FAMILIAR TERRITORY
A.Y. Jackson // Ted Smith
Central Gallery
March 26 to May 28, 2011
Curated by Jann LM Bailey
Visions of our dynamic land are scored deep in the heart and mind of every Canadian. Artists from coast to coast to coast have captured many of those very Canadian images in their work.
HIS LIFE’S WORK
Bob Boyer
Central Gallery
January 15 to March 12, 2011
In 2004 just before Bob Boyer’s death, Kamloops Art Gallery added one of his most significant works to its permanent collection. The Gallery is honoured that Boyer’s Just Another Indian Cowgirl in Iraq has been selected to be part of the celebrated national touring exhibition Bob Boyer: His Life’s Work.
CONSTRUCTION SITES: IDENTITY AND PLACE
Diyan Achjadi // Rebecca Belmore // Therese Bolliger // Dana Claxton // Allyson Clay // Andy Fabo // Leon Golub // Angela Grossmann // Shelagh Keeley // Jim Logan // Ken Lum // Takashi Murakami // Nhan Duc Nguyen // Manuel Pina // Philippe Raphanel // Brendan Lee Satish Tang // Jeff Thomas // Henry Tsang // Jin-me Yoon // Sharyn Yuen
Central Gallery
October 18 to December 31, 2010
Curated by Craig Willms, Annette Hurtig
The Construction Sites: Identity and Place exhibition presents works by contemporary artists who investigate and reflect on the social construction of identity and the production of social space. Made over the past several decades, the works in the exhibition respond to developments in feminist, gender, queer and postcolonial theories. The exhibition concept takes a cue from Henri Lefebvre’s thinking about alienation and modernity, the nature of society, and social revolution as a revolution in everyday life. In his writing Lefebrve speaks about producing one’s life as one would a work. Might we likewise produce our own identity? Or is identity determined by society? And, with the dramatic mobility of information, goods and people aimed for by corporate globalization strategies, what is the relationship between our identity and the places we inhabit?
KLATSASSIN
Stan Douglas
Central Gallery
June 7 to September 4, 2010
Curated by Annette Hurtig
Internationally renowned Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has shown his work at and had it collected by prestigious institutions around the world. His photographs and projections are celebrated not only for their conceptual acuity and formal precision but also for how they continually extend the possibilities of film and video, and art itself. Klatsassin defies the official version of events leading to the Chilcotin War of 1864 by focussing on the story of a Tsilhqot’in chief who was accused of murder, tried and executed. Set in B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region, it depicts events related to gold rush efforts to build a road through Tsilhqot’in territory to the gold fields and the First Nations insurgency in response. Current events in the region echo those of the earlier conflict between aboriginal and colonialist interests. Klatsassin is composed of three elements: a filmic projection, a series of photographic portraits of characters from the film, and a series of landscape or location photographs.
TRUTH OR FICTION?
Doug Buis // Rodney Graham // Kent Monkman // Carol Sawyer // Camille Turner
Central Gallery
April 6 to May 22, 2010
The group exhibition TRUTH or FICTION? brings together various sorts of contemporary art by five contributing artists from near and far: Doug Buis (Knutsford/Kamloops), Rodney Graham (Vancouver), Kent Monkman (Toronto), Carol Sawyer (Vancouver) and Camille Turner (Toronto). The gathered art works share certain attributes: they refer to history and historical narratives, past, present and future; they include historical figures, but also little known, dubious and perhaps fictional characters; and, despite being about the past, present and future, they are more interested in representation than in mimesis—rather than mimic reality they represent it, with all its ambiguities and uncertainties.
TWO VISIONS
Emily Carr // Jack Shadbolt
Central Gallery
January 23 to March 21, 2010
Two Visions: Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt examines the important relationship between two of British Columbia’s most celebrated artists. Carr’s paintings and sketches of west coast forests and First Nations communities have shaped BC’s visual identity and continue to be deeply influential for artists in the region. Jack Shadbolt, who came to Canada as a young child, was among the artists inspired by Carr. He responded enthusiastically to British Columbia’s natural setting, which he rendered according to the modernist trends of twentieth century art. By examining points of similarity and difference between the two artists, Two Visions reveals Shadbolt’s struggle to find a unique artistic voice, while acknowledging Carr’s influential role in the art of this province. The exhibition also celebrates Shadbolt’s significant contribution to Canadian painting on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
HISTORY OF THE PRESENT (SELECTED WORKS 1985-2009)
Jayce Salloum
Central Gallery
October 25, 2009 to January 3, 2010
Curated by Jen Budney
Though Vancouver-based artist Jayce Salloum has been exhibiting his work internationally for over twenty-five years, he is well known in Canada primarily for a single body of work, his provocative and compelling video installation everything and nothing and other works from the ongoing videotape, untitled(1999-ongoing). There are many reasons for Salloum’s relatively low profile in his home country, including the non-commercial and interdisciplinary nature of his work (photography and video practices, collaborative, community-based work, and even curating and writing) and its extremely broad international focus. Yet Salloum is one of Canada’s most widely recognized artists abroad, where his distinctive commitment to the exploration of personal stories and viewpoints within unstable or uncertain geo-political contexts has led him to collaborations with individuals and communities in places as far-ranging as Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Cuba, Lebanon, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Kamloops, and more.
