New Architects in a Liminal Time
With the end of closed galleries and dark stages in sight, Arts Commons is moving full speed ahead into the future of Calgary’s artistic life with Arts Commons Incubator, a first-of-its-kind professional artist development program at the city’s largest performing arts centre. Designed deliberately to support Calgary-based artists who reflect the diversity and vibrancy of Treaty 7 territory, Arts Commons Incubator is now accepting applications until August 31, 2021 from multidisciplinary artists whose work defies categorization and is in active conversation with the world around them. Built to support artists who work across artistic disciplines and have historically been underrepresented in the downtown Calgary cultural scene, Incubator will provide its cohort of 25-35 artists with a season of engagements under four themes: networking; professional development; mentorship; and paid live performance, exhibition, and teaching opportunities within Arts Commons initiatives.
Each season, Arts Commons Incubator will be guided by a different group of Incubator Fellows, bringing new perspectives and fresh approaches to the program. As the inaugural Fellows of the Arts Commons Incubator program, Jae Sterling and Contra have shaped their guiding principals for this first season.
It takes a tenacious imagination for us to survive, articulate our vision, and curate in this extremely volatile planet to suit our daily growing human and creative needs. There is an art to all of this existing that we do.
This might seem like a tall order for a small, landlocked city in the Prairies; where even the passing planes don’t always land during the next big sensation’s tour stop. We are too aware of the sensibilities of this landscape; it’s deafening ability to reduce something spectacular and different to the corporate and cynical. The sensibilities which urge humility in place of ambition. We continuously feel the institutional and social resistance placed against marginalized communities and their access to art and space. Despite all of this, we insist on witnessing and magnifying the city’s ability to evolve and create spectacular artists who can cut through the noise. We are calling for you to cut through the noise and create without inhibitions. After all, in this city, in which artists struggle to break out, in which surviving is an art in itself; an attempt to reimagine it and rebuke the odds, is profound.
TOP: Jae Sterling. Photo by Asim Overstands. ABOVE: Contra. Photo by Asim Overstands
Before we arrive at the future, before we plunge into a new era - however that might look and feel - there is a moment of flux. A limbo, an in-between place in which several great matters are decided and in which we tinker with the tone of the past and set about what could be the next narrative. We’ll call this the liminal space; a time and place that is one of uncertainty. This liminal space requires a profound sense of imagination for us to navigate through, to find the right portal. In this place, we are in transit; there is no arrival without new architects, powerful dreamers, and thoughtful leaders. In short, we need artists and minds who are capable of living in the liminal space with a willingness to make sense of our time, and design a future.
The reality is, for this year and the next, we are in the liminal space. We are in the thick of it. The pandemic has been abrasive, radicalizing, and devastating; we are nowhere close to understanding what the future actually could be. As artists, we have been stretched, forced to evolve, and are emerging with our hands all over the place, with our eyes on what feels like a distant but distinctly different horizon. What is evident is that the journey of getting to the future will require a very strong dose of reprogramming ourselves and our vision. Collectively. Individually. Intimately.
A very long time ago, somewhere in the slideshow carousel of our memories, one remembers palm trees being planted in the middle of the highway back home. Why, in a tropical island like Jamaica were we bringing trees from one part of the island to the next? Doesn’t it seem strange to surgically uproot and graft a semi-foreign object to a place where it might not belong? They said it was to “beautify the highway”. Why would we need to recreate our reality? There is enough flora and fauna around us to last and admire, right? A very long time ago, somewhere in the rolodex of our memories, one of us remembers becoming someone entirely new in a place that was entirely old. An exercise in reinvention and rebirth to unleash a tectonic shift in the ecosystem that we were swimming in. It was at once both terrifying and liberating.
These memories took place in a liminal space, in a transitory time. Remembering them brings us to that same space.
It takes this sort of imagination for us to survive; it requires this interpersonal, intercontextual time travel. You’ve been doing it your entire life. In inviting you into this new program, we are insistent on seeing the art in how we will learn to move from this place to the next. By inviting you into this program, we call on you to see where you stand in this liminal space and to start designing the future.
Jae Sterling & Contra
