Calgary

Wreck City returns to Calgary's Ramsay neighbourhood

After drawing massive crowds for its takeover of a row of houses in Sunnyside, Wreck City returns to bring art to an abandoned car wash in Ramsay.

Artists will transform old car wash into lively exhibition

Wreck City returns to Calgary, this time to an abandoned car wash and in partnership with Sled Island music festival. (Wreck City)

Before the art goes up, the organizers of Wreck City have to factor in some practical concerns about their exhibition spaces. Is there asbestos? What about black mould?

Wreck City attracted approximately 10,000 people to a row of houses slated for demolition in Sunnyside in 2013.

​A group of curators took over the spaces, including nine house, three garages and a greenhouse, and transformed them into an artistic playground, complete with a plastic slide emerging from the top floor of one house and ending up downstairs. 

Now the organization is partnering with the Sled Island music festival and taking over the old Penguin Car Wash in Ramsay.

Music will be front and centre

Caitlind Brown, one of the curators behind the project, says the space is challenging due to its size, so they'll be "looking for larger, iconic works, but fewer in numbers, and then a whole variety of smaller, performative works."

Of course, with Sled Island as a partner, music will be front and centre, but there's no word yet on how the project will look in the end. 

"It will be an interesting thing to sort of narrow down what our project will look like, and I think that the development of the personality of the project is so much contingent on the artists," said Brown. 

"We give them a space, we give them a context and we give them a bit of a theme, and then they respond to those things and they blow our minds."

Wreck City: Demo Tape will run from June 19-28.