low-rez, or low-resolution, pays homage to low-tech media and mediums. The exhibition honours the intersections of Indigenous storytelling, new media, Indigenous futurism, and available consumer technologies. low-rez celebrates storytelling through light based mediums, shape shifting and optical illusion, coding, and glitch photography. Together, the works create the synergy of futurism combined with low-key visuals, Northern Lights, and Northwest Coast First Nations aesthetics.

On May 30th from 6-8pm, join us for an opening reception featuring light snacks and refreshments. This event is free and open to the public.

Krystle Silverfox (b. 1984) is a Selkirk First Nation (Wolf Clan) interdisciplinary visual artist living and working on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwach’an Council (Whitehorse, Yukon). Silverfox holds both a BFA in Visual Art (2015); a BA in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice from UBC (2013); also an MFA in Interdisciplinary studies from Simon Fraser University (2019). Inspired by a material- focused practice, Silverfox uses visual mediums to communicate ideas and tell stories. Silverfox’s work explores concepts of Indigenous futurism, feminism, activism, and de-colonialism.

The Guest Book is a dynamic, rotating group exhibition that reflects on creative gestures made in the Okanagan-Similkameen. The Guest Book includes 26 alumni of the Similkameen Artist Residency (SAR), featuring artworks made during or in response to their residency at SAR between 2021–23, and three Syilx-Okanagan artists. This exhibition reflects SAR’s gratitude for the artists who have shaped their identity as an organization, and for the communities and territories that surround and inspire us.

Mirroring the variable experience of attending the residency, small groupings of alumni artists’ work are installed for 1–2 weeks each, rotating throughout the exhibition. When developing this schedule, SAR curated groupings that encourage thematic and aesthetic conversations between artworks. These include performative processes in collaboration with nature; abstractions inspired by the landscape; the identities and regionalities of “home”; and processes of place. Instead of rotating like residency alumni works, Host Nation artists’ works stay in place throughout the exhibition, grounding the show and encouraging visitors to reflect on their relationship to the region. This curatorial decision is made out of respect for the Syilx-Okanagan people, who have created art on and tended to these lands since time immemorial.

Embodying SAR's goal of creating cross-regional dialogues, The Guest Book bridges local, national, and international artists. Through the showcased works, visitors will experience the energy of SAR, with each piece reflecting the unique perspectives and experiences of the artists who have contributed to our development. SAR is grateful for the opportunity to showcase these works, as each participating artist has been so generous in sharing their creativity with us.

On March 28 from 6-8pm, join us for an opening reception featuring light snacks and refreshments. This event is free and open to the public.

ROTATING SCHEDULE

WEEKS 1–6 | March 28–May 10

yutəlx Franchesca Raven Bell, Madeline Terbasket

On view for the duration of the exhibition, artworks by host nation artists ground the exhibition. Madeline Terbasket’s drag king persona Rez Daddy celebrates queer and two-spirit experience, and yutəlx Franchesca Raven Bell’s images integrate syilx cultural knowledge and reflect their ancestral territories.

WEEK 1 | March 29–April 5

Sidi Chen, Natasha Lavdovsky, Noelle Lee, Esteban Pérez, Andreas Rutkauskas, Niki Singleton, Isaiah Somsen

The exhibition opens with alumni artworks that explore collaborative, performance-based processes with and in nature. These works document human relationships with nature (on the land, with the land, of the land) and portray journalistic encounters with the region.

WEEK 2 | April 8–12

Laurence Belzile, Sidi Chen, Gemma Crowe, Esteban Pérez, Niki Singleton, Isaiah Somsen, Sherry Walchuk, Katherine Wilson

In week two, we see abstract impressions of the Okanagan-Similkameen. This suite of works includes strong textural interpretations that respond to and reflect the residency’s region. We see artists channeling the land, speaking to a particular time and place, and mapping memory.

WEEK 3 | April 15–19

Héloïse Auvray, Laurence Belzile, Alexandra Bischoff, Gemma Crowe, Jeff Hallbauer, Liz Toohey-Weise, Sherry Walchuk, Katherine Wilson, Ulrike Zöllner

Still speaking to abstraction, week three’s artworks move through imprints of place (memories, fuzzy or otherwise) and semiotics of place (the signs and symbols that represent the Okanagan-Similkameen). Here, we begin to consider abstract conceptions of home and the building of regional identities.

WEEK 4 | April 22–26

Héloïse Auvray, Alexandra Bischoff, Miriam Gil, Jeff Hallbauer, Emily Jayne May Myatt, Moe Pramanick, Liz Toohey-Weise, Marion Webber, Ulrike Zöllner

Week four marks a strong shift into the themes of home and identity, the building of these and their permeability. Processes of identity, of artmaking, and of where these intersect all contribute to the feelings of place and an urgency of being.

WEEK 5 | April 29–May 3

Maddie Alexander, Miriam Gil, Emily Jayne May Myatt, Sonny Park, Moe Pramanick, Lewis Reid, Eric Tkaczyk, Marion Webber, Julia Wong, Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora

All the artists in week five capture the mood of the region: the geography, meteorology, biology, entomology, and what else can be found around, and how these things affect the tone of the region and the ways in which artists make work here. There is a sincerity—and sometimes comedy—in these works, speaking to the processes of becoming one’s self.

WEEK 6 | May 6–10

Maddie Alexander, Sonny Park, Lewis Reid, Eric Tkaczyk, Julia Wong, Yasmine Whaley-Kalaora

Closing the exhibition, week six is a continuation of the themes in week five, only with a reduced number of works. This graduation mirrors the seasonal experience of attending the residency. We enter hibernation in November–December: the exodus of tourists quiets the community at large, and the snow and finite daylight of winter settle upon the valley.

Founded in 2021, the Similkameen Artist Residency (SAR) offers a tranquil, affordable, and supportive environment for artistic exploration in Keremeos, BC. As an artist-run residency program, we recognize that working artists face challenges when seeking dedicated time for their creative pursuits. Our inclusive program understands that all artists—including those at various career stages and across diverse artistic trajectories—should be given opportunities to rest and refocus their practices. Enhanced by an ethos of community, curiosity, and creative exchange, SAR’s self-directed residency structure fosters productive solo studio time and collegial, collaborative cohorts.

Jordan Hill is a Coast Salish (T’Sou-ke Nation) new media artist from Vancouver Island whose work alludes to the blurred line between fact and fiction within contemporary culture. Hill questions how we navigate a spatially manipulated world where truth is incredibly difficult to locate both physically and virtually. He juxtaposes unexpected ideas and seemingly unrelated locales, uncovering the intersections between urban and rural facades in ways that transform how we think about both. Hill’s work utilizes our relationship with technology and virtual imagery in a way that helps us foster a deeper connection with the world away from it.

In the piece, Horizontal Vertigo, Hill addresses themes of exhaustion, facade, and transparency in a contemporary society asking too much of our time and energy. In an era where physical and digital environments impose relentless pressure, there is a constant insistence for society and individuals to be producing, to be moving. We find these pressures both in physical and digital environments, becoming increasingly impossible to escape, resulting in perpetual exhaustion. Empathy becomes exhausting through the unrelenting nature of capitalism. We start to become desensitized to this movement, our thoughts and experiences become fleeting. Horizontal Vertigo is a response to facades and spaces relying on the tiredness we are conditioned to accept. 

