A magenta shelf with game tokens, buildings made from wooden blocks, and large coloured banners are but a few elements in Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return, an exhibition on view at Contemporary Calgary. Curated by Mona Filip, the show playfully explores the hidden meanings inside the game Monopoly, exposing how power inequities grease the wheel.
Using Contemporary Calgary’s Ring Gallery’s circular architecture, artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani stages a poetic counterpoint by transforming the floor into a massive, immersive Monopoly board. Viewers are forced to navigate numerous obstacles that reveal hierarchies and inequities. For example, the tiny wooden houses that players hoard to build fictional empires are dwarfed by Calgary’s corporate oil towers, sandstone schools, and churches reconstructed from milled blocks.
On shelves painted in Monopoly colours, the now-retired horse and rider playing piece commands an obedient line of humbler pieces including the iron, shoe, and thimble, alongside the battleship and the cannon. By forcing the pieces into a submissive formation, Avarzamani creates visual allegories about economic hierarchies echoed in other elements. Suspended throughout the game board, large textile banners display bleak messaging that mimic the game’s Chance cards. A striking yellow banner reads: “Burn: You have worked hard. Your reward is the opportunity to work harder. Collect nothing.”
Central to the exhibition is a 2.5-metre-tall cowboy sculpture made from 1,000 pounds of butter. Kept inside a climate-controlled zone, this slow-decaying monument emits a thick, salty scent. The unctuous statue is a satirical effigy of a massive butter sculpture of the Prince of Wales that Canada displayed at the British Empire Exhibition in 1925. Avarzamani cleverly subverts this propaganda using the same Horse and Rider token.
This brings us back to the word “churn.” Historically, churning was the grueling, sacred labor required to turn liquid milk into solid fat — a process so magical it was used in ancient Tibetan and Vedic spiritual rituals. Today, “churn” is cold corporate jargon for the rapid, volatile rotation of labor, investments, and human capital.
Avarzamani binds these vastly different histories in an organic medium designed to self-destruct. As the exhibition progresses, the chilled air cannot fully protect the cowboy. The butter is meant to warp, fracture, and rot. It is a stunning metaphor for economic collapse. In a world obsessed with earning and burning, this sweating, fragile empire of butter serves as a haunting reminder that the games we play are entirely manufactured, inherently unstable, and ultimately bound to melt away.
Churn, Earn, Burn and then Return is on at Contemporary Calgary until November 8. 701 11 Street S.W.; contemporarycalgary.com.
What’s on in the galleries
NORBERG HALL
Yvonne Mullock & Lindsay Montgomery | SoothSayers
Until October 3
This collaborative project was developed during a month-long residency at Medalta, where Mullock and Montgomery explored their shared passion for using craft to explore cultural identity. Drawing on their ancestral ties to Scotland and England, the project fuses folklore and paganism into an experimental work that explores consumption, ritual, and community through a feminist lens.
ESKER FOUNDATION
Johnathan Onyschuk | Old Growths
Until October 25
Johnathan Onyschuk’s window installation explores the recurring historical motif of human faces intertwined with plant matter. By merging anonymous folk-art carvings into dense basswood reliefs, individual features dissolve into swirling botanical patterns. The work speculates that these woodcarvings are efforts to communicate with, recognize, and reunite with our distant botanical relatives or nature dwellers.
WERKLUND CENTRE
+15 GALLERIES | Calgary Queer Arts Society Presents
Thru October
Curated by Wilmer Aburto, this showcase brings together established and emerging 2SLGBTQIA+ artists across the cultural corridor. Across these immersive installations, visitors will encounter playful, mirror-bedecked cowboy icons alongside intimate environments built for peer-to-peer storytelling. Together, these varied textures and narratives form a powerful chorus of survival, joy, and belonging within the city’s civic heartbeat.
ALBERTA CRAFT CALGARY GALLERY
Before They’re Gone | Anna Burger-Martindale
Until September 12
Anna Burger-Martindale’s SPOTLIGHT exhibition is a love letter to the planet’s remarkable biodiversity. Bridging handcrafted jewelry with environmental advocacy, her ongoing series features endangered species beautifully captured in silver wire. Beyond this dazzling tribute to a fragile ecosystem, a portion of all sales will be donated to Wildlife Preservation Canada
NEWZONES GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Samantha Walrod | Off the Beaten Path
Opening September 12
Samantha Walrod’s artworks explore fleeting human-wildlife interactions along the edges of the Canadian wilderness. Combining paint, collage, and digital technologies, her highly tactile, layered compositions address the cultural construction of nature. These dense material layers mirror how the mind retains memories, balancing clarity and obscurity, chaos and visual quiet.
