RE PRESENT: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM SOUTH ASIA
Anonymous 19th Century Photographers // Felice Beato // Samuel Bourne // John Burke // Raja Deen Dayal // Nandan Ghiya // Alexander Gorlizki and Riyaz Uddin Studio // Sunil Gupta // Panchal Mansaram // Annu Palakunnathu Matthew // Adolf de Meyer // Nandini Valli Muthiah // Zinnia Naqvi // Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni // D. Nusserwanji // Raqs Media Collective // Ghasiram Haradev Sharma // Dayanita Singh // Pamela Singh // Vivan Sundaram // Linneaus Tripe
Central Gallery
January 19 to March 31, 2018
Curated by Adrienne Fast, Interim Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
Re Present: Photography from South Asia is a landmark exhibition, the first of its kind in Western Canada to present a diverse range of the rich and varied histories of photographic media from the Indian subcontinent.
SINCE THEN
Rebecca Belmore // Dana Claxton // Leah Decter // Demian Dinéyazhi' // Mark Emerak // Cliff Eyland // Félix González-Torres // Helga Jakobson // Garry Neill Kennedy // Janet Kigusiuq // Cheryl L'Hirondelle // Kent Monkman // Peter Morin // Lisa Myers // Jude Norris // Rúrí // Justin Sorensen // Derek Sullivan // Ione Thorkelsson // Rachael Thorleifson // Chih-Chien Wang // Christopher Wool
Central Gallery
September 23 to December 30, 2017
Curated by Kegan McFadden
Postulating what the future might hold, this exhibition looks to histories of survival as a starting point for a conversation about the possibilities of endurance, cross-cultural exchange and legacy. By looking at artwork that depicts survival, that alludes to hybridity and transformation, and that carries with it the physical markers of distress as part of their conceptual make-up, Since Then challenges preconceived notions of what it is to endure from both a historical and a contemporary point of view.
ALTERNATION
Roy Arden // Rebecca Belmore // Edward Burtynsky // Wally Dion // Aganetha Dyck // Farheen HaQ // Alex Janvier // Komar and Melamid // Eileen Leier // Glenn Lewis // Ken Lum // Divya Mehra // Daphne Odjig // Jana Sasaki // Henry Speck // Takao Tanabe // Joyce Weiland // Tania Willard // Jin-me Yoon // Sharyn Yuen
Central Gallery
July 15 to September 9, 2017
Curated by Adrienne Fast, Interim Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, an event that is being met by a wide spectrum of responses that range from sincere celebration to profound ambivalence and thoughtfully considered refusal. Many people have noted that 1867 is an arbitrary choice for the origin of the country: only Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were then united by the British North America Act, while other histories of nations that have inhabited this land extend tens of thousands of years further back in history…
CANADIAN VISIONARY
Lawren Harris
Central Gallery
July 15 to September 9, 2017
Curated by Ian M. Thom, Senior Curator–Historical, Vancouver Art Gallery
Through both his life and work Harris helped establish an identity for Canadian art. He not only saw the artistic and cultural potential of this country, but also made works that have helped to define the very identity of Canada. Furthermore, he had the courage to take his own art into the realm of abstraction at a time when most of the public was unwilling to follow.
KIDS THESE DAYS
Jo-Anne Balcaen // Sarah Febbraro // Kerri Flannigan // Emmanuelle Léonard // Kyla Mallett // Helen Reed // Guillaume Simoneau
Central Gallery
April 8 to July 1, 2017
Curated by Zoë Chan
In contemporary North America, youth is commonly understood as the period after childhood when young people learn life skills and explore their identities in preparation for impending adulthood, within the formative, protective structures of family and school. This view of youth, however, is a relatively recent one and stands as a distinguishing feature of modernity in the Western world. Many pervasive ideas about youth come from psychology, anthropology and sociology—fields that came to the fore in the twentieth century. Within the social sciences, young people became a category to be studied, understood and conceptualized. In the wake of such theorizing, notions of youth have become persistently linked to wildness, authenticity, freedom and idealism—seductive qualities that have been cast as both dangerous and desirable.
