2024 Annual Postcard Project: special Artist Spotlights
To reflect on 35 years of the Alternator Community, we sent out special invites to past contributing artists, staff, and board members. See what they contributed below.
Michelle Sound
Michelle Sound's exhibition The Aunties that Do (2023) explored cultural identities and histories by engaging with materials and concepts within a contemporary context. Through utilizing practices such as drum making, caribou hair tufting, beadwork, and photography, her work highlights that acts of care and joy are situated in family and community.
You can see more from this exhibition through the link below, or learn more about Sound's practice on her website.
Shirley Wiebe
Shirley Wiebe is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, BC. Her exhibition in the Project Gallery, Follow a Path to the River (2023), explored the idea of new beginnings in unfamiliar places and themes of displacement, endurance and identity through drawing, photography, sculpture, video and music.
Click here to view more of Wiebe’s recent works on her website.
Take a look at Wiebe’s artist talk about the exhibition here, and see the link below for more on Follow a Path to the River.
Shauna Oddleifson
Shauna Oddleifson is a mixed media artist, who graduated from UBCO (then OUC) in 1998. Oddleifson was one of the first artists to exhibit in our Project Gallery alongside creative collaborator Joanne Gervais. The duo presented Sea Dreams (2022), an animated short film about a young girl who explores an underwater seascape and deals with the impact of humans on the environment. Oddleifson’s work is subversive in nature, containing deranged visuals and a schizophrenic sense of humour, appropriating from our childhood desires and patterns of thought.
Check out the exhibition below, and learn more about Oddleifson’s practice on her website.
Cindy Mochizuki
In 2017, Cindy Mochizuki exhibited dawn to dust in the Alternator Main Gallery. The multi-media installation presented a series of stories told from the perspectives of five fictional characters. The resulting animations were housed within architectural, cinematic viewing spaces based on drawings from memory by Mochizuki’s father and his siblings. They depicted an old and abandoned shack house that was one of the post-war "homes" that her father's family moved into following the release of Japanese Canadians from the internment camps of B.C. in 1949. Together, the character's viewpoints attempt to 'make sense’ of the mysterious disappearance of a family as they one by one vacate their home. What remained is a family recollection of childhood, as Canadian-born children trying to survive and make sense of everyday life in a foreign country.
Learn more about Mochizuki’s exhibition below, and visit her website to see more of her work.
Kyle Beal
Back in 2022, Kyle Beal exhibited Screen Time, a collection of artworks that considers ideas of individuality, performance of the everyday, and our online existence in our Main Gallery. All of the objects within the exhibition involved a play of light, either through reflection or transparency as a means of representing the dual nature of our “authentic” and digital lives.
If you like the work shown here be sure to check out his series In a Flash, which you can view on his website.
Jihee Min
Jihee Min is a Korean-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her practice employs narrative strategies and autobiographical experiences to explore the notion of identity and cultural displacement, in a wide range of media, such as sculpture, installation, performance, video, photography and drawing. Min exhibited in the Alternator Main Gallery in 2010 with her solo show Once Upon a Camellia Blossoms. A combination of performance and installation, the show tackled the topic of the fetishization of Asian women within North America.
In the exhibition, Min filled the gallery with over 100 silky camellia blossoms and throughout the opening night wore a long, exaggerated black wig. Viewers were invited to fold origami flowers and pin them to the artists' wig, using commercial images of sexualized Asian women as the folding paper. The following day, Min walked the streets of Kelowna with the decorated wig, leaving origami blossoms at various spaces in town as she walked toward the lake. The final camellia was then folded into a small boat and sent out on the lake as a symbol of hope.
As a callback to Min’s exhibition with the Alternator, the artist references the work in her submission to the Postcard Project. See her postcards in the exhibition and visit the link below to see the connection.
You can also learn more about Min’s work on her website.
Lucas Glenn
Lucas Glenn’s practice is influenced by science fiction and fantasy and aims to address the systems of power that accelerate our climate crisis. Working with sculpture, installation, digital media, synthetic and natural materials, he aims to deconstruct the false boundary between human and what we call nature.
Exploring the connections between the “human” and “non-human”, My Horse Was Hit By Lightning was a duo project exhibited in the Window Gallery in 2019. The exhibition, created by Lucas Glenn alongside his brother Matthew Glenn, explored ecology and masculinity in the context of anthropogenic climate crisis. The Glenn’s used functional equipment such as outdoor supplies, video games, and sports gear to demonstrate the relationship we have with objects, and explore equipment as a mediator of human and non-human.
Glenn’s involvement with the Alternator also extends to his residency in Studio111 (2018, 2020), collaborative exhibitions in the Members’ Gallery (2015), and work with the One11 Zine Collective (2012-13)
Learn more about Lucas Glenn on his website and click below to read more about My Horse Was Hit By Lightning.
