ECHOES
Scott Benesiinaabandan // Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour & Dayna Danger // Caroline Monnet // Nicole Preissl // Maika‘i Tubbs // jaz whitford
Central Gallery
July 15 to September 9, 2023
Curated by Emily Dundas Oke
“Water connects us all.” - Elder Dr. Margaret Vickers Hyslop
As an echo reflects and repeats between entities, this exhibition contemplates ways recurrences traverse generational and geographical expanses. An echo is a continuation that needs a physical body on which to resound. Here, the bodies of water and the physical remnants of stone, plastic, and land become the houses for the historical traces of change and continuity. The works in this exhibition explore the physical and embodied ways in which memory appears and continues to resonate within individuals and across generations. Through practices such as ceremony and revisitations of the voyages of one’s ancestors, the artists included in echoes call upon knowledge systems that do not rely on the written word, but rather assert a continuity and interconnectedness between body, land, and water. Each of these entities also demonstrate their agency as knowing beings. These practices and beliefs posit specific notions of time while entangling our bodies within processes of remembering.
echoes is organized and circulated by the Burnaby Art Gallery, and curated by Emily Dundas Oke.
I KNOW ABOUT LOTS OF THINGS I’VE NEVER SEEN. AND SO DO YOU.
Zoe Kreye
Central Gallery
April 22 to June 30, 2023
Curated by Charo Neville
Breathe, listen, feel, connect, observe. Tune into a sensation in your body. What is it telling you?
I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. invites us to trust our internal knowledge. The exhibition shares work by Vancouver-based artist Zoe Kreye created through a studio practice informed by politicized somatics which grounds the artist in her body and allows her to connect with creative forces informed by her bodily sensations.
Generously supported by the Women’s Art Initiative and Jane Irwin and Ross Hill
GLACIAL RESONANCE
Paul Walde
Central Gallery
January 21 to April 1, 2023
Curated by Charo Neville
Presenting the glacier as a central protagonist, Glacial Resonance brings the stark reality of otherwise distant mountain ranges to the forefront. A solo exhibition of ambitious projects by Canadian artist Paul Walde, Glacial Resonance shares the artist’s enduring concern about environmental crises, channelled through sound and video. Best known for his interdisciplinary performances staged in the natural environment, Walde’s work often involves music and choreography. His immersive installations materialize from projects on mountain sides and from deep in old growth forests that involve myriad volunteers and performers, and technically ̶ and geographically - challenging logistics. The splendor and sense of awe evoked by these landscapes, emphasized through the embodied sound experience of Walde’s installations, offer alternative modes in which to traverse the overwhelming scale of climate change.
WITNESSING
Alicia Henry
Central Gallery
October 1 to December 31, 2022
Curated by Daina Augaitis
For the last two decades, Alicia Henry has been exploring unconventional approaches to portraiture, using the face to represent something that is hidden, revealed, and performed. Henry creates two-dimensional figures and group compositions that are commanding in their grace and expressiveness. Selecting her media carefully, she works with felt, canvas, and other textiles, as well as leather and paperboard, all of which absorb drawn and stitched gestures that register a spectrum of contexts and emotions. Notions of gender and family are significant in her works, as are physical layers that suggest multiple and unfixed identities. Tender renditions of a mother with a child appear, as do groupings of 20 or more females that signify formations of like-minded families within communities.
READING THE LAND: TEN YEARS OF COLLECTING
Rebecca Belmore // Franklin Carmichael // Dana Claxton // Feminist Land Art Retreat // Rodney Graham // Adad Hannah // Andrea Kastner // Ann Kipling // Germaine Koh // Rodney Konopaki and Rhonda Neufeld // Donald Lawrence // Scott Massey // Daphne Odjig // Toni Onley // Gary Pearson // Jerry Pethick // Richard Prince // George Raab // Jack Shadbolt // Gordon Smith // Ted Smith // Tania Willard // Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
Central Gallery
July 16 to September 17, 2022
Curated by Charo Neville
Offering a view into the Kamloops Art Gallery’s collection through its acquisitions over the past ten years, Reading the Land: Ten Years of Collecting shares the expanse of artists and artworks that have come into the Gallery’s care over the past decade. The selection of works focusses on a range of approaches to representing the landscape and critically exploring the idea of land. Spanning wide-ranging art-historical epochs and diverse approaches, the exhibition offers a view into artmaking over the past 100 years in the context of shifting worldviews and conversations about land use and cultural implications. The selection of works in Reading the Land: Ten Years of Collecting present a reading of the land that is inseparable from culture.
HERE ELSEWHERE OTHER HAUNTINGS
Jin-me Yoon
Central Gallery
April 23 to July 2, 2022
Curated by Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre
Curator of Contemporary Art, Musée d’art de Joliette
Here Elsewhere Other Hauntings is the first retrospective dedicated to the work of Jin-me Yoon, a Korean-Canadian artist living in British Columbia. Conceived and organized by the Musée d'art de Joliette, Québec, this exhibition brings together nearly 30 years of Yoon’s artistic practice through a thematic journey. It shares works that condense several of the artist's preoccupations, including her relationship with her Korean heritage, her experience of migration, and her testing of the reality of what are considered Canadian ideals.
