Kamloops Art Gallery

Current Upcoming Touring Past Publications Submissions

Please explore our archive of past exhibitions.

Luminocity

October 23 to October 31, 2020

Downtown Kamloops & Riverside Park

Tania Willard

Caroline Monnet

Sky Hopinka

Marina Roy

Kirsten Leenaars

Adad Hannah

Camal Pirbhai & Camille Turner

Jessie Kobylanski

Levi Glass

Isabelle Pauwels

Jessica Karuhanga

Shirley Bruno

Yoshua Okón

Sandeep Johal

Bertille Bak

Presented every two years, this FREE, week-long, new media, art exhibition showcases video projects by local, national and international artists in unexpected public spaces throughout the downtown core of Kamloops. As an off-site Kamloops Art Gallery initiative, Luminocity embraces new creative concepts and modes of expression in the media arts field and brings recent video projects previously shown primarily in gallery settings to the outdoors.

Inspired by popular, public art events such as Nuit Blanche that take over major cities like Toronto and Montréal, Luminocity transforms Kamloops’ urban environment with projections on the façades of buildings and from windows and site-specific installations at Riverside Park. Luminocity is a unique offering for audiences of all ages to take in video art projects from a diversity of artists and to explore the city of Kamloops in a new way.

Visit the KAG Luminocity website for full details about each artist, talks, tours, and more.

Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Tania Willard
Coney Island Baby, 2018
digital video
Luminocity 2018, Riverside Park
Photo: Devon Lindsay

Curated by Zoë Chan, Guest Curator, and Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

View images of the exhibition here.

Presences

September 26 to December 19, 2020

Esker Foundation

Samuel Roy-Bois

Samuel Roy-Bois’ practice is concerned with the conceptual and material definition of space and the ways the built environment and manufactured things contribute to our understanding of the world. Through sculpture, site-specific installation, and photography, Roy-Bois examines relational networks of objects and their complex philosophical considerations: How do we define ourselves through the creation of structures? Is it possible to conceive of one’s existence outside any material linkage? We make things, but are things also making us?

For this new body of work, Presences, Roy-Bois has created an ensemble of constructed and found objects that consider our contemporary material knowledge. His discrete architectural sculptures act as vessels for everyday things and are separated from the gallery’s architecture by platforms. This series of site-specific improvisational installations present everyday objects in new ways, blur the boundaries between art and life, and shift ordinary things and spaces into a poetic dimension. By connecting sculpture, everyday objects, floor, and ceiling, Roy-Bois manipulates the gallery space as a strategy to create a genuine and direct relationship with the viewer, and his use of everyday items offers a way of understanding our relationship to our environment.

Samuel Roy-Bois: Presences is organized and circulated by the Kamloops Art Gallery. Support for the development and production of new works for the exhibition provided by Esker Foundation.

Samuel Roy-Bois
Sovereign (ladder and mattress), 2019
chromogenic print
Image: Courtesy of the Artist

Curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

View images of the exhibition here.

Casting the Eye Adrift

July 7 to December 31, 2020

Central Gallery

Donald Lawrence

Offering insight into almost four decades of Donald Lawrence’s practice, the retrospective exhibition Casting the Eye Adrift brings together major sculptural works, videos, photographs, drawings, preparatory models and ephemeral works that represent Lawrence’s longstanding interest in the intersections between art, science and technology, and concepts of wilderness. Lawrence’s artistic practice translates the natural world and everyday objects into multifaceted installations that reveal their hand-built construction and his resourceful use of materials. These interests can be traced to his early awareness of display apparatus and sculptural construction inspired by childhood objects, including a fossilized dinosaur bone ever-present in his family home and a telescope gifted to him by his brother.

