Nickle Arts Museum, University of Calgary
June 20 - July 27, 2008 (Main Gallery), June 6 - Sept 27, 2008 (East Gallery)
Public Opening: July 1, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art + Design
July 3 - August 31, 2008
Public Opening: July 3, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Glenbow Museum
July 25 – September 14th, 2008
Public Opening: July 25, 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

A Collaborative, 3-Venue exhibition opening at the Glenbow Museum, the Alberta College of Art and Design's Illingworth Kerr Gallery and the University of Calgary's Nickle Arts Museum.

Since Jeff Spalding's arrival at Glenbow, works of art from across Canada have been pouring into the museum. In a spontaneous show of affection for our new CEO and President, artists, art collectors, dealers and supporters from coast to coast have generously donated over 600 works worth over $1.2 million. From video installation to paintings to photographs to sculptures - the range is absolutely stunning!

Glenbow is thrilled to share these spectacular gifts with audiences across the city. Come explore this treasure trove of art in an unprecedented three-venue exhibition at Glenbow, the Alberta College of Art and Design's Illingworth Kerr Galleryand the University of Calgary's Nickle Art Museum.

Organized by Wayne Baerwaldt, Director/Curator, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Alberta College of Art + Design

Sled Island Music Festival is a four-day, multi-venue festival which showcases a wide variety of emerging and established musical talent.  This year, Sled Island is adding a visual arts component to the roster.  SI: Visual Arts is a chance to see the diverse work of young artists and cultural producers. SI08: Art + Design will occupy a number of downtown spaces, and is an opportunity to question a range of popular visual experiences, and examine how a new generation reads and bridges new art with ideas of the past.

Check out the following four installations/performances at Glenbow!

Wim Delvoye: Cloaca #5
June 25 - August 17
2nd floor Glenbow, Gallery 7

Wim Delvoye's work challenges traditional conventions of taste. In a series of groundbreaking kinetic installations Ghent-based Delvoye has been developing since the mid-1990s, the artist has created machine-sculptures which duplicate the human digestive system without calling on ‘human characteristics'. The various components of the digestive system are replicated, creating an intestinal microclimate of bacterial flora. The work requires constant care, much like a human body, and produces a surprise every day!

Wildflowers of Manitoba: Noam Gonick & Luis Jacob
June 25 - July 13
2nd floor Glenbow, Gallery 7

This installation includes still photos, moving images, sound and performance art from Lake Winnipeg's shores. The installation includes interrelated short film projections in which four young men act out an improbable survivalist lifestyle during the summer of 2006. The script establishes a "nature" film set and a nostalgic vision of a youth-cult. The sets and subjects evoke a distant, more innocent era for alternative, collective lifestyles circa 1967. The work includes film projections, a sound track by the Quebeçois band Harmonium, forest camp gear and live models set in a 12-foot high geodesic dome.

Peaches' Pit (Fan Base)
June 25 - August 17
3rd floor Glenbow, next to Mavericks

Merrill Beth Nisker, better known as Peaches, is an electroclash artist based in Berlin, Germany. She plays almost all the instruments for her songs, programs her own electric beats and produces her records. Nisker's music and performance are preoccupied with gender identity meant to incite and radicalize audiences. Her lyrics and live shows self-consciously blur the distinction between male and female. The installation takes the form of a unique cave, its walls lined with things fans have thrown onstage during her concerts over the last four years. You'll also hear audio of Peaches' fans co-performing one of her best known songs.

Matt Masters, Terrance Houle and others
June 25-28; July 4-12
Glenbow ConocoPhillips Theatre at 7:30 p.m.
$7 per person
Call 403.268.4110 for tickets

Classic country singer and Calgary performance artist, Matt Masters, has co-created a multimedia Western cabaret musical called Don Coyote. Masters plays the role of Don Coyote in a 12-part stage cabaret where Masters sings country music while actors in three key character roles drive the narrative.  Calgary artist Terrance Houle's original video projections will be part of a changing and dynamic backdrop.

Don Coyote is a 21st-century resident of southern Alberta who goes crazy and becomes a cowboy troubadour, roaming rural Alberta while singing songs and righting wrongs. Don Coyote's story is not a re-telling of Don Quixote but does draw inspiration and parallels from it, using the windmills of Pincher Creek, for example, as alternate geographical markers and illusions to power while providing a great setting for a story that is largely a cyber construct from Don Coyote's computer.

Co-produced by the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art + Design.

Miriam Bankey (Calgary, Ab);

Kyle Beal (Montreal, Qc);

Dave And Jenn (Calgary, Ab);

Patrick Lundeen (Brooklyn, Ny);

Chris Millar (Calgary, Ab);

Kim Neudorf (Calgary, Ab);

Ryan Slugget (Austin, Tx).

Dates Still Tentative
4th floor gallery, Glenbow

Artistic innovation is at the core of this proposed exhibition, bringing to light the work of artists whose aesthetic and material concerns have been formed by a Calgary milieu over the past ten years. Can we deduce the influences of a Calgary painting community, from artists such as John Will to Chris Cran? Are there disparate influences that do not have precedents in this milieu? Is there a hybrid aesthetic in development? These and other questions will be examined through the exhibition and enter a critical discourse in printed matter produced by the Sled Island Music Festival (June 25-28, Olympic Plaza and other venues), a co-sponsor of the exhibition. Wil Murray is the exhibit's lead curator.