Spring marks a time of endings and beginnings, and Calgary’s galleries are embracing the new season with a mix of new openings throughout the city while other exhibitions prepare for their final weeks.
My Mother Is Data – Ahreum Lee (The New Gallery)
March 20 – May 2, 2026
After the success of her 2020 exhibition Hopping for Hope at The New Gallery, interdisciplinary media artist Ahreum Lee returns to the space with a new presentation of her ongoing project My Mother is Data. Lee started this project in 2021, and has been evolving it since the initial exhibition in 2022 at Montréal’s Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK. The upcoming Calgary showing will offer audiences a new take on Lee’s previously written narrative.
The immersive installation explores the nature of relationships that exist only in a digital space. The project is rooted in Lee’s personal experience with estrangement from her birth mother after receiving a false notification of her death from her birth father in 2014. Throughout her work, Lee asks the audience to consider how our data, fragments of digital information, like our emails, phone records and online searches, become the emotional framework through which people construct intimacy and memory.
“We felt that this topic was highly socially and politically relevant at this point in history,” said Winona Julian, the programming co-director of the new gallery, when asked about the exhibitions thematic significance.
The exhibition consists of a film titled Memory Palace, which documents Lee’s attempt to verify that her mother was still alive without directly contacting her. In addition to the video, Lee created a live website that continuously searches for and displays posts on X that contain synonyms of the word Mother, highlighting the role these digital fragments play in shaping both the individual and collective understanding of familial relationships.
My Mother is Data opens March 20 at The New Gallery and runs until May 2.
Metronome Yawned – Anthony Cudahy (Esker Foundation)
January 24 – April 26, 2026
After spending the first quarter of the year at Calgary’s Esker Foundation, Anthony Cudahy’s exhibition Metronome Yawned will close at the end of April. The show is a culmination of new and older works from the American painter that explore themes of quiet intimacy, tenderness, and reflection within everyday life.
The exhibition is centered around a series titled Like Night Needs Morning, these works on paper depict figures resting, embracing each other and reflecting as they move through cycles of light and darkness. In these pieces, Cudahy invites the viewer to reflect on the slippery nature of time, and how its passage feels in ordinary moments instead of its measurements by life’s conventional milestones.
The figures depicted in Caudahy’s work reference some notable figures, well-known queer artists and art historians from throughout history and his personal relationships. Overall, using colour, shadows, and the subject’s gesture to create a dreamlike but emotional atmosphere.
Visitors can see Metronome Yawned at the Esker Foundation until April 26.
Still Lifes – M.H. Hutchinson (Paul Kuhn Gallery)
January 31 – March 28, 2026
For almost a decade, Calgary artist Marc (Hutch) Hutchinson has been developing the photographic experiments that make up Still Lifes, his latest exhibition at Paul Kuhn Gallery.
The series of digital prints uses a specialized scanning back attached to a large-format camera, a device typically used by museums to digitally record three-dimensional artifacts.
Hutchinson created these works by placing still-life arrangements on a rotating surface synchronized with the scanning system. Using deliberate camera angles, the device captures only a narrow slice of the subject as it rotates, gradually reimaging the arrangement with unexpected distortions.
Flowers were used as the series’s central subject. For Hutchinson, their presence offered a departure from the conceptual rigor that has defined much of his practice. “Beauty is new to me,” said Marc H. Hutchinson. “I was not brought up in the arts to trust beauty or its social construct, but flowers have an aesthetic that doesn’t regard power or wealth.”
The resulting images balance technical experimentation with visual pleasure, turning traditional still-life photography into an opportunity for viewers to reflect on ideas of perception and beauty.
Still lifes is on display at Paul Kuhn Gallery until March 28.
Featured Image: Two Pieces from M.H. Hutchinson’s Still Lifes exhibition at Paul Kuhn Gallery in Calgary, Alta. From left: Juniper and Delphinium and Lily.