Contemporary Calgary delights with provocative, Instagrammable art shows

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Polar bears in coats of pink, orange, yellow and blue are cavorting in the galleries of the former Calgary science centre. Why?

It’s not science, but art, of course: The bears are an installation by the Italian-American artist Paola Pivi now showing at Contemporary Calgary, the newish public art gallery that is revitalizing the old concrete planetarium and science centre on the west side of downtown Calgary.

Contemporary Calgary is an amalgamation of three institutions – the Art Gallery of Calgary, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Art – that united in 2013 and opened in the long-empty building in 2019. Finding its feet after the closures of the pandemic, the gallery has invited Pivi to make a Canadian solo-show debut with a large exhibition featuring six sculptures of polar bears. They are highly realistic life-size creatures thanks to the work of a Yellowknife taxidermist but each bear is covered in dyed turkey feathers of a different bright colour and posed like a dancer or acrobat.

The initial effect is one of sheer delight – the kind of Instagrammable art that puts a new institution on the civic map – but the piece is also provocative. The peripatetic Pivi, who grew up in Italy and lived briefly in Ottawa as a teenager, now lives in Hawaii but considers Anchorage home; it’s a place where she has actually seen a polar bear in what remains of the wild. Her bears point to our anthropomorphization of animals – bears are always a favourite – and our commodification of just about everything. We are only too happy to consume the riotous bears, and yet their penetrating eyes and menacing snouts do ask us to consider before we do.

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Although there is no evidence of any direct influence, in a Canadian context, the work is powerfully reminiscent of General Idea’s Fin de Siècle, three harp seals stranded on a Styrofoam ice floe, in that case a commodification of the cutesy pup – or the tame artist.

In an earlier consideration of these issues, Pivi once strapped 84 goldfish in glass bowls into the passenger seats of an empty airplane and sent them off on a three-hour flight. The piece was a performance for a 24-hour festival of time-based art in New Zealand in 2009, but you get the idea from a brief video included in Calgary. The plane shakes; the water in the bowls jiggles; the fish swim about aimlessly and no human presence interrupts their strange journey.

If you question the political implications of Pivi’s work – maybe it’s just good fun as the show’s title, Come Check It Out, suggests – start with the sculpture that curator Kanika Anand has placed at the entry to the show.

It’s a small-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty wearing a cartoon-like mask of a woman in a head scarf. It is one of a series of masks, all based on actual people whose freedom is tied to the United States, that Pivi created as public art for New York’s High Line in 2022-23. The Calgary mask represents Mahnaz Akbari, an Afghan woman who fought alongside the American army in her country and escaped with it, but whose application for asylum in the U.S. is ensnared in bureaucracy.

This show opened a month before the U.S. election and, as president-elect Donald Trump promises mass deportations, the political point of the statue could not be clearer.

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Elsewhere Pivi’s work is less obvious, even elegiac. She has reinstalled here a work originally created for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which fills a whole room with a grid of shoes. There are 145 double identical pairs – one used pair and one new in the exact same size and style from sneakers to stilettos. There’s a pair of dirty pink bedroom slippers and a nice fluffy new pair; a pair of soiled Birkenstocks, and a pair of clean ones; a pair of designer mules chewed by a dog and a pair fresh out of the box.

The piece is another reflection on consumption, but it is also surprisingly moving: Each pair is a person, an evocation of a presence but their absence too.

The Pivi show has been installed in a standard arrangement of white cubes on the ground floor of the Contemporary Calgary building. But a repurposed planetarium, which first opened as such in 1967 and then housed the science centre from 1984 to 2011, is not necessarily the easiest building to turn into an art gallery. The second show at Contemporary Calgary, pairing Toronto artist Rajni Perera with Calgary artist Marigold Santos, is installed in the circular corridor that runs around what used to be the planetarium’s domed cinema. That screening room is a space Contemporary Calgary is working to upgrade during the third phase of the renovation: New LED projection equipment will allow artists to experiment with creating immersive experiences.

Meanwhile, the so-called “Ring Gallery” is too awkward to be kind to art but these two artists do represent a strong pairing. Indeed, Perera’s and Santos’s work is so similar one can sometimes be mistaken for the other.

Santos, a visual artist and tattoo artist of Filipino heritage, and Perera, a rising Canadian artist whose family comes from Sri Lanka, are both deeply influenced by the decorative patterns and spiritual iconography of their parents’ Asian cultures. But they are also concerned with integrating those influences into a wholly contemporary global art. Both work with the Patel Brown Gallery in Toronto and first collaborated on a sculpture for that dealer’s booth at the 2023 Armory Show in New York.

Entitled Efflorescence/The Way We Wake, it’s included here, a crouching clay-coloured figure with a large mask and a pair of long decorative breasts serving as a second set of arms. Vegetation, flowers and lichen spring from the cavities in its body and from little mounds scattered nearby. As a figure of nurturing motherhood – a concern of both artists – it is both fecund and fantastical, hearkening back to the prominent sci-fi element that characterized Perera’s earlier work.

Montreal’s PHI Foundation took its cue from that collaboration to organize this exhibition, which showed there last summer and now tours to Calgary. It features Santos’s paintings of disintegrating or transparent female figures filled with references to Filipino material culture from pandan-leaf weaving to the bamboo poles used in the Tinikling dance, from the conical hats worn by rice farmers to the oversized cap sleeves on young girls’ traditional dresses.

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Other powerful paintings show mythical female figures disappearing into painterly abstractions.

Like Santos, Perera has had great success incorporating the dense patterning of Asian art (including South Asian miniature painting) into a contemporary idiom. Still her most recent work included here is getting sparser and more concerned with a universal rather than futurist iconography. Birth is a Bloodsport, for example, one of a series of gouache paintings on tea-stained paper, depicts a naked female figure with distinctive patterning down her arms and around her exposed vagina. A bubble of fertile lines, suggesting vegetation, faces or fetuses, emerge from her mouth. At her feet sits the small, jewelled orb to which she has apparently given birth.

In Perera’s world, female power is both nurturing and terrifying – awesome in the original sense of the word. I Couldn’t Wait Longer features three female shamans with animal masks and wild hair leaping across a canvas studded with fertile streams of clay beads. Like Pivi’s bears, the women dance with abandon.

Paola Pivi: Come Check It Out continues to March 2; Efflorescence/The Way We Wake by Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos continues to April 6, both at Contemporary Calgary, 701 11th Street SW, Calgary.

Editor’s note: Artist Rajni Perera shows with several commercial galleries in Canada and the U.S. Incomplete information appeared in an earlier version of this article. This version has been updated.