“THIS IS A CITY FOR THEM”
Z
oe Harveen Kaur Sihota still remembers the lights, the glowing beams falling from the roof of the Scotiabank Saddledome, illuminating her path as she walked out onto the ice, past the Calgary Flames’ bench, and took her place at the centre of the arena. She wore a yellow Flames practice jersey, emblazoned with ‘SIHOTA’ on the back, and stitched to its front, in a flourishing blossom of colours and patterns, was the design she had poured weeks into: an intricate iteration of the Flames’ signature ‘C’ paying homage to her city’s South Asian community. But thinking back on that late-March night now — when her design permeated every screen and surface in the rink as the Flames hosted their first South Asian Celebration Game — it’s not her own spotlight moment that comes to mind first, says Sihota. It’s the young South Asian fans she passed amid the crowd on the Saddledome’s concourse, it’s the looks on their faces.
“What stood out to me were the kids. A lot of young kids seeing this, and understanding that this is a city for them,” Sihota remembers. “They don’t have to look a certain way, or do a certain job, or talk a certain way. They can do anything in this city. They belong in this city.”
She remembers the parents, too, and the aunts, uncles, and grandparents. “It was incredible. The Calgary Flames marketing director told me that it was the first game in a really long time where the stadium was actually full. … Full of families,” she says. “It was beautiful to see everybody come together. Not only South Asians, but also just Calgarians, coming to the game wanting to see the celebration night.”
Up the road in Edmonton, Sunny Nerval had his own centre-stage memory made a week prior, standing under the Rogers Place lights during the Oilers’ South Asian Celebration Night, taking in the moment with the design he helped create all around him. Thirteen hundred kilometres east, in Winnipeg, Charmi Sheth shared a similar experience, too, sitting among the Canada Life Centre faithful encircled by her artwork, the Jets’ South Asian Heritage Night just the second hockey game she’d ever witnessed. And out west, in Vancouver, Jessie Sohpaul also had a turn in the spotlight, his creation continuing what’s become a beloved tradition of adorning the Canucks’ logo in Diwali-inspired splendour.
Still, as unforgettable as each of those nights at the rink were, it was what happened when these artists saw their work move beyond the arena walls that it all became truly surreal.
“I was in Los Angeles, and I was wearing the jersey,” Sohpaul remembers. “I was on Fairfax, where there’s a lot of streetwear, and I was stopped three or four times, by people who had no idea what the Canucks are, or what hockey is. I was getting so much love for the jersey. It was cool to see it transcending just the sport, as more of a fashion piece — that’s what I set out to do. I was taking a lot of inspiration from how basketball influences culture and fashion. Hockey doesn’t really do that.
“So, I thought, how do we create a jersey that does that, where it resonates with non-sports fans, non-hockey fans?”
It’s a question all four artists — Sihota, Nerval, Sheth, and Sohpaul — found themselves asking as they embarked on their journeys to create something for their communities, their work part of a steadily growing effort by NHL teams to better connect with their fanbases. For South Asian hockey fans, this season was a momentous one on that front, as the league’s four Western Canadian clubs each paid homage to the South Asian community — a small gesture that granted many a chance to finally see themselves in the game they love, and a reminder of the ways in which art can serve as a bridge between the sport and communities that have long been underrepresented within it.
“I could hear my heart beating,” Sheth says, thinking back to that night at the rink in Winnipeg, just a few years after she’d moved to the city from India, when she got the chance to help tie her old home to her new one. “I still remember that.”
F
or as long as she can remember, Sihota has been creating art. But it’s over the past seven years that she began focusing on carving out a path as an artist, focusing primarily on digital art — that shift to a life that centres her creativity was prompted by the feeling that she wasn’t seeing herself, her culture, or her beliefs in the artwork she came across. It was through her design work that Sihota first met Raghav, a Calgary-based singer who also serves as the Flames’ South Asian Community Ambassador. And it was Raghav who brought her the opportunity to create something for her hometown team.
“My dad always took me to hockey games when I was younger. So, to have this opportunity… it was really incredible to be able to represent Calgarians,” Sihota says. “To be able to look at this piece and feel a sense of pride to be from Calgary, but also to be South Asian and living in the city.
“I just wanted to create something that empowered South Asians. I hope that when they look at this piece, they feel like, ‘Wow, I’m actually seen and heard, and my city understands me.’”
