THE 215 LE ESTCWICWÉY̓ (“THE MISSING”)
Johnny Bandura
The Cube
April 15 to June 24, 2023
Curated by Craig Willms
Upon hearing the news in May of 2021 of the 215 children discovered in graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Johnny Bandura began painting 215 portraits as a therapeutic process. He felt compelled to respond to the findings as his grandmother was a Residential School survivor from Kamloops and Bandura remains connected to family in the region.
QUEER NEWFOUNDLAND HOCKEY LEAGUE (QNHL)
Lucas Morneau
The Cube
January 14 to April 1, 2023
Curated by Craig Willms
Playfully and provocatively challenging the prevalence of homophobia and hyper-masculinity in the culture of team sports, Lucas Morneau’s Queer Newfoundland Hockey League (QNHL) proposes 14 fictional teams that reclaim, empower, and amplify LGBTQIA2S+ voices. With team names that include the St. John’s Sissies, Bonavista Buggers, and Ferryland Fairies, Morneau subverts pejoratives used against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, paired with places historically associated with senior hockey league teams in Newfoundland and Labrador.
ASTRAL
Autumn Christopher
The Cube
September 17 to December 31, 2022
Curated by Craig Willms
This exhibition shares work by a recent graduate from Thompson Rivers University (TRU) as part of the Gallery’s annual partnership with TRU’s Fine Arts department. Selected by Kamloops Art Gallery Assistant Curator Craig Willms, this exhibition highlights an emerging artist or artists from TRU’s Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) graduating class, giving artists an opportunity to work with a professional curator to create new work for a professional exhibition space outside the context of school. This year the work of Autumn Christopher is presented.
GHOST DAYS
Terrance Houle
The Cube
June 30 to September 10, 2022
Organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery
This exhibition is the culmination of GHOST DAYS projects developed since 2018. Initiated in 2015, GHOST DAYS is an experimental art adventure, bringing together film, video, performance, photography, and music. This project conjures spirits and ghosts of Indigenous, colonial, and non-colonial history that exist in the light of night, as well as in the darkness of the day.
SAILING PRETTY CLOSE TO THE WIND
Robin Hodgson
The Cube
April 23 to June 18, 2022
Curated by Craig Willms
In a new group of paintings, Kamloops artist Robin Hodgson investigates the psychological and emotional nature of post-able-body life. Through his large-scale colourful compositions, Hodgson incorporates autobiographical moments with broader narratives about the global pandemic.
INJUSTICE AND IDENTITY
Jana Sasaki
The Cube
October 2 to December 31, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator
Injustice and Identity features work by Jana Sasaki, an artist originally from Merritt, BC, and now based in Vancouver, BC. The exhibition includes early photo and text-based works from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s collection that address the history of Japanese internment and the complexities of her family’s mixed-race or Hapa identity.
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN?
Amy Modahl
The Cube
June 26 to September 25, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator
Amy Modahl interweaves explorations of the vocabulary of space, visual-translation, and human and material gesture into her visual language. In her recent project developed for The Cube, Modahl worked with the Kamloops Art Gallery to circulate a call for letters in response to the question “How have you been?” She invited contributors to consider the changes and challenges of the past year and to share their experiences and thoughts. With the limitations of social interaction during the pandemic, our ways of interacting have been greatly altered. Physical interactions and movement in public spaces has to be consciously navigated, often adding stress to previously low-stress outings. Limited travel to see friends and family and the need to avoid comforting physical interactions and in person conversations has further contributed to our stress and general well-being.
STOP ASIAN HATE
Open Gallery
May 19 to July 3, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator
In response to the recent rise in anti-Asian racism the Kamloops Art Gallery is using the Open Gallery as a space to create awareness and generate dialogue. People of Asian descent are the largest racialized community in Canada. The Canadian government has a long history of anti-Asian policies, including the Chinese Head tax, the Chinese Immigration Act, the Komagata Maru incident, and Japanese Internment. The past year has seen an alarming rise in Anti-Asian racism in Canada, most noticeably in British Columbia.
THE SENSE ECONOMY
The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement
The Cube
April 10 to June 19, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator
Through their collaborative practice, The Laboratory of Spatial Bemusement, Megan Dyck and Tia Halliday have focused on presenting a series of kinetic sculptures and dance-based performances that incorporate design and accoutrement reminiscent of 18th-century French furniture and textiles. The Sense Economy invites viewers to engage in a tactile and movement-based consideration of luxury and hybridized domestic objects while being encouraged to think about our own relationship to these objects.
