In humynatur3 Holly Ward 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.

In Seeking Visions for a Better World, Ryan Fedderson employed crowd-sourced images and aspirational sentiments that invoked 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, building on ideas, reflecting on our culture, and imagining better outcomes for humanity.

Community-sourced contributions 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 on her work, visit RYAN!’s website here.

Laura Dutton’s Night Comes On meditated 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. With an undercurrent of scopophilia, 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.

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.