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.

Through her work, Christine D’Ornofrio negotiates the tensions and promises of power found in acts of humour, virtue, narcissism, humiliation, desire, technology and community. The moments she exploits point to intuitive effects and ideologies, sometimes seen as ‘accidents’ to reveal characteristics of mediation that tie personal and political agency.

A focus of her practice is to build dialogue between subject position and the histories, achievements and fallacies of feminist art via mediation and technology. In former works, she has implied that a change in perspective can present an alternative to a rigid systematic structure, or she has confronted her fear of depicting the female body in the conditions of representation by utilizing the gesture of falling that carries both potential and failure. D’Onofrio revealed the contradictions between subversive and derogatory effects of humour, and revealed the power of codes as attributed to tears as simultaneously material and simulated existing within the same referent, or the generative nature of intuitive and tacit connections that influence and are foundational to a creative community.

D’Onofrio struggles with the notion of liberty and its limitations within structures, whether; representational, conceptual, social, economic, political. She reveals the forces of capitalist patriarchy, individualistic neoliberalism and colonial practices that ultimately direct and exploit potential fluid ‘grey zones’, and expose what further facilitates and perpetuates power. Since we working within the system, how can one imagine the potential act of liberty? How can new meaning be created, produced and organized or how can one erupt the production of meaning altogether -and still survive? For subjects to not belong to something, free of titles, codes and limitations, it would exist in crisis. In her work she asks for some concept of liberation to be realized, but liberation only exists when it does not know its end.

At the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, D’Onofrio exhibits a new work that critiques agency as it ‘belongs to’ representational systems, in this case a white female spinster, crazy “cat lady”, pseudo-feminist icon. Her inquiry into the function of social and cultural oppressions to ensure perpetuating power structures perform themselves is to discover new portrayals of the ageing white female embodiment and privilege. Because co-opted depictions of rebellion make revolutionary actions defunct of their power, she questions our place in an intersectional self-aware social, cultural and political theory and deliberately engage both the triumphs and perils of feminist art practice, history and visual culture.

cat cat cat will be on view in our Main Gallery from September 8th - October 20th, 2023.

Christine D’Onofrio (she/her/they) is an uninvited and grateful guest on the unceded ancestral territories of šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmaɁɬ təməxʷ (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsleil-Waaututh), Skwxwú7mesh-ulh Temíx̱w (Squamish), and S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō) nations that some refer to as Vancouver.  She has exhibited work across Canada, including; Eyelevel, Modern Fuel, deluge, Gallery 44, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and La Centrale. She has given artist talks and served on panels in various institutions, including the Vancouver Art Gallery and “Art Now” lectures at the University of Lethbridge.

Active in her art community, she has served on the Board for Access Gallery and set up over a hundred engaged learning placements for students. As the second generation of European immigrants, she was raised as a guest on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nations. D’Onofrio has a BFA from York University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia where she currently teaches.

 Learn more about D’Onofrio’s work by visiting her website.

The Aunties That Do explores personal and familial narratives with a consideration of Indigenous artistic processes. Michelle Sound's works explore cultural identities and histories by engaging materials and concepts within a contemporary context. Through utilizing such practices as drum making, caribou hair tufting, beadwork, and photography, her work highlights that acts of care and joy are situated in family and community. They work with traditional and contemporary materials and techniques to explore maternal labour, identity, cultural knowledge, and cultural inheritances. This exhibition is composed of four bodies of work: 

Holding It Together uses archival images that contain loss, grief, longing and memory. The ripped images exhibit the colonial violence that Sound’s family, and other Indigenous families, have experienced including residential school intergenerational trauma, loss of language, and displacement from territories. These losses can never be fully healed but these histories and realities can be processed through art, culture and stories. The materials of these large 4x3’ artworks include paper, beadwork, embroidery thread, porcupine quills and caribou tufting.

Nimama hates fish but worked in the cannery is informed by Sound’s mother who is Cree from Kinuso, in northern Alberta and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River) First Nation. Her parents became enfranchised in the forties so their children would not be forced to attend residential school as they did. They no longer lived on their reserve and moved around Alberta looking for work. Her mom moved out to BC in the seventies, before Sound was born, for better employment opportunities. She worked in the Richmond cannery, even though she hated fish, as it was a necessity for her family’s survival. Their family has had to navigate a transition into new roles as guests on this territory. They live with a sense of displacement and loss of their community and language. Sound was the first of her family born on the west coast and now raises her son in the traditional, unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. As Sound explains, “this piece explores how we relate to the land we live on and also acknowledges our presence as visitors”. Nimama hates fish but worked in the cannery consists of three works, each 2.5x4’, digital print on cloth vinyl.

80’s Brat is a series of drums that pay homage to the Aunties, a community of caretakers. As Sound explains, “our aunties are also our mothers, who take care of us, our 'cool' moms”. More often than not, the aunties are our first style icons, the loud aunties with the big laugh, who take us to the mall. This drum series is a tribute to their classic auntie style. Dimensions of this series vary, ranging from 8” - 22” in size.

