Patrick MahonBook of Turbulence #2, 2008 (detail)
silkscreen on plexi with hardware
Patrick Mahon's new series of drawings and sculptures, entitled A Book of the River, displays networks of lines and arabesques that describe the movement of water and invoke conditions of environmental and psychological turbulence and unrest. The artist has adapted his work from a series of engravings by J.M.W. Turner, originally compiled in the book Rivers of France (1837). Mahon generates elaborate “nets” of printed lines that propose a poetic and “structural” order to the life-sustaining presence of rivers.
In addition to A Book of the River, the exhibition includes Drawing Water, a series of banners generated from drawings about the Thompson River that were created in workshops by First Nations students from the Sk'elep School of Excellence and by Kamloops residents living adjacent to the river, including some from the Royal Avenue area. The exhibition also includes River, comprising significant works from the gallery’s permanent collection selected by Mahon.
Drawing Water, the larger exhibition, presents the artist’s continued interest in investigating large-scale natural phenomena that invoke both metaphorical and material readings. Operating across multiple fields of inquiry and modes of representation, Drawing Water links the historical subject matter of the river in art with pressing contemporary environmental and social concerns.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with texts by Patrick Mahon, artist interview conducted by Jen Budney (former KAG curator), and a poem by Michael Blackstock.
Isao Sanami/MorrillDry Field, Dry Mind, 2002
pastel, charcoal and
pigma ink on paper
photo © Kamloops Art Gallery/
by Vic Hamm
For many years, Isao Sanami/Morrill lived in Coldstream, near Vernon, where she made ceramics, painted, and grew organic vegetables. This exhibition brings together over twenty of her watercolour paintings and pastel drawings for the first time in Kamloops.
Influenced by both Japanese and Western watercolour techniques, Sanami/Morrill paints our region’s landscapes, capturing both their timeless beauty as well as aspects of their modern degradation. The traces of human habitation, including abandoned cars, mining pits, “keep out” signs, and condo developments, blend with wild landscapes of forests, rolling hills, lakes, grasslands, and sagebrush that contribute to the Southern Interior ’s reputation for great natural beauty. These paintings, along with a series of domestic still lifes featuring appliances and computers in her home, are documents of the rapid change affecting our local environment and our day-to-day lives. In their simple beauty and honesty, Sanami/Morrill’s paintings preserve for future generations a vibrantly hued portrait of our specific time and place.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with texts by Jen Budney (former KAG curator) and Thompson Rivers University Geography Professor Ross Nelson.
Shima IuchiTraces, 2008inkjet print on Japanese rice paper
Shima Iuchi was born in Japan and has lived in Canada since 1998. Traces celebrates ten years of her relocation experience in Canada and also serves as a document of Iuchi’s travels over the last decade. The routes of her travels are traced and digitally printed onto a paper curtain, referencing the interior decor of the small inns and bed-and-breakfasts she stayed at on her travels. Traces is part of a larger body of work titled Transient’s Voice, which deals with the relationship between physical geography, human memory, and personal journey.
Bernadette Mertens-McAllister
The Party Beyond, 2006multimedia on board
As the title suggests, Bernadette Mertens-McAllister explores the idea of death in works that combine paintings and photographs. Based on different encounters with aspects of death in Canada and Mexico, her approach, through the use of a vibrant palette and touches of humour, is surprisingly uplifting. She creates a series within Day of the Dead that deals with her own fight with cancer. In this series, rather than examining the inevitability of death, she looks at healing and the celebration of life.
Barb Nielson
Untitled, 2007watercolour on paper
This display of paintings by members of the Canadian Mental Health Association was generated from increased interest in the CMHA’s arts program. The works are oil, acrylic and watercolour paintings consisting of landscapes, portraits and abstracts. One of the goals of this exhibition is to enlighten the public perception of mental illness. The exhibition also provides the opportunity for the artists to show a part of their identity beyond their diagnosed illnesses.
