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.

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

Stories in My Pocket was an exhibition by artist S.C. Jean. The local artist invited viewers to take a peek inside her mind, process, and stories by sharing a collection of acrylic and oil paintings in her debut solo professional exhibition.

Curated by OAAA Board Members Patrick Lundeen and Dylan Ranney, this exhibition was an initiative to support a celebrated and active member of the Okanagan’s creative community. Lundeen and Ranney provided support for Jean through studio visits and artistic development to contextualize her work for the Alternators Main Gallery.

As a self-taught artist, Jean developed her own unique artistic voice outside of a typical institutional setting. As Lundeen describes, “Jean has not been subjected to [institutional training], and her work remains raw and filled with her own idiosyncrasies. These works are also not the work of your typical “Sunday painter”, but rather have a visceral and expressive quality that is extraordinary, unique and affecting”.

Jean's work drew from sights, sounds and emotions, and centred on deeply held experiences and memories. When Jean approaches a new work, she looks towards her inner-child, and paints to recollect another time; another place; and other circumstances through an abundance of textures, lines, colours to create vibrant portraits, landscapes, and scenes. 

S.C. Jean is a self-taught painter whose impressionistic paintings are drawn from sights, sounds and emotions, and centred on deeply held experiences and memories. When Jean approaches a new work, she looks towards her inner-child, and paints to recollect another time; another place; and other circumstances through an abundance of textures, lines, colors to create vibrant portraits, landscapes, and scenes.

Legroom for Daydreaming was a solo-exhibition of sculptural work and photo documentation that explores the alternative form and function of common objects as pseudo-technological devices. Inspired by the blurring of cultural boundaries evident in Métis architecture and the integration of research, play, and domestic design within European Court Salon inventions, these works explore an intersection of culture and discovery within the domestic device. Familiar yet strange, the works appropriated consumer material into failed-luxury objects that exhibit visual phenomenon or inexplicable functions.

By altering familiar forms with mechanics, optics, photography, and staging with one another, Legroom for Daydreaming provided a dissimilar experience of the domestic objects we are accustomed to interacting with. These alterations gave physical form to phenomenon and create curious, often humorous, situations where the line between image and object was blurred. Combined together in an installation that would warrant leisure and interaction, these works provided legroom for another way of seeing the world or the whatchamacallits that populate it. 

Glass’ practice focuses on an integrated studio process as an alternative to medium specificity. In this integrated practice he has increasingly employed alternative forms and optical technology and as a way to create an immersive experience for audiences and expand the capabilities of traditional mediums of photography, sculpture, new media art, and architecture. “At its centre, my artwork deals with how images are created and experienced in contemporary culture in relation to technology and viewing habits.” 

This concern for an integrated studio practice and research sit at the heart of his professional practice where the methodology of research, play, exhibitions, and theorization come together. Studio experimentation, or play, and public exhibitions offer a way to merge a consistently innovative practice with group curiosity and serious research. “This directly mimics my interest in European Salon culture, where a group of people would watch demonstrations of an experimental device as a way to come up with explanations of phenomenon together. I seek to link this concept further by generating work and exhibitions that combine research and platforms for audiences to see and discuss acts of play.” 

His work and research projects, such as Cineorama or Party Stacker, have continually focused on reworking optical technologies, expanding it’s use and reach. Glass continues this focus within new work in a reinvigorated way by utilizing interest in hybrid technology and art practices with hybrid identities. He has found his own mixed European and Métis identity to be at the root of his interest in developing these alternative domestic forms, hybrid technologies, and a reason to create new perspectives. His artistic practice has tied together an interest in early optical technology with acts of adapting and hybridizing image technology along deeply personal lines. 

Levi Glass is a Canadian artist of Métis and German descent. He has exhibited internationally at venues in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, UK, and frequently across Canada. He holds a BFA degree from Thompson Rivers University and an MFA degree from the University of Victoria. Glass’ research practice focuses on the mediation between images and objects that often result in new technologies in familiar forms. His artistic practice utilizes a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, and new media to experiment with a similar wide range of contemporary issues from self-representation to politics to phenomenology. In addition to his own research and artistic practice, Glass has been an assistant preparator at the Kamloops Art Gallery, a member of the programming committee at Arnica Artist-Run Centre, a research assistant to The Camera Obscura Project, an artist assistant to Donald Lawrence, Kevin Schmidt and Cedric Bomford, and a sessional instructor at the University of Victoria. He currently practices art in Victoria, British Columbia and works in Indigenous Education at Camosun College.

For more information or to see more of his work, please visit leviglass.ca .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a rumor circulating among the Germans as such: “There are 13 Korean students in Potsdam right now. In Germany, 13 is an unlucky number. So, one of them will be unlucky.”

Upon entering the artist’s great-grandfather’s name on Google, she found a section within an article mentioning his time in Germany leading up to his death. The unlucky Korean student that the Germans were foreseeing was her great-grandfather. 

In Sora Park’s exhibition “One of Them Will Be Unlucky”, she used her own family's history of migration as an impetus to explore the role that language plays in depicting the complexity of understanding diaspora. 

The exhibition was inspired by the artist's great-grandfather who became one of the very first Korean residents in Berlin in the early 1900s. In an attempt to explore her family’s history, she decided to go through her great-grandfather’s belongings depicting his life in Germany as a student. However, the letters and notes written in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and German only raised more questions than answers. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information about Robert’s work, visit http://paulrobert.ca/2020/teinture-de-bukavu/

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

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

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

For more information, visit: https://christopherlacroix.com/

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

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

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

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

Seeking Visions for a Better World was a call for images and aspirational sentiments that invoke constructive visions of the future to counterbalance the preponderance of dystopic visions presented in pop-culture, literature, and media. Inspired by traditional pictographs and contemporary graffiti culture, this collection of visions created space for a dialogue where we can build on ideas, reflect on our culture, and imagine better outcomes for humanity.

By working to develop meditations on futures we would like to see, we can generate societal visions that are worth pointing towards. Community- sourced contributions were received before July 21, 2019 and were translated into graphic treatments that progressively saturated the gallery from July 12th to 23rd, 2019.

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

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

Night Comes On was a meditation on the process of looking and being looked at. The installation allowed the viewer to become a voyeur, peering into private spaces while navigating around imposing structures of flickering, hypnotic light. There is an undercurrent of scopophilia, while at the same time the viewer is kept aware that their own presence has not gone unnoticed by the very devices through which they are spying. The voyeurism becomes a self-conscious act, one to which the looker is both implicated and subjected. Night comes on as we moved around this city of windows.

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

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

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

Seeing Laura Dutton’s Art

Interpretive essay by Will Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interpretive Essay by Gary Pearson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lost in Translation

Interpretive Essay by Hanss Lujan

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

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

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

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

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