Art With a Story – Calgary’s Best Kept Art Secret

• Event type: Visual arts

• Beret rating: 3 out of 5 (for being casual, unpretentious, inspiring)

• Great for: The art-curious or the art-lover

• Location: Gorilla House Live Art, 1503 15 Ave SW

• When: Every Wednesday, 7-10 pm, for as long as the gallery owners can keep the place open

• Cost: Free for artists and the public. Includes a no pressure opportunity to purchase art at the closing auction.

Guide to the ratings

Art with a story: Calgary’s best kept art secret is quickly developing a cult following

[caption id="attachment_15410" align="alignright" width="150"] Author Fiona Row[/caption]

My favorite possessions are those with a story. My latest vintage find, that souvenir from a vacation, the table I refinished myself. We collect and display these stories because they remind us of something larger and more valuable than the objects themselves. They are something to show our guests, something more than pretty things you picked up at Ikea.

Serious art collectors follow particular artists, understand the techniques used to create the art they love. In essence, they build their own story around art objects. It makes the artwork something larger. Something with meaning and substance that expresses the knowledge of the collector.

For the average person, this isn’t possible. Recognized artwork is expensive. Understanding and appreciation of the creative process eludes them. Even the most inviting galleries make them feel like an intruder when they’re there to appreciate rather than buy. The result: Most of the art that attempts to bathe our homes in beauty is meaningless, mass-produced, disconnected.

Enter Gorilla House Live Art, brainchild of Rich Theroux. Rich, a modest personality with a try-to-do-everything-and-do-it-awesome bent, felt that to properly serve both artist and customer, the gallery and the studio needed to be one space. Inspired by the competitive camaraderie of breakdance battles (hey wait, I wrote an article about that too...), Rich devised the Wednesday night Gorilla House Art Battle.

My experience of the event was that it was less of a battle, and more of an Iron Chef styled challenge, where the artists are given three randomly generated themes to inspire them and two hours to create an original work of art. At the end of the evening, the artists have the option to auction off their work for between $10 and $300 – a great opportunity for the artist as well as for the art lover looking for affordable, original work.

The Gorilla House is quite literally a house, and on Wednesday nights it’s a home to the dozens of artists, musicians and friends of the same, who go there to participate in the act of creation with like-minded peers. Friends, you know I do a lot of artsy stuff, and I’ve never seen anything like the relaxed, open, welcoming energy of this place on a Wednesday night. It’s like a Folk-festival jam session for visual artists. Everyone is there to inspire and be inspired, bringing the best of their craft into the open for the public to enjoy.

And the public does seem to enjoy it. Including the artists, the Gorilla House may see a hundred visitors pass through in an evening. The turntable throws off hip tunes, guests enjoy happy hour prices at the pub across the street; the atmosphere is unpretentious and high-energy. Did I mention this is free? It’s free for both the artists and the visitors, with no pressure to purchase something from the auction.

As with so many things inspiring and artful, and despite the great turnout from those in-the-know, the Gorilla House still struggles to keep its doors open. Junior-high art teacher by day and gallery-artist-owner-marketer-janitor by night, Rich doesn’t sleep much. But who has time to sleep when you’ve built a beautiful thing that people have begun to count on being there? When every month the rent comes due and you have to rethink whether this is a service you can continue to provide?

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of passing a place you’d always been meaning to check out only to find that it’s shut its doors? Maybe everyone else had the same idea. Mark a Wednesday off on your calendar to experience this event before it, like so many amazing cultural experiences, disappears due to an unrelenting balance sheet.

I plan to make the Gorilla House my Wednesday night home. If you see me there, stop by and say hi. I’ll be painting my little heart out!

Hope to see you soon!

Your artsy fartsy friend,

Fiona

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