Postulating what the future might hold, this exhibition looks to histories of survival as a starting point for a conversation about the possibilities of endurance, cross-cultural exchange and legacy. By looking at artwork that depicts survival, that alludes to hybridity and transformation, and that carries with it the physical markers of distress as part of their conceptual make-up, Since Then challenges preconceived notions of what it is to endure from both a historical and a contemporary point of view.

The artworks featured in Since Then are in turn humorous, confounding and rooted in an awareness of colonial violence. Themes such as water, literature, mythologies and time travel are prevalent, as are factual accounts of hardships. These themes emerge and are explored through a variety of media including video, photography, works on paper, performance and site-specific installation in order to inform this conversation concerning an aesthetics of survival. How is the road forward paved with stories of what has come before? What has happened Since Then?

This sprawling, multi-faceted group exhibition poses questions about what it means to survive and how the markers of survival sometimes, necessarily, force a dialogue about its opposite.

Published in response to this research is a special issue of CV2, The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, featuring a 16-page visual art supplement of work from Since Then as well as an exploratory text by the curator.

Artist and independent curator Tania Willard has also curated a performance series in response to Since Then, to be presented over the course of the exhibition.

Since Then was originally produced in Winnipeg for núna (now) – Icelandic Canada Art Convergence, as part of their 10th anniversary programming in 2016.

Joane Cardinal-Schubert’s Birch Bark Letters to Emily Carr: House of All Sorts, 1991 is on loan to the University of Calgary’s Nickle Galleries for the exhibition The Writing on the Wall: Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert, RCA. Curated by Lindsey Sharman, the exhibition runs from September 21 to December 16, 2017.

Planned Peasanthood stems from the artist’s ongoing project The Pavilion, a geodesic dome that Ward is developing in collaboration with the artist Kevin Schmidt as a rural, site-specific facility for artistic research and production. For this exhibition in The Cube, Ward formulates a series of sculptural and two-dimensional works that explore connections between “natural” systems, skill building, self-reliance and artistic agency within late capitalism.

With increasing pressures on our environment and the rise of neoliberalism, we are currently seeing unprecedented social, political, ecological and economic circumstances of insecurity. Standing on the precipice of this dramatic change, citizens are increasingly being asked to re-examine their core values and daily behaviours and interactions.

Planned Peasanthood is a process-based series of works wherein Ward examines outmoded, pre-modern methods of land-based survival as a means of reclaiming this body of knowledge as a potentially crucial skillset for the coming era. These works resist nostalgic yearnings for days gone by, as with changes in technology these tools no longer are up to the task. Instead, the artist seeks to develop and incorporate distinctly new tools for survival in the present day, such as those that counter facial-recognition and digital tracking strategies.

This project presents a series of sculptural propositions regarding our collective future and in doing so offers a productive moment of reflection on our contemporary present.

Through both his life and work Harris helped establish an identity for Canadian art. He not only saw the artistic and cultural potential of this country, but also made works that have helped to define the very identity of Canada. Furthermore, he had the courage to take his own art into the realm of abstraction at a time when most of the public was unwilling to follow.

Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary presents a selection of key works from the Vancouver Art Gallery's permanent collection that collectively trace Harris' artistic evolution from the early years of the twentieth century, through the groundbreaking work of the Group of Seven period when his work transformed the language of Canadian landscape, and finally to his later experiments in abstraction that reflect his efforts to root his work in a universal language rather than a specific national landscape.

Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the generous support of the Killy Foundation and is curated by Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator–Historical, Vancouver Art Gallery. This exhibition is complemented by a selection of paintings by other members of the Group of Seven, drawn from the collection of the Kamloops Art Gallery and curated by Adrienne Fast, Interim Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, an event that is being met by a wide spectrum of responses that range from sincere celebration to profound ambivalence and thoughtfully considered refusal. Many people have noted that 1867 is an arbitrary choice for the origin of the country: only Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were then united by the British North America Act, while other histories of nations that have inhabited this land extend tens of thousands of years further back in history. Others have argued that the last 150 years have been largely marked by shameful episodes of repression and violence against many Canadian citizens, particularly Indigenous peoples and other communities of colour. For many, it is difficult to reconcile those histories of institutionalized violence with their hopes for Canada today.

AlterNation suggests an alternative approach to the consideration of Canada and the embracing of multiple perspectives towards our shared history. It is an acknowledgement of the many alternative nations that have existed within this country, while also suggesting a fluctuation between those various histories. In logic and mathematics, alternation is defined as “inclusive disjunction,” a term that metaphorically encompasses the ways that Canada has endeavoured to be a bastion of multicultural democracy, but has at times failed to live up to those ideals.

Presented alongside Lawren Harris: Canadian Visionary, AlterNation is comprised of work from the Kamloops Art Gallery permanent collection and supplemented by loans from local and national collections. This exhibition presents contemporary work by a variety of artists that explores how art has been involved in the myth-making and nation-building of Canada, as well as work that challenges the dominant narratives of celebration by highlighting some of the darker histories that are often overlooked in mainstream considerations of Canadian history. This exhibition includes works that are both laudatory and critical of the idea of Canada, as well as works that are both humourous and somber, in an effort to encourage audiences to thoroughly consider the range of positive and negative forces that have shaped Canada over the last 150 years.

