Think of a child once rescued from drowning, still scared of water as an adult. Think of a traumatic experience that traumatizes the person, now struggling to view the world the same as before. Now think of a white paper void of characters as Locke puts it -the Tabula Rasa. This resembles the mind as it starts blank and all the pieces of reason and knowledge, the perception of a “self”- the identity- are derived from experiences. Then imagine a gateway, the medium that ties one’s experiences to this blank slate. Memory! Memory that not just captures, but ties oneself, one’s identity, to one’s memories; lived, being lived, and still to live. Tavakoli’s practice attempts to re-interpret the Identity-memory relationship. As in the identity that cannot be reachable without being lost in memories, and the memories that cannot be experienced, remembered, or even stored without reflecting on the identity of the person carrying them. 

Tavakoli uses technical strategies to deconstruct her compositions, and then displace and distort the reality as we know it, to articulate that memory and identity cannot be defined separately given the complex overlapping nature of the two concepts. Tavakoli’s detailed and impactful charcoal drawings use collage as a starting point to entertain the interdependence of experiences (memories) and identity. What is collage more than fragments you put together to make sense? In Kentridge’s opinion, that is the very way we go through the world. “As a coherent being, one understands this self in fact is a completely provisional fragile construction of a walking collage of thoughts and ideas and thinking.” How then can a person be defined independent of society? Influenced by the socio-political climate of Iran where she grew up as a female artist, Tavakoli draws inspiration and reflects upon the black marks that are left on this collage that is her identity, that is Tavakoli. 

- Parsa Gooya

بطن The core of my person will be on view in the Project Gallery from September 13 - October 26, 2024.

Maryam Tavakoli (b. 1997, Isfahan, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Victoria, BC. She received an MFA degree from the University of Victoria in 2023 subsequent to her BFA from the best art university in her home country, Tehran University of Art, Iran. Tavakoli’s practice questions the relationship between identity, memory, and time. In her works, she makes use of a variety of materials that can embody the vague distorted reflections of memory and identity upon one another, through a combination of practices involving drawing, installation, and sculpture. She seeks to explore identity through memories of lived life experiences, personal traumas, and the social/cultural structure of her home country. Tavakoli’s work has been exhibited in over a dozen exhibitions over the two years since her arrival in Canada, including notable juried solo exhibitions at the Fiftyfifty Arts Collective and Xchanges Gallery in Victoria. She has been the recipient of numerous scholarships through the University of Victoria and is currently teaching as a sessional instructor in both the Visual Arts Department and Continuing Studies Department at UVic.

In this project, Kosar Movahedi approached the exhibition space as a ground for improvisation. Scholar and poet Fred Moten says “improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. How we make nothing out of something.” With this in mind, Kosar sourced photographs from the gallery room and through collage played with common themes in their practice that consider frames, surfaces, and the expectations we have of photography as a medium.

This gallery is a purpose-built space, and like most contemporary art spaces intends to be invisible. For this reason, all the architectural fixtures such as power outlets, vents, and lights are pushed up or down and outside of our sightline. She decided not to add much visual information to this blank horizon and instead highlight its void surface, bringing the attention of viewers to the ignored elements of the room. The resulting work presents itself as a document of the process of rethinking the space through printed photographs. 

The project’s title uses the word ‘folly’ in two meanings: Its common definition of foolishness, as well as referring to ornamental buildings that serve no practical purpose other than enhancing the landscape of a garden or estate. Especially common in 18th Century England and France, these structures often imitated the form of Roman temples, medieval castles, or Gothic towers. This project similarly puts on a gimmick that pokes fun at the indexical notion of photography.

Folly, by Kosar Movahedi will be on view in the Project Gallery from May 10 to June 22 2024.

Heather Savard’s artistic practice is responsive and a process-based exploration of household objects and structures. She makes use of sculpture, installation, drawing, and expanded forms of printmaking to explore how value is assigned in material culture. Her previous research questions have revolved around what it means to be good and what it means for something to hold value.

Savard’s work comprises recurring themes, such as the origins of middle-class objects of luxury, the tension between the duty of safekeeping and the guilt of discarding, and the current overwhelming, abundant need to buy as a form of self-improvement and optimization marketed in consumer culture. The experience of examining what is valuable to them personally has furthered her curiosity into the connection between the individual and societal drive to pursue valuable objects as both an act of living better and a signal to others.

Ethical philosopher Agnes Callard, in her essay 'Who Wants to Play the Status Game,' describes three games played: (1) The Basic Game, (2) Importance Game, and (3) Leveling Game. In the Basic Game, 'you are looking for common ground on the basis of which your conversation might proceed,' and it is a straightforward assessment of your conversational counterpart. She details the more advanced games of determining status via the Importance Game, where 'participants jockey for position,' dropping hints of wealth, connections, or affluence. The Leveling game 'uses empathy to equalize players' and 'reaches down low to achieve common ground' (Callard). Savard is interested in how objects can be used to 'signal enough power to establish a hierarchy' and fit within the Importance Game as described by Callard.

In his collection of essays, 'The Anthropocene Reviewed,' John Green briefly charts the evolution of the American Lawn, where he describes how the 'quality of lawns in the neighborhood began to be seen as a proxy for the quality of the neighborhood itself' (83). Savard’s work in this exhibition explores this relationship using the language of the formal French Garden, with its orderly and hierarchical representations of rules and governance over nature, in combination with contemporary materials used in current home and landscape design. How does the idealized version of the North American lawn fit into the Importance Game played between neighbors while being wrapped up, for Savard at least, inside of the ever-seemingly untenable goal of homeownership?

Heather Savard’s exhibition Greens will be on view in the Project Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from March 15 - April 27 2024.

