First unveiled in 1987, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic is perhaps the most recognizable work by Prague-born Canadian artist Jana Sterbak. Crafted from 50 pounds of raw flank steak, this unsettling dress became a cultural landmark with its visceral punch reignited by Lady Gaga’s rendition, worn at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.
While this work resonates with current pop culture, Sterbak’s deeper pursuit is the body itself, which is at the core of her retrospective at Calgary’s Esker Foundation. Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy presents over 50 works spanning 46 years, offering a rich and provocative glimpse into her material and conceptual concerns, including significant early works and rarely seen artist editions, photographs, and drawings.
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Sterbak fled Czechoslovakia with her family in 1968 after the Prague Spring protests, later studying at Concordia in Montréal. Over her career, she represented Canada at the 2003 Venice Biennale, received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and in 2017 was honoured with the Prix Paul-Émile-Borduas. Despite settling in Canada, Sterbak has strong ties to Europe both professionally and in her affinity for its humanism, irony, and black humour.
From chocolate cast as bones to dancers tethered inside remote-controlled crinolines, Sterbak has redefined feminist and contemporary art through unconventional and provocative materials. For example, in Sisyphus Sport (1997), Sterbak reimagines this mythological burden as a stone backpack outfitted with leather straps. In contrast, more ephemeral materials, such as bread, chocolate, or meat, evoke sustenance, comfort, and the inevitability of decomposition.
Sterbak’s work ranges from sculpture and video to installation and performance, often combining multiple forms in a single work or through multiple renditions. Whatever the form, her work fuses dark humour with physical matter, testing ideas about subjectivity or the struggle for corporeal or political freedom. Sterbak seems to revel in the productive friction found in the tension between opposites, which she uses to probe deeper into uncomfortable themes around mortality, desire, power, and vulnerability.
The human body is omnipresent in Sterbak’s work, which she wraps, clothes, and imprisons within metal bars, wires, and other techno ephemera. Her work is intimate, beautiful, and immersed in contradiction, where fear mingles with longing, and vanity dissolves into decay. What emerges is an artist in tune with the forces that shape us and to the flesh that both binds us and sets us free.
Dimensions of Intimacy runs from September 20 to December 21.
In The Galleries This Month
NORBERG HALL
Laura Findlay: The Darkest Hour
Until October 25
Laura Findlay’s luminous paintings explore tensions between human intervention and ecological processes by capturing nocturnal moments in nature.
Using additive and subtractive painting and mark-making, she reflects on cycles of growth, decay, and transformation through layered imagery, where nature and technology mutate and converge.
ILLINGWORTH KERR GALLERY
Faces and Places
Until November 22
Focusing on AUArts as a vibrant cultural hub, the exhibition explores Calgary’s cultural evolution since the 1970s. Drawing on local archives and narratives, the show reveals how artists and designers have documented, celebrated, and connected their communities to capture the city’s ethos, affirming AUArts as a vital cornerstone in shaping Calgary’s artistic identity.
TRÉPANIERBAER GALLERY
Ed Pien: Incarnate
Evan Penny: Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror
Until November 1
Canadian artists Evan Penny and Ed Pien have garnered international attention for their distinct practices. Penny’s hyper-realistic yet distorted sculptures challenge how we see and define human presence, while Pien’s intricate and immersive installations evoke fragility, memory, and the ephemeral. Presented as a double feature, both exhibitions offer a unique opportunity to experience their work side by side.
ALBERTA CRAFT COUNCIL
Mackenzie Kelly-Frère: Drawn
Until November 1
Textile artist Mackenzie Kelly-Frère explores cloth as a contextual object linking humans, plants, and animals. The exhibition features handwoven works inspired by the Canadian Prairie and an Icelandic residency. Focused on natural phenomena and cultivated landscapes, the work embodies lived experience and human presence through texture, structure, and subtle colouration.
NICKLE GALLERIES
Eveline Kolijn: Ecologies
Until December 6
Rooted in childhood explorations of Caribbean shores and a lifelong dialogue with science, Eveline Kolijn crafts imaginative works that bridge art and ecology.
Through printmaking, video, and installation, she evokes marine worlds while confronting the decline of coral reefs and the impacts of climate change. Rich in scientific curiosity and artistic vision, her work reflects on the fragile beauty that sustains life.