This interactive installation allows viewers to walk in front of and through the projections, casting a silhouette revealing the brutalism behind the trees. These screens behave as a manufactured facade as a way to question our spatial relationship between the physical and digital. In what ways do we allow our intuition to be undermined by a fast-moving world? In a world of content where the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred, it is important we find moments to slow down. This project gives autonomy back to the viewer, allowing for the time and space to spend with a moment that might otherwise push you through it. 

In Peripheral Loading, Hill addresses themes of memory, growth, the virtual, and exhaustion in a contemporary digital age in which we are overexposed to rapid expansion of information. The world is never truly off; we are subject to constant change at all scales, our attention as a commodity is at a premium and can become as fleeting as the information we generate. This project pokes fun at urban sprawl development sites and the temporary fence around them. Lined with mesh, they host utopic renderings of what's to come--a promise of lifestyle and luxury. Much like headlines and thumbnails in virtual spaces, development facades and renderings rely on immediacy to make quick shallow impressions, in spite of the contents they hold. 

In Peripheral Loading, Hill reconstructs the lifeless and flat qualities of these renderings, and encourages viewers to be critical of their relationship within ever-present rapid growth. How do we effectively keep track of our ever-changing public spaces if our attention is at a constant divide? Hill’s interrogation of the development site comes from living in 3 Canadian cities in 5 years, all going through rapid growth movements. Specifically, he reflects on his experience of watching and feeling space change in real-time, to be replaced with fences, craters, and concrete skeletons -- taking away shortcuts, sightlines, and memories of what was before them.

The Missing Distance will be on view in the Main Gallery from September 13 - October 26, 2024.

This exhibition contains flashing lights, images, and other luminous stimulations which may induce epileptic seizures in certain individuals.

Jordan Hill is a Coast Salish (T’Sou-ke Nation) new media artist from Vancouver Island whose work alludes to the blurred line between fact and fiction within contemporary culture. Hill’s work utilizes our relationship with technology and virtual imagery in a way that helps us foster a deeper connection with the world away from it.

See more of Hill’s work on his website and Instagram.

This exhibition acknowledges the support of Arts Nova Scotia.
This exhibition acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Connor MacKinnon’s artistic practice operates through a framework of imagination, potential, and questioning. Examining the unique qualities in objects as specific markers of material culture, his work explores the physical and conceptual reconstruction of objects using generative algorithmic 3D modeling. Linking these algorithms and speculative framework is the desire and ability to create variability and multiplicity within a defined system which both respects our sense of familiarity with an object and disrupts many of the assumed and expected attributes associated with how that object is perceived. CGish itself has been an examination and investigation into his own relationship to shared authorship, artistic labour, and control in the creation of artwork that is in part computer generated. 

While MacKinnon is currently experimenting with integrating A.I. into his practice in small ways the works present in this exhibition do not make use of any A.I. and instead are the output of generative parametric functions. These functions consist of a long series of instructions and restrictions that dictate the order and methodology of digital 3D construction. Their capacity to generate variability, multiplicity, and strangeness comes from their ability to accept variable input, whether that is from a physical artifact, digital geometry, or a purely numerical data set. Output as digital 3d models these forms must go through a process of digital fabrication or computer-aided manufacturing before they can exist in reality. In some cases, they can be directly 3d printed, others follow a process of molding and casting, and some require a more specific form of digital fabrication as in the case of Computers Generated (2024) which are welded steel forms created from patterns cut out on a CNC plasma cutter. 

While much of his work is driven conceptually and designed digitally, balance and personal satisfaction are maintained through a physical and tangible making practice which strives to create a sense of harmony between learning, experimentation, intellectual gratification, aesthetic pleasure, and craftsmanship.

CGish by Connor MacKinnon will be on view in the Main Gallery from May 10 to June 22 2024.

Familiar places, objects, images and scents can transport us to other times and versions of ourselves. In this way, our memories are held by the land and our embodied experiences within it. But how does this memory translocate across geographies? For diasporic peoples, where do our memories belong?

How does memory inform geography and provide an alternate way of knowing and imagining the world? 

In embalmed funks, Michaela Bridgemohan draws on her inherited Afro-Caribbean cultural practices to explore this question, inviting viewers into this archive of intimate Black Canadian home life. This methodology is informed by generative and reciprocal forms of care—prioritizing self-sustenance, futurity and creative power. In this austere gallery space, everyday domestic items like silk pillowcases, end tables and wide-tooth combs are recontextualized—here, we are reverent and attentive: these objects are sacred. But this sacredness does not exist out of time and place; it is situated within Syilx and Caribbean lands and holds those relationships with their people and living things. Sculptures are infused with local plant life, while artistic methods incorporate practices of Afro-Caribbean care—oil is massaged into hair and wood; we make salves from the land to moisten our bodies; beeswax forms a comb. By conflating these practices of caring for the body with those of caring for the land, can memory take root here, too?

Bridgemohan responds to scholarly work by Canadian scholar Dr. Katherine McKittrick; Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, which explores how the practice of resistance to racial domination intensifies Black women’s relationship with land. Bringing attention to spatial acts as forms of poetic expression, resistance and naturalization. In this way, “understanding blackness has been twinned by the practice of placing blackness and rendering body-space integral to the production of space.” Dispossessed bodies and prairie scapes are not passive. Spatial domination is dismissed here, so actions become poetically expressive and remembered as home. The combination of materials, landscape photographs and performances are to “unfix” the one-dimensional perception of black women’s geographic positioning. Embalmed funks insist upon this, recognizing land as home, which insists on naming one’s self and self-history.  

The objects of embalmed funks are representational, but their applications are abstracted: both artifacts of the everyday and relics of distant land/memory; a testament to Afro-Caribbean dispossession and a tribute to Syilx land; an act of cultural persistence and a spectre of what was once remembered.

Michaela Bridgemohan’s exhibition embalmed funks will be on view in the Main Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from March 15 - April 27 2024.

Michaela Bridgemohan is an interdisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who grew up in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, but now gratefully resides on Syilx territory, Kelowna, B.C. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia—Okanagan and received her BFA in Drawing (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017. Through her paternal Caribbean heritage, Bridgemohan's artistic research is driven to reinscribe new notions of multiplicity and multi-dimensionality within Black identity in Canada. She includes cultural ways of making as a legitimate form of artistic expression and creative power. Wood, Indigo and familial objects materialize these immaterial anecdotal memories—a corporeal shadow in the shape of domestic spaces, brown bodies and fertile terrain. Theoretical and contemporary writings on Caribbean-Canadian thought, Black Feminism, Hauntology, Relationality, Indigenous Knowledge and Land-based practices inform these conversations. 

Bridgemohan’s art practice wouldn’t be possible without the gracious support of the British Columbia Arts Council, Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art and Canada Council for the Arts, whose work has been exhibited across Canada and Australia. Exhibitions include but limited to Grunt Gallery-Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen (Vancouver BC), Fort Gallery (Fort Langley BC), Lake Country Art Gallery (Lake Country, BC), Feminist Art Collective (Toronto ON), Diasporic Futurisms (Toronto ON), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton AB), Stride Gallery (Calgary AB), The Marion Nicoll Gallery (Calgary AB), Whitebox Gallery (Brisbane QLD) and Jugglers Art Space (Brisbane QLD).

Puppets Forsaken is an acoustic noise band comprised of David Gifford and Natali Leduc. 

Puppets Forsaken started to collaborate on a sculpture/sound project in 2019 that they called Nostalgia for Futurism. Inspired by the Intonarumori of Futurist Luigi Russolo, author of the manifesto Art of Noises (1913), they built some acoustic noise generators that they used for performances. These machines contrast with our digital age, and allude to the mechanical age. They produce sounds reminiscent of factories, gears, and machines, which, according to Russolo, correspond to our everyday lives and resonate with our bodies more accurately than music.