THE TREE: FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE SOCIAL
Emily Carr // Lawren Harris // Arthur Lismer // Sybil Andrews // Jack Shadbolt // Ian Wallace // Rodney Graham // Liz Magor // Lorraine Gilbert // Pedro Reyes // Patricia Deadman // Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
Central Gallery
June 7 to September 6, 2009
In early 20th century images of trees and forests by Group of Seven painters and Emily Carr, a claim on the rugged territory of the ‘new land’ is expressed by bold stylistic breaks from British painting traditions, breaks that articulated then current ideas about the new Canadian nation. Since then Canadian and international artists have considered and critiqued forces, such as nationalistic and corporate ideologies, that shape interpretations and representations of nature, including the notion of the landscape. The Tree exhibition presents artworks in which images of the tree, representing the natural world, the sublime and the spiritual, are meant to inspire awe and reverence for the power of nature. It also includes works that explore human impulses to tame or exploit the forest, or to use the forest as a stage setting or a place of refuge. The artworks in the exhibition employ a wide variety of approaches and media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and video.
CLAIMING SPACE
Tania Willard
Central Gallery
April 5 to May 24, 2009
As First Nations' land claims slowly grind their way through British Columbia's provincial courts, Tania Willard's art offers a more intimate and passionate probing of territorial issues. Willard's practice has been concerned with cultural displacement, transfer and translation. She uses screen-printing and stencilling processes and oral or written storytelling to probe these concerns. Willard’s grandparents were key interpreters of Secwepemc stories, and Willard’s work often emphasizes the narrative potential of picture-making. Her visual artworks characteristically revive historical elements or contexts within mechanically reproduced images.
SUGAR BOMBS
Diyan Achjadi // Brendan Tang
Central Gallery
April 5 to May 24, 2009
Curated by Kristen Lambertson
The artworks in Sugar Bombs invite us into an imaginative terrain where innocence and beauty meet violence. Diyan Achjadi’s inkjet prints and Brendan Tang’s conceptual ceramic objects similarly juxtapose childlike playfulness with worldly tensions: they feature candy-coloured exploding rockets and imploding robots. These elements in the works direct our attention to the presence of militarism in popular culture and, simultaneously, question its role in the construction of collective and personal identity. Borrowing and combining aspects of diverse cultures, the works in this exhibition critique the normalization of racial and gender stereotypes and militaristic patriotism while signalling a possible reconfiguration of identity.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN
Minn Sjolseth // Anthony Carter
Central Gallery
April 5 to May 24, 2009
Curated by Lisa Henderson
The exhibition Minn Sjolseth and Anthony Carter: Somewhere Between explores the artistic partnership of painter Minn Sjolseth and photographer Anthony Carter. Travelling long distances across the province of British Columbia in the 1960s and 1970s, the two artists sought to capture a transitional moment within many aboriginal communities. Somewhere Between focuses attention on three parallel subject matters depicted in these two artists’ work: moments of candor and the everyday that exist parallel to official ceremonies between aboriginal and settler culture, portraits of native elders in the act of creating arts and crafts, and ‘village-scapes’ where ancient art forms are shown coexisting with the structures of modern life. Sjolseth and Carter’s work highlights a key moment for a diverse set of cultures in British Columbia, making evident aboriginal peoples’ survival and rebirth to a larger Canadian public whose image of First Peoples had been formed from popular media. Addressing the space between modernity and antiquity, the exhibition simultaneously questions the critical boundaries between the document and the work of art.
POP PRINTS
Pierre Ayot // Iain Baxter // Peter Blake // Patrick Caulfield // Greg Curnoe // Jim Dine // General Idea // Betty Goodwin // Richard Hamilton // David Hockney // Robert Indiana // Jasper Johns / Allen Jones // Alex Katz // Ronald Kitaj // Gary Lee-Nova // Roy Lichtenstein // Michael Morris // David Mayrs // N.E. Thing Co. // Claes Oldenburg // Robert Rauschenberg // Michael Snow // Joe Tilson // Andy Warhol // Tom Wesselmann // Joyce Wieland
Central Gallery
January 18 to March 22, 2009
Known for its revolutionary collapsing of the boundaries between high and low culture, the array of 1960s artworks that we have come to know as Pop Art has fundamentally changed how we think about art today. The new wave of 1960s artists borrowed from the bold graphic style, bright chromatic colours, and “new era” imagery associated with mid-twentieth century advertising and product design. The manner in which this exciting new universe of promotional pictures translated across television, magazines, and the built environment inspired a generation of artists to abandon expressive forms of art making and instead mimic and adapt these new languages of convenience, sensationalism, and glamour to develop new approaches to picture making.
