Jason Baerg’s Authors and Antidotes took inspiration from the medicine wheel - an inclusive ground for all people of the red, yellow, black and white nations. The installation featured a series of works that concentrated specifically on red and yellow or black and white. Black and white in the medicine wheel represent the body and soul, while red and yellow represent the mental and emotional. 

This work was developed during the 2009 Indigital Residency at the Alternator during which Baerg created a series of writings on healing that was both personal and for the community at large. These writings were then abstracted into the symbols that appear throughout the exhibition, invoking intuitive responses. 

Jason Baerg is a Toronto-based Cree Métis artist raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts from Rutgers University. As a visual artist, he pushes new boundaries in digital interventions in drawing, painting, and new media installation. Notable international solo exhibitions include the Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, and the Digital Dome at the Institute of the American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Baerg has sat on numerous art juries and won awards through such facilitators as the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and The Toronto Arts Council.

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

Doug Buis’ Okanagan Hover looked into the surprising place that Kelowna occupies in the history of astronautics and space travel. The installation, comprising a large historical landscape diorama, a video installation, photography and stories, brought the viewer on a flight over Kelowna, through volcanic tunnels and vents, past strangely formed asteroids and a beautiful, but tortured planet.

The exhibition celebrated the story of a local woman Verona Frelein, who came to the Kelowna region to study volcanoes and their possible use in early astronautics.

Buis explained, “This exhibition allows the viewer to relax in a bucolic back yard with stunning views, rest in the ancient fruit orchard and read up on the role of the Okanagan Valley in developing early theories about the possibilities of launching space craft.” The viewer could also choose to lie back in a canoe to watch a movie or simply sleep for a while.

Doug Buis was born in London Ontario, and lived in many places including BC, Mexico, Montreal, Saskatoon, and in California for 7 years, before moving to Kamloops. His BFA is from the University of Victoria and his MFA is from  York University in Toronto.  His exhibition record includes galleries and museums across Canada, Holland, Belgium, Korea, and USA.

Buis’ work investigates our malleable perception of landscape and environment through a series of different media and strategies including sculpture, video, kinetic art, installation, other time-based media, photography and some writing.

In Diary of a Nomad, Jude Norris explored the effect of post-modern technologies and attitudes on nomadic cultural approaches to sustenance, lifestyle and survival. Using three projection screens hung like the sides of an open square, Norris constructed a softer inner room from which to consider the gallery as a culturally influenced 'chamber of experience'. Within this portable space, the artist projected often-dispirited panoramas contrasting urban/rural and Indigenous/immigrant migratory cycles. These digital landscapes were both a celebration of the land and a critique of Western landscape traditions.

Jude Norris is a Plains Cree/Anishnawbe/Metis Nation multi-disciplinary First Nations artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has lived for extended periods in the UK , Vancouver, Toronto, and the Lower Similkameen Reservation in Interior Salish territory in Central B.C.

Norris creates work from the vantage point of an Indigenous woman living in post-modern Western society. She expands these personal experiences into work that embodies Indigenous expression and vision, yet is broadly accessible and relevant.

Norris is a recipient of the prestigious Chalmer’s Arts Fellowship, and has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, and can be found in the collections of major museums across Turtle Island.

To learn more about Norris’ and her work, visit her website.