HBC Trapline references the fur trade when beaver pelts were traded for one Hudson Bay Co. four-point blanket. These HBC blankets started to replace traditional blankets that were sewn together from rabbit furs. Indigenous women were vital to the fur trade and the preparation of furs. The four HBC colours of Blue, Yellow, Red, and Green acknowledge the ancestors who worked in the fur trade and the importance of the blanket and women's labour to the fur trade.

The Aunties That Do will be on view from May 19th - July 1st, 2023. Sound is also an artist in residence for this year’s Indigenous Art Intensive at the University Of British Columbia Okanagan. Learn more about the Intensive here.

“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.

Please RSVP by visiting https://www.alternatorcentre.com/events/beading-circle

Michelle Sound is a Cree and Métis artist, educator and mother. She is a member of Wapsewsipi/Swan River First Nation in Northern Alberta, her maternal side is Cree and her paternal side is Métis from central Alberta. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University, School for the Contemporary Arts, and a Master of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University Art + Design. Michelle is a 2021 Salt Spring National Art Award Finalist and has had recent exhibitions at Daphne Art Centre (Montréal), Neutral Ground ARC (Regina) and grunt gallery(Vancouver).

Learn more about Sound and her work, here.

Gabrielle Desrosiers' practice navigates between performance and installation where she brings together mediums such as photography, sculpture, video and found objects. She approaches installation in a scenographic manner and is interested in the notion of reconfiguration of the panorama. Desrosiers reflects on how the manipulation of the image and the object contributes to the idea of simulation and control of a narrative. This relationship of transformation and deformation is expressed in a vision of the collective landscape as well as in a personal and intrinsic perspective. Tinged with humor, Desrosiers' work is colorful and explores the theme of legacy and the concept of self-construction highlighted in her work through collage and the assemblage of various materials. 

But What Did You Come Here For presented, primarily, 3D collages (micro-installations in model format) and a new series of sculptures in the form of assemblages where fragments of objects and materials collected by the artist are grouped together. In this exhibition, Desrosiers had invested herself in the creation of "false artifacts for the future". This research was inspired by a personal story experienced in 2013 during a trip to Italy. During a walk in the woods in the hills around Florence, she came across fake Greco-Roman ruins. These had been intentionally built by a landowner to showcase their estate and wealth, as simulated ruins made people look good at the time. If the disparity of this architecture had not been explained to her, she would have believed in this illusion, in a different history and chronology. 

In her assemblages, Desrosiers explored the artefact-object as a symbol of ruin, of a physical entity or of a bygone era. She also observed the rock as a metamorphosed material of the landscape where elements are accumulated, modified, or destroyed either by nature or human intervention. To simulate a process of sedimentation, the fragments collected by the artist are magnified and grouped together with the help of materials serving as a binder. This gesture of accumulation tends to create a new identity, to multiply the referents and the idea of decoy. Desrosiers questioned the reading of these objects. Are they imbued with a new character or rather with a form of erasure through addition? Are they tainted by our time or an illusion of it?

But What Did You Come Here For was on view in the Main Gallery from March 24 - May 6, 2023.

Born in Quebec City in 1986, Gabrielle Desrosiers currently resides in Magdalen Islands. She holds a diploma in scenography from Saint-Hyacinthe Theatre School (2007), a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal (2018) and from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem (2017). She is a recipient of the Irene F. Whittome Prize in Visual Arts (2018) as well as the Prix Relève from the Conseil de la culture de l'Abitibi-Témiscamingue (2020).

Her work has been presented in Montreal at Skol (2016), at Circa (2018), at Fonderie Darling as part of RIPA (2019) as well as elsewhere in Quebec province such as the Performance Art Festival of Trois-Rivières (2019), at l'Écart in Rouyn-Noranda (2020), at Espace F in Matane (2020), at the Bas-Saint-Laurent Museum in Rivière-du-Loup (2021) as well as at AdMare in Magdalen Islands (2022).

Learn more about Desrosiers’ work on her website.

La pratique de Gabrielle Desrosiers navigue entre la performance et l'installation où elle réunit des médiums tels que la photographie, la sculpture, la vidéo et les objets trouvés. Elle aborde l'installation de manière scénographique et s'intéresse à la notion de reconfiguration du panorama. Desrosiers réfléchit, entre autres, à la façon dont la manipulation de l'image et de l’objet contribue à l'idée de simulation et de contrôle d’un narratif. Ce rapport de transformation et de déformation s’exprime dans une vision du paysage collectif ainsi que dans une perspective personnelle et intrinsèque. Teinté d’humour, le travail de Desrosiers est coloré et explore aussi le thème du legs et le concept d’auto-construction mis en évidence dans ses œuvres par le collage et l’assemblage de divers matériaux. 

Mais qu’est-ce que vous êtes venu faire icitte présente, principalement, des collages 3D (micro-installation en maquette) et une nouvelle série de sculptures sous forme d’assemblages où se regroupent des fragments d’objets et de matériaux récoltés par l’artiste. Dans cette exposition, Desrosiers s’est investie à la création de « faux artéfacts pour le futur ». Cette recherche a été inspiré par un récit personnel vécu en 2013 lors d’un voyage en Italie. Au cours d’une marche en forêt dans les collines autour de Florence, elle se retrouve face à de fausses ruines gréco-romaines. Celles-ci avaient intentionnellement été construites par un propriétaire terrien afin de mettre en valeur son domaine et sa richesse, la simulation de ruines faisant bonne apparence à l’époque. Si la disparité de cette architecture ne lui avait pas été expliquée, elle aurait cru à cette illusion, à une histoire et une chronologie différente. 

