Downtown revitalization. The new Multi-Use Facility and Library will be a catalytic project that will re-energize Airdrie's downtown as a central location for residents to gather, connect and learn, creating a gateway to Airdrie's downtown.

Community and connection. The new Multi-Use Facility and Library will be a hub enjoyed by the community and will serve as a place for people of all abilities and demographics to gather and celebrate, contributing to a healthy and connected community. The new Multi-Use Facility and Library will draw residents to visit the facility for various reasons and act as a central place for the community to access resources and participate in a wide range of programming.

Growth. With population growth expected to continue in Airdrie over the next decade, the new Multi-Use Facility and Library will allow the City to meet the needs of our growing population by offering new and expanded spaces and services.

Airdrie City Council approved the schematic design in April 2023. The schematic design outlines the broad direction for the exterior and interior of the building. The schematic design helps to show how the rooms and spaces in the interior are laied out in relation to the exterior site as a whole. The total interior size will be 73,000 sq ft with 53,000 sq ft for the new library and 20,000 sq ft for the multi-use space with 100 surface parking stalls.

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Description:

Two dynamic public artworks entitled: Change of State/State of Change, are inspired by ideas of transformation and change found both locally and universally. Both interior and exterior works bring community imaginations about the future of this new facility together with forms ispired by Airdrie’s sometimes dramatic temperature swings and their sudden alteration of the city’s landscape.

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Images and Video:

Link to proposal video

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Artist Profile:

Jill Anholt is an award-winning artist based in Vancouver, Canada whose practice includes commissioned environmental and sculptural installations, and collaborative design team projects for public spaces across North America. Jill has a diverse education that includes Sculpture, Human Sciences and Architecture. Exploring hidden stories, systems, and qualities of a particular place, Jill searches for a unique spark of magic in every project she undertakes which she weaves into dynamic spatial artworks that create connections between people, and between people and place, through surprising moments of discovery, revelation and/or transformation. Jill’s process, rooted in the rigours of her diverse education, embraces a wide variety of scales and materials, often incorporating dynamic illumination at night and/or utilizing elements that alter with viewer perspective or interaction, or that transform through engagement with natural phenomena such as sunlight, wind, or changing weather conditions.

Description:

The atrium “Community Portrait” is a cloud of miniature colourful people suspended from the ceiling through a simple armature. The figures are made by scanning Airdrie residents and 3D printing them using a biocomposite produced from agricultural byproducts. This kinetic artwork vibrantly represents the community at the new building’s entrance.

The plaza “Community Portrait” is composed of a ring of split boulders creating a colourful meeting place. The artwork represents the diversity of the community and aims to create new connections. The rocks will be engraved with phrases from local residents describing what the community of Airdrie means to them.

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Images and Video:

Link to proposal video

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Artist Profile:

Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster are Toronto-based artists and educators who have collaborated since 2003. Together they create spaces and objects that interrupt everyday situations in critically engaging and playful ways. As a multi-disciplinary practice, they operate at a variety of scales, from temporary installations to permanent public artworks. Their practice focuses on ‘social infrastructures’ which seek to build community by fostering playful interactions in physical space. Their academic research focuses on the role of play in the built environment and alternative methods of documentation as a form of historic preservation. In 2021 their oral history and photography project “Growing up Modern'' was published by Birkhäuser as a book with English and German editions.

Their work is in the public art collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox), Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (CEPA Gallery), Edmonton Arts Council and the Allied Arts Council of Lethbridge. They have exhibited in galleries, produced temporary installations and realized permanent public artworks in Canada, USA, Germany, France, Italy and South Korea, including solo shows at Vtape in Toronto, the Weissenhofwerkstatt in Stuttgart and Gallery Kolektiv 318 in Marseille.

Description:

Landscapes of the Imagination is a swirling cloud of stories floating up into the atrium of Airdrie’s Multi-Use and Library Facility. Inside each bubble is a fantastical landscape, artfully crafted to reflect the favourite stories of library users – an intricate chandelier, drawings from the books that feed our collective imagination.

Sky Garden is a shimmering archway connecting Nose Creek pathway to Airdrie’s new Multi-Use and Library Facility. Hundreds of aluminum mirrors glisten in a curve rising overhead, referencing a garden trellis, cloud-form, or Chinook arch. These “sky flowers” reflect the colour of Airdrie’s dramatic prairie skies and magnificent sunsets.

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Images and Video:

Link to proposal video

Artist Profile:

Caitlind r.c. Brown is an artist, collaborator, and cultural organizer. She graduated from Alberta University of the Arts in 2010, earning an Alumni of Merit Career Award in 2019. She has founded numerous projects, collectives, and collaborative partnerships, including WRECK CITY, an organization curating experimental art exhibitions in pre-demolition spaces. She guided The Wandering Island with Lane Shordee & Wayne Garrett, facilitating ‘slow art for the audience of birds, bats, beaver, fish, and the occasional curious wanderer’ unfolding on an island in the Elbow River. In response to the rigours of working in the field of public art, Caitlind & Wayne launched The Hibernation Project in 2019, an annual experimental art series combating the isolation of Winter through a series of collaborative events. Spinoffs from The Hibernation Project include monthly sound art radio program, EARS HAVE EYES, and IDLE WORSHIP, a mobile car-based exhibition touring the parking lots of Calgary.