This exhibition has an accompanying publication available here.

The 2017 Curator’s Choice exhibition features a new project by Levi Glass. The artist draws on modern methods of surveillance and a range of critical analyses of the gaze to create a work that involves audience interaction in order to create a mediated experience of viewing and a prompt for self-reflection. Glass cites Foucault’s theory of panopticism, articulated in his work Discipline and Punish (1975) wherein he reflects on the role of surveillance in power structures and as a means of control in society. In these times of increasingly politicized fear, we have seen the rise of Bill C-51 in Canada to expand the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies, and in the USA the National Security Agency has undertaken warrantless surveillance while the Transportation Security Administration has implemented full-body scans under the guise of protecting the public, while simultaneously collecting data with or without an individual’s knowledge or consent. Advances in technology and data collection have made concerns about privacy and power structures between the state and the people ever more pertinent.

In this installation for The Cube, Glass employs multiple cameras and monitors to create a surveillance system that disrupts the very power structure of surveillance by turning the viewer into both the observer and the observed. Issues of security, privacy and individual rights are raised as the live feed is interrupted by recorded footage of previous encounters within the system. The work aims to create a moment of self-reflection as the cameras are turned on the viewer and others for immediate viewing on the adjacent monitors.

This year's Curator’s Choice is the 13th 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 emerging artists from TRU’s Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating class giving them an opportunity to create new work for a professional exhibition space outside the context of school.

In contemporary North America, youth is commonly understood as the period after childhood when young people learn life skills and explore their identities in preparation for impending adulthood, within the formative, protective structures of family and school. This view of youth, however, is a relatively recent one and stands as a distinguishing feature of modernity in the Western world. Many pervasive ideas about youth come from psychology, anthropology and sociology—fields that came to the fore in the twentieth century. Within the social sciences, young people became a category to be studied, understood and conceptualized. In the wake of such theorizing, notions of youth have become persistently linked to wildness, authenticity, freedom and idealism—seductive qualities that have been cast as both dangerous and desirable.

Kids these days focuses on a selection of recent photographs, videos, drawings and prints by Canadian artists. In their examinations of youth and youth cultures within a North American context, the artists employ strategies that echo methodologies used in the social sciences. They document and study the physicality, expressivity and behaviour of young people, concentrating on their tastes, thoughts, communication methods and leisure activities. The works suggest an underlying desire on the part of the artists to capture and comprehend the essence of youth or to affiliate themselves with its attributed characteristics. Popular ideas around youth are also present in the books on display, in the artists’ reflections on their works and in written responses by Gallery visitors.

Concentrating primarily on representations of girlhood, Kids these days offers various views on youth and gender as social and cultural constructs that are also experienced as intersecting lived processes. In other words, youth, like gender, is constructed not only by those who study it but also by young people themselves who, in various ways, actively perform, physically embody and acutely feel it. Kids these days aims to explore this phenomenon as it is articulated within a selection of recent Canadian contemporary art practices.

This exhibition was first presented in 2014 at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University in Sherbrook, Quebec, under the title Bande à part/Kids these days and was subsequently remounted by MSVU Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2016. The curatorial research for this exhibition was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Kamloops–based artist Matt Macintosh’s video installation, falsevoid, explores the relationship between mysticism and culture, drawing on recent projects that address strategies for intercultural exchange and the role of signs, symbols and practices in relation to identities, cultures and discourses. For this project, Macintosh works within the parametres of The Cube, critically considering “the (white) cube” as a recurring motif in western modern art and architecture.

Macintosh draws on his own personal (and web browsing) history as a point of departure to explore problems and possibilities related to the way mystical “experience” is coded into practical and linguistic activities. Bringing together modernist practices, relics of contemporary culture and foundational cultural texts, falsevoid uses the language of instant gratification to speak to the long-haul game of self-realization. At times overwhelming, quiet, disturbing and funny, the work speaks to the inadequacy of cultural production alone as a vehicle for liberation and explores the losses and gains achieved by rendering the ineffable into signs, symbols and practices.

Currently Curator at the Kamloops Museum and Archives, in his artistic practice Matt Macintosh works with found images and objects, painting, video and sound to explore the effects of erasure, systematization and repetition on cultural canon materials as they relate to fundamental human experiences.

The category of youth is not a straightforward one. Beyond its designation of the stage of life between childhood and adulthood, it encompasses a complex multifaceted “imaginary”—one that is rich in analogous associations and imagery. In its most negative light, youth is denigrated as the incarnation of debauchery and excess, but in its most positive light, youth is idealized as the embodiment of pre-socialized authenticity, unbridled potential, creativity and freedom. The celebratory virtues typically associated with youth strikingly correspond with those sought after by many artists within their own art practices.