Sohpaul’s creations are well-known in Vancouver, and among the South Asian community beyond British Columbia, too. The multidisciplinary artist’s work draws on many South Asian motifs and themes, brought to life through painting and drawing, with plenty of digital influence as well, he says.
It was through his established presence out west that the opportunity to merge this approach with his Canucks fandom — to create something for the team that sparked this rise of South Asian celebrations throughout the league — arrived at Sohpaul’s door.
“The project came through, I guess, a lot of word of mouth,” he says. “I wasn’t the first one to do it for the Canucks. The previous artists, and people in the community, like Randip (Janda) and Gurpreet (Sian), put my name out there to the Canucks.”
When that call came, he was taken back to his younger days, out on the asphalt mimicking the Vancouver greats.
“I watched a lot in high school, in elementary school — I was a big fan,” Sohpaul says. “It was really the only sport I followed. I loved it. Me and my friends would watch together, we’d play a lot of street hockey, blocking off the street to play. And once it was dark, we’d just go on our Xbox and play again.”
In Edmonton, Nerval’s earliest memories of the sport felt much the same. “I’ve been, playing hockey since I was a kid,” he says. “Like most Indian kids, ice hockey was out of the question, so I played street hockey, ball hockey, for most of my life.”
His opportunity to create something for his hometown club didn’t come as the others did, though — it was borne of his own determination. After seeing the Diwali celebrations held by the Canucks in recent years, and the incredible response from South Asian fans across the country, Nerval and a group of friends reached out to the Oilers with an offer to help plan a similar celebration for Edmonton.
A couple years later, the project was getting off the ground, and the Oilers were asking for a South Asian-inspired logo of their own. “Myself, I wouldn’t say I’m like the other designers — I’m not an artist full-time, but I like to draw every now and then,” Nerval says. To bring his ideas to life, he turned to friend and coworker JC Lutao, who could bring some graphic design expertise to the table.
For Sheth, in Winnipeg, it was exactly the opposite. An innate understanding of design was already in her blood — it was the hockey side she had to figure out how to navigate.
“My dad is a graphic designer,” Sheth says. And it was with him, back home in India, that she first learned how to make magic with tones and textures, before the love of the craft eventually took hold of her too. “I love painting and making different art forms. I’ve done a lot of canvas paintings, sketching … I also used to do henna designs for brides. It’s a tradition in India — when they have weddings or other events, they put henna on their hands.”
It was through near happenstance that Sheth found herself creating a piece of work that would become part of the Jets’ history. The young designer had reached out to True North Sports about a different position after finishing up her studies in the city, only to wind up with an offer to lead the creation of the artwork that would be the focal point of Winnipeg’s own South Asian Heritage Night, along with the club’s own creative team and Waseem Shaikh, creative director of multicultural marketing firm Ethnicity Matters.
“It was really cool — to design something that was going to represent where I come from, I was super excited,” she remembers. But there were some nerves, too. “It was on a national level — that was something that I had never done before in my career.”
What sold her on the opportunity in the end, though, was what she saw the first time she sat in the stands of Canada Life Centre, enthralled by the creativity of the pre-game festivities.
“It was confusing, because I didn’t know anything about the rules,” she says of the actual game that followed, with a laugh. “But the graphics, it was so cool the way they displayed the motion graphics on the ice. There was music [synced] to what was playing on the ice, other graphics playing constantly. I’ve never seen anything like that before. In India, there’s no snow where I lived, so this game is completely new to me.”
W
hen it came to designing her take on the Flames’ iconic logo, Sihota began with a figure synonymous with many South Asian cultures: the peacock.
“It signifies beauty, grace, and elegance across South Asian heritage. So that was really important to incorporate,” she says. “But I think the most exciting part was the patterns, which hold a lot of cultural significance for storytelling within a lot of different South Asian communities. These patterns represent a line of heritage and beauty and unity that I wanted to show — that, you know, South Asian communities are intertwined with one another, even though we all have our unique perspectives and representation.”
“On the top of the ‘C,’ I really wanted to include South Asian architecture, because I think it is so important in South Asian countries. They hold historic influence and they represent the rich heritage of South Asian countries, and I wanted to showcase that because it’s so specific to South Asian communities,” Sihota continues. “I chose four different colours that were really important, within South Asian culture, that I really wanted to highlight — maroon, saffron, green and red.