Dans ses assemblages, Desrosiers explore l’objet-artéfact tel un symbole de la ruine, d’une entité physique ou d’un temps révolu. Elle observe aussi la roche telle une matière métamorphosable du paysage où les éléments sont accumulés, modifiés ou détruits soit par la nature ou l’intervention humaine. De sorte à simuler un processus de sédimentation, les fragments collectionnés par l’artiste sont magnifiés et regroupés à l’aide de matériaux servant de liant. Ce geste d’accumulation tend à créer une nouvelle identité, à multiplier les référents et l’idée de leurre. Desrosiers questionne ici la lecture de ces objets. Sont-ils empreints d'un nouveau caractère ou plutôt d’une forme d'effacement par l’addition? Sont-ils teintés par notre époque ou une illusion de celle-ci?

Née à Québec en 1986, Gabrielle Desrosiers réside actuellement aux Îles-de-la-Madeleine. Elle est titulaire d'un diplôme en scénographie de l'École de théâtre de Saint-Hyacinthe (2007), d'un baccalauréat en arts visuels de l'Université Concordia à Montréal (2018) et de Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design à Jérusalem (2017). Elle est récipiendaire du prix Irene F. Whittome en arts plastiques (2018) ainsi que du Prix Relève du Conseil de la culture de l'Abitibi-Témiscamingue (2020).

Son travail a été présenté à Montréal, entre autres, au Centre des arts actuels Skol (2016), à Circa art actuel (2018), à la Fonderie Darling dans le cadre de la RIPA – Rencontre interuniversitaire de performance actuelle (2019) ainsi qu'ailleurs au Québec tel au Festival d’art performatif de Trois-Rivières (2019), au centre d'artistes l'Écart à Rouyn-Noranda (2020), à l'Espace F à Matane (2020), au Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent à Rivière-du-loup (2021) ainsi qu’au centre d’artistes AdMare aux Iles-de-la-Madeleine (2022).

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.

Luther Konadu’s photographic work is one continuous documentary project centering on the way objective visual documentation ostensibly formulates public perception that surround collective identities and historic record. Photography with its attendant history continues to be an evidential entity used to profile, surveil, speculate, classify and “understand” different subjectivities and communities. Although this is not exclusive to black subjectivities, that is where Konadu begins and situates his focus. And so, as an image-maker, when he produces images, the legacies of documentary photography are on his mind and he thinks about how he can create an alternate past in order to imagine a different future of self— as it relates to a broader social communal context. The resulting fragment images highlight Konadu’s close community of family of friends as they intimately create a document of self as they see fit. Konadu uses diptychs, polyptychs, text, and re-photography all as strategies to suggest an ellipsis to the photo as well as highlight its inherent artifice. Konadu works in this way to also implicate viewers to slow read and consider the photographs as a breakaway from a reality as opposed to a representation of it.

Luther Konadu is an artist based in Winnipeg (Treaty One). He is the editor for Public Parking; a publication for critical thought and tangential conversations. His studio activities are realized through photographic processes that give way to sculptural components. He acknowledges the legacies of the photographic medium as an interpretive site for generating new conventions and expanding fixed narratives. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Aperture, and FOAM Magazine. He has exhibited nationally and internationally.

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

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

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

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

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

Apihkêw presented an examination of matrilineal lineage and concepts of time using ancestral and familial narratives to explore notions of Métis identity and histories. The exhibition consisted of video projections, audio, aluminum prints and installation elements.

Amy Malbeuf is a multidisciplinary visual artist from Rich Lake, Alberta, Canada. She utilises a variety of mediums including performance, installation, sculpture, caribou hair tufting, beadwork, and digital media. Malbeuf has exhibited and performed nationally.

For more information about Malbeuf and her work, please visit her website.

Apihkêw // Interpretive Essay by Gabrielle Legault

She weaves, she braids, she knits
Kokums, great-grandmothers, mothers, aunties, women of the earth. They bring The Land forth through their roots.

The gallery space transports us to northern Alberta, Home Land to artist Amy Malbeuf. A strip of land from her family farm lies raw, reminiscent of that which has been and continues to be dispossessed. Her work is deeply personal (the braids a literal extension of the artist), but it is also somehow familiar.

The work invites us to contemplate the sacredness of the body. Laced hair alludes to the old ways of the women that went before us, weaved through the fibers of our beings. A reminder of the everyday presence of our relations, our ancestors, shrouded in favor of modern-day individualism.

The work is situated within a movement that seeks to honour and give voice to Indigenous women who have been silenced. As a Métis woman, Malbeuf is conscious of the ways in which the bodies, names, stories, and work of indigenous women have been excluded within Métis histories. Contextualized within Malbeuf’s body of work as a performance artist, bead-worker and caribou-hair tufter, apihkêw exists along a continuum of creative endeavours that highlight often-unrecognized women’s craftwork meanwhile re-imagining Indigenous contemporary art.