SUPERYOUNG
Cooper Battersby // Mark Clintberg // Emily Vey Duke // Sarah Gotowka // Emily Gove // Terrance Houle // Roselina Hung // Sarah Anne Johnson // Jenny Lin // Hazel Meyer // Marc-Antoine K. Phaneuf // Walter Scott
Central Gallery
April 8 to July 1, 2017
Curated by Zoë Chan
The category of youth is not a straightforward one. Beyond its designation of the stage of life between childhood and adulthood, it encompasses a complex multifaceted “imaginary”—one that is rich in analogous associations and imagery. In its most negative light, youth is denigrated as the incarnation of debauchery and excess, but in its most positive light, youth is idealized as the embodiment of pre-socialized authenticity, unbridled potential, creativity and freedom. The celebratory virtues typically associated with youth strikingly correspond with those sought after by many artists within their own art practices.
BECOMING ANIMAL/BECOMING LANDSCAPE: FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE MORRIS AND HELEN BELKIN ART GALLERY
Claude Breeze // Geneviève Cadieux // Emily Carr // Geoffrey Farmer // Russell FitzGerald // Lawren Harris // Donald Jarvis // Glenn Ligon // Attila Richard Lukacs // Ron Martin // Gordon Payne // Margaret Peterson // Jerry Pethick // Marina Roy // Rudolf Schwarzkogler // Jack Shadbolt // Corin Sworn // Elizabeth Vander Zaag // Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun // William Woollett
Central Gallery
January 14 to March 25, 2017
Curated by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
Becoming Animal/Becoming Landscape looks at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s collection through the lens of today’s “post-humanist” discourse that questions the singularity and primacy of man, which has been the dominant view in the West since the Renaissance. At a time of impending catastrophe caused by the change in climate provoked by human activity, some say we now live in a geological age called the Anthropocene—the era when human activity has transformed the global climate. It is perhaps ironic that at this juncture, progressive scholars have come to question a basic assumption of the modern West, that man is the measure of all things.
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.
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.
SHOOTING THE SUN/SPLITTING THE PIE
Jerry Pethick
Central Gallery
July 2 to September 10, 2016
Curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery
Over the course of a career that spanned almost five decades, Jerry Pethick (1935–2003) produced a complex and multifaceted body of work that is difficult to classify. For much of this time he focused on the way in which models of observation – including linear perspective and cultural memory – shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. Through an extended emphasis on an object’s entanglement with its surroundings and the viewer’s consciousness, Pethick challenged culturally determined ways of perceiving space and the related separation of observer and object that has occupied a central position in Western thought since the 18th century.
A LIFE IN THE ARTS
Hugh Hanson Davidson
Central Gallery
April 2 to June 18, 2016
Curated by Roger H. Boulet, Historical Canadian Art, Kamloops Art Gallery
In 2014, the Kamloops Art Gallery received a bequest of works of art from the private collection of Hugh Hanson Davidson (1930-2014). Davidson was a generous benefactor to the Gallery. He donated a number of works in 1998, as well as his library of art books. The Gallery celebrated Davidson and his gift at a special reception in 2002, naming its library the Hugh Hanson Davidson Library. It was always Davidson’s intention to bequeath to the Gallery what remained in his collection, which he amassed over many decades.
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.
OUT OF SIGHT
Harold E. Edgerton // Eadweard Muybridge
Central Gallery
January 16 to March 19, 2016
Curated by Stephanie Rebick, Vancouver Art Gallery
Out of Sight features a selection of photographs recently acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery by Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and Harold Edgerton (1903-1990). Both artists are celebrated for their revolutionary works that expand our understanding of time and motion and extend the capacity of human perception by making time stand still. While time can be measured and evaluated, it also has a profound subjective dimension; how the passage of time is understood and felt is the product of individual experience, making its perception fluid, malleable and subject to interpretation. Both of these artists continually mined this rich terrain – how time can be represented and perceived – by manipulating and distorting the ways in which time functions to challenge our accepted views and preconceived notions.
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.