Lawrence’s eclectic output has focused on early imaging technologies and the meeting place of urban and “wilderness” cultures. Through critical engagement with stories of travel, exploration and mechanical invention, his work merges diverse interests, including sea kayaking and solar phenomena with practices of drawing, photography, construction, D.I.Y. construction, surveying and mapping. His ambitious undertakings have involved converting a kayak to a floating laboratory for underwater pinhole photography and mounting a tent-sized camera obscura on the side of a ferry. This exhibition brings together seminal projects that demonstrate the through-lines of nature and technology in Lawrence’s practice, including Romantic Commodities (1993), The Sled (1995), Underwater Pinhole Photography Project (1997-), Torhamvan/Ferryland (2005), One Eye Folly (2008) and Coastal Camera Obscura (2017).

Lawrence’s current focus on the camera obscura emerges from research into historical understandings of optics in relation to emergent and obsolete technologies. The camera obscura was important to both art and science; it was a precursor to photography and an early optical instrument that provided a means of observing solar phenomena as well as being a tool for artists to render their subjects. Lawrence’s large-scale public artwork, Comet MMXVIII (2018), is part of the Kamloops Art Gallery’s collection and is currently installed on the roof of the Thompson-Nicola Regional District building entrance. Evoking a comet in the night sky and Lawrence’s enduring interest in the pre-photographic optical apparatus that allow us to view such phenomena, the incorporation of bubble wrap and fluorescent light tubes also speaks to Lawrence’s innovative use of salvaged materials and obsolete technology. For this exhibition, Lawrence has constructed a new public artwork on the canopy of the adjacent Paramount Theatre building, offering visitors the opportunity to experience a camera obscura in person, in conjunction with camera obscura works on view in the Gallery.

Donald Lawrence is a professor in the Visual Arts Program at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). In 2017, he was the recipient of the Kamloops Mayor’s Award for the Arts – Artist of the Year award and was the first Chair of the City of Kamloops Arts Commission. A testament to his established commitment to research and teaching, Lawrence was recently awarded the President’s Distinguished Scholar Award at TRU. From 2013 to 2019, Lawrence led The Camera Obscura Project, a multi-year program of research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council that involved numerous students, emerging and established artists, and scholars. An exhibition of artwork from this project was exhibited at the Kamloops Art Gallery in 2016 entitled Midnight Sun Camera Obscura. A parallel exhibition was also exhibited at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and travelled nationally to galleries in Ontario and the Yukon, with a publication forthcoming. That exhibition was followed by the solo exhibition Kepler’s Klepper and The Underwater Pinhole Photography Project in 2018 at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. Lawrence also converted a circa 1927 grain bin into a walk-in, pavilion-style camera obscura at the University of Lethbridge’s Coutts Centre for Western Canadian Heritage outside Nanton, Alberta in 2018. A monograph publication will be produced by the Kamloops Art Gallery following this exhibition.

A video tour of the exhibition with Donald Lawrence and Charo Neville can be viewed HERE. Many thanks to Jonathan Fulton who recorded and edited this video.

Donald Lawrence
One Eye Folly, 2008
camera obscura

Curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

View images of the exhibition here.

Pleasant Field

July 7 to November 14, 2020

The Cube

Anyssa Fortie

Through the creation of a new body of work, Pleasant Field, Kamloops-based artist Anyssa Fortie has developed an immersive installation based on recollections of places and events as abstracted memories. Taking an autobiographical approach, Fortie pulls from past experiences and examines how they have transformed over time. She is interested in how memories change through re-telling and re-remembering them. Fortie probes questions about what makes an experience memorable. How is it that some memories fade through a loss of details while others remain memorable because of the small details? Fortie finds herself questioning her own memory, asking herself: What did I actually see, smell, hear? She observes that over time memories tend to shift, evoking new emotions, resulting in the simplification or complication of a memory, so that it becomes an abstracted version of what really happened.

Boiling down her memories to their key components, Fortie is left with fragments of imagery: a fountain, a bundle of rope, a foot. These seemingly unrelated objects are synthesized to create a narrative that serves as a pathway to the past. Through Pleasant Field, paintings and sculptures work together to create an alternate reality, immersing the viewer in a landscape of memories as they exist at this moment in time.

