A River Runs Through It: How Public Art Tells the Story of Calgary’s Rivers
Artists help us understand who we are in relation to our greatest natural resource — water
As the Bow River flooded its banks and overwhelmed the city in June 2013, artist-duo Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees, known together as Sans façon, sat in the cafeteria of Calgary’s Water Centre and wondered what to do. Sans façon was leading WATERSHED+ at the time. The ambitious project, launched two years earlier as part of Calgary’s Utilities and Environment Protection (UEP) Public Art Plan, embedded artists with engineers, architects, water management experts and municipal staff to connect Calgarians with our watershed through a series of public art works. In the wake of the flood, however, Blanc and Surtees questioned their roles while the river seemed to rebel against the city. “I’m sure we can go fill sandbags,” Blanc said at the time. “But what does an artist do in this situation?”
Just then, an overworked City of Calgary water engineer walked through the cafeteria. The man had barely slept or seen his family for a week. He paused at Sans façon’s table. “He said, ‘We need artists more than ever now,’” recalls Blanc. That engineer, along with others, shared with Sans façon how engineers can talk in graphs and in numbers, but they need an emotional understanding of what is happening. That’s what artists can do.
We all know Calgary’s origin story. The city grew from the place where the Bow and Elbow Rivers meet, a place of convergence where people had gathered for millennia. In a way, our rivers are the original storytellers of this place. They are the enduring authors of a narrative that flows through time and geography. As such, the rivers become a different kind of natural resource for the artists that engage with them. The Bow and Elbow provide inspiration and an opportunity to translate Calgary’s riverine identity through public art. In turn, as the flood-weary engineer claimed, their work grants Calgarians an emotional understanding of who we are.
But engineers and other municipal employees are also part of our rivers’ grand narrative. After all, the Elbow and Bow don’t just simply flow between the riversides. The rivers flow into our homes, through our taps and hoses, and back into the watershed again. Blanc calls the workers who guide the water in and out of our daily lives an “army of carers.” Their usually invisible labour deserves to be celebrated through public art, too.
Left photo: Brian Tolle | Right photo: Kris Collins
INTO THE DAYLIGHT
During his time in Calgary in the 2010s, acclaimed New Yorkbased artist Brian Tolle met with members of the municipal water department and visited the Bow Glacier — not just the source of the eponymous river, but of the watershed that provides most of Calgary’s drinking water. Inspired by all he learned about the city’s water supply, Tolle created Outflow.
For this sculpture, which stands on the banks of the Bow River at Parkdale Plaza, Tolle used computer imaging software to create an inverted 3D image of Mount PeeChee, the third-highest peak in the Bow River watershed. Tolle then cast the inverted mountain in locally produced ductal concrete. The sculpture integrates into the city’s stormwater system, making it a functional part of the system. Viewers can walk through Outflow on a stainless steel bridge and watch stormwater travel through the sculpture to the Bow River just beyond via an outfall. “It seemed to me so interesting that the source of this river is this pristine glacial formation, coincidentally called an ‘outflow’ glacier,” Tolle said in an interview with The Calgary Herald at the time.
Photo: Brian Tolle
Outflow also allows for sunlight to strike the previously covered stormwater as it flows through, a process known as “daylighting,” which can help release certain volatile chemicals from the water before it flows into the river. “One of the best ways to show people where these pollutants were generated and how they make their way into the water was to ‘daylight’ it,” Tolle said in the Herald interview. Outflow also traps the occasional bit of trash or debris that might’ve made its way into the storm drain system. “It seems counterintuitive to allow trash to be collected in a public art project,” Tolle said. “At the same time, I think, what better way to demonstrate what really is happening than to expose it to the public.” The piece allows viewers to visualize the Bow’s journey through our civic infrastructure and imagine our own impact on the river’s health.
Left photo: Courtesy of Wilco Southwest | Right photo: Halo Drain by Sans façon
POLISHING THE WATERSHED
A few kilometres upstream from Outflow stands Dale Hodges Park, one of the largest initiatives and artworks undertaken by WATERSHED+. The park’s collaborators descended upon the former Klippert gravel pit on the Bow River’s northern bank with a pair of ambitions: first to restore the area into a riparian habitat and, second, to improve the stormwater drainage system on the site. Additionally, the artists wanted to look at how to bring people to an emotional connection with the watershed. This unique collaboration between the artists, The City of Calgary (UEP and Public Art departments) and WATERSHED+ consultants O2 Planning + Design, Source2Source and AECOM resulted in a project that melded these intentions that seemed to be at cross purposes: one based in ecology, one in engineering and one in art and society.
Opened in 2019, the $26.8-million project, of which $2.2 million went towards public art, has culminated in a park that makes the stormwater treatment process visible to viewers before the runoff enters the Bow River. Just like Outflow, Dale Hodges Park grants visitors insight into how our manufactured water systems interact with the natural world. In their artist statement, Sans façon explains, “Instead of an invisible system disconnected from citizens, we chose to use the journey of the stormwater and its part in the creation of different habitats to be apparent throughout.”
Stormwater flows from nearby residential communities into the circular Nautilus Pond on the western edge of the park where larger sediment particles are removed from the swirling water. The water then drops through a halo drain and streams slowly through polishing marshes, sculpted into sweeping curves by the design team, where the roots of wetland plants cleanse the stormwater of fine particulate. Finally, the water seeps through a wet marsh before reaching the outfall to the Bow, the stormwater now cleaned of at least half of its sediments.