David SkelhonEnigma, 2007inkjet print
Sponsored by The Art Store; Focus Corporation; iCompass Technologies Inc.; Kamloops Catering & Event Services; KPA Printers; Sun Country Toyota; TD Canada Trust - Kamloops Branches
Media sponsors: Kamloops Daily News and Radio NL
The 20th Annual Art Auction Exhibition offers a three-week preview of the original works of art and the experience packages for this year's auction. Donated works by local, regional, and national artists, such as Werner Braun, Valerie Deacon, Edward Epp, Philippe Raphanel, and George Raab, are featured, along with wonderful amentities and gift packages donated by businesses in British Columbia, Alberta and Washington.
Jana SasaskiHarajuku Street Fashion, 2006etching
This summer marks the fourth annual exhibition in the Cube of work by students graduating from Thompson Rivers University. Selected by Kamloops Art Gallery Assistant Curator Craig Willms, Curator’s Choice highlights some of the talent from TRU’s Bachelor of Fine Arts 2008 graduating class. Students at TRU graduate with a wide variety of specialties, including ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. Like previous Curator’s Choice exhibitions, this one is not so much a “best of” show, but one that is united by thematic and aesthetic threads running through the work of these emerging artists.
Christine BeatonBarbarella, 2007clay
Christine Beaton is a ceramic artist and graphic designer, and has worked in computer aided drafting and architectural modeling. When she was young she disassembled her dad’s watches and her mom’s jewellery. As a consequence, her parents gave her the book How Things Work and promptly moved their finer things out of reach. Her works are an exploration of the materiality of clay and of the inner workings of objects. The forms reflect her interest in science and nature and exhibit great patience and an eye for detail.
Daphne OdjigSpiritual Renewal, 1984acrylic on canvasCollection of Laurentian University Museum and Art Centre/Laurentian University Purchase, B.A. McDonald Memorial Fund and the Canada Council Art Bank, 1984
Supported by Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage
Sponsored by British Columbia Lottery Corporation; Simmons, Black and Emsland Insurance Services; and TD Securities
Media sponsors: Kamloops Daily News; Kamloops Thompson Nicola Review; and Radio NL
Daphne Odjig was instrumental, along with a handful of Anishnabe artists in the 1960s, in bringing to public prominence the pictorial style of the Algonkian painters of Northern Ontario. This exhibition is the first major touring survey of her drawings and paintings since the Art Gallery of Thunder Bay organized a retrospective exhibition in 1985. The Kamloops Art Gallery produced and hosted a very successful survey of her prints from the last four decades in the summer of 2005, and the exhibition is touring until 2008.
In bringing together 40 years of Daphne Odjig’s paintings and drawings, this retrospective exhibition facilitates a long overdue critical assessment of Daphne Odjig’s extensive aesthetic, philosophical, cultural investigations during the last decades of the twentieth century. Examples of her contribution to the early Woodland School are contrasted with the lyricism of her colour work in the 1980s and the sharp political content of her large history paintings. The years within which these works were created represent a complex watershed in the cultural and political history of the First Nations in Canada. Odjig’s experimentation with numerous genres and styles and her determination to give voice to a particular political reality make her an uncommon vehicle for an examination of our country and ourselves. Moreover, the assembly of First Nations writers who have contributed to the catalogue provide culturally cohesive positioning of the work within a critical discourse based on the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of the Anishnabe.
The exhibition comprises nearly 60 works, including examples of Odjig’s history paintings, murals, legend paintings, erotica, abstractions, and landscapes. As a group, these works articulate the breadth of Odjig’s engagement with her personal and cultural history. They also trace the remarkable aesthetic development of the artist from her initial experimentation to the mature mastery of her media.
