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.

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.