Camper: Museum of the Bow, July 6 to 26, 2010, Truck Gallery, Calgary

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"The Camper"

The Camper installation, on location, courtesy Truck Gallery, Calgary.

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"The Camper"

The Camper installation, on location, courtesy Truck Gallery, Calgary.

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"The Camper"

The Camper installation, on location, courtesy Truck Gallery, Calgary.

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Camper: Museum of the Bow, July 6 to 26, 2010, Truck Gallery, Calgary

BY: Mary-Beth Laviolette

The white 1975 Dodge Empress is a period piece — pristine-vintage with original decor. But the Alberta license plate is current and below the back window is a sign identifying the motorhome as CAMPER: Contemporary Art Mobile Public Exhibition Rig. Belonging to the Calgary artist-run centre, Truck, CAMPER is the gallery’s home-away-from-home in the warmer season, used for off-site art projects and for engaging people who, as Director Renato Vitic describes it, “would never step into a gallery.”

Now in its fifth year of operation and outfitted with an indoor video monitor, a stereo sound system and an outdoor screen, the Dodge is a little too snug to be a bona-fide gallery. No matter, really, because motorhomes are all about the ‘outdoors’. In previous years, CAMPER has camped-out at summer festivals, luring in passers-by with interactive projects and works on display, inside and out.

This summer, the artmobile is in the service of Celebration of the Bow, a public art festival organized by The City of Calgary Public Art Program. The idea is to draw people to the Bow River throughout the summer by creating temporary public art ‘interventions’— in this case, having the river and its surroundings the subject of each art project. Truck has invited three artists and collectives to take over CAMPER for three-week residencies.

In July, Bergen, Norway-based artists Chloe Lewis & Andrew Taggart will install The Museum of the Bow in CAMPER, and the summer winds up in September with a piece by Berlin artist Cecile Belmont, Letter Performances — in which groups of Calgarians will come together to spell out Bow-inspired sentences with individual lettered t-shirts.

In between, Argentinean artist José Luis Torres will bring city within a river and a river within a cityto the project in August — he plans to build a series of temporary look-outs that, as he writes, will take the visitor on a journey, an “immersion in nature” on platforms and walkways. The work will focus special attention on the people, geography, and memories that make up the river’s identity.

A sculptor and installation artist with a Masters in landscape architecture, Torres has lived in Montreal since 2003. This will be his first visit to Calgary. He’s interested in how the Bow, flowing directly from the Canadian Rockies, is different from the landscape of the St. Lawrence River, or the riverine environment around his hometown of Córdoba, Argentina, which is cut in two by the La Cañada canal.

The artist says the rudimentary wooden structures he builds for the Bow will echo the river’s natural architecture, a novel intervention for a downtown area largely dominated by the highrise environment of business and commerce.

Find locations for CAMPER at truck.ca