A fascination with youth’s attributed imaginary is vividly articulated throughout the artworks in superyoung, a companion exhibition to Kids these days. Displaying an aesthetics of youth, the featured artworks capture and embody an overarching youth-inspired perspective, mindset or way of communicating. Unlike many of the artists in Kids these days who predominantly assume the role of observer, the artists in superyoung unreservedly adopt and appropriate attitudes, styles, vernaculars and modes of expression commonly ascribed to youth and youth culture. This youth-inspired performativity also manifests itself less explicitly through the creation of artworks made within a coded sensibility of youth—as if made by youth themselves.

Comprised of drawings, collages, textiles, sculptures and videos, superyoung presents a wide range of work marked by aesthetics, styles and strategies that broadly evoke youth and youth culture. These works often display an unpolished, unschooled aesthetic or conversely, a naïve, romantic expressivity. Some recurring tropes are heightened emotionality, nostalgia, humor, playfulness, irony, cynicism and an appreciation of D.I.Y and pop culture.

The curatorial research for this exhibition was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape looks at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s collection through the lens of today’s “post-humanist” discourse that questions the singularity and primacy of man, which has been the dominant view in the West since the Renaissance. At a time of impending catastrophe caused by the change in climate provoked by human activity, some say we now live in a geological age called the Anthropocene—the era when human activity has transformed the global climate. It is perhaps ironic that at this juncture, progressive scholars have come to question a basic assumption of the modern West, that man is the measure of all things.

While one aspect of “post-humanist” studies explores the issues around artificial intelligence and the transformation of our bodies and culture by technology, another looks at alternative ways of seeing the symbiotic relationships between people, animals and land. This latter view proposes a kind of re-enchantment with the world we live in and extends the possibility of sentience and agency to all living creatures and many places as well. The selection of artworks from the Belkin Art Gallery’s collection could be seen to be about animal/human transformation or landscape/human transformation.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is one of many First Nations artists claiming that Indigenous cosmology insists that the land is a living physical and spiritual entity to be profoundly respected. Humans and animals transform into each other and the Creator speaks to us through nature. Reading Emily Carr’s accounts of her painting experience, we realized that her work could also be seen in light of these concerns. Her process involved her becoming landscape, not just depicting landscape. Geneviève Cadieux's Loin de moi, et près du lointain (1993) is a literal transformation of bodies into landscape. And the Viennese artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler performs a kind of alchemy with fish and paint. The idea of becoming animal/becoming landscape allowed other works from this collection to be included which expand the conversation in ways to stimulate and surprise.

Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape: From the Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is organized and circulated by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ann Kipling lives and works in Falkland, BC. Her work is imbued with the beauty and quiet of this rural area. Focusing primarily on portraits, animals and the landscape, Ann Kipling’s process includes drawing similar subjects over long periods of time, recording subtle changes and shifts in expression within these subjects. This prolonged scrutiny gives Kipling's work an unmistakable intensity, fluidity of line and graphic complexity that approaches abstraction. Her portraits are psychologically revealing, retaining evidence of a closely observed encounter between subject and artist. Kipling admits to becoming obsessed with a subject, forming a bond, then interpreting it repeatedly until she exhausts its visual possibilities. Through her repetitive mark-making Kipling suggests that one view cannot capture the complexity and changeability of a person or animal—these fields of reference are variable and constantly shifting.

This selection from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s permanent collection is drawn from a recent substantial donation of work from Ann Kipling to the Gallery and builds on previous donations of drawings and prints from the artist, establishing the Kamloops Art Gallery as a primary long-term home for her life’s work. Ann Kipling's drawings are remarkable in their skill, rigour and complex beauty. Representing the span of her career and the dominant themes of her work, this selection reflects Kipling’s enduring focus on expressive mark-making and the depiction of everyday subjects from her life. This companion exhibition to Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape: From the Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery similarly addresses the transformation of animal/human/landscape.

Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move emerges from the writing of Scottish author Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) and her book The Living Mountain. In it, Shepherd champions a prolonged and contemplative experience of the landscape, foregoing a hurried ascent to a mountain peak in favour of savouring the expanse of the plateau. Shepherd asserts that “moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.”

Laura Findlay’s project questions the current role of history painting through notions of narrative, empathy and the sublime. Her recent work examines historical events from fragments of evidence, re-examining the past through landscapes of dormant volcanoes. Having researched environments such as Volcanoes National Park in Hawai’i and Wells Grey Provincial Park north of Kamloops, the artist collected documents, images and data of historical and current geologic records. This exhibition includes an array of objects with cylindrical imagery and textures meant to be observed from all sides, revealing the static but shifting landscape of vessels.

Findlay's sculptural objects play against static painted depictions of the wall of The Cube, shifting focus between object and image, natural and human-made landscapes. The works move in relation to each other much like viewing a hierarchy of mountain range and landscape slowly hiding and emerging new views as one moves through the space, hinting at clues gained and lost to history, both geological and human.

The body of work developed for this exhibition emerged from research over the past year and her time living and working in Kamloops.