The Hibernation Project

The Hibernation Project is an artist-in-residency taking place at cSPACE Eau Claire for the month of February 2024. 

About the Hibernation Project

The Hibernation Project is an art intervention occurring annually from Winter to Spring. A tool for embracing – and combating – Winter in Canada, each weekend an open community of artists, musicians, and participants respond to a theme, creating new work around the topic. Led by local artists Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, the project started in the artists’ house and yard in the Calgary/Mohkinstsis neighbourhood of Ramsay, and expanded at the beginning of the pandemic to include parking lots and radio waves, tobogganing hills and public parks, zoom channels and imaginary galleries. 

This February, The Hibernation Project is taking up residence at cSPACE Eau Claire for the month. A rotating cast of artists and viewers are invited to participate in a series of experimental activities, open studios, and mini-events. Intended as a gratifying, productive, and immediate experience, artworks are free from the pressure of bureaucracy and perfection. The Hibernation Project is a gestation period for concepts, for workshopping ideas, for snowy day projects, for the dreams of we who wake to sleep.

The Hibernation Project has spawned several spinoff projects, including a monthly sound art radio program called EARS HAVE EYES and a car-based touring exhibition called IDLE WORSHIP.

About the Artists

The Hibernation Project is organized by Caitlind Brown & Wayne Garrett. These multidisciplinary artists and collaborators have an ongoing practice of developing projects, sculptures, installations, and situations in collaboration with diverse public spaces, places, and communities. 

Artist Statement

We work with diverse mediums and materials, ranging from artificial light to re-appropriated urban debris, often resulting in public sculptures and installations.

Drawing from relational aesthetics and institutional critique, the artists’ work explores the interspace between seemingly polarized entities: light + darkness, nature + culture, individual + collective, DIY + institutional. Whether exhibiting in domestic settings, formal galleries, public parks, or heritage buildings, they are enticed by art’s ability to draw connections between materials, spaces, people, and places, changing the everyday through a critical shift in perspective. 

Our hope for the Hibernation-in-Residence is to expand our capacity for experimentation by increasing access to what we’re doing. We haven’t really experimented with a more open public space before, and we’d be curious to see how that changes what we’re doing, how we’re thinking, and who we’re working with. It’s a process! Why not try something new?

What does success look like for you?

With The Hibernation Project, the artists are looking forward to, “a busy, chaotic, super fun month!”and contributing to a vision of Calgary as a city that is “open to more weirdos, more of the time.” Wayne and Caitlind’s unlimited energy mean that they are always up for anything. What gets them excited every day? 

“Stuff do to! People to see. Projects. Fun. Shiny things.” – Caitlind Brown

Get Social

You can find more about these creative powerhouses at www.incandescentcloud.ca and more about The Hibernation Project here: www.hibernationproject.ca