I invite you into my private world, but you are also not welcome there. We can meet at the top of the hour and make love to the land but you won’t understand the language I speak, and so, don’t expect to cum. When you come over, be certain that you know I have children and they are both mine and not mine and when I ask you not to touch them, I mean it, but also can you please love them in ways that allow them to survive? I am unsure of what 9 and 3 mean exactly but I understand that numerologically 9 is sacred and 3 is really just 9’s children divided out of its body and into their own existence, but when combined, they once again become 9. If you follow my live stream, you’ll know what I mean with all of this, and so like, subscribe, and follow to learn more. Also, there is a password and some of the images aren’t mine and so I blur them and the children, who are still not mine, but I get their consent as they pass through my body. And you should know, this is not the real me. 

9/3 is a feminist intervention, digital reimagining, and 21st century meditation by Erin Scott inspired by Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 parts which was presented at the New York Reuben Gallery in 1959. For Kaprow, the original showing of this work is considered an artistic failure. What is often misunderstood about this body of work is the exhaustive textual component which held diagrams, directions, poems, essays, random lists, transcribed conversations, and more. This textual body is much more substantial than what was presented as the 18/6, and lives on as archived documentation. It is this documentation that more actively engages the thin line between art and life, which Kaprow’s happenings would continually seek to dismantle or reveal throughout the 1960-70’s.

9/3 is a videopoem sequence and a series of interactive occurrences that inhabit the often-invisible space between art and life, creating a voyeuristic moment for the viewer as they watch the intimate and every day of children, bodies, land, languages, and personhood. At once elevated in language, images, and metaphor, the poems are also deeply personal and biographic, playing off elements found in documentaries, home movies, and social media content creation. We feel the real and yet see the contrived and we want it all to last, but inevitably, everything fades into a memory or a story we hope our children will tell their children about how we tried to live and when we failed, what we did in the aftermath. 

Every piece in the exhibition appears multiple times across the different mediums. Scott invites viewers to find the interconnections across form, content, and time, and to build the story for yourself. On January 20, January 27, February 3 from 11am-4pm, join Erin Scott in the project gallery to play! Erin will be set up in the gallery with video equipment, projectors, writing materials, an orange shroud, and a kaleidoscope, and opens a generous invitation for anyone to join them to make your own videopoem. This age inclusive event allows anyone visiting the gallery to write, record, and edit your own video with assistance from Erin. Using elements of Erin’s exhibition, such as the projector and orange shroud, participants will make new videos which poetically and visually respond to and play with the ongoing exhibitions in both the main and project gallery.

Come as you are and plan to spend a half hour (or more, or less) playing in this process-led making experience. Dependent on how participants feel, the final product can be emailed to them for private viewing, or they can contribute their videopoem to be edited into the ongoing public exhibition 9/3.

Erin Scott’s exhibition 9/3 will be on view in the Project Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from January 19 to March 2 2024.

Cameron Gelderman is a self-taught emerging, interdisciplinary artist currently living in Kelowna, BC. His process-based practice embraces spontaneity, breaking through one's inhibitions, worry, and self-doubt to enter an intuition-driven state. The result of this process is large webs of woven textile installations and artworks. While considering themes of mental health, Gelderman creates an immersive environment using yarn and thread in his exhibition Yarnlandia. 

Following his instincts, Gelderman creates site-specific installations as a means of working through depression and anxiety by entering a flow state of creation. These transformed spaces, while chaotic, create an intimate space that invites viewers to engage and collaborate. Yarnlandia fosters an exchange between artist and viewer by inviting guests to add their own knots and weaves into the large-scale web of yarn, thread, and textiles, and attempts to empower gallery guests to work through inhibitions, worry, and self-doubt by embracing their creative instincts. 

Through scale, the installation invites visitors to move around the work, experience the works through touch, and to contribute to the installation. Through playful creation, curiosity, and experimentation, Gelderman encourages audiences to trust the process and trust in themselves. As he explains, “these works are there to be touched, satisfy the sense of curiosity, and connect the visual stimulant with the sense of feel. Enter Yarnlandia enthusiastically yourself and if you care to tie a knot, add some yarn, there are pieces highlighted for you to do so.”

Through the artist's experimental approach, Yarnlandia encourages exchange with audiences, and highlights the beauty of the unpredictable and spontaneity. Over time, the installation will evolve with each unique contribution of gallery guests, reflecting the impact community and collaboration can have on one’s individual growth.

Cameron Gelderman’s exhibition Yarnlandia is on view in the Project Gallery from November 3 - December 16, 2023.

I could just take you. And I become you. And you become me

-Breyer P-Orridge

Becoming a medium—a setting, a subject, an object has enfranchised artist Wilson S. Wilson from the discomfort and alienation of gender, sex and script. The Pandrogyny Project offers a personal realisation of pandrogyny as Wilson takes in the materials of objects and furniture around them, and begins to not only become these items, but to replace them, forming a third entity which is neither furniture nor individual, but a pandrogyne of domestic subjects. This concept of pandrogyny has evolved from the work of Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and their decades long Pandrogeny Project in which two people make surgical changes to their body, appearances and identities, becoming one unique, shared self.

Romantic and uncanny, The Pandrogeny Project is a body of work that explores the shifting of identity occurring as one comes to resemble and even function as an object of their space—as a pandrogyne of object/self—in distinguishing the object-subject and the human-object. In the exhibition, the pandrogyne materialises as a collection of furniture chimaera pieces and performance documents: an artist's publication that takes the form of a magazine spread, and a non-linear film where intimate gestures are captured in a series of surreal, pseudo-erotic scenes.

The Pandrogyny Project will be on view in our Project Gallery from September 8th - October 20th, 2023.

During a visit to a ruined ancestral Mennonite village in Ukraine, flooded to dam the Dnieper River, Shirley Wiebe found only an uncanny staircase deposited on the river bank. The form of this eerie architectural feature—disconnected from its initial location and function—serves as a mnemonic surrogate for obliterated place and the flight from persecution.

