LUMINOCITY
Arbour Aboriginal Artists Collective // Patrick Bernatchez // Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett // Kelsey Braun // Doug Buis // Pascal Grandmaison // Devon Lindsay // Matt Macintosh and Keesic Douglas // Lynne Marsh // Monica McGarry // Office of Surrealist Investigations // Jeremy Shaw // Matt Smith // Mark Soo // Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle // Melaina Todd // Who Are We? // Tania Willard
October 28 to November 5, 2016
Downtown Kamloops & Riverside Park
Curated by Charo Neville, Kamloops Art Gallery
During the darkening days of fall, Luminocity 2016 lit up similar sites and introduced new ones with a selection of diverse multi-media work by artists from across the country and from here at home. The Rotary Bandshell was once again home to two weekends of live musical performances featuring local and touring bands and DJs as well as evening events through the week. Visitors to Riverside Park walked through The Deep Dark illuminated doorways by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett amidst the trees and experienced the thumping Detroit techno of Mark Soo’s Several Circles and the altered state of Jeremy Shaw’s Quickeners as well as numerous projects in unexpected locations throughout downtown.
ALL MEMBRANES ARE POROUS
Margaret Dragu // Pascal Grandmaison // Sarah Anne Johnson // Zoe Kreye // Luanne Martineau // Jeremy Shaw
Central Gallery
September 24 to December 31, 2016
Curated by Charo Neville, Kamloops Art Gallery
Flesh, organs, eyes to the soul, under my skin, silhouette, inner voice, scars – the human body, its physical form, internal experience, external representation and metaphoric existence in the world is intimately familiar to us all. The body is deeply personal and inescapably public. It has been the central subject of a wide range of study within medical, spiritual, philosophical and sociological disciplines.
NOT QUITE SURE ABOUT THE GLITTER THOUGH
Monica McGarry
The Cube
September 17 to October 29, 2016
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Monica McGarry’s work uses pop culture, kitsch and humour to challenge how people perceive and engage with images in the world around them. Her choice of material recalls a childhood fascination with glossy and shiny objects and materials. As we mature into adulthood, a fascination with eye-catching material remains, though perhaps our desire to interact with them lessens. The artist delves into how this perception changes as we get older and how we can be drawn back into an investigation of our surroundings, beyond appearances. Glitter, often a staple of children’s art projects, is used as the central medium in McGarry’s large scale painting to invite viewers to take in the shimmering surface more closely, while the text and interrogative titles of both the work and the exhibition wrestle with the seduction of this material, highlighting this uneasy relationship between criticality and the experience of wonder as we age.
SHOOTING THE SUN/SPLITTING THE PIE
Jerry Pethick
Central Gallery
July 2 to September 10, 2016
Curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery
Over the course of a career that spanned almost five decades, Jerry Pethick (1935–2003) produced a complex and multifaceted body of work that is difficult to classify. For much of this time he focused on the way in which models of observation – including linear perspective and cultural memory – shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. Through an extended emphasis on an object’s entanglement with its surroundings and the viewer’s consciousness, Pethick challenged culturally determined ways of perceiving space and the related separation of observer and object that has occupied a central position in Western thought since the 18th century.
CHATROOM PARANOIA
Ryland Fortie
The Cube
July 2 to September 10, 2016
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
This year's Curator’s Choice is the 12th annual exhibition of work by a student graduating from Thompson Rivers University. Selected by Kamloops Art Gallery Assistant Curator Craig Willms, Curator’s Choice annually highlights talent from TRU’s Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating class and gives emerging artists an opportunity to create new work for a professional exhibition space outside the context of school. The 2016 Curator’s Choice exhibition features a new project by Ryland Fortie. Fortie’s research-based practice explores materials and video through multi-media installation. The exhibition title, Chatroom Paranoia, references virtual social spaces found on the Internet as a real time forum for exchanging ideas on particular topics…
A LIFE IN THE ARTS
Hugh Hanson Davidson
Central Gallery
April 2 to June 18, 2016
Curated by Roger H. Boulet, Historical Canadian Art, Kamloops Art Gallery
In 2014, the Kamloops Art Gallery received a bequest of works of art from the private collection of Hugh Hanson Davidson (1930-2014). Davidson was a generous benefactor to the Gallery. He donated a number of works in 1998, as well as his library of art books. The Gallery celebrated Davidson and his gift at a special reception in 2002, naming its library the Hugh Hanson Davidson Library. It was always Davidson’s intention to bequeath to the Gallery what remained in his collection, which he amassed over many decades.
MEMORY LINES
Laura Hargrave
The Cube
March 19 to June 18, 2016
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Through her experimental drawings, Laura Hargrave recreates the experience of memory loss. With her back to the drawing surface Hargrave renders life-size figures as a way of challenging the normal observation and recording process of image creation. She draws blindly, relying only on memory for reference so that the resulting imagery takes on a mix of blind contour drawing and continuous line. The drawings are skewed and proportions take on a slightly altered look, playing with their relationship in space. Through this practice, Hargrave explores the loss of memory that comes with age and refl ects on its effects on friends and relatives. Figures in the drawings appear to wander the gallery as if lost or searching for something, both fl oating and grounding themselves across the walls of the gallery.
MIDNIGHT SUN CAMERA OBSCURA
Dianne Bos // Lea Bucknell // Ernie Kroeger // Donald Lawrence // Kevin Schmidt and Holly Ward // Carsten Wirth // Andrew Wright // Michael Yuhasz
Central Gallery
January 16 to March 19, 2016
Curated by Charo Neville
Camera obscura is Latin for “darkened chamber” or “dark room.” It is a device that admits light through a small opening (often behind a glass lens) into a box or darkened room to project an upside down image of the outside world onto a surface opposite. German Astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the term “camera obscura” in 1604, but experiments with optical devices that eventually led to the creation of light-proof chambers with holes that act as a lens began by astronomers as early as the fourth century BCE. Cameras obscura were used in the Renaissance period to produce images and plans for linear perspective and in the eighteenth century for staging scientific experiments. It was through these observations and discoveries that we learned that the visual imprint of light on the retina is inverted. Theories of optics and the use of the camera obscura have driven philosophical inquiry into the nature of what we see and how we see in the world around us.
OUT OF SIGHT
Harold E. Edgerton // Eadweard Muybridge
Central Gallery
January 16 to March 19, 2016
Curated by Stephanie Rebick, Vancouver Art Gallery
Out of Sight features a selection of photographs recently acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and Harold Edgerton (1903-1990). Both artists are celebrated for their revolutionary works that expand our understanding of time and motion and extend the capacity of human perception by making time stand still. While time can be measured and evaluated, it also has a profound subjective dimension; how the passage of time is understood and felt is the product of individual experience, making its perception fluid, malleable and subject to interpretation. Both of these artists continually mined this rich terrain – how time can be represented and perceived – by manipulating and distorting the ways in which time functions to challenge our accepted views and preconceived notions.
LIVE STREAM: OPTICAL RENDERING
Dion Fortie // Ryland Fortie // Anyssa Gill // Levi Glass // Alex Jensen // Monica McGarry
The Cube
January 16 to March 12, 2016
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Running parallel with Midnight Sun Camera Obscura in the Central Gallery, Live Stream: Optical Rendering features a new project by Kamloops-based artists who took part in the exhibition Strange Things Done at the Yukon School of Visual Arts’ Confluence Gallery during the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival in Dawson City, Yukon in the summer of 2015. Dion Fortie, Ryland Fortie and Levi Glass were among a group of emerging artists who created works that explored self-illuminated sculptural forms in relation to their research into cameras obscura.