The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art kicked off 2021 with another instalment of the Intermission Series, featuring the work of two artists from UBC Okanagan’s MFA program.

Curated by Board Member Bailey Ennig, MFA students Brittany Reitzel and Sam Neal occupied the Main and Window Galleries. Reitzel presented a body of work titled Wallflowers in our Window Gallery, while Neal took over the Main Gallery with Inland Waters.

Kalamalka, courtesy of the artist.

Inland Waters is an exploration of time, place and process. Sam Neal grew up in an urban city in Northern England. Wandering, getting lost, and seeing beauty in the banal was where he found his escape from the congested everyday life. Since coming to the Okanagan in 2019, Neal has found more of a connection to the ground and what is immediately before him rather than longing to be in the distance.

Using cyanotype chemicals, a photographic process discovered in 1842, Neal brushes large pieces of paper that become sensitive to UV light once dry. Each of the works is created in collaboration with a body of water. He has been drawn to how water can appear to change colour when light moves across it, how we can see water’s surface and its depths and how it reflects and refracts to create caustics. Neal carries the sensitized paper to the water and lets the water impact or flow over it. The piece is then left to be exposed and dry at the site it is created in. The connection between the overlapping of water, light and his engagement with the process explores a performative relationship with nature that can be visualized as a direct mapping of a place.

The collaborative nature of the cyanotype process involving Neal and the body of water embraces the unknown possibility of the work's outcome; this collaborative process with nature cannot be fully controlled. He decides where and when to place the sensitized paper into the water and how long it’s left to expose. How many times the waves wash over the paper is his decision. All of these become part of a scientific and calculative response to the making of the work. Nature, however, decides the force of the impact with the paper and how it affects it. Some of the pieces reflect a sense of calmness, and some reflect disruption. Different weather affects the process and the very nature of the environment is the ultimate decision-maker in how the process carries itself into the space where it will live.

Inland Waters featured detailed, digital photographs alongside the original cyanotypes. The photographs depict the reaction between chemicals, water and light on the paper’s surface during the initial contact with water and after it oxidizes in the following days. Fractured lines reflect the braiding rivers and bodies of water, appearing as if they are a topographical map within itself. 

Each body of water acts as a potential threat to the land around it through processes such as shoreline erosion, flooding and other forms of environmental degradation. The cyanotypes in this space were left unfixed, and they retained sediment that is carried along with these bodies of water. They are impermanent objects that are susceptible to growth and decay. 

Fixing a cyanotype would require Neal to thoroughly wash the material and let it dry to its final state. By leaving them unfixed, sediment, algae, and other deposits that reacted with the chemicals remain on the paper's fibre. The sediment and any other organic material can grow, fall off or stay in place. Ultimately, each piece is a living object within an interior space, reflecting its original environment.

Wallflowers, courtesy of the artist.

Wallflowers was an exhibition by artist Brittany Reitzel who makes sculptural forms out of clay, evoking the material’s malleability. The work plays with the liminal zones of being and non-being and talks to the interface between the artist’s body and the natural environment. Through clay, Reitzel is able to explore the softness of the material, the absence and presence of the body and the movement from matter to object. The growth and decay of nature and the body's natural cycles are Reitzel’s inspiration. Using her hands as the primary tool to create, the work reveals the material’s relations to Reitzel’s body and its movements. The hand is exaggerated in her work leaving pinches, mini recesses and fingerprints. Her pieces move from a lump of earth to an animate being. With her hand emphasized, connections are made to process and the resulting final form reveals its own creation.

The work talks to Reitzel’s role in that creation and bears vulnerability to the presence of her own body. It comments on the interface of herself and other natural forms. Prying open raw material as grounds to discover the interwoven relationship between Reitzel’s body and other natural phenomena. Wallflower 1, 2 and 3 detailed these moments of intimate discovery. Like a flower in bloom from right to left the sculptures reveal the gradual opening up between the artist and the material. Recording the stages of growth and transformation as she becomes further attuned. Incisors’ vessel-like form to talk to openings and possibilities. The inside of the vessel represented the unknown and the circle of fang-like forms suggests that the object may open and close. The light pastel colour of the fangs alludes to the wonder and fear in the discovery of something unknown. 

Growth, decay, resilience and vulnerability were the central themes that flowed through this series of sculptures and evoked forms coming in and out of being. Clay is a natural material that moves and shapes to the forms her hands and body can create, and in this sense speaks to our interwoven relationship.