HALCYON FOG
Kelly Richardson
Central Gallery
January 22 to April 2, 2022
Curated by Charo Neville
Using digital technologies, Kelly Richardson creates hyper-real, sublime, and spectacular landscapes that communicate underlying unsettling narratives. Richardson is a Canadian artist based in Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. From 2003 to 2017, she lived in North East England, where she was a Lecturer in Fine Arts at Newcastle University. Widely recognized internationally, Richardson has exhibited her work less frequently in Canada. This solo exhibition presents a view into Richardson’s longstanding exploration of our relationship to nature and how this relates to climate change.
WHOSE STORIES?
Diyan Achjadi // Naoko Fukumaru // Tomoyo Ihaya // Load na Dito // Mark Salvatus // UJINO
Central Gallery
October 2 to December 31, 2021
Curated by Makiko Hara
Reflecting on the experiences and narratives of "others," Whose Stories? shares the work of six artists of Asian descent. Through video installation, photography, animation, print media, drawing, collage, and restored ceramic works, artists Diyan Achjadi, Load na Dito, Naoko Fukumaru, Tomoyo Ihaya, Mark Salvatus, and UJINO convey personal histories told within a community of artists and woven across generations.
HOLDING A LINE IN YOUR HAND
Azadeh Elmizadeh // Colleen Heslin // Russna Kaur // Lyse Lemieux // Rajni Perera
Central Gallery
July 17 to September 18, 2021
Curated by Charo Neville
Holding a line in your hand presents the work of five Canadian women painters from different cultural backgrounds, at different stages in their careers, and based at opposite ends of the country. Their work contains divergent methodologies, but also strong affinities. The exhibition includes artwork abundant in colour, line, and texture, embedded with and unencumbered by ideas. The focus on a small group of female painters offers a renewed perspective on an historically male-dominated domain and reflects today’s growing number of female artists working in the medium. Exploring and expropriating the idea of the painting in a myriad of ways, these artists share an expanded approach to painting. Holding a line in your hand speaks to a resurgence of painting in Canada and an active dialogue around historical precedents and contemporary approaches.
SOUNDINGS: AN EXHIBITION IN FIVE PARTS
Tania Willard // Peter Morin // Maggie Groat // Olivia Whetung // Ogimaa Mikana // Garry Gottfriedson // Greg Staats // Tanya Lukin Linklater // Camille Georgeson-Usher // Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk // Aaron Leon // Sebastian De Line // Diamond Point and Jordan Point // Kite // Raven Chacon and Cristóbal Martínez
Central Gallery
April 29 to July 3, 2021
Curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson
How can a score be a call and tool for decolonization?Curated by Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson, Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts features newly commissioned scores, performances, videos, sculptures, and sound by Indigenous and other artists who respond to this question. Unfolding in a sequence of five parts, the scores take the form of beadwork, videos, objects, graphic notation, historical belongings, and written instructions. During the exhibition, these scores are activated at specific moments by musicians, dancers, performers, and members of the public gradually filling the Gallery and surrounding public spaces with sound and action.
A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT
Scott Massey
Central Gallery
January 22 to April 3, 2021
Curated by Charo Neville
Canadian artist Scott Massey (b.1971) explores the confluence of art and science through multi-media projects that accentuate natural phenomena by fabricated means. Drawing on research into quantum physics, cosmology, astronomy, and other scientific disciplines, Massey’s practice examines cosmological subjects as a way of understanding our place in this greater context.
CASTING THE EYE ADRIFT
Donald Lawrence
Central Gallery
July 7 to December 31, 2020
Curated by Charo Neville
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.
FREE REIN
Feminist Land Art Retreat
Central Gallery
January 17 to March 21, 2020
Curated by Charo Neville
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.
HEXSA’AM: TO BE HERE ALWAYS
Siku Allooloo // Scott Benesiinaabandan // Darryl Dawson // Jaymyn La Vallee // Diane Roberts // Sara Siestreem // Juliana Speier // Nabidu Taylor // Kamala Todd // William Wasden Jr. // Tania Willard // Lindsey Willie
Central Gallery
October 5 to December 28, 2019
Curated by Marianne Nicolson and Althea Thauberger
In 1914, delegates of the McKenna-McBride Royal Commission met with Johnny Scow (Kwikwasuti’nuxw), Copper Johnson (Ha’xwa’mis), Dick Webber and Dick Hawkins (Dzawada’enuxw), and Alec Morgan (Gwawa’enuxw), as well as all the Kwakwaka’wakw Chiefs, to establish the land base of the Kwakwaka’wakw group of nations. A century later, in May 2018, the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation launched the first-ever BC Supreme Court case to extend Aboriginal title to the ocean, claiming that the Province does not have the authority to grant tenures to salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago. As two moments in a tangled timeline of resistance, these legal encounters bring forward the ways that cultural practices can bring new realities into being for a community experiencing ongoing social, cultural and ecological effects of colonization and globalizing economics.
