- 2018 -
Unpacking IKG:
60 Years a Gallery
An archival and fine art exhibition unpacking 60 years of history at the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary Alberta Canada. The exhibition was the culmination of a year's worth of research during a curatorial and archival internship with the Univerty's campus gallery.
Unpacking IKG: 60 Years a Gallery [Sept 25 – Dec 8, 2018]
This exhibition traced six decades of exhibitions at the Alberta College of Art and Design (now Alberta University of the Arts). While art and craft work had been shown by the art college in various locations around Calgary since its inception in 1916, 1958 marked the moment when the art school began programming intentional exhibitions on campus in a dedicated gallery space. To mark this occasion, a timeline of posters, photographs, and archival materials drawn from multiple collections was assembled—not as a fixed story, but as a starting point to understand the gallery's continuous evolution.
Rather than offering a singular history, Unpacking IKG asks: how do galleries remember? What stories are preserved in posters, catalogues, and photographs—and which ones are missing? How have curatorial voices, artistic practices, and community expectations shifted over time, and what does that tell us about the present moment?
By approaching the gallery’s past as something to be questioned rather than neatly summarized, the exhibition opened space for viewers to consider their own relationships to institutional histories. In doing so, it suggested that archives are not endpoints, but living resources—materials to return to, unpack, and reinterpret as our cultural conversations continue to evolve.
Project Gallery