Through this investigation, Puppets Forsaken have developed an audience in the regional “Noise” circuit, they have performed for old growth trees that are no longer there, engaged their work in a theory symposium, interloped in a Visual Art Performance and entered a telekinesis competition. They even recorded an album (Greatest Hits). 

While they had a terrific experience building their noise generators and playing them in public, Puppets Forsaken felt that the audience was missing a big part of the experience, since they could only listen, and not play the instruments. For this reason, they decided to build The Noisebau, an interactive and immersive architectural sound envelope, which is the project they are presenting at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

When visitors produce sounds emanating from The Noisebau, these become an extension of the participant, who has a certain control over their rhythm, pitch and intensity. There is an implied resonance between the participant’s interior and what is behind the walls (the mechanism). By building an immersive installation, they want the audience to feel they are part of the work. Being inside the noise generators is not meant as an act of transgression by the designers, or to aggravate or cause discomfort, but for the audience to pause and reflect on those noises that are usually forgotten in the background. Producing the sound themselves, the visitors will feel the noises at a more personal and visceral level. 

Beside being experiments with acoustic noise, Puppets Forsaken’s projects are imbibed with their deep love for trees and their positive impact on the planet. They are preoccupied by facts such as the disappearance of old growth trees. On Vancouver Island, only 2% of the old growth forest still remain. They wanted to pay homage to the ones that fell to humans, and decided to serenade them. In this spirit, they did two concerts and 2 videos in a clear-cut area meant solely for trees that are no longer there (one with our first set of instruments, and another one with The Noisebau). No humans were invited to these concerts. There is in this act some nostalgia for trees that have disappeared, and the anticipation of a greater loss. It is likely only when these remaining ecosystems have been erased that their true meaning and loss to us will be revealed. This is amplified by some of the noises coming from their modular noise generators that allude to saws and other tools used to cut trees. 

Puppets Forsaken are currently working on a new instrument, called Knock-Knock, that mimics sounds of endangered species. 

Puppet Forsaken’s exhibition The Noisebau will be on view in the Main Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from January 19 to March 2, 2024.

The Noisebau received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts & the BC Arts Council. 

Knock-Knock received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Natasha Harvey’s artwork consists of a series of collaged landscape paintings and linocut prints, which seek to represent and communicate the effects of human interference on the environment while evoking the participatory spirit of love and beauty of nature. Harvey spends time deepening her connection with the land in the Syilx peoples' unceded territories, walking and connecting through place-based research. Over time, during these walks, she has found the expansion of dwellings, homes pushing up the mountainsides around and over wetlands, impacting wildlife habitat and ecology. Construction cuts into the land. Culture and economy reshape the horizon, thus rendering 'space' as politically complex. Therefore, achieving the colonial sublime is not a simple image of beauty without erasure. Harvey questions whether her depictions of the landscape illustrate this complexity and thus encourage a conversation about our expanding contribution to the detriment of the land.

The beautiful, wild landscapes of the Group of Seven contribute to the Canadian identity. The most well-known paintings by this group depict a pristine land, devoid of human evidence. This interpretation and representation of landscape omit industry and human interaction. As an artist, Harvey feels an urgency to try to depict a comprehensive version of landscape art in this time of climate crisis and environmental emergency. This version of landscape depiction illustrates a vista that is manipulated and used for human development. It emphasizes land commodification and colonial capitalism to encourage discussion about our impact on natural spaces.

Harvey’s family has a local construction business. They participate in manicuring and manipulating the landscape. Green grass, geometric ponds and infinity pools replace indigenous habitat. Her family’s livelihood comes from the commodification and development of the landscape. At the same time, Harvey observes the detrimental construction management and practices happening in the Okanagan and recognizes her part in it. Harvey’s position within the construction industry is difficult. Her love for the environment and local landscape has always been sincere however she recognizes the paradox.

Juxtaposing images and attempting to combine found materials, photographs and painting techniques is endless play, exploration and discovery; moments of tight and linear alongside messy and chaotic to construct or weave a layered poetic narrative. Collaged layers are built up and create meaning. She intends to illustrate the many contextual layers within a landscape. She uses found construction materials that have been salvaged from worksites encroaching and overtaking the forest trails where she walks. The construction materials are juxtaposed with the photographic images of forests and living things she has documented during such walks. Building her paintings is laborious. It is physical work that mimics the labour involved when constructing a home. The paintings reflect industry with their large scale and overbearing proportion. These constructed landscape paintings are large in scale. It is meant to feel both encompassing and obstructive. A push and pull, as though you could physically enter the landscape however, it may also feel like a barrier. This implied barrier operates when the recognizable elements of the landscape are interrupted with abstraction and collaged found materials. The linocut prints depict a forested wild landscape. The trees illustrated no longer exist, in their place, houses have been built or are in the process of construction. The prints are large and detailed. The process is meticulous, it takes time, love and care. Documenting forests that have been clear-cut through the slow process of relief printmaking is like a memorial of sorts.

Veneration is created to motivate discussion and awareness concerning our impact on ecology. This discourse could potentially encourage choices of care and contingency towards the environment. Rather than seeing the environment as a resource to be used, love and connection could alter this perception from resource to relative, as we are all elemental.

Natasha Harvey’s exhibition Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics and Love is on view in the Main Gallery from November 3 - December 16, 2023.

From January 27 to March 11, 2023 in our Main Gallery was Moving Through Debris by Austin Clay Willis.

There are two main internal motivators which drive Austin Clay Willis’ art practice. Firstly, he is keenly interested in the bodily relationship to built and architectural environments. Secondly, he is also captivated by the tension between illusory and real space. To these ends Willis creates multimedia, abstract artwork through mediums including (but not limited to) painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. His paintings are primarily concerned with the balance between paint and canvas as physical material, and the notion of painting as a “window” or a representation of real space. The pictorial dimensions of the image oscillate between foreground and background as the combinations of lines, shapes, forms and colours produce illusionary aspects within the picture plane. The material of the painting is foregrounded through texture, drips, finishes, layers, and raw canvas.

In turn, Willis’ sculptures inform his paintings and photographs through material. Then the paintings and photographs are often incorporated back into sculptural installations. These installations relate to the pictorial space, but deal with real environments through material, form, and a conscious attention to the specific rooms they inhabit. Willis creates new structures like walls, ramps, stairs, and platforms to be occupied by the viewer, and bring attention to their physical relationship with space. The materials he uses are the familiar found scraps of dimensional lumber, plywood, discarded sheets of plastic, tarpaulin, textiles, lights, extension cords, and cans of mistinted house paint. Inspiration for his forms comes from a wide array of information, ranging from construction sites, to recycling centres, domestic furniture, DIY-style structures, and even backyard treehouses. In many of Willis’ works, he strives to create dynamic compositions with a charismatic configuration or visual balance.

and a Rag in the Other presented a series of draped canvas paintings by M.E. Sparks. This work explored the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting.

Working primarily with un-stretched canvas, Sparks cuts images from art history to bring them into her own line of vision. Through a process of quotation, deconstruction and collage, the paintings in this exhibition feel somewhat like incomplete sentences. Modular and layered, they resist a finished state while implying the possibility of future reorganization.

In her practice, Sparks pulls apart and rearranges borrowed forms, many of which are taken from historical depictions of youth and femininity within the prickly territory of modernist painting. Rather than present a linear narrative, this mode of reassembly aims to temper expectations of legibility and interrupt an immediate reading of the image. The paintings become more about not knowing, of not being able to pin down or define, and of both the vulnerability and transformative potential that emerge when there is no clear image and no clear answer.

