LAURA ANZOLA & MATTHEW WADDELL

(she/her & he/him)

Laura Anzola (b. Bogotá, Colombia) and Matthew Waddell (b. Calgary, Canada)  have been Calgary-based collaborators for over seven years, creating work both under their own names, and through their collective Axis Z Media Arts (AZMA). They’ve conceived and generated multiple award-winning projects that scrutinize the relationship between human interaction and digital media, many of which have been presented at festivals, galleries, and theatre spaces across Canada.

ORDER & CHAOS

Inspired by the painted white and yellow lines present within many parking environments, Order and Chaos reimagines the rigidity, temporary proprietorship and implied order within these spaces. Climbing into the back of an unassuming rental truck, the audience enters into a hypnotic landscape of geometry and illusion, where the straight and confining lines of the outside parking lot blur into a chaotic world of morphing shapes and ever-shifting perspectives. 

Come park your mind in a dimension of non-boundaries and cross-eyed illusions and stay for a while. 

AUDREY LANE COCKETT

(they/them)

Audrey Lane Cockett is a poet, spoken word artist, filmmaker, artistic director, educator, and ecologist based in Treaty 7 land, Calgary AB. Their work is rooted in Wild, both outside and in. They are a passionate advocate for mental health awareness, connection, and intersectional care for the natural world. Audrey Lane’s work embodies wild feminist rhetoric, political discontent, tender feels in a body that overheard it was broken, deep time, and river rhythm. They are invested in exploring poetry, performance, artistic fusion, community, learning, healing, and transformation.

SOME OF OUR PARTS

An immersive-interactive-intimate-brief-bespoke-poetry-performance! The softest tailgate! Greater than! ‘Some of our Parts’ welcomes you into the Element – to get cozy for 4 to 7 minutes, intuitively pick and pull a car-part-card from the deck, drift into the soundscape and poem that corresponds, and revel in the space between the spaces, the total loss, the repair, the recovery, the movement, the parts, the whole.

GARY MCMILLAN

(he/him)

Gary McMillan is a painter and 3-D artist living and working in Calgary. Since a young age, he has engaged in making interesting objects meant to delight and challenge whoever happened to stumble across his creations. He attended Alberta College of Art in 1989, graduating with distinction in 1991. He has currently been making 3-D projects from fine jewelry to cardboard sculpted alien beings to twelve foot snow carvings.

HORB

A hatchback-turned-beast affectionately called “Horb” by the artist’s son, this monster is constructed from a “skin” of painted garden fabric, literally turning the car into a monster. The deep shadowy gullet of the car-creature is occupied by a diminutive second beast as the larger one’s companion/operator. The sculpture comments on the mechanical denizens of the parking lot as forming a varied population of distinct types to which multiple taxonomies could easily be applied. As they bask in the sun or move idly about, these shiny monsters could be categorized by their size, number of openings, color patterns, or most importantly, by how much status their respective operators possess.

​​KEITH MURRAY

(they/them)

Keith Murray is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, designer, activist, speaker, and facilitator based in Calgary, Treaty 7, Canada. Keith is also a faith leader in their third year of Seminary; a Candidate for Ordained Ministry in the United Church of Canada. Keith has presented their work around the world, including the MoMA NYC, and Witte de With, NL, and was the first artist-in-residence at Union Theological Seminary in New York, through AA Bronson’s Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice. Murray has designed theatrical installations on ice and snow for NiX, and projected stories on 100-foot-tall trees for Out On a Limb.  Keith won the 2014 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Integrated Design with for their Art Direction on Nothing But Sky. Keith has had the pleasure of innovating along with Kendra Fanconi, new creative projects to support trans, two-spirit and gender non-conforming young people, under the Learn By Heart banner in partnership with Trans Care BC and Playwrights Theatre Centre. Keith is currently developing new work with Pacific Theatre, bringing to life the story of trans byzantine monks in ABBAMMA! the musical.

Keith Murray’s performance featured the one and only Jamie Tea (they/she/he), professional actor, vocalist, and artist.

