According to the World Economic Forum, 85% of all textiles go to the dump each year. Fashion production makes up 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions, and pollutes rivers, streams and oceans. This raises the questions: why buy new when we can renew?

Beauty What! is a collection of upcycled wearable art and design costumes created for the 2022 Art For Change 2022 Beauty WAD (Wearable Art and Design) Competition curated by Hanna Karin for the Members’ Gallery of the Alternator, on view from August 8 to 27, 2022.

Showcasing well-known and unknown designers from Canada and Myanmar, all of the submissions are made from repurposed fabric, natural fibres, packaging, and other discarded materials.

These entries exemplify the value-added potential of extending the lifespan of post-consumer waste. Trash becomes treasure, as a viable commodity and as a means to reduce our environmental footprint.

The entries also exemplify the incredible talent and ingenuity of trash artists. Inconsistencies that exist in unusual or weathered products mean costume preparation time is significantly longer than when starting with new materials. However, in the right hands, these irregularities create exciting potential for unique fashion and art, as demonstrated in this exhibit.

Beauty What! celebrates diversity in design and in designers. Marginalized artists from ChuChu and divergent artists from Cool Arts are represented side-by-side with their creative peers.

Beauty What! is part of the Art For Change exhibition — a series of five exhibits and three events that focus on using art and inclusive collaboration to create positive environmental change. Exhibits are located at the Rotary Centre for the Arts and at the Okanagan Heritage Museum. Find out more at artforchange.earth.

The artists featured include: Becky TenVeen from Summerland BC; Erica Bee from Kelowna, BC; Hanna Karin from Kelowna, BC; Hla Hla Yee from Dala, Myanmar; Julia Soleski from Kelowna, BC; Leslie Leong from Whitehorse, Yukon; Martha Ritchie from Haines Junction, Yukon; Ryan Williams from Kelowna, BC; Sen Sen from Dala, Myanmar; Sustainable Rave from Kelowna, BC; Trish Chung from 100 Mile House, BC.

For more information about Art for Change visit their website or follow them on Instagram and Facebook.

Manuel Axel Strain is a 2Spirit artist from the lands and waters of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Simpcw and Syilx peoples, based in the sacred homelands of their q̓ic̓əy̓(Katzie) and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen) relatives. Strain’s parents are Tracey Strain and Eric Strain, Strain’s grandparents are Harold Eustache (Chu Chua), Marie Louis (nk̓maplqs), Helen Point  (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) and John Strain (Irish). Strain’s Great Grandparents Are Tina Cole (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) and Tony Point (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Rose and Ben Louis (nk̓maplqs) and Manuel and Christine Eustache (Chu Chua). Although they attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design they prioritize Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents and ancestors.

Creating artwork in collaboration with and reference to their relatives, their shared experiences become a source of agency that resonates through their work with performance, land, painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound and installation. Their artworks often envelop subjects in relation with ancestral and community ties, Indigeneity, labour, resource extraction, gender, Indigenous medicines and life forces. Strain often perceives their work to confront and undermine the imposed realities of colonialism. offering a new space that can exist beyond its matrix. They have contributed work to the Capture Photography Festival through Richmond Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, and more distant places across Turtle Island.

Strain’s work can be characterized as being informed by their family's personal and political contemporalities: to be 2S, to be Indigenous is simply political, socially challenging and very regional. This exhibition features stories of Strain’s relatives that allude to the enduring thrivence, wisdom and vitality of Indigenous families. This work is about the time-honoured passages to and from Manuel Strain’s paternal and maternal ancestral homelands, as experienced by their family members. For Strain, these experiences evoke the seasonal run that salmon take between bodies of water.

The stories presented in this exhibition are from these journeys, collected and presented in video, audio and installation, and disclose themes related to forest fires, residential schools, plant and salmon siblings.

For this exhibition Strain collaborated with Tracey Eustache, Eric Strain, Condesa Strain, Quintasket Strain, Segwses Strain, Cam Strain, Elli-May Eustache, Julie Eustache, and Kalli Van Stone.

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.

Opening January 28th in our Main Gallery is Screen Time by artist Kyle Beal.

Screen Time is a collection of recent artworks that considers ideas of individuality, performance of the everyday, and our online existence. Tracing an ever blurring line between performing ourselves and at-rest ‘authenticity’, the exhibition features a mix of objects, which all rely on an interplay between reflection and transparency; slyly all surface no depth. Of the sculptures- The Green Room refers to the room actors use before the performance, in costume but not in character; realized here as a model minimalist glass house, as a counterpoint Mirror Stage presents a stage to stand on and perhaps watch yourself fall off of. On the walls a series of mirrors with embedded and abstracted text doubles the space and doubles you. The exhibition acts as a platform with viewers positioned in dual roles of ‘content creator’ and ‘cultural consumer’, while aiming to parasitically capitalize on the inevitable selfies.

Screen Time will be on from January 28th - March 12th 2022 in our Main Gallery.

Canadian artist, Kyle Beal, challenges convention through his conceptual art practice. Using a multidisciplinary approach, he incorporates a wide variety of media including drawing, sculpture and installation. Formal and informal research is applied to deepen understandings and explore the ideas and concepts that he finds resonant. Images of ubiquitous objects and spaces appear as a common thread throughout his works. The initially apparent simplicity of his subjects, however, is underscored by Beals application of optically illusionistic techniques. Engaging audiences with nuanced surprise, humorous tropes, and wit, Beal presents an accessible platform for his viewers to reconsider their day-to-day routines and behaviour.

Beal holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2001) and an MFA from the University of Victoria (2004). His work has been exhibited across Canada and the USA in Montreal, Toronto, New York City, Calgary, Saskatoon, Seattle, and Vancouver, notably including presentations in the 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, and the Esker Foundation, Calgary, among others. Beal currently lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. Recent activities and upcoming exhibitions include a solo Series Exhibition at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary rescheduled to 2022, and he will be participating in the La Napoule residency in France in April of 2022 His art is represented by VivianeArt (Calgary AB)