A solar-powered, interactive, kinetic sculptural installation consisting of eight large scale repurposed vintage mechanical horses running wild across the breathtaking prairie landscape at Leighton Art Centre.

September to November, 2016

November 7–15, 2014
THEATRE JUNCTION GRAND

Born in the Year of the Horse, Josephine Baker left her homeland in the USA in the 1920s to live in France where she became an international superstar and a symbol of the Jazz Age. Hers is a story of struggle, humour, dignity and survival. In collaboration with Lisa Brawn, Kimberley Cooper uses the idea of Josephine Baker as inspiration to create a fictional fantasy in an otherworldly setting. Experience images, sounds and movement that celebrate the essence of Josephine Baker set to an original score performed by a three-piece band. 

In 2013 I worked on a pay-it-forward public-art-on-private-residences project with help from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. A series of glossy enamel Pop woodcuts were installed on the exterior street-side of inner city houses. Each of the recipients then produced one artwork for installation on another house. You can find the pophouse woodcuts in Capitol Hill, Mount Pleasant, Briar Hill, Bankview, Crescent Heights, Ramsay, Roxboro, Sunnyside, and Inglewood.

This small scale interdisciplinary project space was originally started by the United Congress in 1999 as One Minute Happiness. In 2007 they handed it over to me and I renamed it Museo Poco. When Angie Inglis + Jane Grace + I closed Sugar Shack Art Salon in 2010 we co-curated the window gallery as Sugar Cube. Then it was a collaborative space known as La Fenêtre co-curated by me + Eddie Olson + White-field Senate. We closed the window gallery after 16 years at the end of 2015.

Photos row 1:
Romana Prokopiw / Leslie Sweder / Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner / John Will / Tanzerpudel (pudilluminator)

row 2:
Jolie Bird / Sally Raab / Jack Bride

The Sugar Shack Art Salon was an independent gallery and interdisciplinary project space run by Angela "Fat Harp Malone" Inglis, Lisa "Pretty Liver McGee" Brawn, and Jane "Boney Jones" Grace in 2009 and 2010 in a turn-of-the-century “cottage” in residential NW Calgary. Sugar Shack featured 77 local, provincial and national artists at shows such as Debutante’s Ball, Nursies, Paper Jam, Love Shack, DioramaRama!, God Show 2: The Resurrection, and Genderblender. There was also an artist residency, The L. S. Benschop Institute for the Preservation & Veneration of Imagination & Nostalgia. The art salon was closed when centipedes fell from the light sockets.

Sugarmobile was an artmobile in a 1935 silver trailer from 2001 - 2002. Sugarmobile appeared at ACAD, Estate Gallery, Calgary Folk Festival, Stride Gallery, The Art Gallery of Calgary, and made several appearances in the parking lot of Carpenters Hall in Kensington, Calgary.

Bambi Media Machine was an artmobile in a 1962 Airstream Bambi from 2009 to 2010. This artmobile debuted in August 2009 with the Mobile Surgical Beautification Unit performance and film “I Liked You Better Before”.

Plot Summary

Inspired by freak carnival sideshow and the infamous Lobotomobile, "I Liked You Better Before" tells the story of a band of charlatans who travel through rural Canada performing plastic surgery procedures at breakneck pace on farmers and townspeople ca. 1969. The surgeries are performed in the Mobile Surgical Beautification Unit, a vintage Airstream Bambi trailer.