Exhibition Opening
Erik Olson + Preston Pavlis
September 25
6:00-9:00 PM
Please join Contemporary Calgary on Thursday, September 25, from 6-9 PM, for the opening of two solo exhibitions, Erik Olson: In the Garden and Preston Pavlis: You there.
Doors
6:00 PMRemarks
6:45 PM | AtriumIn-Conversation with artists Erik Olson, Preston Pavlis and Senior Curator Kanika Anand
7-8 PM | Heather Edwards TheatreGalleries Close
9:00 PM
FREE to the public. No registration is required.
Seating for the In-Conversation with artists Erik Olson, Pavlis and Senior Curator Kanika Anand is first-come, first-served.
Erik Olson
In the Garden
September 25, 2025—February 15, 2026
Silent Spikes uses movement, theatrical staging and historical narrative to question existing ideas about the performance of masculinity, and the way those normative performances become mythologized in figures like the cowboy. If the cowboy can be understood as shorthand for a set of ideas that says as much about the violent foundations of maleness in the American imagination as it does about how we celebrate the values exemplified by this figure, then where do men of Asian descent find themselves within this representational landscape? And how can sensuousness complicate these performances, and allow for an erotics of both resistance and care?
A major component of the video reflects on the entangled histories of Westward expansion and Chinese immigration, examining how they shape cultural myths and collective memory. Through a two-channel video installation and accompanying photographs, Kenneth Tam explores the performance of masculinity—how it is constructed, codified, and mythologized in the iconic trope of the cowboy.
References are made to the 1867 strike by Chinese railroad workers in the Sierra Nevada Mountains—one of the largest labour actions in U.S. history. Between the 1840s and 1870s, Chinese workers played a critical yet often overlooked role in constructing two transcontinental railways: the Central Pacific in the United States and the Pacific Railway in Canada. These histories are evoked through interpretive narration and filmed sequences shot in the abandoned tunnels of Northern California—monumental voids carved into the landscape by these workers, now haunting symbols of erasure and endurance.
In the making of Silent Spikes, Tam worked with a group of untrained Asian American men, inviting them into a collaborative and unscripted process. Some don cowboy attire and echo the gestures of rodeo riders, while others engage in loosely scored solo and group activities that blur the boundary between roleplay and self-expression. Through this process, new and expansive expressions of male identity emerge—shaped by tenderness, resistance, and emotional complexity. Through their unscripted collaboration, the artist and his participants honour inherited struggles while centring vulnerability and connection as reparative forms of male embodiment.
Curated by Kanika Anand
Preston Pavlis
You there
September 25, 2025—February 15, 2026
You there—is it a greeting, a call, or a way of marking someone’s place? At once familiar and ambiguous, the phrase reflects the shifting dynamics at the heart of Preston Pavlis’ work: the act of seeing and being seen, the relation between self and other, and the distance between here and elsewhere.
Pavlis’ subjects are drawn from walks in and around the artist’s home in Halifax, where moments of quiet abandonment surface in both the ordinary and the unexpected. A beech tree in summer bloom, a discarded mattress, an upturned chair, or toys arranged on a stump—each holds a trace of something left behind, something at the edge of disappearance. Equally tender are the portraits of friends and family captured in gestures of rest, play, or introspection. Abandonment here is not only loss but also ease, presence, and the poetry of the everyday.
The works themselves reflect a duality—between image and object, distance and intimacy. Painted on one side and quilted on the other, they remain suspended between two modes of attention: the painterly, which invites contemplation from afar, and the tactile, which draws the viewer close. The painted compositions are richly textured, while the quilted side is stitched from worn pieces of clothing, each bearing traces of touch and use. What’s soft becomes structural; what’s discarded is made part of a new whole.
Cloth, like skin, holds memory. It folds, stretches, stains, and carries the marks of the body. Pavlis selects and uses fabric intuitively—drawn to the physical and visual weight of materials and their ability to suggest something else. A bleached piece of denim might resemble a cloudy sky; a worn piece of leather might suggest wood, mud, or skin. Shifting meanings keep the work open—cohesive in form, but resistant to collapse into a singular interpretation.
This layered materiality reflects a practice grounded in attention, care, and reuse. A playful dialogue unfolds between painting and quilting: a beech tree on one side is held by the image of a pair of jeans mid-jump on the other; a discarded mattress finds its echo in a stitched arrangement of pillowcases. These connections are subtle but deliberate, reinforcing the relationship between surface, memory, and the act of looking.
Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is invited to change position—to step back, come close, and look again. These works resist a fixed point of view. They ask us to move with them, to follow the artist’s gaze, and to trace the tension between the intimate and the elusive. Like the act of walking, seeing here is not passive but embodied. Each work holds a moment suspended—an encounter, a trace, a quiet call extended across distance.