Mary Smith McCulloch
Mary Smith McCulloch is an internationally exhibiting printmaker who has been based in Kelowna since the 1970s. McCulloch has played an integral role in the growth of the creative community in Kelowna. Not only is she the founder of the Printmaking program at UBCO (previously OUC), teaching the next generation of printmakers, but she is also credited as one of the founder members of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
McCulloch participated in the retrospective exhibition: Okanagan Artists Alternative Association- Alternator Gallery: Founders Show (1998) which showcased the artists involved in the Alternator's conception.
Recently, McCulloch exhibited at the Kelowna Art Gallery with As Above, So Below, which can be viewed via the link here.
Pip Dryden
Emerging artist Pip Dryden exhibited in the Project Gallery in 2022 with I Make My Bed which explored the connection between our bodies and places of rest, specifically, the intimacy and safety they held. In this work, Dryden embellished a bed with the residue of the body, including teeth, hair, and fingernails, to remind viewers of the materiality and vulnerability of their bodies.
Click the link below to learn more about this exhibition.
Laura Dutton
In 2019, Laura Dutton exhibited in our Main Gallery with Night Comes On, an immersive sculptural and digital experience. Comprised of a series of scenes via projection and small stacked screens, Night Comes On was a meditation 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.
Dutton’s submission to the Postacrd Project echoes her 2022 work An Ocean In a Drop, which you can see here on her website.
Learn more about Night Comes On at the link below.
Natali Leduc
Natali Leduc, an artist and member of the acoustic noise band duo “Puppets Forsaken” alongside David Gifford, exhibited in the Main Gallery earlier in 2024. Titled The Noisebau, the exhibition was intended as an interactive musical experience that invited the audience to participate through noise generators: sculptures designed to create a series of noises that are usually forgotten in the background. As visitors interacted with the artworks, they became an extension of the work and experienced the noises at a more personal and visceral level.
You can learn more about Puppets Forsaken and the music they produce here.
Amy Modahl
Amy Modahl’s work investigates the vocabulary of space, visual-translation, and human and material gesture. In 2017, Modahl exhibited All of The Words of the Words Have Words in the Alternator Window Gallery. The installation, created with drawing and oil painting, acted as a space where visual and verbal language intersect. Focusing on hands as a powerful tool for communication, Modahl explores how hand gestures can be a metaphor for power, transformation, success, and failure, especially in politics where showmanship trumps honesty, and reality merges with theatre where the body speaks loudly.
Visit Modahl's website to learn more about her practice.
Michaela Bridgemohan
Michaela Bridgemohan is a cross-disciplinary artist based in the Syilx Territory/Kelowna. Through her paternal Caribbean heritage, Bridgemohan's artistic research is driven to reinscribe new notions of multiplicity and multi-dimensionality within Black identity in Canada.
Earlier in 2024, Michaela exhibited in the Main Gallery space with her exhibition, embalmed funks - which aimed to elevate objects for their ability to hold strong memories and parts of our identity in relationship to the land. Drawing from her Afro-Caribbean cultural practices, Bridgemohan questions how memory translocates across geographies for diasporic peoples. This methodology is informed by generative and reciprocal forms of care—prioritizing self-sustenance, futurity and creative power.
Learn more at the link below.
Laura Widmer
Laura Widmer is a locally-based artist who received a BFA from UBC Okanagan. Often working with large-scale, black and white linocuts, Widmer’s work is concerned with negotiating and renegotiating our understanding of the world. Positioning herself in these in-between moments, Widmer’s work hovers between being and becoming, formal and conceptual tension.
In 2011, she was part of a group show Traditions And Transitions, curated by Briar Craig in the Alternaor Main Gallery. The exhibition addressed attitudes towards printmaking in the modern age and the push-pull relationship between keeping tradition and adapting to present-day technology.
You can view Widmer’s website here, which provides a snapshot of her creating the postcard submitted for the Postcard Project.
Learn more about Traditions And Transitions below.
Robin Arseneault
In 2000, Robin Arseneault exhibited The Proximity of Pink. Her diverse practice includes drawing, photo-based imagery and sculpture, collage, and the creation of artist books. Arseneault’s work often explores the uncomfortable intersection of failure, objection, and humour, playing with a wide variety of materials to push materials past their boundaries. The resulting works often explore the uncanny, the tragic, or the comic.
To check out more of her works, take a look at her website here.
Sandra Cook
Sandra Cook, otherwise known as S.C. Jean, exhibited Stories in My Pocket in the Alternator Main Gallery in 2021. 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.
As a self-taught artist, Jean developed her own unique artistic voice outside of a typical institutional setting. Jean's work draws from sights, sounds and emotions, and centres on deeply held experiences and memories. Jean approaches painting with spontaneity, intertwining the wonder and awe, and sometimes the sadness and grief, of life. Through texture, mark-making, and vibrant colours, she aims to create an experience in time that is left to stand still.
As an active member of the Okanagan’s creative community, Jean has played an important role at the Alternator as not only an exhibiting artist but regular gallery volunteer.
Learn more about the artist below.
