Getting to know the artists: Sans façon
Memorial Parkway Public Art Project
During my conversation with Tristan Surtees, one half of the artist duo Sans façon, the clinking of a large compressor machine almost drowns out our voices. Designed by the artists, the machine compacts plastic into thick square sheets that will be used as building material in one of their upcoming projects. To prepare, Sans façon and their team painstakingly sorted through piles of bottle caps and broken down, non-recyclable bins from a local waste centre. Every 15 minutes, the machine must be manually adjusted by Surtees, who apologizes as he moves in and out of camera, a reminder of the physicality of Sans façon’s art practice as well as their commitment to reshaping existing materials, one sheet at a time.
Sans façon (which roughly translates to “without fuss”) emerged as an art practice in 2001, when Surtees, an environmental artist, and Charles Blanc, an architect, connected over their shared interest in the social possibilities of public space. For over two decades, Sans façon has created projects that transform public spaces in unexpected ways using primarily existing materials, from light, to repurposed plastic, to water, rocks and the soil from the sites themselves. A recent project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pictures of the Future, in collaboration with artist Steve Gurysh, included the surveying and propagation of 300-year-old trees in an urban forest. A past project on Fogo Island mapped the seascapes, shoals and reefs of the island using community knowledge and oral traditions.
“We’re interested in the relationship between people and the place,” Surtees says. “We find it endlessly fascinating to go through the finer context and then find a relationship with that context.” He describes the duo’s approach to public art as the opposite of “tell us what you’ll make before you get here.”
After working on public art projects in Europe and the U.K., Sans façon were drawn to Calgary when an unconventional brief caught their attention in 2007, a commission to explore the connection between Calgarians and the Elbow and Bow River watersheds.
“We brought together people from different disciplines — a social geographer, a graphic designer, a water engineer, an architect, another artist and ourselves — to really look at the relationship between Calgarians and the watersheds. And together with the people of the utility, we developed this program called Watershed+.”
The Watershed+ program unfolded over a period of eight years, highlighting projects that explored art, science engineering, and landscape architecture to “build an emotional connection between people and the watershed.” The result was a wide-ranging series of artist residencies and installations facilitated by Sans façon. There were also several projects created, including Dale Hodges Park; Reservoir in Saddleridge Reservoir by Peter Von Tiesenhausen, Jen Reimer and Magnus Tiesenhausen; How Deep Is Your Love by Becky Shaw; and Tim Knowle’s The Blind Jam Crossing in Inglewood.
Surtees and Blanc were only planning to stay in Calgary for the 18-month pilot period of Watershed+, but they found themselves drawn to Calgary’s environmental context and youthful “can do” energy. Surtees notes that this place has been an important confluence of water and land for Indigenous communities for thousands of years and is also a very young city.
Sans façon’s approach to public art is inspired by the work of the Artist Placement Group (APG), a British artist collective from the late 1960s. APG advocated for the long-term presence of artists within public infrastructure, instead of solely in galleries and museums. Rather than follow the typical process of commissioning an artist to produce a public artwork, Sans façon are more interested in exploring what it means to be part of an existing space by spending time in the community. This is reflected in the long lifecycle of Watershed+, which framed water as a natural resource and an essential utility in the everyday lives of Calgarians.
“Charles and I want to bring artists into the full experience of a utility,” Surtees notes. “And then look at how they can explore the work of that utility, not at the service of, but in dialogue with.”
The process for their projects starts with a detailed exploratory proposal, and a few nagging questions. They will then spend months and sometimes years connecting with different members of the community, from artists to utility workers, to environmental designers and engineers, in an effort to understand what Surtees calls “the layers of narrative” of a place. The duo embraces finding beauty in everyday contexts and exploring specific elements of a place, from materials to social practices.
Surtees considers it a privilege to be given the opportunity to work together with community members to create something that resonates.
“Public artwork, from our perspective, is an invitation to look at something from a different perspective, rather than tell people what to think. There isn’t a hard roadmap on how to engage,” he notes. “It has to evolve over time. Otherwise, you miss an opportunity to really respond to a place.”
Over the next two years, Sans façon will be developing a site-specific public art project for the Memorial Parkway.
Read the first blog post about the Memorial Parkway Public Art Project here. You can learn more about the project here.
