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.
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.
LUMINOCITY
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
Downtown Kamloops & Riverside Park
October 23 to October 31, 2020
Curated by Zoë Chan, Guest Curator, and Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
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.
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.
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.
COMET MMXVIII
Donald Lawrence
TNRD Civic Building
May 11, 2019 to December 31, 2021
Curated by Charo Neville
The Kamloops Art Gallery is pleased to announce the realization of Donald Lawrence’s public artwork, Comet MMXVIII, 2018, on the new entrance to the Thompson-Nicola Regional District Building which houses the TNRD civic offices, the Kamloops Branch of the TNRD Library and the Kamloops Art Gallery. An illuminated work, Comet MMXVIII will light up as dusk arrives each evening. Interpretative material is on display in the building's atrium.
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?
LUMINOCITY
Ruba Alshoshan // Lea Bucknell // Maureen Gruben // Doug Buis and Brad Harder // Allison Hrabluik // Jessie Kobylanski // Donald Lawrence // Nichole Mahon // Cindy Mochizuki // Jeneen Frei Njootli // Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva // Marlene Millar and Phillip Szporer // Howie Tsui // Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Chandra Melting Tallow and Tania Willard // Jin-Me Yoon
Downtown Kamloops & Riverside Park
October 12 to October 20, 2018
Curated by Charo Neville, Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Luminocity returns in the fall of 2018 for its third biennial event. A week-long video art exhibition, Luminocity showcases video projects by artists from across the country in 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.
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.
GESTURAL TERRAIN
Ann Kipling
Central Gallery
January 14 to March 25, 2017
Curated by Charo Neville, Kamloops Art Gallery
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.
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.
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.
THE COMMONS
Kevin Schmidt
Central Gallery
October 3 to December 31, 2015
Curated by Charo Neville
This exhibition presents a survey of work by Canadian artist Kevin Schmidt. It charts key projects over the past decade and brings them together for the first time. Schmidt’s work engages in a critical restaging of spectacle through the reproduction of cultural industry and strategies of displacement, often into “wilderness” or “natural” settings. The reading of his work is tied to the place of its making and exhibition, self-reflexively exposing the conditions of production and display. Works are often situated in remote locations, where Schmidt stages events through the relocation of common features of the urban environment (billboard, block-buster film, rock-show lights) into untouched areas. Through this cross-over Schmidt interrogates notions of the sublime, the idea of varied “publics” and shared bodies of knowledge. The notion of “the commons” has consistently been an underlying focus of Schmidt’s work.