For Indigenous women, ignoring the women that came before us is futile, as their pain and trauma is inherited through generations. The body is a vessel of not only unresolved despair, but also enduring strength. The gallery environment is haunting, charged with a sense of grief that may cause a visceral reaction for some people. The aesthetic of the work is stark, a reminder of all that has been lost in a relentless gale of colonization: culture, identity, spirituality, language and Land.

The interrelatedness of all living beings is a central component of apihkêw, weaved together through connections that transcend time and space. Illuminating the ways in which experiences are relived throughout generational lifetimes, the work stands as a tactile reminder of the stillness and flux of the passing of time. Drawing on concepts described by indigenous scholar Leroy Little Bear, temporality is understood as cyclical and non-linear. Place is thought together with time and space.

Though subtle, the collection in its entirety is powerful, chilling, and provocative. An atmosphere of mourning culminates with an intensity that is felt through the cutting of braids. Though in other contexts, it may be an icon of residential school trauma and indigenous erasure, here expresses somethingcomplex. The future is re-imagined, unshackled from solemnity. Not an absolving of the women and their resilience that has been passed through the body along bloodlines, but a recognition that strength lies in surrendering to oneself. Though somber, the work whispers beyond the bleakness, of persistence through adversity, of a life after loss, of Ahkemeyimowak.

Jason Baerg’s Authors and Antidotes took inspiration from the medicine wheel - an inclusive ground for all people of the red, yellow, black and white nations. The installation featured a series of works that concentrated specifically on red and yellow or black and white. Black and white in the medicine wheel represent the body and soul, while red and yellow represent the mental and emotional. 

This work was developed during the 2009 Indigital Residency at the Alternator during which Baerg created a series of writings on healing that was both personal and for the community at large. These writings were then abstracted into the symbols that appear throughout the exhibition, invoking intuitive responses. 

Jason Baerg is a Toronto-based Cree Métis artist raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University. As a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting, and new media installation. Notable international solo exhibitions include the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, and the Digital Dome at the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baerg has sat on numerous art juries and won awards through such facilitators as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council.

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

Doug Buis’ Okanagan Hover looked into the surprising place that Kelowna occupies in the history of astronautics and space travel. The installation, comprising a large historical landscape diorama, a video installation, photography and stories, brought the viewer on a flight over Kelowna, through volcanic tunnels and vents, past strangely formed asteroids and a beautiful, but tortured planet.

The exhibition celebrated the story of a local woman Verona Frelein, who came to the Kelowna region to study volcanoes and their possible use in early astronautics.

Buis explained, “This exhibition allows the viewer to relax in a bucolic back yard with stunning views, rest in the ancient fruit orchard and read up on the role of the Okanagan Valley in developing early theories about the possibilities of launching space craft.” The viewer could also choose to lie back in a canoe to watch a movie or simply sleep for a while.

Doug Buis was born in London Ontario, and lived in many places including BC, Mexico, Montreal, Saskatoon, and in California for 7 years, before moving to Kamloops. His BFA is from the University of Victoria and his MFA is from  York University in Toronto.  His exhibition record includes galleries and museums across Canada, Holland, Belgium, Korea, and USA.

Buis’ work investigates our malleable perception of landscape and environment through a series of different media and strategies including sculpture, video, kinetic art, installation, other time-based media, photography and some writing.

In Diary of a Nomad, Jude Norris explored the effect of post-modern technologies and attitudes on nomadic cultural approaches to sustenance, lifestyle and survival. Using three projection screens hung like the sides of an open square, Norris constructed a softer inner room from which to consider the gallery as a culturally influenced 'chamber of experience'. Within this portable space, the artist projected often-dispirited panoramas contrasting urban/rural and Indigenous/immigrant migratory cycles. These digital landscapes were both a celebration of the land and a critique of Western landscape traditions.

Jude Norris is a Plains Cree/Anishnawbe/Metis Nation multi-disciplinary First Nations artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has lived for extended periods in the UK , Vancouver, Toronto, and the Lower Similkameen Reservation in Interior Salish territory in Central B.C.

Norris creates work from the vantage point of an Indigenous woman living in post-modern Western society. She expands these personal experiences into work that embodies Indigenous expression and vision, yet is broadly accessible and relevant.

Norris is a recipient of the prestigious Chalmer’s Arts Fellowship, and has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, and can be found in the collections of major museums across Turtle Island.

To learn more about Norris’ and her work, visit her website.

A bellwether is a herald or a harbinger.

In this exhibition, Threewalls brought together a group of artists (currently or formerly based in Chicago) whose work imparts a kind of warning or predication. Riding the line of disaster prophesy, the work suggested cultural and environmental decline, as well as simultaneously deconstructing the meaning of art or the Avant-garde as a pilaster of faith in the abstract. Positioning a group of artists whose work created disruption within the accepted narrative of modern art alongside work that proposed a menacing or hesitant narrative, Bellwether was both a document of doubt and anxiety in the face of cultural disrepair, as well as a provocation from a group of artists working from outside the traditional poles of the Avante-garde. 

Bellwether featured work by Daniel Anhorn, David Coyle, Caleb Jones Lyons, Christian Kuras & Duncan McKenzie, Josh Mannis, Heather Mekkelson and Jenny Walters. Bellwether was curated by Shannon R. Stratton, who was Director and Chief Curator of Programs at Threewalls at the time.