This body of work began during a Berlin art residency following the artist’s research, and more recently has continued in Vancouver. Follow a Path to the River reflects on what is not a unique occurrence, but one that is experienced over and over. Leaving everything behind to start anew. The exhibition invites viewers to follow shifting perspectives exploring themes of displacement, endurance and identity through drawing, photography, sculpture, video and music. Shirley Wiebe’s practice examines how memory is bound up in place and landscape through layered and composite viewpoints; how structures, objects and materials have agency to convey history and meaning; to spark personal and collective memory.

Follow a Path to the River will be on view in the Project Gallery from May 19 - July 1, 2023.

Please join us on June 8th from 5-6pm for an online Artist Talk with the artist. Details and registration can be found here!

As a supplement to the exhibition, Shirley Wiebe has also recorded a song titled Follow a Path to the River, which you can listen to here.

Interpretive essay courtesy of the artist.

The Staircase

Essay by Fae Logie © April 23, 2023

“Did you feel an ache for the village beneath the water when you were standing on the riverbank?” I ask.

“Yes and no,” Shirl responds, “My maternal grandparents had left the site long before the Dnieper River was flooded.”

We sit side by side in Shirl’s art studio with the window ajar.  Semi-trucks gear up along Clarke Street, hauling cargo from the Vancouver Harbour to points south.  Today the white painted studio appears like a gallery, an installation of photographic works juxtaposed with multitudes of drawings of various sizes, shapes, and materials.  Everything is carefully curated and positioned from low to the floor to almost ceiling height.  It is a narrative of inquiry imbued with a sense of timelessness.  

“When did you work on these?” I ask.

“After my journey to central Ukraine in 2009.  My grandparents were part of a Mennonite colony along the river, back in the late 1800s.” 

Having collaborated or critiqued each other’s art for many years, I intuit Shirl’s process.  Her interest is in finding unexpected encounters in the environment, places of transition and flux, and recreating a sense of “coming across it” for the viewer.  Things of day-to-day life are transformed into iconographies of memory.  They take shape, often using what is at hand in the landscapes, to define an ephemeral presence.  

A staircase, in its many configurations, dominates this visual field.  As I look closer, I realize every artwork incorporates elements of steps, representing a continuum between figurative and abstraction.  “Is there a specific meaning you associate with staircases?” I ask.  

“There are so many,” Shirl responds, “My work explores inter-relationships between the built environment and physical geography.  Staircases are part myth, part dream, part faery tale.  I see them as symbolic of a passageway between two things: places, ideas, or states of being.”  

One enlarged grainy photographic montage, six feet in width, realistically depicts a concrete set of stairs resting on the river’s edge.  It is an incongruous image, alluding to a structure floating in space.  Perpendicular to the flowing river, it could lead down to the submerged settlement, or as I see it, feeling a pull towards the dark fluvial waters, a hidden meaning below.  I envision myself standing on the bottom step, water lapping at the soles of my feet, then plunging down against the cold current to see a glint off the arched windows of the Mennonite Brethren Church, blurred through the polluted murkiness.  Yet all evidence would be gone.  

Shirl pulls me back from my reverie.  “My grandparents left Andraesfeld long before the damning of the Dnieper River in 1930.  It was part of Russia at that time.  They left for other reasons.”   

Her alert eyes regard me behind round blue frames, pondering my perspective on impermanence.  My own art practice is deeply embedded in an attachment to objects and place.   

“It is not in the Mennonite’s belief system to hold onto worldly belongings - a house, a shed for cattle or a plot of land.  As a devout colony, my grandparents would have found connection in faith and community.  As an ethnic sect, they moved throughout history, persecuted, and expelled from one country to leave for another.”

“Why did they leave Andraesfeld?” I ask.

“In 1874, Russia passed an act that made it compulsory for all young men to do military service.  This would have conflicted with their central tenet of pacifism as a way of life.”  

My gaze drifts back to the walls, pausing to take in intimate sketches on vellum that render elements of stairs in graphic detail: yellowish brown steps descending into a charcoal pool; a handrail attached to a watery smudge; lines made by machine stitched thread expanding out in varying proportions of riser and tread, defying gravity; swirls of black thread cascading down steps like a rushing torrent.  Repetition of the stair motif distorts and collapses in on itself, the materiality escaping into an abstract body or organic blobs of pinkish diluted blood. 

Partially hidden behind a worktable, a pink diaphanous sculpture peeks out.  It holds its hollow form in stillness.  On closer inspection, it defines three distinct steps in human scale, a volumetric expansion of thin flexible plastic sheets, pierced together with metal rings.  As I reach out to place my palm lightly on its uppermost surface, it jingles and jiggles.  I look back at the pink blob sketches, watercolour leeching out to wrap around an outline of geometric shapes, the piercing rings floating in space like punctuation marks.     

“We’ll come back to that,” Shirl says, as I turn to her.     

“Tell me about the day you went to the Dnieper River,” I ask. 

Shirl looks away.  Her hands begin to delicately move in line with her words, as if placing connecting images in a finite order.   

It is a day in late May, the weather warm enough that she wears a t-shirt.  Shirl has arranged for a translator and a driver to act as local guides.  As they leave Zaporizhzhia, Ludmilla, petite in the wide front seat of the sedan, speaks to the driver, Dimitri, his thick tanned hands lightly cradling the steering wheel.  They are both at least a decade younger than Shirl, now in her mid-fifties, but today she doesn’t feel the elder.  

Ludmilla, tucking her straight blonde hair behind an ear, turns to face Shirl.  “I have arranged for lunch in a small village.  Its baker will provide for us,” she says.  Her accent is familiar to Shirl as it mixes with faint music seeping from the car radio.  Leading tours, especially foreigners searching for remnants of their Mennonite roots, is what Ludmilla and Dimitri do, though they have never had a solo client and an artist at that.  Easing into the drive ahead, they know to find a common language, not only to use English, but to allow for the day to unfold as circumstances present themselves.  