CELEBRITIES OF THE SELF
Tim Lee // Michael Markowsky // Shannon Oksanen // Kathy Slade // Dan Starling // Althea Thauberger // Weekend Leisure
Central Gallery
January 18 to March 22, 2009
In a world of high-speed file sharing and endless “top ranked” still and moving images, the 15 minutes of fame that Andy Warhol once promised us may have arrived in democratic spirit, but it has done so in a fleeting way that even he could not have anticipated. At this moment of the instantaneous star, today’s visual artists are re-examining the notion of celebrity and the iconic moments of the past through the changing visual habits of the present. The exhibition Celebrities of the Self presents artworks in which the self is constantly under a process of redefinition through the picturing of famous and/or notorious individuals. The exhibition features a variety of artworks that represent figures, personas and icons of popular media history in a manner that foregrounds the role that digital reproduction plays in the intense subjectivity of the fan. The exhibition includes work by Tim Lee, Michael Markowsky, Shannon Oksanen, Kathy Slade, Dan Starling, Althea Thauberger, and Weekend Leisure.
REAL LIFE AND LANDSCAPES
Isao Sanami/Morrill
Central Gallery
October 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009
For many years, Isao Sanami/Morrill lived in Coldstream, near Vernon, where she made ceramics, painted, and grew organic vegetables. This exhibition brings together over twenty of her watercolour paintings and pastel drawings for the first time in Kamloops.
DRAWING WATER
Patrick Mahon
Central Gallery
October 19, 2008 to January 4, 2009
Patrick Mahon's new series of drawings and sculptures, entitledA Book of the River, displays networks of lines and arabesques that describe the movement of water and invoke conditions of environmental and psychological turbulence and unrest. The artist has adapted his work from a series of engravings by J.M.W. Turner, originally compiled in the book Rivers of France(1837). Mahon generates elaborate “nets” of printed lines that propose a poetic and “structural” order to the life-sustaining presence of rivers.
THE DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS OF DAPHNE ODJIG: A RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION
Daphne Odjig
Central Gallery
June 8 to August 31, 2008
Daphne Odjig was instrumental, along with a handful of Anishnabe artists in the 1960s, in bringing to public prominence the pictorial style of the Algonkian painters of Northern Ontario. This exhibition is the first major touring survey of her drawings and paintings since the Art Gallery of Thunder Bay organized a retrospective exhibition in 1985. The Kamloops Art Gallery produced and hosted a very successful survey of her prints from the last four decades in the summer of 2005, and the exhibition is touring until 2008.
RHONDA WEPPLER AND TREVOR MAHOVSKY
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky
Central Gallery
March 30 to May 25, 2008
Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky are a Vancouver-based artist-duo, and among the most exciting young artists to emerge in Canada in the last decade. Although they have been working together since only 2004, they have already exhibited their work extensively across the country and internationally, in Vancouver, Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, Nagoya, Berlin, Tokyo, Portland, and elsewhere. Sculptors Weppler and Mahovsky are known for the playful and unsettling ways they transform everyday objects, such as styrene coffee cups, tin cans, cars, pop bottles, and other hallmarks of the everyday. Their work, conflicted in its relationship to a world of things, draws from both minimalist and Pop histories, while displaying a distinctly contemporary critical conceptualism.
THE END IS MY BEGINNING
Gary Pearson
Central Gallery
March 30 to May 25, 2008
The Kamloops Art Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Gary Pearson, one of British Columbia’s most dynamic contemporary painters. The End is My Beginning features new paintings and works from the last half decade. It is Pearson’s first solo exhibition in Kamloops.
ART AND SOCIETY IN CANADA 1913-1950
Lawren Harris // AY Jackson // Jean Paul Riopelle // Paul Emile Borduas
Central Gallery
January 20 to March 16, 2008
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada. Presentation of this exhibition in Kamloops is made possible in part through a grant from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage and with support from the Mapping Quality of Life and the Cultural Future of Small Cities CURA, a community-university research alliance sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
AT HOME IN OUR OWN COUNTRY: GROUP OF SEVEN WORKS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
A.Y. Jackson // Fred Varley // Arthur Lismer // Franklin Carmichael
Central Gallery
January 20 to March 16, 2008
To complement the feature exhibition, Art and Society, the Gallery’s curatorial staff has selected several delightful works by Group of Seven members A.Y. Jackson, Fred Varley, Arthur Lismer, and Franklin Carmichael for display in the north corridor. All the works are from the Kamloops Art Gallery’s permanent collection, and represent the beautiful landscapes of Interior British Columbia and Ontario. “The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country,” wrote the members of the Group of Seven. This intimate exhibition takes a look at our own home through the eyes of four of Canada’s most famous artists.