Wayne Patrick Garrett is an artist and musician. He trained as a Journeyman Machinist at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, working in Whitehorse, Yukon for several years before returning to Alberta to pursue an education in Jazz Music at Mount Royal University. He entered into the world of contemporary art through the Arbour Lake Sghool, a subversive arts collective in the suburbs of Calgary, when he moved into the collective's house in 2007. Here he met Caitlind Brown and they began their joint career in the arts, collaborating on films and installations. Wayne performs as a musician in a series of bands, including Ghostkeeper, Amy Nelson, Ryan Bourne & The Plant City Band, and many more. He will be releasing his first solo pedal steel album with Inner Ocean Records in 2024. Wayne’s love of collaboration, rigorous experimentation, composition, and technical proficiency began with music and machining, and expanded into a multidisciplinary arts practice.

Description:

From Earth to Sky is a public art installation symbolizing the connection between Mother Earth and Father Sky through a sculptural tipi. The seven poles, each adorned with Blackfoot pictographs, represent the seven generations practice and the seven local tribes. This landmark honors Indigenous heritage, promotes community values and celebrates unity.

High Pasture Mobile; Past, Present and Future is a suspended-art concept featuring pictographs in three circular patterns representing Airdrie’s past, present, and future. Created through community collaboration, including unique pictographs by local Blackfoot artist Adrian Stimson, it reflects diverse voices and stories, symbolizing Airdrie's unity and heritage.

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Images and Video:

Link to proposal video

Artist Profile:

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta. Adrian has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He is an interdisciplinary artist and exhibits nationally and internationally. His performance art looks at identity construction, specifically the hybridization of the Indian, the cowboy, the shaman and Two Spirit being. Buffalo Boy, The Shaman Exterminator are two reoccurring personas. His paintings are varied yet his use of black and white monochromatic paintings that depict bison in imagined landscapes are melancholic, memorializing, whimsical, they evoke ideas cultural fragility, resilience and nostalgia. His installation work primarily examines the residential school experience; He has used the material culture from Old Sun Residential School on his Nation to create works that speak to genocide, loss and resilience. He was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, which sent him to Afghanistan. Adrian was awarded the Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018. REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award –Hnatyshyn Foundation 2017. He was awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003.

Pierre Poussin is a Queer French Mauritian-Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale sculpture and public art. His artistic goal is to bring joy, wonder and discovery into public spaces. He believes that art has the power to empower, to enrich and excite the soul, as well as being inclusive, accessible and meaningful for a community. Pierre thinks art should be tailor-made for the space it inhabits, and just as importantly, for the people and community that the artwork serves. His work explores the contrasts that exist in our surroundings, blending elements of nature, industry, history, and technology. He focuses on creating permanent public art installations and sculptures that animate their surroundings and the communities they serve.

For the past 15 years, Pierre has had the opportunity of creating dozens of permanent public artworks across Canada including multiple free-standing sculptures and integrated public art installations for architectural and landscaping firms, urban developers, as well as municipal and federal public art programs for cities across the country, including: Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Collingwood and Vancouver. His upcoming projects include a series of public artworks for the City of Ottawa's Westboro and Sherbourne LRT stations. Forage will be a collection of over-sized freestanding fossilized mushrooms crafted with weathered-steel and Local Lichen will be a series of low-relief sculptures created in part by recreating a lichen growth algorithm to help generate natural growth patterns and reassembling them using traditional rug-making techniques.

Another upcoming public art project is entitled Saga, and created for the Town of Collingwood, Ontario. It will comprise of two 9.1m (30’) tall lighthouses with etched drawings inspired directly by the first and last ships built in the area, helping to commemorate the importance of Collingwood’s historic shipbuilding industry. Pierre’s most recent work includes: Brick Obelisk, for The City of Toronto, Cascades, for The City of Ottawa, Esprit, for The City of Edmonton, and Ursa, for One Water Street Towers (Kelowna, BC) by The North American Development Group and Kerkhoff Construction. Over the years, he has had the pleasure of working with a diverse range of clients including: The 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics Games, Sheridan College, Princeton University, McMaster University, Nienkämper Furniture, Concord Adex Developments' Lakeshore Panorama, Quartz & Lumen Condominium Towers (Toronto, ON), Diamante Developments' Yorkville Florian Tower (Toronto, ON), Pinnacle International Developments' Crystal Tower for Uptown (Mississauga, ON), Toronto’s Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the Walt Disney Corporation. Pierre studied biochemistry at the University of Ottawa and Furniture Design at Sheridan College.