In exchange, the Alternator sent Scott August, Sarah Fuller, and Bracken H’anuse Corlett to Chicago to present their work in an exhibition titled Turned Intos.

Threewalls, an evolving Blk-space, fosters contemporary art practices that respond to lived experiences, encouraging connections beyond art. Threewalls provides support to artists, produces innovative programming, and creates a space for artists and creatives to thrive. The work of Threewalls rests firmly within a culture of care, a culture of intentionality, a culture of space, a culture of rootedness that centers humanity through the lens of art and relationship-building.

For more information about Threewalls, visit their website.

Daniel Anhorn is an artist originally from Revelstoke BC, with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently works as a Preparator at the Red-Deer Art Gallery and Museum.

David Coyle is a painter and artist currently working out of Philidelphia, PA.

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

Caleb Jones-Lyons is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad including High Energy Constructs (Los Angeles), 40000 (Chicago), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and Bemis Underground (Omaha).

Christian Kuras & Duncan McKenzie have been collaborating on projects since 2003. Christian Kuras lives in suburban Manchester, England. His work has been shown and published across Canada, the United States and Europe. Duncan MacKenzie is an artist, pundit, educator and a founding member/producer of Bad at Sports. His works have appeared in galleries all over the world including Canada, Australia, The United States of America, New Zealand, Estonia and England. He currently enjoys a posting as an Assistant Professor in Art + Design at Columbia College Chicago.

For more information about their work, visit their website.

Josh Mannis has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His exhibition record includes the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec, the Tate Modern in London, and solo and group exhibitions at contemporary art galleries in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland OR, Boston, Mexico City, Vancouver and Berlin.

Heather Mekkelson is a sculptor and installation artist based in Chicago. She has had several solo exhibitions at Chicago galleries such as 65GRAND, 4th Ward Project Space, and STANDARD. Her work has been exhibited in group shows in galleries and institutions nationally since 2001. Mekkelson’s work has been featured in Art Journal, Art21 Magazine, Artforum.com, Artnet, Flavorpill, Hyperallergic, Newcity, Time Out Chicago, and others. She has been the recipient of several fellowships and grants including the 2020 Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship in Sculpture and a 2012 Artadia Award.

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

Jenny Walters is a photographer with an MFA from the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, Houston and Kansas City. Walters has been reviewed in ArtForum, Modern Painters and Art Monthly.

Faith Moosang & Christoph Runné‘s The Blair Bush Project formed a representation of war, concentrated on the motivations that fuelled military and economic conflicts at the time, within the ever-changing alliances of international politics. 

Hand-processed, speed-manipulated 16 mm film looped imagery of a guard dog lapping water, a nuclear blast and an oil-filled nodding donkey blended with appropriated imagery from the movies Wall Street and MacArthur, and were projected on to a rotating screen. Audio of motors blended with the noise of the projectors to create a feeling of confusion and chaos. 

Faith Moosang is a multimedia artist, curator, writer and researcher who lives and works in Vancouver, BC.. Her work centres around inquiry into spectacle culture, media, mediated imagery and the mechanically reproduced image. She has an MFA from the School for Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University and has expanded her practice to the realms of public art and curating contemporary art. She has also published books, articles and blogs relating to culture, pop culture, research, history and photography. Her research and writing have garnered awards and her specific passions are things archival, historical and political.

For more information about Moosang and her work, visit her website.

Christoph Runné is a Vancouver-based experimental film, video, and installation artist. Through his work, he explores the unhidden yet seemingly invisible world around us. He creates visual tone poems with a humanitarian heartbeat whose minimalist and impressionistic methodology contradicts the complex human conditions with which Runné engages.

Drawing upon notions of spirituality, mobility, history and power, this photo-based and video installation mixes the traditional with the contemporary, suggesting that tradition is contemporary and that the contemporary is traditional. Through the blurring of definitions, ancient philosophies and cutting-edge representations of the aboriginal body and image, Claxton attempts to pay homage to Black Elk and the Horse Dance.

This project was commissioned by the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation.

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis (IN), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN). Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Audain Museum, Getty Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, University of Toronto, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery.

She has received the VIVA Award (2001), Eiteljorg Fellowship (2007), Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2019), YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2019), Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2020), and the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts (2023). She is the winner of Best Experimental film at the IMAGINATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival (2013).

Fringing the Cube, her solo survey exhibition, was mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018) and the body of work Headdress premiered at the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto ON (2019). She is set to have a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2024.

She is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and she resides in Vancouver Canada. 

Dana comments, “I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings – mni ki wakan - water is sacred. ”

To learn more about Claxton and her work, Visit her website.

The House That Herman Built was the result of Jackie Sumell’s five-year collaboration and correspondence with Herman Wallace; an inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (USA). The question they tried to answer was, “what kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell dream of after 30 years of solitary confinement?” This question is explored in different modalities including a scale wood model of the house, a CAD model video, as well as dozens of drawings, diagrams, and letters of correspondence.

Jackie Sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a Source Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. Sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. Sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration.

Herman Wallace, one of the ‘Angola Three’, was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1971 for robbery charges. In 1972 he and fellow inmates Robert King and Albert Woodfox were charged with murdering a prison guard, and Wallace spent the next 42 years in solitary confinement; maintaining his innocence over the decades. Jackie Sumell began a correspondence with Wallace in 2006, which kicked off years of activism and artistic collaboration. Wallace was released from prison on October 1st, 2013, and passed away, a free man, three days later.