Fortie’s new body of work builds on her undergraduate project, which she developed while completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Thompson Rivers University in 2017 that focused on experiences of coming of age and the tension between childhood and adulthood. Maintaining a distinctly playful and colourful aesthetic, Fortie’s loosely rendered marks and associations flow across the canvas and the walls of The Curbe, materializing in a fluid installation of two- and three-dimensional objects that inhabit an immersive environment.

Anyssa Fortie, The Stars I Never Saw (Study) (detail), 2020, oil on canvas, 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

View images of the exhibition here.

Cling

January 17 to March 14, 2020

The Cube

Twyla Exner

Twyla Exner’s practice is inspired by nature and the reciprocal systems of electronic refuse and technological obsolescence. Of the pre-Internet generation, Exner is both frustrated and fascinated by the increasing use and invasion of technology in our daily lives.

For her new project, Cling, Exner creates an installation of discarded satellite television dishes and infests them with sculptural barnacles that suggest an analogous relationship between invasive species and discarded technology. By connecting nature and technology in this way, Exner engages in current debates about how digital platforms serve to connect us while simultaneously disconnecting us from the real world. Satellites circulate ceaselessly in the skies above us, wifi operates invisibly all around us and “the Cloud” is now a commonly used term and a storage system that exists in the digital realm.

Through the steady transposition of once precious, now abandoned technology, digital tools are in a cycle of perpetual advancement inherently aligned with capitalism by way of planned obsolescence. Exner contends that the prevalence of obsolete technology and the resulting waste that impacts our natural environment exists as evidence of the need for physical resources as a prerequisite for digitized environments. Ironically, this same metaphysical space prides itself as a release from materiality.

Attached to the walls of the Gallery and expanding outside to off-site locations, the works in this exhibition propose hybrids of technological structures and living organisms that have gone awry, multiplying in ways beyond our control. They take the form of abandoned technologies that have sprouted new life, clever artificialities that imitate nature, or biotechnological fixtures of the not-too-distant future.

Twyla Exner lives and works in Prince George, British Columbia. Her practice encompasses numerous mediums, including drawing, sculpture, ceramics and installation. Her works explore themes of nature, combined with technology and electronics, and have been exhibited across Canada. Exner has taught at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, and Grande Prairie Regional College, Grande Prairie, Alberta. She currently works as the Director of Public Programs at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George.

Cling (installation view), 2019
cast urethan, satellites
dimensions variable
Image courtesy of the Artist

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

View images of the exhibition here.

Free Rein

January 17 to March 16, 2020

Central Gallery

Feminist Land Art Retreat

Feminist Land Art Retreat (FLAR) is a conceptual project that was initiated in 2010 with a poster advertising an unrealized event. Appropriating the style of a 1960s protest poster, the artists inverted an image of the canonical land artwork Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson to transform it into an image of the female reproductive system. Through this simple gesture FLAR asked the viewer to reconsider the terms “feminist,” “land art” and “retreat” and the resulting associations that emerged. By doing so, an art historical moment was reimagined. Since that time FLAR’s practice has involved advertising forms including posters, site-specific billboards and clothing, as well as videos, sculptures and performances. Their work draws upon the material, conceptual and political work of feminist artists, land artists, activists, theorists, writers and musicians.

Free Rein brings together a major body of work which began in 2017 and includes new work made specifically for the Kamloops Art Gallery. Including video, sculpture, sound and text-based work, this exhibition plays with tropes of the Western cinematic genre, particularly the character of the cowboy or Lone Ranger. By drawing from strategies of feminism, science fiction and social utopianism, FLAR proposes an alternate world in which the historical trajectories of land and gender relations exist without ownership or prescribed hierarchies. Their 3-channel video installation No Man’s Land: The Trilogy unfolds in three divergent locations (Berlin, Germany, Heffley Creek, BC, and Galisteo, New Mexico) and features three protagonists: the solitary rider, the horse and the landscape. Embedded cultural myths of the “West” are replaced by images of mutual reliance, presented through a critical feminist lens to complicate the relationship between human, animal and land.