Once out of the city, they detour onto rural backroads, most paved, some not, weaving between cultivated fields extending from settlements of corrugated roofed houses and outbuildings.  Shirl notices women her age working in their makeshift yards, chickens running about, fencing materials of this and that, worn outdoor tables accumulating pots and tools, every surface functioning in a seemingly haphazard way.  These women remind Shirl of her mother with their weathered, yet radiating faces, and her mother’s life given to preparing sustenance from the land: butchering chickens, milking cows, planting and harvesting gardens, putting up preserves.  

As they pass through one village, Dimitri slows and stops in front of a slate grey single-story house.  A middle-aged woman comes out of her gate to greet them.  She wears a loose blue pattern scarf knotted at the nape of her neck.  Without words, she takes in Shirl’s face with an inquisitive grin.  After brief introductions, Ludmilla asks in Ukrainian, “May I show Shirl the remnants of Mennonite buildings in your yard?”  

“Tak,” the woman replies, leading the way through overgrown grasses that scratch at Shirl’s bare ankles.  Segments of tawny free-standing walls rise like monuments, the thick handmade bricks exposed where the mortar has fallen off.  “This was a school,” the woman says in Ukrainian, “and over here the earth was dug out to provide for cold storage.”  Ludmilla translates as Shirl stands in what would have been the interior, her hand pressing against the uneven texture of flaking masonry.  

“It means a lot to me that people living here now know and remember the history of the Mennonite’s presence on this land.” Shirl says to Ludmilla, who in turn relays this message to the present owner as they slowly walk back to the car.  

Late morning, they arrive at their intended destination, as close as they will get to the former site of Andraesfeld.  From the parked car, Shirl sees a few distant farmhouses, but no further vestiges of an absent ancestry.  Is this it? she asks herself, the outcome of a thumbtack defining a spot on a map determined from months of planning?

“Can we get out and walk?” Shirl asks.

“Yes, of course!” 

 The day’s heat presses in like a vacant yearning picking at Shirl’s resolve, moisture beading on her palms.  She knows there must be more, something of being here and now, in the present.  Shirl spots the river a short distance away.  

“I want to get to the river,” she exclaims.  Ludmilla and Dimitri follow, aware by now that Shirl has her own ideas.

Silver poplar and linden trees dot the steppe to the water but mostly it is low growing deciduous shrubs, fescue, and feather grasses.  An arid scent infuses the air; a nostalgic pang quickens in Shirl for the prairie of her childhood home in southern Saskatchewan.  Approaching the low dip of the riverbank, her footing shifts in the loose sand.  

Immediately in view is a concrete staircase set apart from any architectural reference.  Utilitarian in appearance, it provides no purpose.  Its bulk departs the sandy bank at the top elongated step, balancing at a slant, a black shadow cast beneath.  Shirl counts eleven steps.  A smooth round handrail is perched along one side, curved at both ends, to aid in an assuming descent into the water, or the opposite, an ascension from the swirling greyish blue undertow.  She feels an irresistible beckoning.  This marvelous object is fraught with symbolism and metaphor, ceremoniously placed like a beached whale, something that has died and washed up, still intact and solid.  

For all Shirl’s research and preparations, she couldn’t have imagined this outcome.  Not realizing what she had been looking for, she has come upon where she needs to be, like meeting someone you feel you have known all your life, a sudden swooning in her body, an elation.  The staircase does not make sense, neither the impossible physicality of it nor the hunger it feeds.  It is a treasure, a tangible artefact, the gesture of a gift.  Now, she has something to go by.  Everything feels to be changing.  

Ludmilla and Dimitri observe from a respectful distance, eyeing an approaching small boat.  Two young couples land at the base of the stairs, boisterously calling out.  Ludmilla intervenes in Ukrainian. “This woman is an artist from Canada.  She is here to explore the village of her mother’s parents, now beneath the river here.” 

“Come out with us,” one of the men says in English, whereby they all start waving encouragement.  Shirl starts towards them, full of letting go of who she is in the moment, what even her purpose is here, suddenly open to all possibilities.  

Ludmilla intervenes again.  “This is not a good idea.  They have been drinking.” 

Dimitri also steps forward.  “Sorry, but we must be going soon.”  

Shirl watches the boat depart, both cherishing the notion of being on the river and of staying with her staircase.  She turns around, still in the object’s mystery, longing to stretch out the length of the steps’ inert surface, allowing the warmth of her limbs to transfer into its materiality, to feel the bite of each stair imprint her spine.  The handrail calls for her to reach out, gripping her fingers around its girth like a handshake, never to let go.  Shirl’s wish is to remain, to be alone with her thoughts.  

“We should be moving on,” Dimitri reinstates.  

Shirl, realizing all will be lost, takes out her camera, stepping back to frame the staircase from a side view, the river spanning to a horizon of cropped hills, then sky.  Will evidence of this unknowable be captured? she asks herself.  Will an image be able to fill the void?   

The visit is over too soon.  Her longing to stay conflicts with the retreating backs of her guides, intent now on the luncheon date.  Shirl runs to catch up, flopping into the back seat then turning to watch through the rear window until the staircase is out of site.  The Beatles song, “Two of Us” is playing quietly on the radio.  She hums the chorus, about home, going home.  

What is home? she mulls over to herself.   

Shirl closes the studio window to the afternoon breeze, pausing in her telling.  Slender fingers hang outstretched at her sides, a look of introspection flits across her forehead. 

I walk to the far wall to attend more closely to a miniature set of stairs protruding into the space.  It is a perfect scale replica of the Dnieper staircase, about twenty inches in length, made of grey cardstock and speckled with paint to give the impression of concrete. 