OMNIUM GATHERUM | A COLLECTION OF MISCELLANEOUS THINGS
Kelsey Blokland // Ashya Cross // Sophia Dodic // Marisa Drayton // Tenessa Gagnon // Sara Hall // Kalene Michalovsky // Sue Miller // Christyn Rebmann // Lyn Richards // Carol Schlosar // Elizabeth Spike // Emily Wood
The Cube
January 30 to April 3, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assitant Curator
This exhibition celebrates the work of the Thompson Rivers University Bachelor of Fine Arts 2020 graduating class. The COVID-19 global pandemic has disrupted many events, including how students participate in university classes, resulting in the shut down of many public and private spaces, including the University.
AMBIGUOUS PARTS
Mark Soo // Lisa Klapstock
The Cube
November 21, 2020 to January 16, 2021
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
This exhibition brings together two unique photographic works from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s collection. Both works explore the viewer’s perception through abstraction by playing with scale to distort meaning and to question the subject. Each artist has specified an unconventional installation of their photographs to encourage the viewer to engage with the work in relation to the confines of gallery space.
PLEASANT FIELD
Anyssa Fortie
The Cube
July 7 to November 14, 2020
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
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…
CLING
Twyla Exner
The Cube
January 17 to March 14, 2020
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
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.
UPON FURTHER DISCUSSION...
Josh Allan // Deb Fong // Kazia Poore // Elizabeth Sigalet
The Cube
September 21 to October 26, 2019
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Josh Allan, Deb Fong, Kazia Poore and Elizabeth Sigalet initiated a Polite Conversation in their final year as Bachelor of Fine Arts students at Thompson Rivers University. Coming from different perspectives and using different mediums, the four students began their project by employing a “call and response” approach as a way to step outside their own ways of working and to expand their methods of making art in an attempt to push the boundaries of their own practices.
POLY(MER)HEDRON
David Jacob Harder
The Cube
July 6 to September 7, 2019
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
David Jacob Harder started journaling his interactions with the materiality of everyday objects in 2012. While working on large-scale projects as part of his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Thompson Rivers University, he began keeping a “metal journal” where he recorded his daily encounters with metal objects. More recently Harder has been chronicling every plastic object he uses on a daily basis. For each object, he records what it is and its estimated lifespan and he writes about his personal connection to and use of the object. Harder then casts each object in concrete, creating a monument to each of these objects while quantifying the volume of space each object takes up.
FOUR OLDEST DAUGHTERS
Darlene Kalynka
The Cube
March 30 to June 29, 2019
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Darlene Kalynka is a Kamloops-based artist working as an instructor in the Faculty of Visual Arts at Thompson Rivers University. In this new body of work, Four Oldest Daughters, Kalynka reflects on family roles, labour and sacrifice across three generations of her family in Ukraine and Canada.
I WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION AND NOW IT'S OVER
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber
The Cube
January 12 to March 23, 2019
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are Winnipeg-based artists who work collaboratively to create paintings, drawings and text-based work. In 2008, Dumontier and Farber began working as a duo, meeting regularly, listening to records and making collaborative drawings, following a successful period working collaboratively with the larger artist collective The Royal Art Lodge.
A CHINESE DANCE
Edward Cheung
The Cube
September 15 to November 3, 2018
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
The 2018 Curator’s Choice exhibition features a new project by Edward Cheung. The artist works with photography and video to explore his Chinese-Canadian heritage and the changing cultural and geographic community where he grew up. Investigating a pivotal shift in the place he calls home, Cheung addresses the loss of heritage and cultural spaces within Vancouver’s Chinatown by critiquing the methods that developers use to preserve and acknowledge spaces that have been lost to gentrification. A Chinese Dance speaks to the way in which commercial endeavours and the tourism industry are effecting changes to the cultural fabric of this historic community. The social and architectural landscape in Cheung’s scenes are activated through audience participation as the viewer’s presence directly disrupts and degrades the images they are viewing. This intervention is a prompt for viewers to consider how their presence affects the work in the gallery and how collective actions can have unintended consequences in the gentrification of communities and cultural spaces.
EVERY NIGHT A WORLD CREATED
Dion Fortie
The Cube
July 7 to September 8, 2018
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
As part of Dion Fortie’s artistic process, he finds materials through daily walks along riverbanks, industrial outskirts and sites of refuse. At these sites, cast-off materials are detached from their intended purpose and found alongside unrelated objects. Fortie repurposes these finds, transforming them symbolically and formally in sculptural arrangements. The works take the form of assemblages, assisted ready-mades and installations that reference art history and design. They are often constructed to human scale, suggesting anthropomorphic forms that act as stand-ins for the human body.
CIRCLES & WIGS: BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Ashleigh Bartlett // Jessica Groome
The Cube
April 7 to June 23, 2018
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
CIRCLES & WIGS is a collaborative practice between Jessica Groome and Ashleigh Bartlett creating drawings, paintings and installations. Living in different cities, they have conducted intensive self-directed residencies in each other’s studios since 2015 to produce new work playing off each other’s practices. For this exhibition, the two artists worked from their respective cities for six months before coming together at the Kamloops Art Gallery for a two-week residency to complete the project in The Cube.