Downtown funk
all due respect to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars and their earworm of a song, but it’s Calgary’s downtown that’s been in a funk lately. The economic downturn has certainly taken its toll on the city’s central hub, with mass layoffs and office vacancies edging toward an all-time high.
But when the economy ebbs, creativity will flow—it’s the flipside of the boom-time story in which artists get crowded out of creative spaces when rents go through the roof. Bearing that in mind, it makes sense that a new visual-arts festival should take up in Calgary’s downtown during the downturn, particularly one that’s free to attend.
The inaugural Glow downtown winter-light festival, hosted by the Calgary Downtown Association, will take place over the Family Day long weekend, and will feature evening programs of light-based installations, projections, performances and interactive experiences. The installations will be set up at various sites around the downtown core, with festival hubs at Olympic Plaza and at Harley Hotchkiss Gardens (the park area at the Calgary Courts Centre), where you can get maps and other info.
The artistic talent pool for Glow skews local, though there are a handful of contributions from other parts of Canada as well as a duo, Varvara & Mar, hailing from Estonia and Spain, respectively. (Varvara & Mar are behind Smile, an interactive installation at the corner of 6th Avenue and Centre Street that lights up when people smile into it.) The local contingent includes the luminous team of Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett, co-creators of the epic Wreck City projects as well as another memorable light installation—the incandescent Cloud from 2012’s Nuit Blanche event at Olympic Plaza. This time around, Brown and Garrett are mounting a large-scale outdoor work (Monument to Fallen Stars) at 4th Street and 5th Avenue S.W., in which the heads of discarded streetlights will be positioned to create familiar constellations that can be viewed through a telescope pointed at a reflecting mirror. Perhaps the best thing about the Glow festival is that it’s taking place in late February, a time when even those who profess to love winter, tire of the darkness and drudgery. To have grit-strewn asphalt transformed into something luminescent and lovely is like a civic-scale version of a SAD light-therapy visor. Don’t believe it? Just watch.