IONIC BONDS
Maggie Boyd // Steven Brekelmans // Tom Burrows // Babak Golkar // Glenn Lewis // Eunice Luk // Paul Mathieu // Eric Metcalfe // Gailan Ngan // Wayne Ngan
Central Gallery
July 13 to September 21, 2019
Curated Charo Neville
The atoms in ceramic materials are held together by chemical bonds. An ionic bond occurs between materials with different electronegativity—metal and non-metal. The metal atom transfers electrons to the non-metal atom, becoming positively charged, whereas the non-metal becomes negatively charged. The two ions, having opposite charges, attract each other with a strong electrostatic force. The artists in this exhibition are bonded by their distinctive approaches to ceramics. Through diverse ways of working with clay, the artists respond to the deep historical roots of ceramics, the medium’s connection to the land and its ability to transform through human contact.
PRESENCES
Samuel Roy-Bois
Central Gallery
April 6 to June 29, 2019
Curated by Charo Neville
Originally from Québec City, Samuel Roy-Bois is based in the Okanagan, where he is assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus and heads an interdisciplinary lab for creative exchange The Research Studio for Spaces and Things. Roy-Bois’ artistic practice involves site-specific installations concerned with the conceptual and material definition of space and the ways the built environment contributes to our understanding of the world. Through sculpture, photography and installation, Roy-Bois examines the relational network of objects and their historical resonance: 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 making us?
GLINTS AND REFLECTIONS
Adad Hannah
Central Gallery
January 18 to March 23, 2019
Curated by Lynn Bannon and Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre. Produced and circulated by the Musée d’art de Joliette.
Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He lives and works in Vancouver and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. This exhibition brings together key works made by Hannah in the past decade that focus on his enduring interest in the photographic image in relation to personal and social histories.
INVERTED PYRAMIDS AND ROADS TO NOWHERE
Eleanor King
Central Gallery
September 29 to December 29, 2018
Curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Eleanor King is a Nova Scotian artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice combines sound art, social practices, improvisations, drawing, and sculptural installations that engage with memory, community, technology and the everyday. Also a musician, sound is often integrated into the spatial experience of her found and self-generated sculptural installations. King’s site-specific installations and relational aesthetics emerge from research that addresses the place and context where she is exhibiting.
THROUGH THE MEMORY ATLAS: 40 YEARS OF COLLECTING
Central Gallery
July 14 to September 15, 2018
Curated by Roger Boulet, Jen Budney, Susan Edelstein, Adrienne Fast, Andrew Hunter, Charo Neville, Jordan Strom and Tania Willard
In celebration of the Kamloops Art Gallery’s 40th anniversary, Through the Memory Atlas: 40 Years of Collecting, gathers together the most comprehensive selection of works from its permanent collection in one exhibition to date. This exhibition is a unique opportunity to bring a large and diverse group of works, in various media, out from storage and into public view. The exhibition title and curatorial framework pay homage to the German art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg, who founded a private library for Cultural Studies that organized and classified the legacy of Western culture in an experimental, non-logical and non-conventional manner. His project has worked to inspire and inform many contemporary artists today. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas constituted cosmographic and art historical images arranged non-chronologically to reveal the ways in which subjective and objective forces shape our understanding of Western culture. His juxtaposition of “information constellations” attempted to make sense of the overwhelming process of historical change, creating what he called “thought space” (Denkraum), rather than a definitive archive.
THE POETICS OF SPACE
Barbara Astman // Maxwell Bates // Rebecca Belmore // B.C. Binning // Lee Bontecou // Bertram Brooker // Karin Bubaš // Arabella Campbell // Emily Carr // Ian Carr-Harris // Share Corsault // Christos Dikeakos // Michael Drebert // Lawren Harris // Owen Kydd // Beatrice Lennie // Landon MacKenzie // Myfanwy MacLeod // Scott McFarland // Jason McLean // Alex Morrison // Ben Nicholson // James Nizam // Dennis A. Oppenheim // Annie Pootoogook // Richard Prince // Pudlo Pudlat // Abraham Rattner // Kyohei Sakaguchi // Reece Terris // Ron Tran // Renée Van Halm // William Vazan
Central Gallery
April 14 to June 30, 2018
Curated by Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator Emerita and Emmy Lee Wall, Assistant Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery
Much art of the last several centuries has been preoccupied with the creation of space, from the illusionistic space of Renaissance art to the presence of depth that can exist even within pure abstraction. Divided into three sections, this exhibition presents a range of historical and contemporary artworks by more than 30 artists that together communicate some of the countless ways artists have contemplated space – from its optical perceptions, to its emotional impact and finally, to its geographical or topographical limits.