Through layers, curling edges, and a revealing of the painting’s underside, the work in this exhibition confronted the presumed fixedness and solidity of the flat picture plane. Sparks explored the material possibilities of draped canvas as a way to call into question painting’s limiting dichotomies (front vs. back, abstraction vs. figuration, image vs. object) while introducing a softness and provisionality to the painted image.

Included in the exhibition was a printed booklet with a link to one of the artist's recent web-based artworks, titled in_your_painting. This piece belonged to a series of digital works exploring quotation, collage, and language. Drawing from the history of Dada poetry, in_your_painting used a hand-coded computer program to generate a series of phrases, which seemed to lead us through someone else’s space. The narrative was partially constructed through a random sampling of titles from the mid-twentieth-century paintings of Balthus, all of which depicted the young female body. Access in_your_painting by visiting Sparks’ website.

and a Rag in the Other was on view in the Main Gallery from October 28 to December 10, 2022.

M.E. Sparks is an artist and educator currently living in Winnipeg, MB, Treaty 1 Territory. Her studio practice is rooted in mixed emotions: an unrelenting infatuation with painting and a critical distrust of its dominant history. As an inheritor and perpetuator of this history, she considers this internal conflict a generative place to begin. Recent exhibitions include We can only hint at this with words at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art (North Vancouver, 2022) and a A Fine Line at Trapp Projects (Vancouver, 2021). She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University and BFA from NSCAD University. Sparks gratefully acknowledges the support of Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council.

“Time is A Mother.”

-   Ocean Vuong, Not Even

“I’m always out of step with the clock of the historical.”

-   Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

What is time, and how do we experience it? Recent and ongoing events have made us all aware that time is as fragile as it is precious. If the order of time were to collapse, for whom would it matter?

The passage of time depends on our frame of reference. Feminist and decolonial studies explain that our current perception of time is a social construct. Time binds, disciplines, and imposes social norms. Time as we know it is a structuring device that upkeeps traditions and life cycles that reinforce normative behaviours and colonial narratives. Time As Relative features temporalities unmediated by the structures of colonialism and heteronormativity from trans, queer, and non-binary perspectives. The artists in the exhibition share their nuanced understandings of time—ones that are fluid, non-linear, infinite, and subjective.

This exhibition particularly ruminated on the complexities of queerness and family, offering poetic and interconnected dialogues on how these have coexisted in the past and how their connection may expand and even form new temporal and relational dynamics. The title of this exhibition served as both a provocation and a metaphor. It is a reminder of the theory of relativity, which proposes that time is relative to one’s experience, but also, time can be personified as a relative. Time can be queer and ancestral, kindred, and generational.

Curated by Hanss Lujan Torres, Time As Relative featured work by Arielle Twist, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Kama La Mackerel, Léuli Eshrāghi, and Lucas LaRochelle.

Time As Relative was on view in the Main Gallery from September 16 to October 22, 2022.

This project was made possible with the support of The Audain Foundation.

This is a Love Story was a response to internal exploration and external observation by artist Lindsay Kirker. The paintings took their cue from the rapid expansion of the urban landscape, surveying a curiosity and fascination with the built environment and a concern for the nature that surrounds us. 

A need for stability manifests itself through an attraction to structure. Considering most of our time is spent in the city, these spaces inform and influence us. A sense of order is established through line, grid, and repetition, assuming pattern and stability. This suggests that life unfolds linearly, that we take the same unconscious routes, among clearly defined paths and that there is an order between our experience and the people we come into contact with. The painting reflects the human mind and spirit, intuition and behaviour, perhaps more spontaneous encounters that occur outside of these assumed patterns of activity.

This is a Love Story confronted the ideas and structures we put into place in order to protect ourselves from uncertainty. Dreamscapes were collaged together using the everyday, often seen as banal, to evoke a philosophical reading of the ever-expanding metropolis. How we build represents what we value. Materials used and decisions made will embed themselves in the layers of the earth and the strata of human history. The focus of this work transcends prefabricated concrete slabs constructed to contain and instead, examines the foundations of Being. When integrated with nature, the city’s infrastructure acts as a space for contemplation; the individual and collective journey, and the act of rebuilding.

Lindsay Kirker is a painter and recent Master of Fine Arts graduate from The University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. In her work she is interested in finding a balance between realism and abstraction with emphasis on human ethics and moral responsibility, specifically in the context of the present environmental crises. Over the last several years, Kirker’s work has reflected a search for stability during a time of uncertainty, the city's infrastructure has served as a poetic metaphor for this endeavour. An emerging artist and recipient of the 2019 Audain Foundation Travel Award and Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Master’s Award, Kirker has exhibited work throughout British Columbia and Alberta. She is presently settled on the traditional territory of the Syilx/Okanagan Peoples in British Columbia, Canada.

Growth Machine references the dominant role that capitalism and capitalists play in (re)making cities primarily as sources of continuous capital accumulation, rather than as living and dwelling spaces for the cities’ occupants. Beginning with a voiceover from found footage of a YouTube how-to tutorial video, this installation took a satirical stance (against) the development of urban space as a growth machine. In this how-to guide, all decisions about the development of a ‘successful city’ are based on land value and the accumulation of wealth. This work juxtaposes a broad range of urban scenes in order to illustrate the politics of urban transformation. Growth Machine both investigated and contested the commodification and financialization of both urban space and urban life itself. It contested (through satire and suggestion) the way that important questions of urban existence get reduced to questions of profit and loss in a system designed as an urban growth machine.

Alternator Chat with Aileen Bahmanipour, Godfre Leung and Yasmine Haiboub in a discussion about her practice and exhibition Wasting Techniques on February 18, 2021. (https://youtu.be/un7Jk4Jm7P8)

I am both the image-maker and image-breaker as I make things in order to destroy. In this order, I think about “wasting techniques” [1] : those which involve carving away a piece of material until the shape we want remains. These are also common techniques in subtractive industrial processes, for example in milling machines and extraction tools.  

I accumulate, manipulate, and trace explanatory diagrams of these useful tools to make diagrammatic drawings on a clear acetate sheet; they become scribbles, illegible, messy, sloppy marks. Leaving minimum negative space on the ground of the image, I turn that ground into an entire positive space, all occupied by drawings, to the point that I can’t see what I am drawing. So, I contradict the very purpose of Drawing, which is to see, to look at things. 

There is a machine, titled Spitting Machine, that squirts water to the Diagrams of Wasting Techniques and gradually washes them away and turning them into stains on the floor. “Visitors” [2] can see the process through two cameras in front and behind the drawings. The repetitive washing of the drawings creates a transparency for the visitors’ lens. This clear ground of the image allows the image to shift into a more transparent relationship through visitors’ participation in the act of looking.

Wasting Techniques exhibited Aileen Bahmanipour’s exploration into contemporary forms of Iconoclasm. She defines Iconoclasm not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it. To do that, she challenges the figure/ground relations. The ground of the image, through the history of image-making, has been always suppressed and hidden by the covering image. By vandalizing the image, the iconoclast gives an opportunity to the ground of the image to find a language, to become visible, and be part of the image.

Using available imagery and through disturbing the pattern of already established representations, Bahmanipour searches for a new way of perceiving the image and ground of the image. She disturbs the seemingly know quality of images in my works and trouble distinguishing the image from its ground. With situating herself in the existing hybrid dialogues between Western and Eastern perspectives, she challenges the very idea of perspectives in order to reach an anti-perspectival point of view, from which the subject’s understanding of image and the truth behind the image’s appearance can possibly construct a transparent relationship.

