Conceptual Themes

Art can express the exchange of nature and culture through stories. Site-specific artists are often storytellers who relay poetics of place. Storytellers weave narratives designed to interest, amuse, remind, warn, or educate. While the most enthralling stories are often rooted in real events, a merging of illusion with memory can produce a captivating narrative through which to communicate the human condition.

Just as narrated stories can jump between historic, contemporary, and futuristic periods, stories told through art can thread together different time frames. Art can trace tales honoring Bend in the Bow’s past while envisioning and stimulating its future development. Art can offer a path that links the present moment of lived experience to both past recollections and future predictions through immersive experiences that physically connect people to the stories being told.

Calgarians are forward thinkers who like to take risks and try new things to push The City forward. This is evidenced at Bend in the Bow through the stories of William Pearce and Colonel Walker, community volunteers, public agencies, and industrial companies who collaborated to manifest a vision of reclaiming the Wildlands, and the teams of scientists and engineers exploring new ways to rebuild and protect habitat along the Bow River.

Like science, art is an exploration. Sitespecific artists investigate place-based systems, stories, materials, and phenomena that support and broaden the concepts of their investigation. With the right collaborations and procedures in place, art at Bend in the Bow can exhibit an exploratory theme, mixing boldness with caution, innovation with flexibility, to inspire generations of Calgarians on one level to explore the parks of Bend in the Bow and on another level to move The City in new directions.

Use of the scientific method combined with inventive practices of manipulating aesthetic, natural, and cultural systems to broadly elicit habitat-forming processes is an area for ample exploration by artists at Bend in the Bow. This could include environmental and sculptural treatments that are based in scientific data but are yet untried, conceptual framing devices that highlight processes at work in the landscape, a combination of both, or something else entirely.

Nature will survive into the future in some fantastic format, but we do not know what it will look like or act like. We do not know what people of the future will value—whether it will be wild, undisturbed nature or nature that has been managed to survive the changes that our world is undergoing. It is important that we continue to experiment and learn and develop tools for many possible future scenarios.

The art opportunities identified in this plan offer artists possibilities for collaborating with scientists to develop and test experimental methods of ecological stewardship that could be of value to present as well as future generations. Particularly at the Wildlands, with its already highly altered soil chemistry, art might experiment with new methods for regenerating ecological function in an urban condition.

The “controls” for these experiments are the large sections of Bend in the Bow that will be left unchanged or will be enhanced with only a very light touch, leaning toward conservation rather than experimentation.

Many natural systems move across the site. Perhaps most important to Bend in the Bow is the migration of wildlife. Many animals travel through seasonally. Also critical are the migration of the river’s gravel bars, islands, and channels; and the migration, or succession, of the riverine forest. All of these types of migration occur over time and space.

Cultural migrations at Bend in the Bow are evident in its layers of accumulated history, the transportation network of trains, trails, pathways and bridges that pass through it, and the goods that have moved across the land.

Art can assist to reveal and bring fluidity to beneficial natural migrations like wildlife, as well as cultural migrations of history, industry and knowledge. Conversely, art can also be used to impede harmful migrations like soil pollutants into ground water and flood water, invasive species, and people into fragile ecologies.

Wildness is a construct of human consciousness, a recognition of being both a part of and separate from the natural world. Experiences of wildness occur in the liminal state of recognizing this otherness, or presence of something that exceeds cultural definition. Wildness is a subjectively defined state that varies with each moment of human history and to some degree within each person at any given moment in time.

Art objects are themselves not constructions of wildness, but art can be conceived and placed with an aspiration to arouse perceptive experiences or impressions of wildness.

Some artists seek to reveal phenomena of the world around us through objects of wonder. Wonders, historically, were rare objects that intertwined nature and artifice in usual ways. Collections of wonders were the precursors to natural history museums.

Wonder is also a dynamic passion; a “sudden surprise of the soul” (as described by Rene Descartes) in the presence of something mysterious and extraordinary, but real. Wonder happens at the line between the known and unknown. It elicits curiosity and inspires inquiry. Often accompanying an experience of wonder is an investigation, long or short, that brings a sudden realization of knowledge to the viewer, an “a-ha” moment.

Seeing a rainbow remains a delight even after you understand the circumstances and science behind its occurrence. The experience of radiant color gripping the visual senses is arguably even enhanced by that understanding. The knowledge of how sun meets rain at perfect angles to the horizon and eye, and how that orients and places you in the momentary environment, is only surpassed by the emotional experience of being in the presence of the light.

The sublime, also a passion, unlike wonder, does not reveal itself. The sublime occurs when we encounter a phenomenon that we intuit is infinite but which we are unable to understand through reason. It is the recognition and awe of our incapacity to attain a full understanding of the vastness simultaneous with the fleeting realization that an “all” of the universe exists. The sublime can not be represented or predicted. It is in many ways a chance occurrence affecting different people in different circumstances, similar to wildness. The sublime is transformational. It can change vocabularies and break conventions to evoke hidden potential.

The sublime arises most often in the presence of nature and, coupled with the “beautiful,” has been an aesthetic that has inspired landscape painters and designers for centuries.

Related, and applying to the Wildlands, is an idea of the “industrial sublime,” wherein industrial works are transfigured into aesthetic objects. These objects are made heroic by their isolation and lack of functional context. These often monumental forms can evoke the sublime as expressions of our often precarious attempts to control nature through technology.

An augmented reality is a mediated reality in which information about the environment is overlaid onto the real world. Merging fiction with fact, illusion with memory, an augmented reality can provide an enchanting, often interactive artistic lens through which to experience stories about a place.

In digital media, augmented reality refers to supplementing real-world environments with computer-generated content. Analogously, site-based artworks like those proposed for Bend in the Bow can place technologically simple physical interventions into the real landscape in such a way that they augment how people perceive environmental conditions—framing them, magnifying them, erasing them, altering them—actually or conceptually, depending on the artist’s exploration.

An augmented reality can add information, cast a future vision, reflect a past scene, overlap storylines, or enhance people’s understanding of the present.