Alternator exhibition essays respond to the artworks presented through our Main Gallery exhibition series, and add another layer of interpretation to the exhibitions on view. These essays take a variety of forms: formal essays, Q&As with the artist, interpretive responses, and other types of creative writing pieces.
Read the essay supporting our current exhibition below, or review the essay archive going back to 2019.
Interested in writing for us? Learn how to join our roster of writers here.
Who gets to gaze upon whom, for what, for how long, and under which conditions? Can I look at your face as long as I desire? Can I see your wet mouth parting and closing and parting and closing? Can I watch your children fly above your private trampoline? Can I stare? I don’t know you and you don’t know me - what gaze is safe?
Read MoreNatasha Harvey’s exhibit of five works expresses the desire and sorrow of her lifelong relationship with the unceded land of the Syilx Okanagan territory. A mixture of acrylic painting, spray paint, collage of found building materials, linocut print, drawing, and photography, her layered, complex, airy canvases create a ghostly landscape of lost forests, half-built wooden houses, patchy snow, torn fences, and oversized undergrowth.
Rather than romanticising houses in the woods, these works draw attention to the vulgarity of wooden houses built over the scraps of a razed forest. Rather than hiding the process of clear-cutting, excavation, and construction, Harvey’s compositions seem to peel the skin from the body of built suburbia, showing the violence of ongoing colonial land capture.
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