I would like to thank Denise Ryner, Yasmin Haiboub, Godfre Leung, Setareh Yasan, and Chris Warren for their kind supports. Also, I would like to thank BC Arts Council and Alternator’s members and staff for giving me the opportunity of exhibiting this work and helping me through the exhibition.

Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian artist. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Art University of Tehran and MFA in Visual arts from the University of British Columbia. Bahmanipour has exhibited her work in a body of solo and group exhibitions in Iran as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gallery 1515, Hatch Art Gallery, and Two Rivers Gallery.

She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Artist in 2019, and the Early Career Development grant from BC Arts Council in 2019.

For more information on Aileen’s work, visit her website.

In Sora Park’s exhibition One of Them Will Be Unlucky, the artist draws from her family history of migration as an impetus to explore the role that language plays in depicting the complexity of understanding diaspora. 

Sora Park is a Korean-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. In her practice, she explores the impact that globalization and migration have on the creation of various subcultures around the world and how the movement of people and their culture affect the sustainability of these subcultures. 

She explores how quantitative and qualitative data gathered during her research translates into works of art through text, media and installation. She puts an emphasis on a concept of translation in art production as collected data transforms itself into different mediums and is depicted as tangible artworks. 

Her works provides a glimpse into specific subcultures and issues - especially those resulted from globalization and migration - that many people may not be aware of. 

Sora Park received her BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada and an MA in Fine Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Bergen, Norway. She is a recipient of grants from Arts Council Norway, Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council. 

Click here to view Park’s website.

Steven Cottingham is interested in the difference between reality and realism. For instance, how is it that images of fire produce real heat and light? In an era of deep fakes and fake news, images lose their assumption of verisimilitude. But just because they are not ‘true’ does not mean they aren’t also ‘real’. These images are used to construct rather than capture reality—each one of them is produced by workers carrying out certain visions of how reality should be represented and what real life should be like. Cottingham suggests that our shared reality is populated by these constructed images: advertisements and algorithms used for commercial and political ends alike. These omnipresent media forms may not truly represent our diverse, individual experiences of reality, and yet they nonetheless orient us into our daily roles as workers, citizens, and subjects.

By using open source rendering software, Cottingham produced tableaus of implausible but nonetheless realistic (that is, believable) events. A car burns on a soundstage, mixing highly-staged commercial production techniques with spontaneous protest tactics. Heat radiates out from the electronics, reinstating the physicality of otherwise virtual representations. In this way, we can start to grasp the slippage between signs and their signifiers in this disorienting media landscape where nothing seems to add up.

Steven Cottingham is an artist and curator based in Vancouver. Cottingham holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited across Canada, the US and Cuba, as well as several locations in Europe. 

For more information about Steven’s work, visit his website.

Tattooing is inherently Indigenous. Our hands make magic, our hands heal hurt. Through the stitching of skins we connect to things that we know but can’t always see. The works presented in As Old As The Hills are a step back to see how much is interconnected. Like a spider, we innately weave webs to catch what we need to nourish our souls.

As an artist who practices handpoke and skin stitching tattooing traditions, I see how tattooing acts as a mirror. I am slowly unpacking Nehiyawak tattooing to see what it is made up of. I am exploring natural pigments, stories, dreams, transference, and the savage. I am noticing how the adornment of our bodies through clothing, jewelry and tattoos carry with them power and protection. I am curious about tattoo culture as a whole and how the term ‘traditional tattoos’ carry multiple definitions. How do old school traditional American tattoos reflect in current culture? How does historical slang continue to perpetuate colonial perspectives? At what point does tattoo culture at large converge with Indigenous cultures?

Audie Murray is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with various materials including beadwork, quillwork, textiles, repurposed objects, drawing, and media. She is Michif, raised and working in Regina, Saskatchewan, treaty 4 territory. Much of her family and family histories are located in the Qu’Appelle and Meadow Lake regions of Saskatchewan. Audie holds a visual arts diploma from Camosun College, 2016; Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Regina, 2017; and is currently an MFA student at the University of Calgary. She has shown at various locations including the Alberta Art Gallery, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Glenbow Museum, and the Anchorage Museum.

Audie is a practicing cultural tattoo practitioner working with hand poke and skin stitching methods. She was mentored by the Earthline Tattoo Collective in the summer of 2017 and continues to work with the collective. Her tattoo practice is an extension of her visual arts practice through the reclamation and assertion of Indigenous bodies and the intertwining presence of themes like medicine, healing and growth.

Audie's art practice is informed by the process of making and visiting. Her practice explores themes of contemporary culture and how this relates to experiences of duality and connectivity. Working with specific material choices, she often uses found objects from daily life and transmutes them . This practice is a way to reclaim and work through various subject matter, much of it relating to the body, space, and relationships with a focus on the intersection and expansion of time.

For more information about Audie’s work, visit her website..

The relationship between the aesthetic and political is not a direct correlation, but depends on accumulating experiences of dissensual moments.

—Jaimey Hamilton Faris. Uncommon Goods: Global Dimensions of the Readymade. Intellect, 2013. p. 145. 

A grid of over 100 luminous and brilliantly coloured swatches, less than a foot square each, and composed of tightly-woven seed beads, formed the centrepiece of this exhibition. The beaded swatches, designed by algorithms that take as input colours from the Pantone Fashion Color Report each spring and fall since 2015, are then outsourced for production to Bagalwa Baliahamwabo, a family friend of Paul Robert, and his ad hoc team of artisans in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo. 

This ongoing work is a comically tragic re-staging of the antagonisms inherent in production and consumption under globalization. Immaterial labour in the form of commodities’ intellectual and cultural content is contrasted with something that sits uneasily between the romanticized craftsmanship of the indigenous artisan and the cheap manual labour of the foreign factory worker. Capital and commodities flow effortlessly between nations that in so many other ways remain literally worlds apart. Robert strives to give a fresh visibility to these conditions, recognizing his contribution as a single node in an ecosystem of more and less entitled, provocative, and idealistic voices.

Beadwork evokes a history of trade that continues to this day. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, Venetian glass beads were produced en masse specifically for trade with the colonies of the so-called “New World” and Africa. There, they underwent a process of commodity indigenization as they were incorporated into dress, custom, and ritual, and eventually sold back to European tourists as exotic souvenirs. Today, Canada is connected to Africa by flows of gold, copper, diamonds, and tungsten. Well-intentioned but simplistic responses, like the banning of conflict minerals, often make things worse for the poorest while performing the ideological function of absolving westerners of imagined links to warlords. 

Mr. Bagalwa was a long-time correspondant with Robert's father, Aurèle Robert. He persisted in writing letters to the Robert family even after Aurèle's passing. Paul's eventual response to Mr. Bagalwa's remarkable agency has resulted in artifacts that he hopes contribute to the reconfiguration of the normalized logic of global labour-commodities into newly visible and meaningful materialities.

For more information about Robert’s work, visit his website.

Christopher Lacroix interrogates the relentless effort of queer existence — an existence that is both aspiring to and rejecting normative social structures that problematizes deviant ways of being. This paradox of simultaneous aspiration and resistance is embodied in unnerving durational performances infused with an uncomfortable balance of tragedy and melodrama. Rather than reproducing the pain that the mainstream social structures inflict on others, his performances redirect the pain onto himself; his identity and his body. What results is a queer and campy masochism that explores abject self-deprecation as a means of self-preservation and resistance.

