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.