PARKED IN NEUTRAL

After millions of years living in trees in tight-knit communities, picking gnats out of each others fur, we have reduced our corporeal communications to 280 character transmissions. Inter-carnationality traded in, to dial in to the digital facsimile. Abandoning our archaic and analogue connections, connecting our socialities to the immediacy of social media.

Knock on the door no more! Notifications, Alerts, blurts, blogs n vlogs. Scribbles, stamped and sent on ships—trade em in! Telegrams, telegraphs, telephones, TXTs, Tweets, TikTalkin’,  Snappin’,  Chattin’ n Zoomin’. From S.O.S. to SMS, Dial-up to DSL, Fax Machines to Fibre Optic n 5G. Lift-off from meatspace, launch into cyberspace, rocket to the meme-o-sphere!

Via semiotics we relate in meme-space; our bodies, our senses we truncate. In place of conversation: platforms, protest placards and parades, soapboxes and comment sections, convoys, “content creators,” and commentators, demonstration, occupations, retaliation, conflagration. Dialogue and discourse, sacred chants and symphonies reduced to slogans, symbols, memes, phrases and whistles, shouts and screams.

Who’s Right, Who’s Wrong, with whom do you belong? Are you with us or against us, Left of Right, Right of Left, Centrist? Are you for Freedom or Responsibility?  Justice-seeking or apolitical? Standing your ground or silent? 

Oppressor, Oppressed, Privileged, Marginalized, Victim, Victimizer, Victor, Woke, Joke, Sheep, Shill, Silenced, Silencer, Snowflake, Self-Obsessed, Narcissist, Rule-Follower, Red-pill, Redneck, Karen, Knuckle-dragger, Racist, Republican, Reptilian, You People, Those People, Monster, Mob, Bully, Biggot, Fairy, F*ggot, Freak, Tr*nny, Transphobe, Triggered, Trigger-happy, Hippy, Homo, Homophobe, Globo-Homo, Ex-Gay, Homo No Mo, Slurrer, Shit-Stirrer, Ciscum, SJW, No-Fun, PC, UCP, NDP, GOP, Liberal, Libertarian, Libtard, Socialist, Communist, Fascist, Nazi, Feminazi, Supremacist, Elitist, Pinko Commie, Queer, Dyke, Butch, Bitch, Queen, Cog in the machine, Pansy, Patsy, Puppet, Hater, Tolerator, Xenophobe, Xenophile, Exoticizer, Colonizier, Sympathizer, Nativist, Nationalist, Sensationalist, Dispensationist, Democrat, Demigog, Nutjob, Antifa, Anti-Vaxxer, Masker, Anarchist, Antichrist, Xtian, WASP, Whitey, One of them, Missonary, Militant, Monster, Mob, Incel, Rebel, Cancelled, Breeder, Bootlicker, Boomer, Groomer, Doomsdayer, Naysayer, Sending Thoughts ‘n Prayers, Coward, Defender, Fighter, Offender, Freedumb, Fool, Fake News Follower, Fearmonger, Not-Belonger…

Tired of it all? – Join us in the Neutral Zone: Where we say nothing, stand for nothing, identify with nothing, and are nothing. 

Here no one belongs or relates to any one or anything. There are no rights to defend, no injustice or justice. No one to believe or trust, no worries, no fuss, no others here, there’s just us. 

Twitter:       @PARKEDINNEUTRAL

Instagram:  @parkedinneutral

#ParkedInNeutral #NeutralZone

KHALID OMOKANYE

(he/him)

Khalid Omokanye in an artist, designer, professor, craftsman, and small business entrepreneur. He has a BA with minors in architecture, communications, and visual arts, and holds a Masters in Architecture. His extensive travels have brought him around the world, notably to work briefly at The Agency of Sculpture in Yakadandah, Australia, where he assisted with the building and transport of large scale sculptures for manufacturing. His residential and commercial design can be seen throughout Calgary, with his most recent project transforming the front room of Roberto Ostberg Gallery into a cocktail and tapas bar called The Artist Lounge. Khalid was the lead artist behind ISOLATED BABEL, a collaborative sculpture unfolding like an exquisite corpse over a COVID winter as part of The Hibernation Project.

