Jarod Charzewski’s sculptural installation Knox Mountain - Rearranged used discarded clothing from local second-hand stores. Sculpting with the colours and textures of post-consumer textiles, he built geological forms to create the appearance of sedimentary rock. Local residents might’ve found their old pants or jackets transformed into an organic landscape reflecting the cultural values of our consumer-driven society. 

Working outside the gallery, Charzewski transported one of his sculptures throughout the city on the back of a trailer. These new outcroppings appeared within the city, challenging individuals to consider their own consumer habits. Like sedimentary rock, these ways of being can also be transformed over time and with pressure, often into unexpected forms.

Charzewski’s work is influenced by his experience growing up in the inner city of Winnipeg and summers spent in rural Manitoba. In his art, the geology and changing ephemeral qualities of light and climate of the Canadian prairies is moulded within a critical urban awareness. 

Jarod Charzewski grew up in the inner city of Winnipeg where the attitudes and esthetics of an urban setting tookhold. He also spent time on a family farm in rural Manitoba. This combination of surroundings is where he gained appreciation for natural and manufactured landscapes. He fuels his art with visuals of change; landscapes and recreates aesthetics that investigate mankind's evolving influence. Artistically he uses these sensations to release ethereality in site-specific experiences.

Charzewski holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba (1996) and an MFA from the University of Minnesota (2005). He has received artist grants from several US and Canadian arts organizations including the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts and received a Puffin Award for the environmental content of his work. He has exhibited across the US and Canada including such venues as the Grand Canyon National Park site specific installation, Le Biennale de Montréal in Montreal Quebec, the Bunnell Arts Center in Homer Alaska. In addition, in Spring of 2018 he had a mid career retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at the University of Southern California, Fullerton. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina

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

Traditions and Transitions, curated by Briar Craig, challenged contemporary attitudes towards printmaking. Selected works addressed debates in printmaking affected by technological advances and the concurrent desire to honour traditional practices. Artists from across the country represented a breadth of works using traditional, conceptual and mass-production techniques. This exhibition demonstrated how prints made in dramatically different ways can be relevant and exist side by side.

Mark Bovey is an artist and Associate Professor in the Printmaking Area at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax Nova Scotia Canada (2004-present). He received his MVA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta in 1992 and his BFA from Queen's University in Kingston Ontario in 1989.

For more information on Bovey’s work, visit his website.

Jesjit Gill is a visual artist and printmaker based in Toronto, ON. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design with a BFA in 2010. In his art practice he uses print as a medium to wed photographic collage and hand drawn elements that are arranged into dream-like scenes inspired by science fiction and surrealist art. He is also a co-organizer of Zine Dream, a small press fair that began in 2007 and features over 90 exhibitors including small presses, self publishers, printmakers and illustrators.

For more information on Gill’s work, visit his website.

Dana Tosic holds a BFA from Queen’s University and an MFA from the University of Calgary, both with a specialization in printmaking. In 2010 she was selected for the Tim Mara Graduate Student Exchange in the Printmaking Department at the Royal College of Art, London, U.K. Her research interests include explorations into embodied perception and memory as well as the application of digital technology to traditional practices in printmaking. She recently presented her research and artwork at the Printopolis International Symposium in Printmaking in Toronto in 2010

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

Robert Truszkowski holds a BFA from Queens’s University and a MFA from Concordia University. He has exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally. Notable achievements include The 2019 Biennale International de l’estampe contemporain (group exhibition in Trois-Riviéres, Canada),"The Conversationalist" at the Dunlop Art Gallery (solo exhibition in Regina Saskatchewan), "Connections - Printmaking from Saskatchewan and South Korea" (group exhibition at the Saskatchewan Craft Council), "Kyoto Hanga 2016" (group exhibition Kyoto and Tokushima Japan). Truszkowski is currently Associate Professor of Print Media and Head of the Department of Visual Arts, at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan Canada.

For more information on Truszkowski’s work visit his website.

Laura Widmer is a visual artist based in Kelowna, British Columbia. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in printmaking from the University of British Columbia's Okanagan Campus. Her work explores themes of intimacy, time and moments of personal transition. She uses traditional printmaking and papermaking methods in her work and enjoys the contrast they provide to the digital and increasingly virtual spaces we inhabit in the contemporary world.

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

Sue Bizecki’s Windows challenged viewers to consider what it means to own a home. The exhibition featured a documentary-style video relaying personal stories documenting the history of development specific to the Okanagan. The video was projected on the gallery floor, where it took a three-dimensional shape on a screen formed using multiples of miniature white paper homes. 

Building on oral histories, Bizecki engaged with both local Indigenous philosophies and contemporary immigrant stories. The focus of her work disrupted master narratives of development and progress through the insertion of individual and diverse reflections on ownership. By considering personal reflections on the idea of home, Bizecki relayed the importance of establishing community and identity against dominant colonial archetypes of property development and capitalist gain.

Additionally, Bizecki engaged the community by instructing gallery visitors how to build their own cookie-cutter paper home following a few easy steps. These homes were placed outside of the gallery to create a temporary, model community. 

Susan Bizecki is a Kelowna-based multi-media artist. Most of her practice lives in the space between installation, video work or both. She enjoys experimenting with fabric and other materials. She is currently working on some large-scale fibre sculptures with an interest in the current climate of environmentalism.