An additional video made for this iteration of the project centres on the horse’s point of view. A wall drawing acts as an abstracted map that could be for a horse or a human, recalling dressage patterns drawn in the sand and then performed in No Man’s Land. Creating tension between a sense of comfort and control, larger-than-life horse blankets and a bridle are shifted from their everyday use to infer an otherworldly dimension. A ceramic bowl burnished with horse hair featured in No Man’s Land serves as a speaker playing a Western-style theme song. Body Language Poems describe visual cues of a horse’s body in a relaxed and aggravated state on mirrors, implicating the viewer. The project also expands outside the Gallery with a large-scale banner of a horse’s eye that connects to two advertising banners inside featuring the landscape and rider, completing the trilogy.

This body of work proposes alternative images of wildness, freedom and autonomy to the ones that have catalyzed colonial settlement and constructed feminine relationships with nature. Subverting expectations of the Western genre, FLAR’s concept of the “West” is supple, offering a story of land relations beyond ownership and one where land is tied to multiple female perspectives.

FLAR initiated No Man’s Land: The Trilogy with curator Amy Kazymerchyk in 2017 and completed post-production of the video in residence at Western Front, Vancouver, in the spring of 2018. The exhibition Free Rein was first presented at the Audain Gallery (part of Simon Fraser University Galleries) in Vancouver, May 31 to August 4, 2018, curated by Amy Kazymerchyk. The exhibition premiered No Man’s Land: The Trilogy, which was supported by SFU Galleries, the Western Front Media Arts Residency, Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council and ACUD Gallery. The first chapter of No Man’s Land was presented at ACUD Gallery in Berlin, April 29 to May 28, 2017, curated by Elodie Evers. Free Rein was most recently shown at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, January 19 to March 31, 2019, curated by Leila Timmins. This iteration of Free Rein is curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery.

Feminist Land Art Retreat's recent solo exhibitions include Heavy Flow: The Re-Release, Ginerva Gambino, Cologne; Duty Free, Studio for Propositional Cinema, Düsseldorf; and Last Resort, Kunsthaus Bregenz Billboards, Bregenz. They have participated in group exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; De La Warr Pavillion, UK; 500 Capp Street, San Francisco; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, and JTT Gallery, New York City, among others. In 2018 they produced a series of aerial artworks and live radio broadcasts supported by the City of Vancouver and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.

A video tour of the exhibition with Charo Neville filmed at the opening reception, January 17, 2020, can be viewed HERE. Many thanks to Jonathan Fulton who recorded and edited this video.

Installation view of
Feminist Land Art Retreat: Free Rein.
Photo: Cory Hope

Curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery

Generously sponsored by Fiona Chan, Pamela & Jason Fawcett and Ross Hill & Jane Irwin

View images of the exhibition here.

The Writing on the Wall: Works of Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert, RCA

January 11 to June 13, 2020

Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre

Joane Cardinal-Schubert

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 inclusion in the touring exhibition The Writing on the Wall: Works of Dr. Joane Cardinal-Schubert, RCA. Curated by Lindsey Sharman of the Nickle Galleries, the exhibition reflects the cyclical nature of Joane Cardinal-Schubert’s (1942-2009) work, including pivotal paintings, drawings, prints, collage, ceramic, and installation. The tour was shown at the Nickle Galleries, September 21 to December 16, 2017, the Red Deer Museum, May 5 to August 12, 2018, the Kenderdine Art Gallery | College Art Galleries at University of Saskatchewan, Feb. 1 to April 27, 2019, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, June 14 to September 8, 2019 and the Esplanade Arts and Heritage Centre, January 11 to March 28, 2020.

Joane Cardinal-Schubert
Birch Bark Letters to Emily Carr: House of All Sorts, 1991
acrylic and collage on paper
101.6 x 127.0 cm
Collection of the Kamloops Art Gallery
Photo: Cory Hope

Curated by Lindsey Sharman

View images of the exhibition here.

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