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.
BOPPIN’ WITH MR. MYNAH
Alex Forbes // Tina Moore // Tricia Sellmer // Henry Small
The Cube
March 7 to April 26, 2009
The exhibition follows a boppin’ bird, Mr. Mynah, as he takes in some baseball, surprises the pizza man, dances at his favourite jazz bar and jumps in to join the band. The tale is fun and whimsical, but watch out, Mr. Mynah may steal your watch and make his getaway in his red convertible. Alex Forbes’ poem chronicles the adventures of Mr. Mynah alongside Tricia Sellmer’s paintings. The music of Henry Small and the voice of Tina Moore enrich the experience in The Cube. A catalogue of the exhibition is available in The Gallery Store.
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.
MOD POP
Kamloops Printmakers
The Cube
January 17 to March 1, 2009
Responding to a retrospective of pop culture’s greatest practitioners poses an interesting problem for contemporary artists, and the Kamloops Printmakers have enthusiastically taken up the challenge in this group exhibition. If the Pop art movement of the 1950s and 60s was fuelled by a fascination with media and the proliferation of repetitive images in consumer advertising, then it is equally true that artists working in the first decade of the 21st century are no less affected by the culture of global mass media and marketing. We need look no further than our TVs, computer monitors and PDA devices to find an ever-deepening archive of images and sound bytes to serve as source materials. Just as Pop artists adapted and co-opted the bold graphic language of commercial print technologies of the mid-20th century, so today’s print artists increasingly choose commercially-driven digital processes and image manipulation and combine them with traditional print technologies to navigate the signs and symbols of our own time.
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.
DAY OF THE DEAD
Bernadette Mertens-McAllister
The Cube
September 13 to November 2, 2008
As the title suggests, Bernadette Mertens-McAllister explores the idea of death in works that combine paintings and photographs. Based on different encounters with aspects of death in Canada and Mexico, her approach, through the use of a vibrant palette and touches of humour, is surprisingly uplifting. She creates a series within Day of the Dead that deals with her own fight with cancer. In this series, rather than examining the inevitability of death, she looks at healing and the celebration of life.
CURATOR’S CHOICE
Nelina Magliochi // Zachary Pinette // Jana Sasaki
The Cube
July 26 to September 7, 2008
This summer marks the fourth annual exhibition in the Cube of work by students graduating from Thompson Rivers University. Selected by Kamloops Art Gallery Assistant Curator Craig Willms, Curator’s Choice highlights some of the talent from TRU’s Bachelor of Fine Arts 2008 graduating class. Students at TRU graduate with a wide variety of specialties, including ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, painting, photography, and installation. Like previous Curator’s Choice exhibitions, this one is not so much a “best of” show, but one that is united by thematic and aesthetic threads running through the work of these emerging artists.
BRUSHES ON WHEELS
Terry Kirkpatrick
The Cube
June 8 to July 20, 2008
Since becoming partially disabled in 1991, Terry Kirkpatrick has completed accounting and computer courses at Thompson Rivers University and received an Art Diploma from Stratford Career Institute in 2002. He creates works in pencil crayon, pastel, watercolour, acrylic, and oil paint. His work has been displayed at Art in the Park at Riverside Park. Kirkpatrick’s images are drawn from First Peoples iconography, his friends and personal experiences.
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.
CLOSE TO HOME AND FAR AWAY
Charlotte Kinzie
The Cube
April 19 to May 25, 2008
Charlotte Kinzie is a photographer who captures her surroundings with an eye open to new experiences. An avid traveller, she photographs the far-away and the close-to-home. As good as she is at transporting viewers to far off lands in her travel photographs, her ability to translate local scenes into something new is also impressive. She was voted Victoria’s Favourite Photographer of 2004, and Victoria’s news weekly Monday Magazine stated that she is the kind of photographer who is able “to turn ordinary moments into memorable works of art.” Now back in Kamloops, she presents a mixture of some of her most compelling colour photographs.
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.
FROM THE BRUSHES OF BARRIERE
Yellowhead Artists’ Co-operative: Yellowhead Artists’ Co-operative: Marge Mitchell // Shirley Kristensen // Wayne Broomfield // Robert Bambrick // Jean Cartier
The Cube
March 1 to April 13, 2008
The exhibition features work by Barriere’s Yellowhead Artists’ Co-operative. Meeting once a week to paint in studio or en plein air, Marge Mitchell, Shirley Kristensen, Wayne Broomfield, Robert Bambrick, and Jean Cartier have formed a tightly knit unit to provide each other criticism, support, and camaraderie. In this exhibition, the five members exhibit some of their finest works, including oil and watercolour paintings, sculpture, and scrimshaw. Representing life in the North Thompson Valley, the exhibition is rich in landscape views and images of life on the ranch. The exhibition coincides with The Kamloops Cowboy Festival, which runs March 7 to 9, 2008.
SHAZAM! BREAKING OUT OF THE BOX
Laura Bittante // Martin Tuba // Andrew Enpaauk Dexel // Randall Eustache
The Cube
January 20 to February 24, 2008
Shazam! Breaking out of the Box is an exhibition of locally produced art that breaks out of the moulds that separate fine art from commercial art. Inspired by popular culture, artists Laura Bittante, Martin Tuba, Andrew Enpaauk Dexel and Randall Eustache have created an array of contemporary artworks inspired by mass culture, particularly cartoons and animation. A fun and inspiring exhibition, Shazam! is an exploration of the “highs” and “lows” of pop art by artists from our region.
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.
CONTEMPORARY CURIOSITIES: ODD OBJECTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
Taiga Chiba // Jack Jeffrey // Liz Magor // Dianne Michel // Ros Eldridge // Andrew Atagootak // Attila Richard Lukacs // Eldon Garnet // Raymond Dupuis // Alan Wood
Central Gallery
October 28 to December 31, 2007
This exhibition features a selection of artworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection, all of which share a certain lack of recognisability—or at least a very surprising form! Included are recent additions to the collection by British Columbian artists, such as Taiga Chiba's sumi-e paintings of prehistoric life forms, misshapen "chocks" by Jack Jeffrey, and mittens mysteriously stuffed with cigarettes by Liz Magor. Other works in the exhibition have not emerged from storage for a decade or more, including extraordinary wall hangings from the 1970s by Dianne Michel and Ros Eldridge. These works join an improbable cribbage board by Andrew Atagootak, portraits of hanging beef carcasses by Attila Richard Lukacs, evocative photographs of dead matter by Eldon Garnet, and eccentric assemblages by Raymond Dupuis and Alan Wood. Contemporary Curiosities celebrates the ambiguous, the mysterious, the playful, and the downright weird in contemporary Canadian art.