On December 10th, 2023 from 4 pm to 6 pm, join us for a free introductory Indigo Dye Workshop facilitated by Alternator artist-in-residence Michaela Bridgemohan.

In this workshop, Michaela will share the agricultural process and culturally informed practices utilized in Indigo dyeing. Participants are given their cotton bandanas and will work intimately with an organic Indigo vat while learning various shibori techniques.

This workshop is appropriate for all skill levels and all ages, no art experience is required. Coffee and tea will be provided.

Please RSVP using Eventbrite to secure your spot as space is limited. You can register here.

*note, be prepared to get messy, dress appropriately!

This workshop will take place in Studio 111 of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, located at the Rotary Centre for the Arts (421 Cawston Ave - Unit 103 Kelowna, B.C. V1Y 6Z1)

Learn more about Michaelas artistic practice by visiting her Instagram (@michmohan).

On November 30th, 2023 from 4 pm to 6 pm, join us for a free introductory Indigo Dye Workshop facilitated by Alternator artist-in-residence Michaela Bridgemohan.

In this workshop, Michaela will share the agricultural process and culturally informed practices utilized in Indigo dyeing. Participants are given their cotton bandanas and will work intimately with an organic Indigo vat while learning various shibori techniques.

This workshop is appropriate for all skill levels and all ages, no art experience is required. Coffee and tea will be provided.

Please RSVP using Eventbrite to secure your spot as space is limited. You can register here.

*note, be prepared to get messy, dress appropriately!

This workshop will take place in Studio 111 of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, located at the Rotary Centre for the Arts (421 Cawston Ave - Unit 103 Kelowna, B.C. V1Y 6Z1)

Learn more about Michaelas artistic practice by visiting her Instagram (@michmohan).

In collaboration with the Kelowna Métis Association, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art invites you to join us for an evening of beading and crafting.

On June 28th, from 6-8 pm, we will be hosting a Beading Circle in our main gallery space. Participants can enjoy working on beading projects while surrounded by the work of Cree and Métis artist Michelle Sound.

This event is free to attend and open to anyone. Participants are encouraged to bring their own beading project. However, supplies will be available for first-time beaders to create a beaded pin. Folks of all skill levels are welcome - if you've never beaded before and will require some help getting started, our Kelowna Métis Youth representative & others with experience will be happy to share their tips and techniques with you.

Please let us know if you can attend by registering below.

In collaboration with the Kelowna Métis Association, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art invites you to join us for an evening of beading and crafting.

On May 31st, from 6-8 pm, we will be hosting a Beading Circle in our main gallery space. Participants can enjoy working on beading projects while surrounded by the work of Cree and Métis artist Michelle Sound.

This event is free to attend and open to anyone. Participants are encouraged to bring their own beading project. However, supplies will be available for first-time beaders to create a beaded pin. Folks of all skill levels are welcome - if you've never beaded before and will require some help getting started, our Kelowna Métis Youth representative & others with experience will be happy to share their tips and techniques with you.

Please let us know if you can attend by registering below.

A second Beading Circle will be taking place on June 28th, 6-8pm. We hope to see you there!

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to invite you to join Gao Yujie and guests on Friday, May 5th from 6:30 pm to 8 pm for an artist talk and discussion on the artist's recent exhibition Flowing to Unsettle in the Alternator's Project Gallery.

This in-person event will contain three parts. Gao will begin this event with a short presentation on her work including her recent 6-week-long performance at the Alternator. In part 2, Gao will be joined by Dr. Megan Smith and Xiaoxuan/Sherry Huang in discussing the performance and themes related to the exhibition such as perceptions of time. To close the event Gao and guests will open up the discussion to the audience for a Q&A.

This event is free with registration. Light snacks will be available for guests. Register at Eventbrite 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. Her exhibition, Flowing to Unsettle is on view in the Project Gallery of the Alternator until May 6th, 2023.

You can learn more about Gao and her exhibition here.

Xiaoxuan / Sherry Huang (she/they) is a writer, scholar, & educator working in experimental criticism, literary audio, & other forms of hybrid poetics. Her writing lingers in the doorway like a long goodbye, aiming to be what it claims to need: “A book [that] is always-already a sign of love. A sign for love.” Her first full-length publication, Love Speech (2019, Metatron Press,) is a book of poetry & auto-theory. She holds an MFA from University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus,) & is a 1.5 generation Canadian-上海人.