Jackie Continues the legacy of Herman to this day through the Solitary Gardens organization- which can be viewed here. Below is an excerpt from the website:

“Jackie sumell’s most celebrated project, Herman’s House, resulted from an incredible 12-year collaboration with political prisoner Herman Wallace. Herman spent over decades in solitary confinement in the State of Louisiana, for a crime he could not have possibly committed. In his 29th year of isolation, while a graduate student at Stanford University, she began writing him, eventually asking: “What kind of house does a man who has lived in a six-foot-by-nine-foot box for almost thirty years dream of?” This question launched our collaborative project, The House That Herman Built (Herman’s House), an ongoing exhibition, installation, book, advocacy campaign, and Emmy Award-winning documentary (Best Artistic Documentary, 2013). After spending over 41 years in a 6’ x9’ cage, Herman’s conviction was overturned and he was released from prison on October 1, 2013. He died 3-days later from the complications of advanced liver cancer. Fueled by the desire to keep Herman’s legacy alive, The Solitary Gardens, turns solitary confinement cells into garden beds that are the same size and blue-print as the cell Herman, and so many others spend decades in. The contents (plants, flowers and herbs) of the prison-cell-turned-garden-bed are designed by prisoners serving their sentences in isolation through proxies on the outside. Central to this project is a call to end the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, simultaneously inspiring compassion necessary to dismantle systems of punishment and control.”

Balloons and plastic masks are definitive markers of celebration. In his installation For My Culture, Brendan Fernandes subverted these synthetic signs of festivity to pose the question: whose party is this anyway?

The pristine gallery space became an artificial landscape in NeoPrimitivism II.  Decoy deer stood proxy for their natural counterparts, hidden behind flimsy plastic masks.   Modeled from African tribal masks, the white party favours were consumable artifacts. They offered a level of superficial disguise – making the false deer more conspicuous while simultaneously providing camouflage within the white-walled sanctuary. Made of commercial plastic instead of sanctified wood, these artifacts were designed for a different ritual – viewing art. The masks speak of cultural translation: objects taken out of context, drained of color and visually simplified.

Translations of culture occur every time people cross borders and assimilate.  By pointing to what is lost during naturalization, Fernandes addressed larger questions of post-colonial identity and the role of art in the transcription of power and purpose. 

Visitors to the gallery were playfully implicated in this complex exchange by a box of white balloons printed with linear drawings of African masks. Offered as souvenirs of the exhibition, the balloons were free for the taking, but at what cost?  The act of inflating a balloon with helium distorted the image of the mask, distancing the reproduction even further from the original.  At the same time, it raised the visibility of the pseudo-artifact, quite literally. Tethered to viewers, the balloons became mobile signifiers of a dislocated idea of ‘Africa’ – casual diaspora that can extended the exhibition beyond the gallery doors.

The title of this piece, Authentic POP, was a reminder of the ephemeral nature of these inflated emissaries, but also made reference to the commodification of culture as exemplified by Pop Art. In contrast to ‘authentic’ experience, Fernandes presented identity as a marketable export – an inoculated version of the self, globally acceptable, but dislocated from its source.

At a post-colonial moment when many people were experiencing a displaced life, the artist questioned the basic premise of ‘home.’  In a short video loop, a repeated lion’s call was translated in subtitles as “Go Home”. But after a complex journey, the viewer could no longer be entirely sure of which home the lion speaks. Is it ‘ours’ or ‘his?’ And once the barrier between the two is crossed, does ‘home’ truly belong to anyone? At the end of the party, the viewer may have started to recognize an uncomfortable truth: in this space, we are all masquerading.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Fernandes’ projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Fernandes’ projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.

Fernandes is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Fernandes is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University.

To learn more about Fernandes and his work, visit his website.

Fariba Samsami’s Reframing addressed political events and gendered social realities in Iran, confronting the paradigms of oppression that impact women’s lives in Iran. She responded to the rapid rise and expansion of Islamic culture in the West through technologies of information exchange and social control.

Reframing included an installation that recreated an identity-card photo booth. The viewer was invited to sit on a chair and view video footage of veiled women demonstrating in Iran. Photos were taken of visitors while they were in the booth, and could be printed and taken home. However, these photos were edited to include a veil over the viewer’s head.

Fariba Samsami was born in Tehran and now lives in Montréal. She has a BFA from Concordia University and a BFA from the College of Decorative Arts in Tehran. Samsami has exhibited at the Conseil des arts textile du Québec (Montréal), Articule (Montréal), Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario (Sudbury, Ont.), Maison de la culture (Montréal), Atelier Silex (Trois-Rivières, Que.), Hamilton Artists Inc. (Hamilton, Ont.), Grave (Victoriaville, Que.), Le CEG (Sorel-Tracy, Que.), the Centre culturel franco-manitobain (Saint-Boniface, Man.), and Modern Fuel Gallery (Kingston, Ont.).

