Contemporary Conversations with

Lucy Sparrow

Thursday, May 25 | 7:00 – 8:00 PM

Contemporary Calgary is excited to welcome UK artist Lucy Sparrow for an artist talk on May 25th at 7 pm. Known for her tactile, colourful felt creations, Sparrow has taken the art world by storm with her installations of everyday spaces, including a fully-felted supermarket, a deli, and a sex shop. During the talk, Sparrow will discuss her latest installation, McHappiness, a fully-functioning felted burger restaurant and homage to the golden arches. Join us for an evening of insight and inspiration as Sparrow shares her artistic process and commentary on the state of consumer culture.

About the Artist

Lucy Sparrow

Lucy Sparrow is one of the most exciting and original artists working in the UK today. Her practice is quirky yet subversive, luring the audience in with her soft, tactile, colourful felt creations before hitting them hard with her comment on subjects including the demise of the traditional high street and the fragmentation of community.  

She took the art world by storm in Summer 2014 with the opening of her fully-stocked felt Cornershop installation in London’s East End. With queues around the block and wall to wall media coverage, it was both a commercial and critical success. Warmongery, a controversial sell-out installation exploring the issues around gun control and mental health followed in May 2015 and in October 2015, Madame Roxy’s Erotic Emporium opened its doors in the back streets of London’s Soho, showcasing the artist’s complete commitment to her artistic vision, recreating an entire sex shop in glorious technicolour felt, including a fully working, animated felt peep show. In 2016, the BBC commissioned Lucy to recreates the Crown Jewels in felt, to celebrate HRH The Queen’s official 90th birthday.

In May 2017, Lucy undertook her first solo show in the US, opening The Convenience Store, a New York bodega stocked with 9,000 felted artworks. Scheduled to run for a month, the store was an instant hit, selling out in just over two weeks.  The bodega dominated the NYC art scene, appearing everywhere from the New York Times to the massive TV screens on Times Square.  Returning to the US in August 2018, Lucy opened Sparrow Mart, a fully-felted supermarket in Downtown Los Angeles. Complete with 31,000 hand-painted works. Another instant hit, it generated global press attention and a round the block queue.

December 2018 saw Lucy’s work unveiled in the windows of the Hermés flagship Store on Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills and she dominated the headlines at Miami Art Week with her installation piece, Triple Art Bypass, that saw the artist perform ‘live’ surgery to huge crowds at Context Art Fair.

In 2019, Lucy created the cover artwork for the Spring issue of Juxtapoz magazine and opened her debut museum exhibition Lucy Sparrow’s Felt Imaginarium at M Woods in Beijing, China. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, Rockefeller Centre in NYC played host to Lucy’s on 6th, a fully stocked felt deli and immersive art experience.

In 2021, Lucy returned home for her first UK exhibition in over five years, opening The Bourdon Street Chemist in the heart of Mayfair in London. This incredibly successful installation gained blanket media coverage, saw fans queueing around the block and became the must-see British exhibition post-Covid.

In April 2021 Lucy was selected as guest artist for series 2 two of Grayson Perry’s Art Club.  Her work will be exhibited in the accompanying exhibition at Bristol Museum & Art gallery between December 2021 and May 2022.

January 2022 saw Lucy return to the US for to unveil her  most ambitious installation yet. She unveiled Tampa Fresh Foods, a 3,000 sq ft hypermarket filled with over 50,000 felt groceries, a Cuban sandwich bar and humidor, that went viral on tiktok, creating hour-long queues and global coverage.

In June 2022 the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall unveiled Lucy’s fully-felted 6-metre long installation entitled The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Lunch, created to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s 70th year on the British throne. In July, the work was installed in Buckingham Palace as part of the summer exhibition.

For Frieze Week 2022, Lucy installed a felt covered ice cream van in Regent’s Park selling Mr Frieze ice pops, Mr Whippy 99s and a full selection of childhood favourite ice lollies.

In November 2022, Lucy opened Felt ‘R’ Us, a pop-up Christmas shop and exhibition housing her most loved installations.  Meanwhile in Miami, Lucy treated Art Week visitors to McHappiness A fully functioning felted burger restaurant and homage to the golden arches.

Lucy Sparrow lives in a felt cave in an undisclosed location, with her companion Sebastian.

Supporters

Contemporary Conversations Presents:

Marigold Santos in conversation with Haema Sivanesan

Wednesday, March 29, 2022

Join us on a journey through Calgary-based artist Marigold Santos’ work as she talks to curator Haema Sivanesan about the intent, the stories, and the processes behind her work.