You can learn more about Huang's work here.

Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang 是一位以音乐、摄影和印刷为创作媒介的诗人。她通常喜欢用模拟的、短暂的、实验性的方法来制作有形的艺术品。她最近的长 篇出版物《爱的演讲》（梅塔特隆出版社2019年）是创新地结合了诗歌和书信体写作，同时她也正在发行的限量版包括磁带、侧边和杂志，并进一步尝试将诗歌与表演艺术的多元融合。

Dr. Megan Smith is a UBC 2022 Killam Laureate, Associate Professor in Creative Technologies in FCCS. Her practice-based research probes systems for delivering syndicated data through narrative structure and she often works with virtual and augmented reality, geo-location, live-feed installation, and performance as methods for storytelling.

You can learn more about Smith's work here.

The Alternator is pleased to invite you to a Triple Opening Reception on Friday, March 24th from 6-8pm. Join us in celebrating new works by Gabrielle Desrosiers in the Main Gallery, Gao Yujie in the Project Gallery, and in the Members’ Gallery is work by UBCO students.

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

The Alternator is pleased to welcome our members to a Triple Opening Reception on Friday, January 27th from 6-8pm. Join us in celebrating new works by Austin Clay Willis in the Main Gallery, Rylan Broadbent in the Project Gallery, and Mike Lennon in the Members’ Gallery.

This event is free with registration. Registration gets you one (1) free drink ticket, snacks will also be provided. Register for this event here.

Join us at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday, October 28th, from 6-8pm for a triple opening reception for M.E. Sparks' and a Rag in the Other, Whitney Brennan's a sound falls but leaves no bruise, and Marguerite MacIntosh's Closet Meditations.

This event is free and open to the public; registration is required. Light catering and drinks will be provided. Registration gets you one (1) free drink ticket. You can register for this event here.

We hope to see you there!

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.

and a Rag in the Other presents a series of draped canvas paintings by M.E. Sparks. This work explores the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting. Through layers, curling edges, and a revealing of the painting’s underside, the work in this exhibition confronts the presumed fixedness and solidity of the flat picture plane. Sparks explores 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.

Whitney Brennan is a sound artist and curator living on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. She holds a Master of Arts in Art History: Critical & Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. Whitney is the Co-Director of Arts Assembly, a not-for-profit, community-centric arts organization that emphasizes artistic collaboration.

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.

Marguerite MacIntosh is an artist and retired architect in addition to being a wife, mother, and grandmother. Her works in acrylic, pencil and mixed media contemplate her own experiences of time and place and point to an awareness of the present moment and the liminal spaces in which we find ourselves. She lives with her husband and their dog Beau in Summerland, British Columbia.

Closet Meditations emerged as a project following Marguerite MacIntosh’s participation in the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art’s online exhibition The Assembly: Sustainability earlier this year and her reading of The Journal of John Woolman: an eighteenth-century Quaker whose writings challenged issues of his day that continue to plague contemporary life, often speaking of how the lure of luxury manifested in possessions, clothing, and travel can so easily override sound judgment. In this installation, MacIntosh examines the contents of her own closet and its preponderance of black clothing. She considers how she uses the clothes she buys and wears to inform her identity in myriad ways, usually distracted and detached from the implications of this consumption in terms of environmental destruction and worker exploitation.

Join us at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art on Friday, September 9th, from 6-8pm for a double opening reception for Alison Trim with Tethered and Christina Knittel with Processing...

This event is free and open to the public; registration is required. Tickets grant guests 1 free drink ticket. Light catering will be provided. You can register for this event here.

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 by Alison Trim. 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 phenomenological experience of land. This work was made across the Okanagan and Slocan Valley regions, unceded territories of the Syilx and Sinixt peoples.

Christina Knittel is an artist who creates abstract paintings using mixed media. As an intuitive, process-based artist, colour and mark-making are distinctive elements in Knittel’s work. By allowing the moment to determine what happens next, she makes room for the unexpected. Her paintings are dynamic and vibrant pieces of art, capturing the complexities of moving from moment to moment

In the last 2 years, overwhelming uncertainty in the world often made it difficult for Knittel to work in her usual process. The paintings included in Processing… are special because they represent moments of reconnecting with calm and joy within that uncertainty. These paintings are dynamic and vibrant, capturing the complexities of moving from moment to moment. They radiate a calm, joyful energy that she hopes people feel when they experience her work.