Parallel World: The Architecture of Survival was a sculptural and media installation incorporating photographs of temporary shelters in downtown Belgrade built by refugees from Kosovo and other migrants seeking a better life. Artists Boja Vasic & Vessna Perunovich constructed a shanty house in the gallery together with a two-channel video titled Gypsy Utopia. Their work considers the social, political and economic realities that force people into a nomadic existence. In this installation, architecture worked as a powerful visual and environmental force, making it impossible for viewers to ignore ostracized members of society.

Boja Vasic is a Toronto based media artist and photographer. His work has been shown at the 8th Havana Biennial in Cuba, VI Yugoslav Biennial of Youth Vrsac in Serbia, XIII International Art Biennial of Vila Nova de Cerveira in Portugal, Third Tirana Biennial in Albania, and at the Liverpool Biennial, Independents. His video were shown at festivals in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Chicago, Denver, Toronto, and he has won several international awards including the Chris Award at the Columbus International Film and Video Festival, a Bronze Medal at New York Festivals, and the Gold Award at Dallas HeSCA Media Festival.

Vessna Perunovich is a Toronto-based internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist whose work embraces performance, video, sculpture, painting and drawing. She works with issues around home, displacement the notions of mobility and boundaries. Perunovich’s work constantly brings to forefront her own position on the borders of identity in its multiple formations (social, political, personal, cultural and so on). Born and educated in Former Yugoslavia, Perunovich moved to Toronto Canada in the late 1980s. Her artistic practice reflects the multifaceted nature of her diasporic experience; it is interdisciplinary, performative, and often transitory in form and content. The artist’s body and her personal experiences are always the point of reference for an aesthetics that operates intuitively, and practice that challenges one’s capability to move beyond barriers imposed by spaces, institutions, ideologies, or body’s own limitations.

The Roma (in) Ruins // Interpretive Essay by Vessna Krstich and Nikolas Drosos

The industrious gypsy peddler was a common figure in the city of Belgrade during the civil war years in the former Yugoslavia. Today, the Serbian capital is striving to recover from international isolation by promoting capitalist enterprise and urban regeneration, often at the expense of the Roma population. While organizations exist to prevent further exclusion, discrimination restricts their participation in the educational system and labour market. On the other hand, their own socioeconomic conditions as well as their ill-reputed status, further segregates this ethnic group from mainstream society.

Toronto-based documentary filmmaker Boja Vasic and artist Vessna Perunovich have returned to their homeland to document this marginalized community. The pair revisited their former neighbourhood in Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) and the gypsy settlement nearby, which they approached with a new sensitivity, after having spent twenty years living in Canada. Themes of displacement and exile are reoccurring leitmotifs in Perunovich’s oeuvre while political and anthropological issues shape Vasic’s cinematic work. Parrel World: The Architecture of Survival, represents their combined efforts to explore the economic, social and political dimensions of architecture and the idea of forced nomadism.

99 photographs of Roma gypsies in front of their homes don the gallery walls. Each shack is marked for demolition and the blurred backgrounds efface the high rise apartment buildings in the distance. The artists have also installed a replica of one of these shanty dwellings, which they assembled from discarded materials. By reorganizing waste into living quarters the Roma gypsies perform an act of ‘recycling’. The resulting ’organic’ edifices are perishable, forced to extinction much like its inhabitants. This type of architecture could be seen as the other ‘international style’ of the late modern era. Made from found materials, mostly wash of the big urban centres, these ephemeral structures can be found today in most parts of the world, from South America to Europe and Southeast Asia. They represent a parallel yet antithetical world to the structures typical of global capitalism: the ephemeral shantytowns versus the permanent glitzy high-rises, the architecture of survival versus the architecture of profit.

The distance between these two parallel worlds is also reflected in the two-channel video projection. Hidden from view in order to remain inconspicuous, the video camera slowly pans the desolate dump of this Roma encampment. It only surveys the sit and does not scan for more intimate details. While this trepidation creates an objective vista on the part of the artist/researcher it also makes us more self-conscious of our status as a privileged intruder.

Vesna Krstich is a Toronto-based educator, art critic and independent curator. Her research explores the interrelationship between art and experimental pedagogic practices from the 1960s onwards. She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialized in Contemporary Art. Krstich’s writing has appeared in Art Papers, Parachute, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and Curator: The Museum Journal, among others.

Nikolas Drosos is a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He specializes in Modern Art, with an emphasis on Eastern European Art in its global context. He holds a PhD from the City University of New York and a MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

David Diviney’s Blinds, Hides, and Other Points of View presented found objects and appropriated imagery within an open and often-broken narrative. In this semiotic game, the meaning of an object is severed from its origins, leaving room for new interpretations.

David Diviney is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax) where he has worked since 2009. His recent projects include The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978, Jason de Haan: Noghwhere Bodili is Everywhere Goostly, Eleanor King: Dark Utopian, John Greer: retroActive, and Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg: The Way Things Are. He curated David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East, a retrospective of the late artist’s work that opened in 2011 at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) before travelling to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown) and the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena). He previously held the positions of Assistant Curator of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge) and Director of the artist-run centre Eye Level Gallery (Halifax). He has also taught courses at Alberta College of Art and Design, University of Lethbridge, Thompson Rivers University, and Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

As of 2024, David Diviney is the chief curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia

To learn more about David’s work, you can view his Instagram @dmdiviney.