Terry KirkpatrickMe, Son and Grandsonacrylic
Since becoming partially disabled in 1991, Terry Kirkpatrick has completed accounting and computer courses at Thompson Rivers University and received an Art Diploma from Stratford Career Institute in 2002. He creates works in pencil crayon, pastel, watercolour, acrylic, and oil paint. His work has been displayed at Art in the Park at Riverside Park. Kirkpatrick’s images are drawn from First Peoples iconography, his friends and personal experiences.
Brian RoubleSamsara, 1999 (detail)soapstone
Awakenings brings together science and spirituality through Brian Rouble’s exploration of global consciousness. He has traveled the globe, making multiple trips to Africa. His sculptures are influenced by indigenous African art and culture and his scientific background in genetics and quantum physics. His imagery is based on human forms—most notably faces—emerging and contorting out of different varieties of soapstone. Rouble and his family make their home on a small acreage in Monte Lake, southeast of Kamloops.
Rise and Michael,students in Ms. Eadie's Grade 6 class, work on their papier mache Indian King Cobra.
The students of Beattie School of the Arts have created works to bring awareness of the ecological footprint established by humans. As the title of the exhibition suggests, many ecosystems and species in Canada and around the world are in danger of being lost due to increased human pressure on the environment. The exhibition encourages viewers to get involved and take some action in protecting these endangered places and animals. The exhibition includes plasticine pondscapes and papier mache 3-D works in the Open Gallery and the air above.
Gary PearsonWhen I get to Baton Rouge, 2005oil and oil enamel on canvasKamloops Art Gallery CollectionPurchased with financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program
The Kamloops Art Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Gary Pearson, one of British Columbia’s most dynamic contemporary painters. The End is My Beginning features new paintings and works from the last half decade. It is Pearson’s first solo exhibition in Kamloops.
The surfaces of Pearson’s paintings are highly worked and richly textured. They are often close to monochromatic, punctuated by surprising, off-key bursts of colour. Although Pearson began as an abstract painter, today most of his works portray individuals and groups of people in semi-public and transient venues, such as bars, diners, or hotels. Patterns remain an important feature of all his compositions, and may consist of words, palm trees, architectural features, and other images or symbols. His drawing style is deliberately crude, which gives his works a direct and earthy character.
There are narratives in Pearson’s art, but they are all unresolved or indeterminate. The works therefore draw heavily on what the viewer brings to them for their meaning, posing possibilities for deep resonance, and reflections on melancholy, humour, isolation, human dignity, longing, and resolve. Along with paintings and drawings, Pearson produces videos, which share a painterly quality in their production style and visual appearance.
At the Kamloops Art Gallery, Pearson presents some of his latest work from 2007, a selection from his 2005 Greenville series, which was inspired in part by the songs of Lucinda Williams, some earlier drawings, and two videos. All of the works feature scenes from everyday life in unnamed places.
Gary Pearson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna. He has shown his work widely across Canada as well as in Germany, Norway, Poland, the USA, and Australia.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with a feature essay by former Thompson Rivers University instructor, poet, and performance artist David Bateman, and an interview with the artist by KAG curator, Jen Budney.
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky
Bricks and Flowers, 2007 hydrocal on metal and foam armature, enamel paintinstallation view, Pari Nadimi Gallery
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are a Vancouver-based artist-duo, and among the most exciting young artists to emerge in Canada in the last decade. Although they have been working together since only 2004, they have already exhibited their work extensively across the country and internationally, in Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, Nagoya, Berlin, Tokyo, Portland, and elsewhere. Sculptors Weppler and Mahovsky are known for the playful and unsettling ways they transform everyday objects, such as styrene coffee cups, tin cans, cars, pop bottles, and other hallmarks of the everyday. Their work, conflicted in its relationship to a world of things, draws from both minimalist and Pop histories, while displaying a distinctly contemporary critical conceptualism.