Shirl speaks up.  “I completed about half of these works during a three-month artist residency in Berlin, late in the same year after my time in Ukraine.  Then the remainder once I returned to Vancouver.”

“Why Berlin?”  I ask, still somewhat distracted by the tiny staircase, its attention to detail not going unnoticed. 

“The opportunity for the art residency arose.  It struck me as a perfect place to divulge my research, integrating aspects of my German heritage with my observations from Ukraine.  My affinity to the iconic shape of the staircase had a chance to incubate in the intervening months.”  

“Tell me about how you used this model as a device,” I ask.    

“It became a means to engage with Berlin, placing it in situ as a performative act.  At first, I was conscious of recreating a plausible reading, framing the placements such that the resulting photographs would appear in realistic perspectival space.  Then, I pushed further towards the limits of possibility.”  Shirl points to a few of the photographs that capture contradictory scale and angles; in some the steps hang precariously in mid-air.   

“I titled this series, ‘Treppe’,” Shirl interjects, “German for staircase.  In part I was intrigued by the notion of the staircase as an architectural threshold between opposing spaces.  The found staircase hinted at a disconnection, a severance from the building it once served.  I embraced the brokenness and lack of purpose.  It became a construct with which to examine separation, displacement, identity, and place.”  

I had been interpreting many of the photographs as actual staircases in the urban landscape.  Now I see that all these images are fabrications, the model staircase making its cameo appearance without fail.  Prominent sites of Berlin are recognizable, beckoning from the backgrounds, the former SS headquarters building, partially in ruin, or a remaining segment of the Berlin Wall with its signature graffiti face.  But others involve ambiguous sites, underground rail stations, vacant interiors, watercourses, each in tandem with the cropped stand-in.   

“Tell me more about your experiences in Berlin,” I inquire.

Shirl wakes in the bare rectangular room.  White walls, grey painted floor, heavy white molding framing two large windows divided into four square panes.  Dawn light defines two identical sets of squares creeping up the opposite wall.  Below the windows the white painted radiators gurgle to wakefulness.  Shirl has moved most of the room’s furnishings to the hallway, including the bed frame.  All that remains is an imitation wood table, two chairs, and a mattress on the floor.  She prefers it this way, to be unencumbered during this time by the past lives of objects.  

The smell of new PVC plastic counters a slight pervasive mustiness.  In the shadow of the far corner, the bulky sculptural form of thick pink skin masquerades as a low rise of steps.  It came together quickly, still raw in its presence.  What is my relationship to this new thing?  Shirl asks herself.  Yet the title “HOST” has already attached itself, as in holding or accommodating.  

Pinned above the sculpture, high on the end wall is an enlarged black-and-white copy of the photograph she took of the staircase next to the Dnieper River.  On the other end wall is a drawing surface made up of fifteen sheets of 300-gram watercolour paper taped together from the back and mounted as a grid.  The composite stretches over eight feet tall by six feet wide.  Beginning work on it the day she arrived, Shirl’s intention is to mark time over this month of thirty days, plotting her psychic passage through the city.  She studies the initial laying of vermillion red and ochre swatches in broad arm sweeping strokes, details of graphite lines cupping a distinct edge of apple green, drips flowing uninhibited.  A delicate wooden ladder leans against the wall next to the drawing, a means of gaining height to reach the upper half.  It was the final concession to the useful things she allowed to remain in the studio, harbouring something of the staircase’s liminal structure to get from one point to another, up and down, and up again.  

Shirl rises and dresses in the dim light.       

Outside the air is cold, the day greying with promised rain.  Shirl sets out along Kopenhagener Straße, as she has every day so far, stopping first at a favourite coffee shop around the corner.  

Berlin’s frenetic pulse quickens her pace.  She lets intuition guide her trajectory rather than a set plan.  The act of walking is a key element to her art practise, whether at home or in the unchartered territories of elsewhere.  She perceives a nostalgic rumination to these wanderings, acknowledging a melancholic past pushing in on her thoughts.  Berlin is a city whose social fabric beats in conflicting turmoil.  It both distracts from and awakens in her losses she carries, finding a restless solace in the city’s struggles.

Wrapped in plastic, the cardstock staircase is a reassuring object tucked in Shirl’s backpack.  A side street discloses a row of unopened storefronts, the day still early.  In one, a mannequin stands with arms stiff at her sides, confronting Shirl.  Its plain formal attire gives an impression of authority; from simple tailored cuffs, hands hang lifelike, pale, the fingers slightly bent.  Shirl stares at them.  

As a young child, the palms of Shirl’s hands held a power over her gaze.  She would see them as other than herself, later referring to it as “hand staring”.  There was an element of fear involved.  She took care to not overdo this activity, to not become desensitized to the feeling it evoked, understanding even as a child it would serve her, its seed developing into an acute sensitivity to the world around her.  

Shirl unwraps the model and presses its length to the window.  There is an immediate interchange, the stairs reflection erasing the solidity of the mannequin’s dark torso, the pale hands left unscathed, like a ghost trying not to be seen.  With one hand supporting the model she takes a hasty photograph.  Unnerved by the interaction, she hurries on.  

Brandenburg Gate looms in the near distance.  Crowds are funneling through to witness the date, the 20th year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Shirl turns instead to enter the pastoral Tiergarten park, consciously refuting a desire to investigate the plaza until later.  

Pungent decomposing leaf litter lures her as she disturbs a congregation of geese, their fluttering squawks beating overhead.  Meandering pathways break into damp grassy fields.  Shirl veers towards a maze of enveloping thickets, trickling sounds of water enticing her further afield.  The spot she is looking for will make itself known.  Reflecting patterns of dark and light cast by bare branches of hovering oaks and chestnuts signal a haptic terrain.  A hushing solitude embraces a bucolic pool, a reservoir for mourning.      

