Eye on the Esplanade: Grow, community, culture

By Medicine Hat News on June 1, 2018.

I feel really grateful. From a young age, I knew I wanted to be an artist, and I’m lucky enough to have a career that allows me to engage creatively on a daily basis. As the manager and curator of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibition Program, I research Alberta artists and organize art exhibitions that tour non-traditional gallery spaces, such as schools and libraries throughout southeast Alberta.

The provincial government has funded the program for the past 33 years, and has been delivered through the Esplanade for 25 of those years. I love my job and I love the people I work with. Working at the Esplanade also occasionally gives me an opportunity to work on special projects not related to TREX. These projects can take several months to come to fruition, and it takes a team of people to accomplish them.

This past October, we began the Esplanade’s exterior vitrine (glass display case) project. The exterior vitrines are approximately nine feet wide by five feet high by two feet deep. I think of them as dioramas. Vitrines we’re all familiar with are located on the outside of downtown department stores. They usually serve as advertising space, a place to feature products, usually with some sort of theme.

We began our project by researching contemporary vitrine designs. Apple, Nike and the clothing store Anthropologie are quite innovative when it comes to vitrine design. Their displays are eye catching, colourful, unique and revolutionary. But unlike those companies, we aren’t aiming to sell but to communicate a theme. The theme we chose to inspire our design was “community.” The next step was to figure out how to visually convey this theme in three nine-by-five-foot vitrines, as the concept of community is quite broad.

In recent years, the Esplanade’s programming has had several interactive components — for example, the “Make Your Mark” wall during the Esplanade@Ten celebration, and the handmade-paper-flower garden in the vignette “Grow: Medicine Hat’s Gardening Heritage.” The most exciting component of these projects was the community participation. Everyone who visited the Esplanade during the Esplanade@Ten celebration was able to write or draw on the gallery wall with a variety of paint markers. Children who attended our summer art camps were invited to create paper flowers, which were added to the “Grow” vignette, and it was the most beautiful garden we’ve ever seen! We felt these projects encompassed the theme of community, since children, youth and adults in Medicine Hat had generated the content.

We decided to use these projects as the inspiration for our vitrine design. Each vitrine is based on a word that encompassed the theme of past community projects: GROW, COMMUNITY and CULTURE. We enlisted a local design company, Flag 5 Inc., owned and operated by Melissa Chinski, to create the design files. After several meetings involving much measuring, painting, printing, cutting, sewing, stuffing and installing, we have accomplished our goal: new exterior vitrines for the Esplanade that represent our community.

So if you find yourself walking or driving by the Esplanade on Second Avenue or Fourth Street, something may catch your eye — perhaps a five-foot flower created by art camp participants, or floating, three-dimensional pillow letters, or a colourful graffiti-filled installation of hundreds of words and drawings.

Thank you, Medicine Hat. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Xanthe Isbister is the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Travelling Exhibitions program manager/curator at the Esplanade.