WESTERN & SONIA CORNWALL ROUNDUP
Central Gallery
January 18 to March 23, 2013
Curated by Roger Boulet, Charo Neville
The Kamloops Art Gallery’s 2013 exhibition program focuses its attention on the idea of “place.” Situated within active ranching country, the first exhibitions of the year look at how the mythology of the West has developed in this region and opens up a conversation about our relationship to this place. Western brings together key works by artists who have addressed the idea of the “west” and the “western” in diverse and complex ways. This group exhibition aims to take stock of the history of settlement in the west and to reflect upon how this history and its manifestations have shaped the popular imagination. It includes an absurd and yet strongly metaphorical large-scale installation by the artist collective DRIL that features the tumbleweed as the main protagonist. It also comprises a provocative work from the KAG’s permanent collection by Cornelia Wyngaarden that plays on the sexual stereotype of the “Marlboro Man” as well as the resulting installation from Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s polemical performance An Indian Act Shooting the Indian Act, also from the KAG's collection. Dana Claxton's Mustang Suite photographs, produced like slick advertisements, portray the complexities and contemporary realities of the "Indian" family through hybrid portraits. The exhibition also features Louise Noguchi's complete early video series Language of the Rope, in which the artist studies the phenomenon of re-staged and re-enacted cowboy culture. At times exaggerating these inherited and ingrained mythologies, the work in the exhibition challenges the “western” trope from multivalent perspectives, offering an un-romanticized pithy view of relations between cowboys, the North American frontier and First Nations peoples. In conjunction with an exhibition of paintings by artist and rancher, Sonia Cornwall, the exhibition re-frames the “Wild West” as an ideological space through a post-colonial lens of East and West and male and female. This key grouping of Cornwall’s work offers insite into life on a ranch near Kamloops and demonstrates the artist's dedication to depicting the landscape and everyday scenes.
Generously sponsored by The Plaza Hotel, BC Cattlemen's Association, Funk Signs
Installation view showing DRIL
Move It On Over, 2011–
installation
Courtesy of the Artists
Photo: Kamloops Art Gallery
Germaine Koh: Weather Systems
Germaine Koh is a Vancouver-based artist whose work relates natural and human systems by focusing on the inter-relatedness of conditions in the built and natural environment. Koh’s work often links the space of the gallery with the outside environment or actively intervenes in the institution to reveal tensions between the public and private realms. Through her interventions into technology and everyday systems, Koh creates alternate networks of transmission and exchange.
This full colour publication was produced in conjunction with the solo exhibition Germaine Koh: Weather Systems at the Kamloops Art Gallery April 6 to June 15, 2013 and includes reproductions of the artist’s works spanning two decades.