Shirl selects a stick to support her cardboard staircase, balancing it cautiously on the sandy substrate.  She crouches down.  Her camera viewfinder slowly pans back and forth; the grey rigidness of the stairs imposes its dominant stance as she moves it further and further out of the frame.  Back and forth until her eye detects a sharp edge between truth and fiction.  A sense of the impossible recaptured?  She moves the placement.  Tries again.  And again.  Click. 

Exiting the park, amplified music and voices assault as Shirl enters the mass pulsing within the cordoned off streets.  Her energy shifts to that of the crowd, reading facial expressions, catching snippets of German and English, narrowing in on smells of grease and boiled sugar.  “Look,” she says, pointing up.  Everyone is looking up.  

Articulated wings span out from dark statue-like figures crowning the buildings.  Ha, she laughs to herself, the Berlin film, “Wings of Desire”.  Just yesterday, she scoured the Staatbibliothek with her model, staging it amongst the book stacks, the very place the film was shot in 1987.  Everything feels to be connecting.  This is my Berlin, she thinks.  The angel actors float down on cables, animating their silver feather appendages, their long coats and hair covered in chalky grey dust.      

A reoccurring dream finds purchase as Shirl walks back over the George-C.-Marshall- Brücke at dusk.  The dream is always about living in a city where she has never been, yet knowing the streets and buildings as if it were home.  She pauses, scanning the River Spree, its arterial course pulling at the memory of her dream.  Is Berlin her oneiric city?  

At the threshold of the residency building, warmth calls Shirl in, her body weary.  In the second-floor kitchen, greetings from the other six international residents are exchanged.  “How was your day?”  “What did you do?”  “What did you see?”  She sits for a moment accepting a cup of tea, then retreats to her studio.  

Shirl goes to the wall drawing, climbing the first few rungs of the ladder.  Reaching out with her left hand, her pencil traces the day’s unfolding without conscious thought or reason, whatever comes to mind.  Marks rapidly overlay the thin washes: images of boards torn apart, falling into oblivion; a pole or stake piercing an organic shape, an edible treat, or a wounded limb; the outline of an animal, its pointed snout raised in a scream.   

There is a knock at the door.  “Is this a good time?” Trina asks, poking her face in, a wide eager face delineated by blunt bangs partially obscuring her eyes.  Trina is one of the other artists, coming to Berlin from South Korea.  She wears a blue terrycloth robe.      

“Yes, come in.  Please.” Shirl steps down from the ladder.  Going into the far corner she gingerly carries out the pink stair sculpture, its metal rings announcing its placement at the centre of the room.  

“I think of this as a social sculpture,” Shirl explains, “one that finds completion only by its ability to be engaged with.”  

“Ok,” Trina says, her voice cautious.  

“Interreact in any way you want, but as agreed, I want to document the process.”  

 Trina walks to the form.  Circumnavigating it, her bare feet land and push off, land, and push off, slowly, soundlessly.  She stops.  Considering.  Slipping off her robe, she pulls her nightgown over her head.  Both garments lay on the floor discarded.  Naked, she squats down.  Her hands slip beneath the fluorescent edging, limbs lowering, heels pressing back, toes poised, her body stretching out, palms lifting the lip of the hollow form over her head, her torso slithering in, her back rounding, her legs extending into the lowest step.   

Pinkness contains the body, the structure holds, shelters.  Everything is tinted pink and red, blood, and flesh, as in a womb.  Without warning, the grace of Trina’s gesture moves Shirl.  She lowers the camera as tears crest the dam of her eyelids.        

“Don’t cry.”  Trina stands beside her, robed.  “Don’t cry.”

The noise diminishing from Clarke Street indicates rush hour traffic is easing.  Shirl pulls down the blinds as the daylight beyond her studio window fades.  

“There is another thing I want to show you,” Shirl says, taking a tattered bound book from a box at her feet.  “This is my mother’s hymnal.  She died soon after I returned from Berlin.”

I accept the fragile offering, opening it, its binding hesitant as if imparting pain.  Words stray up from the verses, imagery of rocks, rivers, hills, trees, the word ‘wonder’.  

“Was singing a choral tradition in Mennonite culture?” I ask.   

“Yes.  Long after my mother could no longer communicate due to dementia, she would sit with a hymn book on her lap, singing the words as she traced the lines.”

Shirl hands me an image of handmade papers worked onto copper sheeting. “One more thing,” she says smiling.  It is obviously a new work in progress.  Disfigured step shapes traverse horizontally but they are almost undefinable, as if Shirl is allowing the staircase to finally be released into the encircling blue paper.  Abutting the blueness are torn scraps of a hymnal, musical notations, notes, and rests with bars serving as both ripples in the water, or lines in the sand.  A path along a river.    

“I gave myself permission to use pages from my mother’s hymnal, wanting her hand in the work.  She provided me with a way to continue following this path, developing ideas as a form of devotion.”   

Shirley Wiebe is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver BC. Born and raised in a rural Saskatchewan farming community, Shirley's work is informed by a strong childhood bond with the prairie landscape. Her installation and sculptural work explores relationships between physical geography and the built environment, with a particular interest in site-specific and project-based work.

Wiebe has participated in a number of international art residencies as an opportunity to initiate projects and new bodies of work with materials she discovers there. She has created site-specific installations in national public art galleries and sculpture parks throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Learn more about Wiebe and her work, here.

As a Canadian visual artist Fae Logie’s practice operates within the registers of the scientific and the poetic, the conceptual and the environmental. Embracing elements of sculpture, drawing, photography and text, the diversity of her visual output adheres to processes of critical observation and research.  Logie lives and works on Bowen Island where she is part of a co-housing.  She has an MFA degree from the University of British Columbia, though initially she studied science, a discipline that continues to inform her work.  This year Logie is enrolled in ‘The Writer’s Studio’, at Simon Fraser University, writing in both fiction and non-fiction.

