The THING Print

Lisa Brawn is a Calgary based artist specializing in painted woodcut blocks. Her work is in public collections such as The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary Civic Art Collection, and The University of Lethbridge collection, as well as in private collections across Canada, Europe, and the United States. A major component of Lisa’s art practice has been exploring the possibilities for alternative art venues and interdisciplinary project spaces. Starting in 2001, her artmobile, in a 1935 vintage travel trailer, was followed by an art salon in Calgary’s Grain Exchange building. Lisa then collaborated with Milo Dlouhy and Angela Inglis to transform a downtown warehouse into an artist-run gallery and Museum of Oddities. In 2007 Brawn, Dlouhy, and Inglis collaborated on a storefront museum in Art Central, and in 2009 and 2010, Brawn and Inglis collaborated with Jane Grace on an interdisciplinary project space in a hundred year old cottage in residential NW Calgary. In 2009 Brawn transformed a 1962 Airstream into a second mobile gallery, The Bambi Media Machine, which was featured in the film I Liked You Better Before. From 2007 to 2012, Lisa operated a 17 Avenue SW window gallery, which started as La Fenêtre (curated with White-Field Senate and Eddie Olson), and morphed into Sugar Cube (with Inglis and Grace). Most recently, Brawn transformed a Kaki Lima Indonesian meatball soup cart into a gilded pushcart art dispensary, CART Blanche, which debuted on River Walk in 2019. Lisa has experimented with intensification in the use of existing art space, with shows such as Festival of Wrongheadedness; the exhibition of 31 large scale paintings and rapid-fire candy striping over 62 days in the display window La Fenêtre. She has activated previously overlooked exhibition space by installing large scale glossy enamel icons and text-based Pop woodcuts on the streetside facades of private residences for her Pophouse project, which engaged people in the shared experience of living within art-filled communities. In 2014, Lisa created a 50m giant kinetic sculptural installation of mechanical multiples for Beakerhead, and collaborated with Decidedly Jazz Danceworks on a multidisciplinary performance emphasizing movement, rhythm, and desire, at Theatre Junction Grand.