 Christopher Lacroix (Canadian, b. 1986) holds a BFA from Ryerson University, ON (2012) and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, BC (2018). His work has been exhibited at The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver), window (Winnipeg), Artspace Contemporary Art Projects (Peterborough), and Forest City Gallery (London). Lacroix was the 2018 recipient of the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize. He currently lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

For more information about Lacroix’s work, visit his website.

In humynatur3 Holly Ward explored the dissolution of Nature/Culture distinctions as emergent in the Anthropocene, a new geological era wherein human activity has influenced the course of all non-human systems, towards unprecedented outcomes.

In this context, hierarchical classifications distinguishing between biological organisms, environmental processes and ‘animal’ vs. human pursuits are dissolved, creating the ‘Terra Incognita’ of a radically unknowable future. Utilizing the gallery space as a laboratory, sculptural assemblages and 2D works explore themes of mutation, acceleration, extinction and evolution. These real-time material investigations acknowledge the contemporary event horizon of radical change while seeking to build conceptual frameworks for responsive reckoning and strategies of collective world-building.

Based between Toronto and Heffley-Creek BC, Holly Ward is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, multi- media installation, architecture, video and drawing as a means to examine the role of aesthetics in the formation of new social realities. Stemming from research of various visionary practices such as utopian philosophy, science fiction literature, Visionary Architecture, counter-cultural practices and urban planning, her work investigates the arbitrary nature of symbolic designation and the use-value of form in a social context.

For more information about Ward’s work, visit her website.

In Seeking Visions for a Better World, Ryan Fedderson employed crowd-sourced images and aspirational sentiments that invoked constructive visions of the future to counterbalance the preponderance of dystopic visions presented in pop-culture, literature, and media. Inspired by traditional pictographs and contemporary graffiti culture, this collection of visions created space for a dialogue, building on ideas, reflecting on our culture, and imagining better outcomes for humanity.

Community-sourced contributions were translated into graphic treatments that progressively saturated the gallery from July 12th to 23rd, 2019.

RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen (b.1984) Confederated Tribes of the Colville (Okanogan /Arrow Lakes /German /English) is a mixed-media installation artist who specializes in interactive and immersive artworks that invite audience engagement. She was born and raised in Wenatchee, WA.

Feddersen received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Cornish College of the Arts in 2009, graduating Magna Cum Laude. She remained in Seattle for approximately ten years while working as an artist, studio assistant, and arts administrator, before relocating to Tacoma, WA, where she is now based with her husband and two cats; Brock, Gonzo, and Gamma Ray. She was inspired to create interactive and temporary artworks as a way to honor an indigenous perspective on the relationship between artist and community. Her approach emphasizes humor, play, and creative engagement to create opportunities for personal introspection and discovery. Cultivating engagement with the contemporary indigenous art world has been a transformative way that Feddersen has connected with her cultural heritage and dismantled her American cultural indoctrination. Through residencies, gatherings, workshops, and community, Feddersen has been inspired, educated, encouraged, and mentored by indigenous artists, culture-bearers and activists. These relationships have influenced and reinforced her approach to art, culture, and community.

For more information on her work, visit RYAN!’s website here.

Laura Dutton’s Night Comes On meditated on the process of looking and being looked at. The installation allowed the viewer to become a voyeur, peering into private spaces while navigating around imposing structures of flickering, hypnotic light. With an undercurrent of scopophilia, the viewer is kept aware that their own presence has not gone unnoticed by the very devices through which they are spying. The voyeurism becomes a self-conscious act, one to which the looker is both implicated and subjected.

Laura Dutton is a photo/video-based artist and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria.  She received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2011 and a BFA (Hons.) from Concordia University, Montréal in 2006.

Dutton works with photography and video installation to unravel the materiality of photographic images and disrupt our ability to look straight through to the referent described.  By obscuring, degrading, or removing the subject matter altogether, her images reveal their own process and become distilled suggestions of what once stood before the lens, offering an epistemological space for the viewer to meditate on the act of seeing and knowing.

For more information on Dutton’s work, visit her website.

Seeing Laura Dutton’s Art

Interpretive essay by Will Hoffman

Night Comes On is a fascinating exhibition that Laura Dutton has created. Black boxes, many black boxes scatter outwardly positioned like speakers as if they are projecting something. They are stacked in a way that many will face you from different angles. The black boxes are like a model of an ambitious architectural building, each box like a room, a unit. In this vast array of boxes many of them contain screens playing out scenes.

In these scenes contained within the box within a window frame there are figures moving, some moving closer, another turning on a light, there is a branch moving with the wind.

You can look at what people in one frame are up to and then move onto another. It’s like you are interested in these people and these people in the videos are interested in you or you are apart of it somehow. It would feel creepy to be looking in on these figures but the fact that they are darkened to where you cannot make out their faces gives them some anonymity. The silhouetted figures paired with muted tropical coloured light sources and their arrangement with others remove many social taboos with observing and instead create interest.

Taking in this exhibition made me feel a subdued presence combined with a genuine curiosity with these lives on display. With the changing of everyday technology, people are sharing more and more of their personal lives. Seeing an Instagram story of what a person is up to brings a directed viewpoint that is measured. In this exhibition, the people in the windows won’t get to see the analytics data that @username_611 has viewed their story, for how long, and when he exited the story. In the same way, I don't know if @emily.cats.life wants to share this moment with the public other than we are able view in her window and if she required more privacy could close the blinds. Maybe the interest to see something removes the self-consciousness of oneself being seen.

Breaking up the space in this exhibition are also window-like pictures within steel frames. They are window-like in that they appear like a window but are not the window themselves. Looking at these illuminated windows closer, a moiré pattern (an unwanted artifact that can appear when overlapping dots) is blown up to such a large degree that the dots exude their own beauty. These dots almost create a type of sacred geometry and dance over each other. From afar these large lightboxes show windows in an abstracted way with washes of colour that create forms, some of which appear stuttered or rippled.

This exhibition is a window to a lot of questions but it also sprinkles some resolve about watching, peeking, and being seen.

Patrick Lundeen’s images are generated primarily by his subconscious through a combination of improvisation and revision. This process involves a combination of freely associating with meanings already existent within the found materials that he manipulates and the generation of new forms that are based on his reaction to these free associations.

Lundeen considers his recent artworks to be abstractions that are based on recognizable motifs and signifiers. The figurative and conceptual elements in each work can be compared to the melody or “head” in jazz music; they are jumping-off points that tie the composition together. Yet, like in jazz, it is the improvisational parts that give the work its emotional qualities and make it a viable work of art. After the work has been completed, Lundeen probes it for meanings and extrapolate on these in further works.

Patrick Lundeen is an artist, teacher and musician born in Lethbridge Alberta (Treaty 7) and currently based in Kelowna BC (Okanagan-Syilx territory) where he teaches drawing at The University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) and is a member of the board of directors at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. This past spring, he put out his fourth self-released album (on cassette) as The Oblique Mystic called “Religions of the Grandfather”. Lundeen has a forthcoming exhibition (2022) at the Kelowna Art Gallery and past exhibitions at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, L’Ecart, The Odd Gallery, Katherine Mulherin Projects, Confederation Centre and Wetterling Gallery. He has received research and creation grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and his work has been written about Canadian Art, Border Crossings, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Time Out Chicago and Flash Art.