Unsettling is home,
life is improvisation,
the present is not future enough to live with.

Flowing to Unsettle invites participants to explore the elasticity of experiential time through a durational performance that takes place over six weeks in the Project Gallery at the Alternator. 

As a Chinese media artist, performer, and researcher working in Canada, Gao Yujie uses time as a primary artistic material. Through performative actions such as drawing with different timeframes, her work delves into the essence of experiential temporality, both physically, digitally, and interculturally, examining how it can be stretched, compressed, and reconfigured in ways that challenge our taken-for-granted notion of time. Her research focuses on how performative computational art can inhabit and evoke different sensations of time, and how we can collectively hold space while experiencing individualized temporal perceptions. The central ideas are the concept of flow and a sense of wandering in relation to time and how these ‘states of being’ affect our perceptions.

Flowing to Unsettle is the final phase of a PhD research-creation project at UBC Okanagan initiated in 2020. In the previous phases Yujie has performed in a total of 72 livestreams, repeatedly implementing the same improvisation prompt ‘fill a canvas from empty to full’ with variables like duration, materials, platforms, and scales. For the first time ever, through her six-week-long performance at the Alternator, Yujie will use the exhibition space as her canvas, performing every day, collaborating with a variety of technologies and inviting participants to engage with their own temporal perceptions in an embodied experience where they are encouraged to slow down, reflect, and connect with the environment. The process of being – including thinking, wandering, playing, making, failing, problem-solving, and reflecting – forms the ‘whole’ of the work. The work itself is in the process. The performance will be broadcasted and recorded. By performing extensively for six weeks, she is also questioning what defines the boundaries between art time, machine time and life time and how they intertwine with each other.

The subthemes explored in Flowing to Unsettle include accumulation and decay, boredom and freedom, repetition and variation, rules and autonomy, endurance and intuition and how each aspect shapes our time perspective. By creating an open-ended live setting, Yujie invites multiple perceptions of time to coexist and foster meaningful shared experiences that celebrate uniqueness and differences. In doing so, she hopes to open up new possibilities for artistic expression of understanding and relating to time and to deliver this message for the audience:

“Take your time.”

Flowing to Unsettle will be on view in the Project Gallery from March 24 - May 6, 2023. You can view the live stream of Gao’s six-week-long durational performance below and view each previous day’s live stream here.

Gao Yujie is an interdisciplinary media artist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her generative participatory performance work studies the materiality of duration and explores the elasticity of space and time in rule-based interactive environments.

Learn more about Gao’s work on her website.

Hockey enjoys a notional status almost akin to religion, especially here in Canada, but having never played anything more serious than childhood pond-hockey, Rylan Broadbent avoided the inculcation of organized sport. And yet still found himself drawn to play the game as an adult. Broadbents first chance to play in goalie equipment came in year one of art school, and the feeling was entirely new. The ritual of shedding street clothing, down to bare skin, and donning an armor of sorts, was all unfamiliar to him, but one that he has repeated hundreds of times since. More than the pleasure of competition and the comradery of team sports, he continues to be attracted to how the equipment makes him feel: not impervious, exactly, (pain is often part of the game) but capable, protected, and secure.

Why the goalie mask? Because this one piece of gear, more than any other, feels the most personal and intimate to Broadbent, but it can also act as a wider symbol for how we choose to veil ourselves. Everyone wears masks —some metaphorical, some physical— in order to present, project, or protect themselves. And while goalies at every level of the game customize their equipment to match the team, the mask remains a representation of the individual that often features highly detailed imagery and symbols. Broadbent is drawn to the unique combination of form, meaning, and function that sets the mask apart from the other equipment.

Broadbent began working through this installation by pressing clay into a plaster mold of one of his old goalie masks. The resulting object is close in form to the original, but offers a number of possibilities in which to modify the context and pose technical, material, and semiotic questions. Clay was selected as the primary vehicle for its materiality, proximity of local facilities, and deep heritage. The masks now reference a craft tradition that stretches back thousands of years, and like all ceramics, embody a unique combination of aesthetics and physical properties; they are both incredibly durable and astonishingly fragile.

Behind My Mask, I am Secure will be on view in the Project Gallery from January 27 to March 11, 2023.

Rylan Broadbent is a sculptor, designer, and fabricator, who resides and works out of the North Okanagan. Employing an array of techniques, ranging from traditional to digital, he is primarily interested in examining the interconnected relationships between object, form, material, and meaning.

Objects, like images and language, can hold information; they are utilitarian in their function and also symbols that reference bodies of meaning. And just as physical forms can be modified, so too can the semiotic attachments. Context can be skewed, shifting definitions, and complicating the interpretation. The objects he selects often speak towards notions of masculine identity, relationship to violence, and social fragmentation.

Broadbent holds a BFA from the University of Calgary, and a MFA from University of British Columbia Okanagan.

Whitney Brennan’s, a sound falls but leaves no bruise explores sound, poetry, textiles, and the mediums’ relationships to anxiety and misophonia*. This exhibition invites audiences to ask questions about relationships between our senses of hearing and touch, and between sound and textiles.

Our access to sound through touch is usually through vibrations; tiny oscillations of movement that pass through objects that, when touched, elicit a sensation. How else can we engage this cross-sensorial relationship between sound and touch? What does accessing sound feel like?

With both textiles and sound, the concepts of a ‘weave’ and ‘density’ influence our relationship to the medium. Consider the weight or thickness of a fabric, or how we experience sound as it weaves through us; how does that impact the way our bodies move through a space? In this exhibition, Brennan asks us to consider our senses in relation to our mental health and our ability to construct or disrupt our surroundings through sound, or to connect to our environment through touch. 

a sound falls but leaves no bruise will be on view in the Project Gallery from October 28 to December 10.

