see you there // meet me here: echoes of eau claire

I curated this project’s photographs and created the interactive installations for this show.

Featuring photographs by
Brady Fullerton, Danny Luong
and Stephen Chan

May 23 – July 12, 2025

Press:

Last days of Calgary’s Eau Claire Market chronicled in new multimedia exhibit an article covering see you there // meet me here: echoes of eau claire written by Amir Said for CBC. Published May 25, 2025.

CKUA’s Kate Stevens invites Szeto to chat about see you there meet me here: echoes of eau claire for CKUA Radio. Published May 22, 2025.

The last days of the Eau Claire Market an interview by Loren McGinniss, host of Calgary’s Eye Opener with Jessica Szeto, covering see you there // meet me here: echoes of eau claire for CBC. Published May 22, 2025.

One year after Eau Claire Market’s closure, see you there // meet me here: echoe of eau claire investigates the complicated emotions and memories surrounding what we may be losing or gaining with the demolition of this iconic mall.

Through installations and found objects, as well as still images, video work, and audio captured in the final weeks before the mall’s official closure in May 2024, this exhibition showcases the mall during the last few moments of its 30-year life.

Throughout its history, the mall struggled with its identity, and underwent varying states of growth, decline, and uncertainty. Even now, in its death throes, the demolition site remains in a state of ambiguity about its future.

Part of mourning is collective remembering.

Each person’s experience of the mall was unique, often contextualized by when they visited the mall and what resonated with them at that time. In that spirit, this show also provides a space for visitors to formally document all these rich, nuanced memories, and add them to our exhibition. As a community, we can gather here and remember this mall, its artifice, and its relationship to our own personal histories.

How do we remember something that was never fully realized?

How do we collectively mourn an imperfect thing?

Documentation by Stefan Legisa

I created this interactive window display installation. As folks walk by the window, their images are inserted into the photographs displayed on the 9 CRT televisions. I wanted to create a feeling of you visiting the mall again, but only through viewing yourself in the screen like a security camera.

These were seats we saved from the actual theatre at Eau Claire Market.

These are zine pages that folks contributed as part of my workshops and as open gallery space

I created this stand-up video game for the Raspberry Pi, it’s a two-player text adventure about wandering the mall

Curatorial Statement – Jessica Szeto /

Sometimes, we unwittingly find ourselves acting as archeologists of our own lives. As we grow older, so grows our mental catalogue of all the people, places, things, and ideas that have gone extinct within our lifetime.

We unearth remnants of our past, and we can either choose to carelessly discard those memories, or to carefully preserve and treasure them.

Eau Claire Market was a strange place. What pieces of it are worth remembering? What should we forget?

As someone born and raised in Calgary, I have so many memories of Eau Claire Market during its 30-year lifespan.

A mall is a difficult object to remember, especially one that was as porous as Eau Claire Market. Its identity was always shifting, and the retailers and food establishments were constantly in flux. Depending on when you visited the mall, your memories of it will be radically different from other visitors from other eras.

In the 1980s, plans were announced to pave over historic bus barns, and redevelop this area as our version of Granville Island in Vancouver. There were setbacks and delays even during the construction phase, and ownership bounced from one financier to another.

The mall finally opened with great optimism on August 13, 1993. The 170,000 square foot building was built to house 125 stores, services, and entertainment venues. On the day it opened, it had 10 full-service restaurants, 60 stores, a fresh-food market with 40 stalls, 20 buskers, and a five-screen 1500 seat Cineplex Odeon. The IMAX theatre would open in September 1993, but then it would close down in 2004.

It’s impossible to know all the retailers who passed through those doors. Entrepreneurs with big dreams were mostly left with only disappointment. But a few long-standing stores weathered the storms as best they could. Good Earth was the longest original tenant of the mall. The Garage lived there for 28 years, Son of the Pharaoh for 27 years, Sweet Surprise served candy for 25 years, a hairdresser worked there for 24 years, and Island Foods lasted 21 years.

I remember those early days of the mall. My grandparents would take me to a toy store called Who’s Who in the Zoo, I’d get a balloon animal from one of the many roaming street performers, and then we’d eat at the Hard Rock Cafe.

But eventually, the crowds disappeared. Then the retailers. Then so did my grandparents.

By 1998, the debt of the market exceeded its value, so it was sold. Then it was sold again. By 2004, Harvard Developments bought the mall for $28 million and announced they were going to demolish and redevelop the mall.

But then the recession hit, and the project was cancelled.

In 2013, they announced another plan to demolish the mall and build five towers, 1000 residential units, 800,000 sq feet of office space, and 550,000 sq feet for retail space.

But again, it never happened.

In 2023, they announced they would be demolishing the mall to build mass transit, the Green Line. They officially closed the mall on May 31, 2024.

But yet again, this project has stalled, and is currently in a state of pessimistic uncertainty.

I can’t help but imagine what this mall could’ve been in another life. What if we had actually believed and invested in transforming it, instead of always threatening to tear it down?

Maybe in a parallel universe it’s still alive as a food hall, or an arts space, or a grocery store.

There’s so many things the mall could’ve been, but wasn’t.

There’s so many times when its owners could’ve made different decisions, but didn’t.

And now it’s gone.

In a time when we could use more physical spaces to gather together in, we’ve demolished a place that was never fully realized.

We live in a city that loves to pave over our history and move on. But what if we fight the urge to forget, and force ourselves to remember this imperfect place?

Maybe we can dig through those co-mingling feelings of relief and dread, and find something to grasp onto amidst the rubble of all this wanton destruction. Maybe together, we can assemble the fuzzy edges of our memories into a story of this mall that makes sense.

So friends, gather here with me as we excavate this site together, one last time.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand through empty, echoing corridors outlined with teal, purple, red, and lime. There’ll be sunlight streaming in through the atrium windows, and we’ll watch our shadows flicker across those bare concrete floors.

Eat a meal in the food court, stuff your pockets full of candy, and then we’ll ride the escalator upstairs to soak up some darkness.

see you there

meet me here

eau claire market