Left photo: Courtesy of Sans façon | Right photo: Wilco Southwest
In turn, the wetlands offer a new biodiverse habitat for both flora and fauna. Nearly 50,000 woody and 40,000 emergent plants were included at the site, and the outfall stream feeds an important trout-rearing habitat. The park also forms a new locus on a wildlife corridor — a highway for beavers, skunks, deer and raccoons — from Bowness Park upstream to Edworthy Park to the east.
According to O2 Planning + Design, the park’s pathways and boardwalks “mimic and contrast” how the water flows, inviting visitors to “read the river’s story over time.” Never has stormwater treatment been this engaging. Or this beautiful.
A MOMENT IN TIME
Photos: Steve Gurysh
Kansas artist Steve Gurysh’s contribution to WATERSHED+, called Parts per trillion, was somewhat more ephemeral. During this threeyear project with Dynamic Environment Lab, Gurysh worked with UEP employees to 3D scan items — graffiti-tagged stones, a Cliff Swallow nest, a bison skull — derived from the Bow River watershed. He then populated a digital archive of these objects.
As he amassed his archive, Gurysh engaged with his UEP colleagues to learn about the vast tangle of geological, historical and anthropological forces that define the watershed. He investigated sediment flow, attended archeological digs and examined the inner workings of the city’s water infrastructure. The title of the piece was inspired by the researchers Gurysh engaged with and their ability to assess the watershed in astounding detail and resolution — literally in parts per trillion.
“Through this engagement with water experts in Calgary, I learned that Parts per trillion as an idea revealed a perspective, how even seemingly very small traces of human activity could have disproportionate effects downstream. I decided to meticulously recreate the graffitied stones [I came across at a bend in the river], as a way to record the marks made by anonymous people while considering how these gestures relate to the scale of the watershed, to imagine what might happen if the stones continued to be swept down the river, and how strange it would be to find these markings many miles from here, many years from now.”
Gurysh translated the 3D scans of his found objects back into physical forms by casting them in earthenware ceramic. On a snowy September day in 2019, Gurysh fired the pieces in a pit he dug at Edworthy Park’s riverside on the spot where an early 20th-century brick factory once stood. In his description of Parts per trillion, Gurysh wrote, “This gesture both finalizes the ceramic process, carbon-dating each object, while registering a visible mark of the landscape.”
The flow of the Bow River — or any river — might represent the unceasing flow of time. But Gurysh’s ceramics press pause on this chronology, preserving these objects in the moment of their discovery. Time, like the river, carries on, and all that remained of Gurysh’s riverine labours was the fading scar his pit kiln left behind.
GETTING PERSONAL
Varying Proximities sign: Hiba Abdallah
Perhaps the most intimate and whimsical contributions to the WATERSHED+ program came in 2014 from Broken City Lab (BCL), an Ontario-based collective. BCL’s artists Hiba Abdallah, Joshua Babcock and Justin Langois produced a series of river-engaged works called Varying Proximities. For one of these works, titled Subtext: River Signs, BCL installed 100 signs to stormwater outfall sites around Calgary with playful but probing questions such as: Is the river painful? Is the river hopeless? Is the river rebellious?
These questions might seem ludicrous on their face, but they compelled viewers to consider their own human relationship with the Bow and Elbow in ways they wouldn’t have thought of before.
Through these queries, the rivers become more than just waterways, but our fellow Calgarians — characters caught up in a civic drama we’re all a part of. “In a way, we were trying to personify the river,” Abdallah says. The fact that the signs pose questions rather than issue statements means every viewer brings their own potential answers. The piece is not fully complete, then, without our own riverside contemplation.
Connecting to the Bow Hotline: Hiba Abdallah | Bow-Inspired Hard Candy: Jared Sych
Connecting to the Bow Hotline was another work in the Varying Proximities series. The artists established a toll-free phone number for “viewers” to call: 1-844-OURBOW- RIVER. The Bow would “answer” with a recording of the flowing water. Like the river signs, the phone number played with the idea of personifying the river — this time in an even more intimate and human way. “Is there a situation where somebody would really just need to hear the sound of the river to feel comforted?” asks Abdallah. “Maybe you moved away, and hearing the river makes you feel like you’re close to home again.”
When Calgary Arts Development approached BCL to ask if they could bring the hotline live again in 2024, a decade after the original launch, the artists took the opportunity to rethink the project. One of the changes is to the number itself. “In the 10-year span, we’ve learned so much about nature and our relationship to it, through Indigenous learning,” Abdallah says. “That initial phone number was so possessive. Our river.” The new number will be 1-855-BOW-LSTN. BCL hopes to reframe the project in a way that grants agency back to the river. “Before, it was framed as you’re taking something from the river. This time, the thinking is that the river can give you something.”
Our physical connection to water is simple enough to comprehend. We drink and we wash. We paddle and swim. There is no resource more essential or more banal. But the work of these artists reveals the depth of our simultaneous connection to the source of that water. The same river we skip stones across flows over our bodies in the shower. The river we raft down on lazy summer days forms the ice in our lemonade. Through public art, we see our relationship with the river is emotional and psychological, too. The river doesn’t just give us “something,” as Abdallah says. The river gives us everything.
This article was originally published in the 2024 edition of Create Calgary, an annual magazine launched by Calgary Arts Development to celebrate the work of artists who call Mohkinsstsis/Calgary home.
You can pick up a free copy at public libraries, community recreation centres and other places where you find your favourite magazines. You can also read the digital version online here.