*Misophonia is a condition in which certain sounds cause a negative response in the body. With misophonia, triggering sounds alert the part of the brain connected to emotions like anger, and to physiological responses like “fight or flight," or the sympathetic nervous system.

On view in the Project Gallery starting September 9th is Tethered: a study in entanglements by Alison Trim.

Tethered is the latest development of an ongoing project that layers and stitches cut paper into floor-based installations, engaging with surface as a rich and complex interaction.  The thread of our inescapable connection to land that moves through the work is reflected in the title. Tethered is a phrase used when an animal is tied to restrict movement. 

Alison Trim's practice demands a haptic engagement with materials and a physical immersion in place. Walking and other somatic engagements with land and place are intrinsic to her work, while drawing, photography, cutting and reassembling are the studio processes through which she interacts with ideas and materials. The resulting works are the artefacts of both, as much about the process of making as they are a record of the phenomenological experience of land. This work was made across the Okanagan and Slocan Valley regions, unceded territories of the Syilx and Sinixt peoples.

Tethered will be on view in the Project Gallery from September 9 to October 22, 2022.

In the Project Gallery from May 6 to June 25, 2022, is I Make My Bed by Pip Dryden.

We spend about a third of our lives asleep. Through the use of materials from the body, I Make My Bed illustrates the way we are physically connected to our beds. The bed itself accumulates evidence of the life that it’s part of. While we sleep, our bodies are left vulnerable, completely surrendered to our beds. The pillow cradles our heads as we sleep, creating a relationship between our dreaming selves and our pillows. The pillows in I Make My Bed are embellished with residue of the body, reminding the viewer of the materiality and vulnerability of their own bodies. The presentation of bodily objects separated from the body itself illustrates the intimate physical connection between our bodies and our beds. I Make My Bed presents the discomfort of being faced with that which reminds us of our own mortality, physicality, and materiality in the place that we surrender ourselves.

Mechuda, a Spanish word used to refer to someone with long or particularly messy hair is a word that resonates with Vanessa Mercedes Figueroa quite deeply. For Figueroa, to be mechuda can sometimes feel like an identifier existing as a person of colour within the global north. The third space coined by Homi K Bhabha refers to hybrid cultural perspectives associated with both globalization and colonialism. As Figueroa’s work inhabits the third space, she has been continually exploring what it means to be ethnically coded existing within western spaces, and the navigation of these spaces as a person of colour.

Peluda has been an ongoing project surrounding celebration of ethnic body hair. Losing her hair over the last 4 years has led Figueroa to create a large body of work, all falling under the title Peluda, which is a Spanish word meaning hairy. Containing a variety of mediums, the iteration of Peluda exhibited in the Project Gallery experiments with collage and photography and involves attaching hair to inkjet prints. This series contains multiple inkjet prints of various parts of Figueroa’s body including her legs, underarms and arms with hundreds of individual hairs glued onto them.

Arregla Tus Cejas is a recent photographic endeavour, in which human hair was attached to Figueroa’s face using pros-aide. Arregla Tus Cejas translates to Fix Your Eyebrows, something she has consistently heard through adolescence having thick ethnic eyebrows, her mother having waxed them for her for the first time when she was 13 years old. These 26”x25” inkjet prints present a juxtaposition between the seriousness and sadness in her face, yet playful girlishness through the small bows and butterfly clips in her eyebrows.

Living and working out of Vancouver, Canada, Vanessa Mercedes Figueroa is an emerging artist of colour exploring identity politics, as well as the consideration of critical theory, her goal is to create a visual response and evaluation of current events affecting marginalized groups to set the tone for the sociopolitical period we are in, to allow for reevaluation and critical reflection. Figueroa’s work primarily functions through a diaristic lens exploring the notion of homemaking within the third space inhabited by children of immigrants of colour. Through performative and sculptural gestures, intervention of the longing and yearning for home while existing within the third space and making home your own. While living within the third space, existing is inherently uncomfortable and when living within those in-betweens, comfort and home are self-made.

The first exhibition to take place in the Project Gallery, our new programming space, was Sea Dreams, a collaboration by local artists Joanne Gervais and Shauna Oddleifson.

Sea Dreams is an animated tale that tells a story of a little girl character wearing an octopus mask and her interactions with sea-creatures, underwater plant life and the impact of human negligence. With increasing temperatures brought about by climate change, and the accumulation of plastics, the health of the oceans is under threat. With this work, the artists reference the effect we have on our environment, and how the way we interact with nature can have consequences. 

Sea Dreams was on view in the Project Gallery from January 28 to March 12, 2022.

Shauna Oddleifson’s work is subversive in nature, containing deranged visuals and a schizophrenic sense of humour, appropriating from our childhood desires and patterns of thought. Her work affixes a subtext narrative to a common object or idea in order to provoke a societal response. Her conceptual and creative practice centres on the character of the little girl and her growth through living in the world with other people, creatures and environments.

Shauna Oddleifson graduated from UBC Okanagan (previously OUC) in 1998 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, graduating with distinction. Since graduating, she has been involved with the arts community in Kelowna working in galleries as well as volunteering with various arts organizations and special events. Shauna has a studio practice, both art and craft-based, and has exhibited work throughout the Okanagan as well as in various artist-run centres and galleries across Canada.

Joanne Gervais' work looks at the role memory plays in the formation of identity and how the arrangement of imagery, video, sound and motion can be used to depict the non-linear nature of nostalgia and its capacity to imaginatively restructure past narratives. Her work often references and suggests alternative perceptions of these narratives.

Joanne Gervais is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kelowna, BC. Her practice ranges from documentaries, promotional videos, and performance collaborations to print, drawing and design. Joanne holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC where she now works.

The collaboration of these artists has led to a new installation of works based on their intersecting interest in nostalgia, and their desire to combine their different mediums as a means of further investigating the impact of memory and imagination.