Brit Bachman
In the exhibition, Aiden Come Home (2013), multidisciplinary artist and writer Brit Bachmann aimed to highlight a simple, ephemeral moment. The highly personal Window Gallery installation included a continuous line drawing documenting shifting facial expressions. The continuous line acted as a metaphor for the converging narratives of strangers and friends to illustrate a sequence of actions that compose a single, often fleeting, moment. Bachmann’s work is known to voyeuristically chronicle the every day and the intimate with a linear flare that can only be traced back to the hand that made it.
To learn more about Bachmann’s practice see the link below or visit her website.
Amanda Wood
Amanda Wood is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples. In 2020, she exhibited Robustness to Uncertainty, a textile-based installation in the Window Gallery. The exhibition explored the idea of the individual being a part of a larger collective and the role they may play. Wood compares her work to starlings - how the individual strings interwoven to create a textile object are like birds that come together to form a flock.
Wood’s practice is process and materials-driven and aims to build a visual language that gives shape and voice to the complex realities of divergent minds and bodies. Learn more about Wood’s practice by visiting her website.
Christian Nicolay
Christian Nicolay is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist working between Kelowna and Vancouver BC. His diverse body of work employs a wide range of media and techniques often seeking pathways that intercept traditional ways of working with materials.
Nicolay exhibited in the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art as part React 2010 (2010), a group exhibition curated by Jennifer Pickering, Arthur Schwimmer and Jason Baerg in response to the 2010 Olympics.
Check out his website to learn more about the artist.
Aileen Bahmanipour
Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian artist whose practice is currently centred on exploring contemporary forms of Iconoclasm. She defines Iconoclasm as not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it. To do that, she challenges the figure/ground relations and questions how they identify each other through iconoclastic gestures.
Bahmanipour’s exhibition Wasting Techniques, shown in the Main Gallery in 2021, included a “spitting machine”; an automated machine that would spit at a large mechanical drawing, slowly disintegrating the drawing. The residue would then spill onto the floor of the gallery and progressively leave stains.
For further reading on this exhibition, check out this essay written by Godfre Leung here, and for more information on Aileen’s work visit her website here.
M.E. Sparks
and a Rag in the Other (2022) included a series of draped canvas paintings by artist M.E. Sparks. Displayed in our Main Gallery, the exhibition explored the tension between pictorial representation and the material conditions of painting. The sculptural paintings, made from unstretched canvas, cut images from art history to bring them into Spark’s line of vision. Through a process of quotation, deconstruction and collage, the works resisted a finished state, implying the possibility of future reorganization.
Sparks' practice involves dissembling and rearranging borrowed forms, many of which are taken from historical depictions of youth and femininity within the prickly territory of modernist painting. Rather than present a linear narrative, this mode of reassembly aims to temper expectations of legibility and interrupt an immediate reading of the image. The paintings become about not knowing and the transformative potential that emerges when there is no clear image or definition.
In a similar fashion, Sparks created a miniature version of these layered paintings for her submission to the 2024 Postcard Project.
To see more of M.E. Sparks’ work, visit her website or see the link below.
Diana Thorneycroft
Winnipeg-based artist Diana Thorneycroft is best known for humorous and dark photographic work depicting facets of Canadian identity often involving the use of toys, dolls, and miniature scenes. In 2000, Thorneycroft exhibited Presentation, Representation, Unpresentable at the Alternator, which continued her exploration into the darker sides of humanity through imagery of masks, nightmares and other ritualistic symbols.
Thorneycroft has exhibited in several galleries across North America, including Toronto, Montreal, and LA. To learn more about the artist visit her website.
Jane Everette
Jane Everette’s long-standing relationship with the Alternator ranges from participating on our Board of Directors to past exhibiting artist. Her contributions include participating on our Programming Committee and curating various exhibitions. Everette’s exhibition history at the Alternator includes Aquariums (1992), CHILDRENS’ OWN SHOW; TV In Our Eyes (1993), and An Exhibition of Self-portraits (1994).
Her practice is based on both painting and drawing and often focuses on the intersection between the man-made and natural world. Everette’s work can be found throughout Canada in galleries and backdrops for performances, such as Ballet Kelowna’s Macbeth production.
You can view her work on her website here.
Joanne Gervais
Joanne Gervais is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kelowna, BC. Her practice ranges from media based productions to drawing and design. Gervais exhibited alongside Shauna Oddleifson for our premier show in the Project Gallery Sea Dreams (2022). The duo created a mythical animation that involved a young girl traveling through an underwater dreamscape. The mixed-media animation incorporated a mix of live-action and collaged elements. Gervais’ submission to the 2024 Postcard Project share a similar aesthetic.
Gervais' work looks at the role memory plays in the formation of identity and how the arrangement of imagery, video, sound and motion can be used to depict the non-linear nature of nostalgia and its capacity to imaginatively restructure past narratives.
Click below to learn more about her exhibition Sea Dreams.