This conversation is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Human Capital, on view until April 16, 2023.

About the Speakers

Marigold Santos
ARTIST

Marigold Santos pursues an interdisciplinary art practice involving drawn, painted, and printed works, sculpture, tattooing, and sound. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. Marigold Santos lives and works in Mohkinstsis/Calgary

Haema Sivanesan
CURATOR

Haema Sivanesan is a curator, researcher and art writer with extensive experience across a range of sectors in the visual arts in Canada and abroad.  She has held leadership and curatorial positions in public art galleries, artist-run centres and festivals, most recently as a Curator, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2015-2021); and Consulting Curator at the Bengal Foundation, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2014-2018). Before immigrating to Canada from Australia in 2005, she was a curator in the Asian art department at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1996-2004). Her research typically focuses on Asian and Asian diasporic transnational and transcultural art histories. In 2018, she was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (New York) Curatorial Research Fellowship; and in 2016, the recipient of a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation (Hong Kong) multi-year research and exhibition development grant for the project In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice (2022). She is the newly appointed Director, Leighton Studios and Program Partnerships at the Banff Centre.

Human Capital is presented in partnership with the Mackenzie Art Gallery

Contemporary Conversations Presents:
Chitra Ganesh & Human Capital

Thursday, October 13, 2022

Extended as public programs of Chitra Ganesh: Astral Dance & Human Capital, please join Contemporary Calgary for a series of Contemporary Conversations in celebration of the opening of our fall exhibitions.

About the Speakers

Chitra Ganesh

ARTIST

Chitra Ganesh (b. 1975 Brooklyn, New York, USA) received a BA in Art-Semiotics and Comparative Literature from Brown University, Providence, RI in 1996. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001 and received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, NY in 2002. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Across a twenty-year practice, Chitra Ganesh has developed an expansive body of work rooted in drawing and painting, which has evolved to encompass animations, wall drawings, collages, computer generated imagery, video, and sculpture. Through studies in literature, semiotics, social theory, science fiction, and historical and mythic texts, Ganesh attempts to reconcile representations of femininity, sexuality, and power absent from the artistic and literary canons. She often draws on Hindu and Buddhist iconography and South Asian forms such as Kalighat and Madhubani, and is currently negotiating her relationship to these images with the rise of right wing fundamentalism in India.

Tak Pham

CURATOR

Tak Pham is Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. He holds an M.F.A in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. He has curated exhibitions for the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2019-present); Varley Art Gallery, Markham (2020); Nuit Blanche Toronto, Toronto (2017); Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto (2017); Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto (2017); and Y+ Contemporary, Scarborough (2016), among others. His writings and reviews have appeared in Canadian Art, ESPACE art actuel, esse arts + opinions, GalleriesWest, Studio Magazine, ArtAsiaPacific and Hyperallergic.

Nurgül Rodriguez

ARTIST

Nurgül Rodriguez is an artist with an interdisciplinary practice and a PhD student at Werklund School of Education. She has an active individual practice of disciplines and media including porcelain, installation, handmade paper, printmaking, three-dimensional pieces, and more recently socially engaged and collaborative projects. Her work is social, political and personal with a focus on issues of immigration, diasporas, borders and cultures. She explores becoming a diasporic individual during identity formation within a new culture. Nurgul settled in Calgary in 2009 after many nomadic years of living in Turkey, the United States and Spain with her family. She currently lives in Calgary making, writing, teaching, collaborating and always learning.

Nura Ali

ARTIST

Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her wide-ranging practice investigates the linguistic scaffolding upholding the assumptions we bring to the act of reading and writing. Alongside her visual arts practice, Nura is also a prolific writer, a lifelong learner and has participated in various national and international residencies. Her work has been shown nationally and received numerous awards and grants; most recently from the Calgary Arts Development, the Rozsa Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. When she is not curled up with a book or pottering around her garden, Nura is dreaming up ways to dismantle oppressive structures and for this reason, became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionized workers cooperative whose mission it is to transform labour practices in the arts sector and create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural workers.

Marigold Santos

ARTIST

Marigold Santos pursues an interdisciplinary art practice involving drawn, painted, and printed works, sculpture, tattooing, and sound. Her work explores self-hood and identity that embraces multiplicity, fragmentation and empowerment, as informed by diasporic experiences. She holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and an MFA from Concordia University. As a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, she continues to exhibit widely across Canada. Marigold Santos lives and works in Mohkinstsis/Calgary