A Woman Walking

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Alana Bartol, “A Woman Walking (the City Limits)," 2016, HDV, 30:07 min., ed. 2/3

In the summer of 2016, Alana Bartol decided to walk the length of Calgary’s city limits. The journey would take her along busy highways and winding paths, past farms, gated communities and industrial areas. She saw cows and cars, fences and No Trespassing signs, as well as bulrushes, native grasses and a muskrat.

As a newcomer from Ontario, arriving to teach at what is now the Alberta University of the Arts, Bartol’s initial impetus was curiosity – she wanted to understand the city beyond her car-free existence in the central core. Her plan was to document the walk with photographs and video.

“I love walking,” says Bartol, whose work will be displayed at Calgary’s VivianeArt from July 24 to Aug. 30, in a two-person show with Sandra Meigs, a former professor at the University of Victoria, who is exhibiting paintings of the McIntyre Ranch in Southern Alberta. 

“I really feel walking is one of the best ways to get to know a place. You’re slowed down, you’re experiencing the smells and the sounds and your surroundings in a way that you just can’t from a vehicle.”

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Alana Bartol, “A Woman Walking (the City Limits),” 2016

risograph, 17” x 11” (The yellow line shows Calgary’s city limits, while the pink line is where Bartol walked.)

A glance at a map of Calgary’s city limits – encompassing a surprising 848 square kilometres or 327 square miles – underlines the ambition of Bartol’s project. The boundary is not marked, apart from an occasional Welcome to Calgary sign, so she relied on Google Maps. She veered away from the route when it traversed private property and, as with any adventure, sometimes had trouble figuring out exactly how to get back on course. Tackling the walk in chunks, she spent about 10 days doing different stretches of the route, usually starting and stopping at places where she could access public transit to get home. 

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Alana Bartol, “A Woman Walking (the City Limits), Bearspaw Dam,” 2016

archival inkjet print, 11” x 34” ed. 3/3

The first day, a friend with a car dropped her off at the city’s northern limits, which extend as far as the town of Balzac. It was blustery, and as she walked she began to notice trash snagged in barbed wire fences, including a deflated sex doll, one of 14 photographs included in the project, titled A Woman Walking (the City Limits). 

“It just stopped me in my tracks for a while,” she says. “I shot some video of it and I took some photographs and I was thinking maybe I need to pay attention to some of the objects that I am encountering in this walk and think about what they tell us about the city. So that was a big shift.”

She began to collect some of the detritus – golf balls, a homemade music CD, labels from food packaging, the wand from a bottle of mascara – and eventually paired some of it with her landscape photos. The works create visual dialogues about consumerism and systems of land use that reflect broader histories of colonialism in Calgary, or, as she prefers to call it, Mohkinstsis, a Blackfoot word that means “elbow.” It refers to the sharp bend in the Elbow River before its confluence with the Bow River, east of the city's downtown core.

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Alana Bartol, “A Woman Walking (the City Limits), Walden Parade SE,” 2016

archival inkjet print, 11” x 34” ed. 2/3

The project also contests notions of how lone women occupy public space. Bartol says people mostly ignored her. A few drivers stopped to ask if she needed help, and she had a creepy encounter with a persistent guy who wanted to give her a ride but eventually lost interest and drove away. Her biggest issue, she says, was warding off mosquitos. She acknowledges the privilege of her white settler ancestry may have protected her during a summer shaken by the fatal shooting of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, by a Saskatchewan farmer.

Bartol has a varied art practice that explores visibility, transformation and survival, looking at the ways we negotiate the boundaries of our relationships with the non-human world and each other. She has undertaken previous walks, including a 2014 collaboration with Jamaica-born Canadian artist Camille Turner that drew public attention to the history of slavery in Windsor, Ont., where Bartol grew up. More recent projects have considered the oil and gas industry, including the creation of a fictitious adoption agency for orphan wells, a festering environmental issue in Alberta.

A Woman Walking (the City Limits), first shown at Calgary’s New Gallery as part of the 2016 Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival, has toured southwestern Alberta as part of the TREX program of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, which purchased the project. ■ 

Alana Bartol: A Woman Walking (the City Limits) is on view at VivianeArt in Calgary as part of Places-Species-Bodies, Walking Alberta, a two-person show with Sandra Meigs from July 24 to Aug. 30, 2020.

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