CLEAN YA TRACKS

An exercise in greenwashing, ‘Clean Ya Tracks’ is a copper wire sculpture sitting in the back of a pickup truck, filled with tree seeds that slowly blow away as the truck drives – potentially spreading the trees that could erase the truck’s carbon footprint in a hopeful (though perhaps futile) gesture. 

The copper sculpture was created in a style reminiscent of the late sculptor and the artist’s friend, Cameron Roberts.

KEITH RODGER

(he/him)

Keith Rodger is a musician and occasional performance based artist who is exploring the possibility of being happy and present. Keith’s performance art practice is centered in personal growth, with a focus on re-examining and reimagining his habit energies and his perceived personal boundaries using the uncomfortable pressure and energy of public gaze and (generally self imposed) expectation. 

TRYING TO BE A PLANT

“I, Keith Rodger, am hereby scheming to fill my mini van with a layer of nice friendly dirt upon a raised wooden platform with a 3’x3’ish sized hole in the middle, where I will sit amongst the dirt, giving the illusion of my van containing a lot more dirt than it actually will.  There will be a variety of flowering and leafy plants living in the dirt around me and an interactive feature through which people outside the van will be able to participate in watering me, the boy or me the plant or them the plants or you can turn the lights off and on and I won’t get mad at all because I am a plant now.  There may also be a number of insects in the van and some gross food for the insects.  I will sit silently amongst these things at each location and it will be well.  I may also get pretty culty with candle light in the van.  There may also be moths.”

MAGGIE SCHAEFER

(she/her)

Maggie Schaefer was born in Calgary, AB in 1981 and graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design in 2008. As a graphic designer, illustrator and photographer Maggie has created websites and media for comedian Trent McClellan, Alberta Dance Theatre, ACAD Public Design, ACAD Extended Studies, Cornerstone Millworks amongst others. In her fine arts practice Maggie enjoys exhibiting in group shows such as The Hibernation Project and Idle Worship, where she can explore themes that capture her imagination.  Her preferred mediums are photos, mixed media, acrylic, cut paper and digital media. Humor is often used in her work to tell her tales.

COME GATHER HERE

Using familiar methods used by car dealerships to gain attention, ‘Come Gather Here’ welcomes the public to come and see ‘Idle Worship: A mobile exhibition’. First noticed at a distance by way of a large helium balloon high up in the sky tethered by a line decorated with glittering tassels and small flags, visitors will make their way over to satisfy their curiosity. Upon arriving at the gathering of art cars, visitors can interact with each artist and find out more about the event and its sponsors from the host at ‘Come Gather Here’. For those wanting to get in on the action an interactive racetrack with miniature versions of each art car will be set-up for visitors to race here. 

CAITLIND R.C. BROWN & WAYNE GARRETT

(she/her & he/him)

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett explore intersections between light + dark, nature + culture, DIY + institutional, individual + collective. Centering their practice in relational space, the duo create projects that beckon viewers with novel materials and participatory contexts. Their work has been exhibited extensively across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Whether exhibiting in formal galleries, pre-demolition buildings, islands in the Elbow River, or their own backyard, Caitlind & Wayne believe in art’s radical potential to transform the everyday through a critical shift in perspective. Caitlind & Wayne co-organized IDLE WORSHIP.

IDLE WORSHIP was organized by Caitlind & Wayne as an offshoot of The Hibernation Project.

SHRINE TO BLACK GOLD

Inside the trunk of an unassuming 2001 Mazda MPV is a shimmering golden shrine flowing with motor oil, created for worshiping car culture, oil & gas, and the blessed byproducts of ‘Black Gold.’ Praise be to Alberta’s richest resource! Kneel before the altarnator, reflect in the deep black well, and pray for blessings of wealth, great fortune, and a new age of economic prosperity bringing eternal happiness.