Pocket Art Machine, Calgary

The Canadian art landscape is ever-changing. Places + Spaces keeps you informed of established and up-and-coming exhibition venues across the country including museums, galleries, artist-run centres, and more. This month, we hear from Kenzie Housego, founder of Pocket Art Machine in Calgary.

What is the history and mandate of your gallery?

Pocket Art Machine is a community art exhibition project that installs art vending machines in everyday places and stocks them with small-format original work made by local Calgary artists – think stickers, art postcards, zines, mini ceramics, mini paintings, keychains, pins, embroidery patches, and more. The first machine launched on August 2 at Congress Coffee, a café known for their art and music events. The second was installed at Contemporary Calgary on August 6. The third goes into the Artist Lounge at the Ruberto Ostberg Gallery on September 11. PAM was launched with a municipal art grant from Calgary Arts Development.
My partner and I are collectors of artist books, multiples, and miniatures, and oddities in general, and we enjoy attending art book fairs. I always get excited when I encounter art vending machines in other cities and always thought there should be one (or three) in Calgary.
PAM is also inspired by the ethos of artists’ books and democratic multiples that took hold in the 1960s – particularly Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962). At the time, it was created to be a low-cost edition, and the art was made to be reproducible, so that anyone could participate in collecting it. Everything in the PAM machines is under $25.
As for our mandate, it’s my job as an artist to ask questions. How can artist books, small art objects, or multiples, democratize art markets, making art accessible to the public? Maybe Pocket Art Machine is my way of asking and or answering these questions. Everyone should be able to own, collect, and engage with art. One of my favourite tactics for inspiring memorable art engagement is play. PAM uses the vending machine as a playful, unexpected way to bring local art into daily life. My artwork is Pocket Art Machine; the artwork inside is made by Calgary artists.

What’s a highlight of the neighbourhood where the gallery is located?

The mini three-row PAM is located at Congress, an independent coffee house and performance venue in the unassuming artsy Greenview Industrial Park. The café is eclectic and welcoming, and captures the heart of the coffee scene of the 1990s. They also offer a zine library within an old retro fridge for folks to enjoy. In 2024 I was working at Congress, and this zine library gave me the final inspiration to apply and secure a grant to make art vending machines a thing in Calgary. So, it’s fitting they are the first Pocket Art Machine host venue. Our five-row PAM is at Contemporary Calgary in their bookstore/gift shop. The Artist Lounge (TAL) is an art-inspired cocktail lounge that sits within the Ruberto Ostberg Gallery, located in the Capitol Hill area of Calgary. TAL will host the only coin operated PAM as of September 11. Three neighbourhood locations, each with their own distinct audiences.

What’s your favourite part of running your art gallery?

I love supporting artists, meeting new people, and championing inclusion. With art books and multiples, the physical handling can be inseparable from how the meaning lands. If tactility is part of an artwork’s meaning, a vending machine engineers that moment on purpose. Insert a coin, buy the art, turn a knob, catch something real in your hand. How lovely to distill art engagement into a moment, delivered to someone who was not necessarily out looking for art that day. It’s also a counterbalance to our very digital world. Lastly, I am buying one of everything for my personal collection!

How do you find out about new artists?

We had a round one call out, that received almost sixty concept submissions from emerging and established artists working within ceramics, printmaking, illustration, textiles, painting, and photography. Ten were selected. Each was paid an artist fee upfront to create their series or edition before anything sold, regardless of whether anything sells. All revenue from the machines is reinvested back into the project to fund future PAM artists and their “art snacks”.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I think PAM will likely exist in other Alberta cities (I have machine number four waiting in my studio for the right host venue). Or why not aim high and have larger Pocket Art Machines installed in every major Canadian airport terminal. An art snack by local artists, what could be a better travel souvenir?

What excites you about your upcoming exhibitions?

I am excited to launch the third Pocket Art Machine. It will include Surveillance Cloud 02, a limited-edition enamel pin by Lisa Brawn, who will also be exhibiting her full-size works the Ruberto Ostberg Gallery alongside paintings by Mandy Stobo, and a collage series by Chad Saunders.
A few other artists in the Round One launch are Jaron Whittingham, who made COOL S: 1K, 125 handmade zines containing one thousand hand-drawn versions of the stylized S that generations of schoolchildren have drawn in the margins of their notebooks. No two are alike. Teresa Tam made Tam’s Express, Mystery Canned Snacks, thirty hand-made risograph printed boxes with tiny hand-painted canned food keychains and a slip of paper carrying potentially useful information or a fortune. Tam’s work takes familiar spaces and experiences, and rebuilds them until they are slightly foreign. And fiber artist Caitlin Thompson’s The Nectar Collector, is an edition of embroidered patches of a vampire cabbage butterfly, a symbol she has used in her studio for years. It has an inviting silhouette, but it is hiding teeth. Beauty is a lure that bites.