In their exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Weppler and Mahovsky present a new body of work called Clutter Sculptures, which is decidedly more “baroque” than their earlier, clean-lined Stacked Objects. Everyday items, such as bricks, bottles, and tires, are formed out of wire armatures, which are then slathered in plaster and enamelled. The sculptures appear to be drenched in glossy icing and thrown together into haphazard, candy-coloured jumbles. In the words of Globe and Mail reviewer Gary Michael Dault, these sculptures “both attract (they are bright and toy-like) and repel (they are glandular-looking, as if they had been secreted rather than constructed).”
Along with the Clutter Sculptures, Weppler and Mahovsky present four large “collapsing” sculptures of expensive status objects: two tinfoil casts of a vintage car and two black paper casts of a hearse. To make the car sculptures, the artists use sheets of regular tinfoil glued together to form large sheets, which are then wrapped carefully around a real car. The tinfoil “mould” is lifted off, and transported to the gallery, where, over the course of the exhibition, it slowly collapses under its own weight. The model for the car sculpture is a vintage car belonging to a Kamloops resident.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with an essay by local poet Susan Buis and an interview with the artists by KAG curator, Jen Budney.
Charlotte KinzieBig Bad Wheel, 2007digital photograph
Charlotte Kinzie is a photographer who captures her surroundings with an eye open to new experiences. An avid traveller, she photographs the far-away and the close-to-home. As good as she is at transporting viewers to far off lands in her travel photographs, her ability to translate local scenes into something new is also impressive. She was voted Victoria’s Favourite Photographer of 2004, and Victoria’s news weekly Monday Magazine stated that she is the kind of photographer who is able “to turn ordinary moments into memorable works of art.” Now back in Kamloops, she presents a mixture of some of her most compelling colour photographs.
Ray HellmenWaiting for the Limo, 2006-08stained glass
Ray Hellmen has created a series of stained glass panels with a nostalgic look at the wonders of winter. An avid skier, Hellmen reflects his love of winter and winter sports in this exhibition. He references vintage posters depicting classic winter activities, and creates scenes of skaters and skiers in fashions from a bygone era. In addition to winter scenes, Glass In Retro features other vintage 1920s scenes. Using a palette of brightly coloured panes, his vision of winter life sparkles in the sun’s rays. A self-taught artisan, Hellmen has made this hobby into a career and now works full time creating stained glass and teaching stained glass lessons.
Brittany KaniganSeeing Double, 2007photograph
Produced and curated by grade-twelve photography students from St. Ann’s Academy, We’re not in Kamloops Anymore exhibits images of our city seen from a unique angle. These student photographers have been inspired to capture and communicate their personal points of view. Some images may have elements Kamloopsians recognize, but perhaps can’t place. Other photographs question the beauty or ugliness found in the back corners of our city. What unites these images is the photographers’ purist approach to an honest recording of what they see through the lens of their cameras. The exhibition includes works by Shelby Denison, Devon Fisher, Brittany Kanigan, Cara Karpluk, Madelaine MacDougall, Jerome Dauk, Louis Nelson, Nicole Saat, Courtney Hunter, Julienne Ignace, and Vanessa Lord.
Marge MitchellHerd Bull, 2003bronze
The exhibition features work by Barriere’s Yellowhead Artists’ Co-operative. Meeting once a week to paint in studio or en plein air, Marge Mitchell, Shirley Kristensen, Wayne Broomfield, Robert Bambrick, and Jean Cartier have formed a tightly knit unit to provide each other criticism, support, and camaraderie. In this exhibition, the five members exhibit some of their finest works, including oil and watercolour paintings, sculpture, and scrimshaw. Representing life in the North Thompson Valley, the exhibition is rich in landscape views and images of life on the ranch. The exhibition coincides with The Kamloops Cowboy Festival, which runs March 7 to 9, 2008.
Paraskeva Clark, Petroushka, 1937National Gallery of Canada, OttawaPhoto © NGC© Clive and Benedict Clark
The Kamloops Art Gallery is proud to host another prestigious exhibition from the National Gallery of Canada. Art and Society in Canada 1913-1950 includes approximately 45 works of art by some of Canada’s most famous artists from the first half of the twentieth century. Many artists from this period were dedicated to the ideals of nationalism, political awareness, and a liberated society. They also believed that art could powerfully affect and shape society. This exhibit explores three distinct artistic movements that shaped Canadian art and Canadian society: the Group of Seven, the Social Realists, and Les Automatistes.
