary interventions by Paul Wong and Jeff Thomas in the Glenbow's historical exhibition spaces. The historical show in question, Mavericks, is actually something I wish I had had more time to take in. For one, it really hooked me with the fact that it now plays home to Calgary's once-iconic neon Telstar Drug sign. I remember driving by this drugstore repeatedly in my teens and twenties, so it's that slightly uncanny time of life when one starts seeing things from one's youth presented as history. Ah, well. I'm glad the sign, abandoned just a couple of years ago when the drugstore closed, now has a permanent home. I have to say I also really enjoyed similarly immersive installations as a Winnipeg kid visiting the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature--Mavericks takes a similar tack to prairie history with reconstructed storefronts, diners, signage, train cars and the like. Some might call it cheesy, but I know for a damn fact it's engaging to a lot of people.

Of course, exhibitions like Mavericks leave out a lot of historical complexity, which is why it's wise to integrate interventions from the likes of Wong and Thomas.

Wong's work, in a room adjacent to the Telstar sign, focused on Alberta's gay rodeo circuit, and juxtaposed photographs of same with rodeo bronzes from the Glenbow's collection. Though Wong's aesthetic was a bit over the top, with lots of rodeo double-entendre text scrolling across the screen, I really appreciated the artist making space for this often overlooked group, who challenge stereotypes both of Albertans and of queer culture.

As for Thomas, I've long admired his photographic projects documenting and juxtaposing representations of First Nations culture in the North American landscape. It's good to see a few of those works integrated into various locations throughout Mavericks, because First Nations history is a fraught topic, largely because of ye olde maverick-style colonization. However, I wish there had been more space to show Thomas' work on its own as well--maybe that's just because that's how I first saw Thomas' work, or maybe it's because it's work that really speaks for itself.

In any case, I hope the Glenbow welcomes more interventions of this kind--these so-called grand narratives certainly need it!

Finally, I have to make note of the Glenbow's weird internal layout, particularly the brassy, gold-tinged 70s/80s staircase, the centrepiece of which is a multi-story glass chandelier. I think this element is getting to the point of shifting potentially from "dated" to "retro", though it is far from white-cube asceticism. It actually makes me think of an hipster-glam nightclub opportunity waiting to happen, something the Glenbow could in future think about capitalizing on, perhaps, for rentals or fundraisers. After all, if we can't capitalize on weirdness, what kind of (art) mavericks are we, really?