ApotheCycle by Kelly Andres
Kelly Andres
ApotheCycle
Site #1
Churchill Square
11am-9:30pm
A roaming scent-apothecary on wheels offers unlabeled local aromas to stir memory and dialogue. Participants may receive a limited-edition scent token—infused, engraved, and ephemeral. Worn or gifted, each token becomes a lingering thread of connection: a tiny, fragrant archive of something half-remembered, half-imagined.
Kelly Andres (assisted by Courtney Andres), 2008, Urban Habitat Laboratory (Apothecary Version), M:ST Performance Art Festival, Calgary
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Saturday, June 21: 12 to 2pm & 4 to 6pm
Sunday, June 22: 12 to 2pm & 4 to 6pm
Saturday June 28: 12 to 2pm & 4 to 6pm
Sunday June 29: 12 to 2pm & 4 to 6pm
Tuesday July 1 All Day: Volunteer-Led Exhibit Activation
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Rooted in socially engaged performance and DIY ethics, my work thrives in the porous spaces where stories, spores, and sonic residues collide.”
I work with living systems, rotting systems, speculative systems—anything that leaks, sprouts, ferments, or refuses easy categorization. My practice builds tactile, sensorial encounters that explore interdependence, decay, memory, and ecological entanglement. Rooted in socially engaged performance and DIY ethics, my work thrives in the porous spaces where stories, spores, and sonic residues collide.
I construct mobile, temporary structures using humble technologies: bicycles, water pumps, fermentation, plants, gardening experiments, DIY builds, and sound—both recorded and responsive. These elements aren’t props; they’re collaborators—messy, responsive, and alive. Scent and sound become volatile mediums: intimate, immersive, uncontrollable. I offer them as invitations—to remember, to feel, to connect beyond language.
My projects resist permanence. Instead, they function as living archives of place, gesture, and encounter. Participants contribute not as audience, but as co-conspirators in a slow choreography of sensing and remembering. What results is never static—just fleeting rituals, fragments of sound, scent-trails, and lingering atmospheres
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kelly Andres is a rural interdisciplinary artist based in Central Alberta, on the traditional territories of the Siksikaitsitapi, Tsuut'ina, Stoney Nakoda, Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis peoples. Her work is located at the intersection of ecological systems, sensory technologies, and performance, creating situations that invite audiences into playful and affective relationships with their environments. With a background in socially engaged art and speculative design, Andres creates conceptual systems that highlight the dynamic entanglements between humans, nonhumans, and the more-than-human world. Her projects often take hybrid forms—part installation, part experiment, part poetic ritual—and emphasize collaborative gestures and tactile, ephemeral experiences. From mobile bike-labs to interactive installations, her practice foregrounds the body, memory, and ecology as shared sites of knowledge and exchange. Andres has exhibited nationally and internationally and remains dedicated to slow, grounded, place-responsive art-making, often revisiting previous works as seeds for new iterations.