Originally from Québec City, Samuel Roy-Bois is based in the Okanagan, where he is assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus and heads an interdisciplinary lab for creative exchange The Research Studio for Spaces and Things. Roy-Bois’ artistic practice involves site-specific installations concerned with the conceptual and material definition of space and the ways the built environment contributes to our understanding of the world. Through sculpture, photography and installation, Roy-Bois examines the relational network of objects and their historical resonance: How do we define ourselves through the creation of structures? Is it possible to conceive of one’s existence outside any material linkage? We make things, but are things making us?

In his 2013 to 2015 touring exhibition Not a new world, just an old trick, Roy Bois built a large-scale model of an art gallery inside an art gallery to house objects from the collections of various art institutions, selected by the artist, as a site to question the value and role of the objects populating an institutional collection. He has also created an interactive soundproof rehearsal space, Ugly Today, Beautiful Tomorrow, 2009, within the Vancouver Art Gallery, equipped with drums, a bass, two guitars and amplifiers, all of which visitors were invited to play. The sound from this space was then piped into the gallery’s lobby. In a more recent project looking at the effect of architecture on collective memory, La pyramide, Roy-Bois reconstructed the previous architectural footprint of the artist run centre Œil de Poisson before it moved into its current location 20 years ago and invited two artists to invite two artists and so on, until 175 artists contributed artwork to fill the space in a kind of artistic Ponzi scheme. In these projects Roy-Bois foregrounds the role of the viewer by shifting the focus away from the object and bringing attention to the gallery context.

For his new body of work at the Kamloops Art Gallery, Roy-Bois has created an ensemble of constructed and found objects that consider our contemporary material knowledge. His architectural structures act as vessels for everyday objects, pointing to the ways in which human experience is inextricably linked to manufactured things and spaces and how the greater meaning of our existence is mediated through things. Referencing what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality,” a mode of existence based on the mediated real where fiction and non-fiction are indistinguishable, Roy Bois’ sculptures and photographs of momentary sculptures that exist only long enough to document, reveal our tenuous relationship with the real. Through improvisational sculptures that re-present everyday objects in new ways, Roy-Bois’ practice works within an economy of means, blurring the boundaries between art and life and shifting ordinary objects and spaces into a poetic dimension – potentially shifting the viewer’s perception.

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.

Kalynka works with the etching process, using large copper plates to depict life-sized scythes as stand-ins for each of the oldest daughters in three generations of her family. The scythe is an implement of labour used by both Kalynka’s grandmothers on farms in their home country of Ukraine and in northern Saskatchewan, where her family settled. As the eldest children, each woman in the family was expected to make sacrifices in order to take care of the younger siblings and to take responsibility for chores on the family farm. Education was sometimes foregone so these women could contribute to the family and their way of life.

Featuring a key symbol of this experience, Kaylnka’s project is intended as a celebration, acknowledging the sacrifices of these women and emphasizing the connection that runs through the three generations.

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He lives and works in Vancouver and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. This exhibition brings together key works made by Hannah in the past decade that focus on his enduring interest in the photographic image in relation to personal and social histories.

Hannah’s work uses intertwined modes of expression (photography, video, installation and performance) to generate the still image. His videos are presented in a fixed manner and from a frontal perspective, with scenes skillfully constructed and orchestrated by the artist in which participants, whose gestures are fixed without being totally immobile, take part in various activities staged by the artist. Often developing his projects over numerous months or years, doing intensive research and working with large groups of participants through community workshops, Hannah’s staged images draw on references ranging from celebrated historical paintings and sculptures to everyday lives.

Temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s work. He consistently diversifies the means of animating a fixed image, beginning with capturing a pose on video that is held momentarily by the vacillating bodies. Hannah's “living pictures” play with the fascinated and attentive eye of the spectator. In recent work, the artist has endeavoured to generate the illusion of movement by taking a multitude of photographs of a body in action in order to successively articulate all the phases, reminiscent of the chronophotography of artist Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904).

This exhibition brings together key themes that define the narrative of Hannah’s artistic practice: Mirroring the Museum, Reflections of Artworks and Lives Captured. In these varied bodies of work Hannah explores seriality, repetition, recovery, duplication, reflection, the copy and visual citation.

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.

The artists' imagery and texts are generated primarily through a call and response approach wherein paintings and drawings serve as the catalyst for the text. Writing has become increasingly the focus for the two artists; they often generate multiple texts before deciding on the final work. Using humour as a key device, the result of this collaborative process is a fusion of imagery and text layered with absurd narratives and dark humour. Their work is influenced by Surrealist language and methodologies, and often utilizes word play in reference to pop culture, past and present. Through their democratic approach to art making, the artists invite opportunity for open creative possibilities based on extensive dialogue.

The exhibition, I wasn’t paying attention and now it’s over, features Dumontier and Farber’s collaborative paintings and small print editions, as well as their ongoing series of Library paintings and Typing editions. The Library paintings began in 2009 and consist of thousands of book paintings that continue to grow with every exhibition. Book covers and spines reveal fictional titles displayed in a large grid, consisting of a vast collection of questions, absurd phrases and punchlines. The viewing experience is similar to perusing the shelves of a wall-sized library.

The Typing series consists of two different prints, one featuring a woman and the other featuring a man, seated in front of a typewriter with a large blank page encompassing most of the frame. The print is then put through a typewriter where the artists write letters and captions and create typed imagery. Typical of their collaborative practice as a whole, these projects generously open up to the input and output of each artist.