Interpretive Essay by Gary Pearson

The Chicken Man has come home to roost after a late-night gig at a popular jive joint. He’s a drummer in a noise band. His energy level is still high. Maybe he’s (still) high? He can’t go straight to bed. The rooster in him won’t fall asleep as morning draws nigh, so he does loosen up exercises, calisthenics, stretches, wind-down movements. His exercise regimen lacks the self-righteous postures of Lululemon, or the focal concentrations of yoga, as he exercises his own way, swinging his arms around as if he were king of the coop, intermittently striking a nearby crash cymbal and anything else within his radial arc. The Chicken Man is in the mood; silently crowing a few greasy black lines from the clown ballad “Nightmare on Cawston Street”. 

His temporary white cube domicile is shared with other eccentric music minded occupants, including a gorilla, stylishly attired in a waste basket fez, a Canada goose, an satanic beer drinking white boxing dog who’ll put on the gloves with any and all takers. Don’t turn your back on this madcap household for want of bananas, beer, or boxed ears, or for that matter visual strangulation by electrical extension cords. Let’s call this motley crew of misfits “Noise Farm”.

What motivates the pursuit of unconventionality, of eccentricity, even of bizarre eccentricity? A rejection of, disdain for, or even fear of, conventions and artistic orthodoxies; to be the entertainer and/or the provocateur? A lively imagination might be useful to the pursuit, but there must be something core to the motivation. Would it be necessary to have a well-formed knowledge of models of convention across the fields of style and aesthetics, artistic paradigms and histories, of commodity and consumer cultures, of criticality and creative enterprise, of satire and the turn toward wry self-deprecation, to undertake this pursuit? Or would staging the art work as cleverly contrived outsider art be the motivation to abjure all signs of convention in favor of the absurd and ultra-unconventional? And, what might the objective be in so doing?

The size of the sculptures is consistently referenced to human scale, as are the objects junk store aesthetics and myriad re-purposed components, all serving to soften the alien other worldly effect. Patrick Lundeens’ sculpture is an art of improvisatory assemblage, deliberately positioning the flea market just steps away from the art market. The three fluorescent colored garage sale signs (which read: Garage Sale 3745 Lakeshore) on the walls are a direct mode of address to these economically disparate zones of free enterprise.  One would also be well advised to read these as signs of artistic intention, orienting the audience toward the many ironies of arts economies, and in a metaphorical two-minded or two-handed reading how one might slap another in the face while simultaneously slapping oneself. There is no doubt that the garage sale signs are the key conceptual components of the exhibition, and they invite one to relax, but I don’t mean to imply reduce, the necessity of intellectualizing the sculptural objects.

Patrick Lundeen: Noise Farm is a carnivalesque romp through a metamorphosing tableau vivant, where the unexpected must be expected as audience members activate motion sensors, step on foot pedals, and pluck guitar strings, interactively transforming the abject anthropomorphized personages on the stage floor and, not un-ironically, implicating themselves into the clowns’ musical masquerade.

Olivia Whetung’s gaa-waategamaag explored Mississauga-Anishinaabe place and landscape. Many Anishinaabe and Mississauga place names refer to the water; in fact, the name Mississauga itself refers to water. Navigating within Mississauga territory means having a constant awareness of the bodies of water, even when on land. Roads follow the contours of rivers and lakes, and traffic bottlenecks at bridges. However, the physical waterscape as well as the names used to refer to places have changed over time.

These works focused on one specific place name: gaa-waategamaag. According to historical record this name dates to the late 1800s and was given by Martha Whetung. It is more commonly pronounced and written ‘Kawartha’, and has been translated as ‘land of reflections’. This name, along with its multiple spellings, embodies a complex set of relations between people, place, and language.

The Reflections series attempted to illustrate this name through beadwork. Whetung worked from digital photographs of light reflecting off of water in the area now known as the Kawarthas, editing the photos to create beadwork charts and translating those charts into loomwork. The resulting beadwork shimmered in the light and gave an illusion of surface movement as the viewer moved around it.

Olivia Whetung is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University, and has an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Whetung’s work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake, Ontario.

For more information about Whetung’s work, visit her website.

Lost in Translation // Interpretive Essay by Hanss Lujan

The title, gaa-waategamaag is the starting point for the work presented by Mississauga-Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung.

The term is traced back to the late 1800s, when tourism entrepreneur Mossum Boyd held a competition asking locals to submit a place name for the region found in south-central Ontario. Martha Whetung, a member of the Curve Lake First Nation and a relative of the artist, proposed the anishinaabemowin term gaa-waategamaag translating to “Land of Reflections.” The name was adopted for its definition and its branding quality but was then transformed to “Kawartha” as a means to make easier for English speakers to pronounce. Through this Anglicized process, the translation of the word also was re-branded as the slogan “Bright Waters and Happy Lands.” Around the same time, water locks and bridges were being developed along the Trent-Severn Waterway, a long series of interconnected lakes, rivers and canals; their construction physically changing the landscape to a recreational boating destination.

gaa-wategamaag features seven beadworks that depict images of water, including fragments of waves and ripples from the shores from the Kawartha Lakes and the Trent-Severn Waterway.

The artist explores the process of translation as she reworks digital photographs into beadwork, a medium she was taught from a young age and later reintroduced during her undergrad at Algoma University. The process of Anglicization can be interpreted by the initial pixelation of the digital photograph, where colours are flattened and minimized to a few select colours. The re-introduction of each pixel as a Delica seed bead can be seen as an act of reclamation; providing a dynamic experience of colours and textures that recall the original definition of the name place as “Land ofReflections.”

The scale of each work invites the viewer to have an intimate interaction with the image. These are contemplative objects; their vibrancy, colours, and beauty captivate your attention and invite you in. The shimmer of the beads creates a mirror-like quality. It’s easy for us to forget that as humans, we too are made of water; perhaps here we are given a chance to reflect upon ourselves, our relationship to water, and our responsibility to the environment.

Book of Nineteen Nocturnes presented a hand-drawn and crafted artists’ book of the same name, 17 years in the making, 500 pages long. Each of the 19 chapters are hand-bound into individual accordion books, containing graphite drawings, watercolours, ink-paintings, ink-jet prints and collaged text. Both the text and images were developed while traveling (often trekking) throughout Nordic Europe, Canada, the Himalayas and China. Although the story and setting are fictitious, both are heavily inspired by these places: the animals and vegetation, the landscapes and skies, and the shifts in weather and lighting. Echoing the genres of painterly and musical nocturnes, this book is driven by its ambient, nighttime setting ­– a realm populated by wandering monsters. It is about being lost, lonely and homesick. While relating to graphic novels and illustrated fairytales, this book is also akin to an illuminated manuscript or a grimoire.

A tentative, uncertain, and vaguely autobiographical odyssey, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes tells a story of wandering, a search for belonging, that ultimately results in the discovery of one’s own very intimate otherness. At the intersection of Lewis Caroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Guillermo del Toro, this travel narrative draws heterogenous, aeonic memories of Earth’s deep time into a monstrous, supernatural and dreamlike universe. As in a post-humanist dream, trees show off their capacity for reason, sensitive matter mingles with the living, species fuse into complex hybrids that defy classification. In the form of a tale, he reveals a twilight world where “reality,” merging with dreams and diverging from appearances, becomes a fleeting concept, intelligible only through a differed or displaced gaze. In this sense, Book of Nineteen Nocturnes echoes a long line of philosophical interrogations of the real, whether the latter be cosmic, quantum, or metaphysical.