Identity is forged by connection with the other in concert with the other’s outlook on us. To realize this project, Gilles Morissette undertook a collaboration with over a hundred students from l'Anse-au-Sable school in Kelowna, pairing younger and older students to create a collective work exhibited at the Alternator. Each student was asked to paint the eye of his or her partner on an ordinary light bulb. The participants also took photographs of each other’s eyes, images that were transposed onto mirrors as part of the installation. Morissette puts the students in the situation of acutely observing each other. In doing so, he is creating the necessary conditions for an awakening of awareness of the other in each of the young participants.

Gilles Morissette works in sculpture, installation, art actions and photography/digital images. The in-situ work is inspired previously by specific elements of the site, be it the architecture, the history and the people who live there.
My art puts in situation beings and the spaces in which we exist. The place that we occupy on earth and the universe, the outlook that we project beyond the visible world. These immersive works allow the participant to become an integral part of the discourse: the being here. I seek to create an experience of space where it is possible to perceive and grasp what it may reveal. It is a face-to-face from which emerges a discourse between light and shadow, the visible and invisible, materiality and immateriality, sound and silence.

Gilles Morissette has exhibited across Canada, the U.S.A., in Europe and Japan. His work is represented in a number of permanent collections, among them the Canada Art Bank, Alberta Art Foundation, Toms Pauli Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Léopold-Hoesch Museum in Düren, Germany, The Hall of Awa Japanese Paper Museum in Yamakawa, Japan, and the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia - Fundo de Arte DANAE in Madrid, Spain. From 1998 to 2019, he was invited to participate in multidisciplinary exhibitions of the SMCQ Homage Series dedicated to current composers of Quebec.   

To learn more, you can visit Gilles’ website here.

Selling Venus, was created by Dominique Rey in a South Carolina striptease club. She photographed the erotic dancers in the intimacy of their dressing room at the very moment where, alone with themselves, they prepare for the game of seduction awaiting them on stage, when they turn themselves over to the gaze of the other.

These portraits seek to unveil, the artist stresses “the illusions and stereotypes while reactualizing the debate about women in oppressive roles.” Captured in the reflection of a glance, the pictures show women absorbed by their image, observing themselves, putting on makeup, and fixing their hair with scant attention to the presence of the photographer. In a play of glances and diverted attention, Rey suggests a representation of these women that is different from that of the simple reflection of male desire by emphasizing this more interior gaze, filled with hope and ambition.

Selling Venus, finds its origin in the artist's personal experience as a stripper in a club in Osaka, Japan. In this context, she took her first photographs revealing the ritual of physical and psychological transformation these workers practice every day, a ritual meant not only to prepare a game of charm and seduction, but also to adorn oneself in a protective suit.

Dominique Rey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Winnipeg, Canada whose practice includes photography, video, performance, collage, and sculpture. Her work delves into peripheral subjectivities, from individuals and groups of people on the margins of dominant culture, to performance-based works that mine the terrain of the unconscious. She is interested in examining the outsider within society, as well as a deep sense of being we have of being strangers to ourselves. For this reason, she utilizes modes of fragmentation to explore the construction of self, as it relates to current experiences of dislocation and disorientation.

For more information on Rey and her current work, visit her website.

Jennifer Linton presents drawings and etchings that fuse emotion with religious iconography to explore themes of female sexuality, the concept of virginity and the difficult territory of child abuse. St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins features images of Linton masquerading as Ursula, the patron saint of schoolgirls. Blood transforms into flowers and kilt-clad schoolgirls behead monsters in fantastical works that combine camp and catharsis.

Jennifer Linton is a Canadian interdisciplinary visual artist working with animation, drawing and printmaking. Her animated films explore the traditional medium of paper cutout animation, combining a hand-drawn style with the texture and materiality of stop-motion. Thematically, her films often blend beautiful and erotic imagery with grotesque and uncanny elements. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from York University (2010), and a BA in Art & Art History from the University of Toronto (1992). She also teaches art and design courses at post-secondary institutions such as OCAD University (Toronto) and Sheridan College (Oakville). Linton has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

To learn more about Jennifer and her current work, visit her website.

Glowing Madonna was an interactive video installation, whereby the viewer’s shadow together with a video projection of a contemporary Virgin Mary, were exposed onto a large photo-luminescent wall panel. This piece blended elements of celebrity culture and religion in a somber and restless search for a self-defined woman’s identity. Glowing Madonna was inspired by the representation of women in Catholicism and pop culture, including Virgin Mary apparitions, glow-in-the-dark figurines and superstar shows like Canadian Idol.

Teresa Ascencao is a multimedia artist whose work toys with social constructs of body language, costume, customs, and inner corporeal experiences. Her folk and pop inspired artworks employ concept-related mediums and technologies that invite audiences to play with iconographies and scenarios involving gender, seduction, consumption, and class.

Teresa was born in Brazil to Azorean parents, and immigrated to Canada at a young age. She graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto’s Honours Fine Art Studio program and holds an MFA specializing in Media Art and Sex-Positive Feminism from OCAD University. Ascencao’s work has been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. She lives and works in Toronto and teaches at OCAD University and University of Toronto.

To learn more about Teresa and her current work, visit her website.