During the 1920s, members of the Group of Seven, such as AY Jackson and Lawren Harris, argued that the idea of “North” was central to Canadian identity and that artists should explore, paint, and validate the northern landscape for Canadians. In their view, art was a means of revealing the spiritual values of nature, which they felt crucial to the emerging national identity.
For the generation that emerged in the 1930s, art had a more direct role in confronting the political, economic and social crises of their time. Claiming that earlier ideals were "escapist," the Social Realists sought to reflect the social, political, and economic issues of the day and resist what they felt were increasing threats to freedom. During this period, organizations such as the Federation of Canadian Artists and the Labour Arts Guild promoted the integration of art and society.
In the 1940s, the Quebec-based group Les Automatistes, which included such renowned artists as Paul-Emile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, rejected the Social Realists’ preoccupation with subject matter. Inspired by Surrealism, they associated the spontaneity of automatic painting with personal liberation and believed that their art could create a New World. Their goals were summarized in the 1948 manifesto “Refus global” in which Fernand Leduc called for "works of art sister to the atom bomb."
Art and Society is a portrait of our nation in its youth, when Canadian artists had faith in the future and in their power to shape it. The exhibition contains exquisite paintings and sculpture from the National Gallery of Canada, and gives Kamloops residents an opportunity to see first-hand works by some of Canada’s all-time greatest artists, including Lawren Harris, AY Jackson, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Paul Emile Borduas.
Alexander Young JacksonMount Paul, Kamloops, B.C., 1945oil on boardKamloops Art Gallery Collection
To complement the feature exhibition, Art and Society, the Gallery’s curatorial staff has selected several delightful works by Group of Seven members A.Y. Jackson, Fred Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Franklin Carmichael for display in the north corridor. All the works are from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s permanent collection, and represent the beautiful landscapes of Interior British Columbia and Ontario. “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country,” wrote the members of the Group of Seven. This intimate exhibition takes a look at our own home through the eyes of four of Canada’s most famous artists.
Over the years, these works were acquired for the permanent collection either through purchase or donation. Of special note is Quesnel River by A.Y. Jackson. One of the first works of art in the KAG collection, it was donated as a bequest from the estate of former mayor of Kamloops J.E. Fitzwater. He specified in his will that the work be held “on loan and in trust until such time as Kamloops shall have an Art Gallery of its own.”
Marisa Phillips, Ktunaxa NationFinal Dream, 2007digital print
Chris Bose from the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society and Marisa Phillips from Ktunaxa First Nations are facilitating an art exchange. This collaborative effort features art by Aboriginal youth from the Cranbrook and Kamloops regions. After this winter exhibition in Kamloops, the exhibition travels to Cranbrook for display.
Martin TubaRepent Sinner, 2005acrylic on canvas
Shazam! Breaking out of the Box is an exhibition of locally produced art that breaks out of the moulds that separate fine art from commercial art. Inspired by popular culture, artists Laura Bittante, Martin Tuba, Andrew Enpaauk Dexel and Randall Eustache have created an array of contemporary artworks inspired by mass culture, particularly cartoons and animation. A fun and inspiring exhibition, Shazam! is an exploration of the “highs” and “lows” of pop art by artists from our region.
Martha AtaraBeautiful Life, 2007acrylic on aluminum
Originally from Columbia, Martha Atara paints and engraves aluminum panels. Her unique method of creation involves carving shallow grooves onto soft and flexible sheets of thick aluminum. She then paints her intricate designs with bright colours. Tallado con nuestras Manos, or Carving with our Hands, is an exhibition of some of her nature-inspired designs. Vibrant with colour, these works shimmer under the light.
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