Jim Holyoak is a drawer and writer, based in British Columbia, Canada. His discipline is comprised of book arts, ink-painting, and room-sized drawing installations. In parallel to his solo practice, Holyoak has orchestrated numerous collaborative drawing projects, often with fellow artist Matt Shane, and sometimes involving hundreds of people drawing together. Holyoak received a BFA from the University of Victoria, an MFA from Concordia University, and studied as an apprentice to master ink-painter Shen Ling Xiang, in Yangshuo, China. He has attended artist-residencies in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Banff, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and throughout Norway. His work has circulated widely in Europe and North America, including at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the GEM Museum of Contemporary Art in The Hague, Tegnerforbundet (Drawing Association) in Oslo, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Rīga, and the Carnegie Mellon International Drawing Symposium in Pittsburgh. Holyoak’s work was featured in the We Are Monsters issue of Border Crossings Magazine and the Feminisms issue of Esse Magazine.

For more information about Holyoak’s work visit his website or follow him on Instagram

Tia Halliday uses performance, photography and dance as a way of physically negotiating paradigms of painterly abstraction. Her performances, or performed paintings, are a mode of generative research; to analyze, create and pose questions about the body’s relationship to painting and sculpture. She would physically perform and choreograph common painterly tropes such as edge, flatness, depth and rhythm with the use of the body under dynamically sewn fabric cloaks or “sheaths.” These sheaths mimic being underneath the skin of a painting. Beneath the intricately sewn garments, which include fabrics that both stretch and remain taught, props such as poles and harnesses are used to augment a sense of performed movement, the presence of the body and two-dimensional pictorial shape.

Halliday’s inquiry yields many forms of creative artifact and evidence of process. Photographs of the performances are then digitally collaged to become large-scale photographic artworks. In addition to these photo works, she created a series of paintings on canvas and drawings on paper, directly informed by the performance. These works were material- based reflections and translations of both the collage, photo, choreography and performance work.

Tia Halliday was born in Calgary Alberta. She received a BFA in distinction from the Alberta College of Art and Design, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and obtained an MFA from Concordia University. Halliday has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions and performance projects across Canada, the U.S.A and Europe. Her work has been highlighted in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, and Canadian Art. Tia is the daughter of the late Canadian abstract painter Richard Halliday RCA. Tia Halliday is currently a tenure-track Instructor of visual art and theory at the University of Calgary's Department of Art.

For more information about Halliday’s work visit her website or follow her on Instagram.

If Eyes had Feet: The Kinesthetic Pictorial // Interpetive Essay by Kait Strauss

How is dance defined? A performance, a sequence of steps, choreography, motion. A juxtaposition of movement and stillness, of fluidity and rigidity.

How do we define visual art? Sculptures, paintings, architecture, and drawings. The variances of smooth and rough shapes, colours, and patterns.

Now combine the two and we arrive at Tia Halliday’s performed abstractions. Right away the viewer is drawn to that which is relatable to oneself: the feet and legs. More than a sculpture or shapes on a canvas, these works blend movement and art and showcase dancers “within the skin of the painting.” By incorporating the human form into her work, Halliday allows the observer to immediately form a connection with many of her pieces.

In creating these works, Halliday has worked with trained dancers, directing them and encouraging non-verbal communication to explore different shapes and tensions with the body. Sheaths of fabric of varying tautness and elasticity draped over the dancers, enhance the visual experience. The majority of the works showcase only the legs and feet of the human form. While the rest of the dancers’ bodies are hidden under an eclectic collection of sewn fabrics, we are left to admire the piece, to feel the work as a whole. It ignites a sense of curiosity about the extremities and allows us to imagine the positioning of the rest of the body beneath. Perhaps one can make out an elbow, or a knee, or the luxurious curve of a back. For some works, additional props were used to generate more rigid shapes of broader reach. Though we are witnessing a frozen moment within these photographs, the artist wishes to encourage our minds to experience the journey of reaching those points. By combining dance and visual art, Halliday has created pieces that come alive before the eyes of the viewer. Envision the improvisational movements; the dancers pulling the fabrics tight around their bodies in one instance and in the next, allowing a breath of air to create a bubble, an entirely different dynamic.

Through these works, Halliday has been exploring the idea of a “moving painting.” When speaking with the artist about the creative process, we discussed learning about visual art in a classroom setting. Instructors push their students to create works with dynamism. Work that shows a “push vs pull” relationship. The same principles ring true in the realm of dance. Contract vs release. Fall and recover. Plié deeper to create a higher jump. When considered in that sense, one realizes the use of opposition is a major player in both art forms.

Halliday successfully steps outside of the box to create vibrant, contemporary, performance art. The beauty, strength, power, and grace of dancers has been delicately blended with her eye for dynamic paintings and sculpture to create a visual feast for observers.

Kait Strauss has an extensive dance background and obtained my Bachelor’s of Performing Arts degree from Oklahoma City University.

Brittney Bear Hat's exhibition Kokum continued the artist’s ongoing exploration of relationships and the value they hold through storytelling, memory and traditions.

This exhibition was inspired by Bear Hat’s relationship with her kokum (grandmother in Cree), a connection that was not established until later in the artist’s life, and one that introduced a new perspective distinct from Bear Hat’s own Blackfoot upbringing. Comprising of items passed down to the artist from her kokum, in this work Bear Hat sought to let these new-found items develop and reveal their familial significance. By transforming these gifts into more, letting them become images on their own as part of this exhibition, Bear Hat considers the value of these gifts - ordinary household items that become so much more over time.

Brittney Bear Hat is a Mohkinstsis/Calgary-based artist, whose Blackfoot and Cree/Dane-zaa ancestors have lived on the lands that are now part of Treaty 7 and 8, for many millennia. Her work explores this cultural lineage through installation, photography, text and collage. Bear Hat graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2011, where she majored in painting. Her work explores identity, and adds to the rich stories of her home territories. Within her work, Bear Hat is exploring that which ties her to these unique landscapes.

For more information about Bear Hat’s work, visit her website.

Kokum // Interpretive Essay by Shannon Lester

As you enter Brittney Bear Hat’s exhibition you will see three major elements in her work: blown-up family photos, familiar physical objects, and handwriting on the wall. All of the objects displayed in the gallery were given to Bear Hat by her kokum. The photographs were also provided by family; the handwriting on the wall is her own.

This exhibition is a tribute to Bear Hat’s grandmother who is no longer with us. It is a testament to the inspiration that family brings, and the Elder’s role in teaching the importance of tradition to younger generations. The writing on the wall creates continuity between the mounted physical objects and the photographs, playfully hung with camouflage tape. This method of display gives us an interactive experience, like visiting a living museum. Unlike a museum, however, the experiences presented here are not from the distant past; they exist in the now and are very tangible.

Most of the objects displayed are related to hunting or being on the land. A self - professed city girl, Bear Hat said that her grandmother was key in encouraging her to make long-lasting connections with nature. She recounted a story of learning how to skin a moose at the age of 7, and how she is now learning how to hunt and tan hides.

Speaking to the artist about the personal nature of this exhibition, Bear Hat revealed she has reached a point where she feels more comfortable going inward and sharing her own personal narrative. This is in stark contrast to her previous work in which she explored stereotypes and topics that she felt were more surface-oriented.

This exhibition is not only about Indigenous culture - hunting and camping are experiences that most Canadians can relate to. Indeed, the desire to honour past loved ones, especially in acknowledging the importance and power of the matriarch, is a universal inclination (or perhaps more accurately should be). The title of this exhibition is very appropriate. Kokum, which means ‘grandmother’ in Cree, is a reminder that we should all acknowledge the wise women of this earth and the traditions that they hold in their hands, hearts and minds.