CUSTOM MADE / TSITSLEM TE STEM TE CK'ULTENS-KUC
Elizabeth Nutaraluk Aulatjut // Rebecca Belmore // Hannah Claus // Wally Dion // Phil Gray // Maggie Groat // Maureen Gruben // Gabrielle Hill // Merritt Johnson // Ursula Johnson // Brian Jungen // Bev Koski // Mike MacDonald // Amy Malbeuf // Divya Mehra // Peter Morin // Nadia Myre // Jeneen Frei Njootli // Wendy Red Star // Charlene Vickers
Central Gallery
June 27 to September 12, 2015
Curated by Kamloops Art Gallery, Canada Council Aboriginal Curator in Residence, Tania Willard
CUSTOM MADE / Tsitslem te stem te ck'ultens-kuc focuses on artists referencing skills-based artistic production within a contemporary and transformative context. The exhibition explores the ways in which artists are manipulating, transposing and re-learning skills-based arts like beadwork and basketry and how they are relating these skills to cultural heritage, new materials, concepts and techniques. CUSTOM MADE frames a dialogue between artists whose works cross boundaries, challenging and conflating binaries of art and craft, both contemporary and traditional.
MORE THAN VISIBLE: PHOTOGRAPHY, ECOLOGY + CONTACT CULTURE IN THE SALISHAN LANDSCAPE TSLEX TE SK’ULT.S TE TMICW
Central Gallery
June 27 to September 12, 2015
Curated by CAUSA / Collective for Advanced and Unified Studies in the Visual Arts
Prior to disruptive contact with colonial educators, the First Peoples of North America did not distinguish between craft and fine art. Traditionally, expressions of material and spiritual culture were grounded and conjoined in a concentric network of relationships that fluently linked language to place – place to placement – and placement to purpose. In this context, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company completed its transcontinental line in 1885. From Banff, Alberta to Kamloops, British Columbia (and onwards from Kamloops to Vancouver), the railway would subsequently connect each of the Interior and Coast Salish territories.
IDEAS & THINGS
Jen Aitken // Hadley+Maxwell // Kelly Lycan // Mark Neufeld // Derek Sullivan
Central Gallery
March 28 to June 13, 2015
Curated by Charo Neville
“The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. And, yet, the word things holds within it a more audacious ambiguity.”
HOUSEWORK(S)
Pam Hall
Central Gallery
January 17 to March 14, 2015
Curated by Dr. Melinda Pinfold
Pam Hall is an interdisciplinary artist working across and sometimes in between the boundaries of medium and discipline. She makes visual art, constructs installations, works with language and is engaged in film, video and, most recently, performance. She works alone (inside and outside of her studios) and collaborates with others (sometimes individuals, sometimes communities). Based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, she travels extensively to pursue the creation and presentation of her work. She also teaches graduate students in the United States. Her work has been shown throughout Canada and internationally.
SHUNT
Khan Lee
Central Gallery
October 18 to December 31, 2014
Curated by Charo Neville, Kamloops Art Gallery
Khan Lee’s video Shunt focuses on the iconic image and sound of a freight train—a feature of the local landscape that is steeped in Canada’s growth as a nation and that resonates locally on many levels, as a key source of employment and a constant sign of the movement of goods. In relation to A Terrible Beauty: Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr, Shuntcontributes to an ongoing dialogue about the sublime and industrialized landscape. To be viewed and heard inside and outside the Gallery, the work was produced as part of Luminocity, a week-long public art project featuring video projection, new media works and events in public spaces throughout downtown Kamloops.
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY
Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr
Central Gallery
October 18 to December 31, 2014
Curated by Bruce Grenville, Vancouver Art Gallery
A Terrible Beauty offers a selection of photographs by Toronto-based photographer Edward Burtynsky, who is internationally renowned for his captivating images of natural and built environments that reflect both the impressive reach of human enterprise and the extraordinary impact of our hubris. Produced between 1983 and 2013, the photographs in A Terrible Beauty together represent all of his major bodies of work, from his early series of homestead photographs shot in British Columbia in the 1980s to his new, groundbreaking project on the subject of water and its fundamental place in the world ecology.