Homecoming Alumni Exhibition

The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies is please to host an exhibition of recent works by selected BFA and MFA alumni as part of Homecoming 2018.

Artists in the exhibition include Dylan Ranney (BFA 2012); Heather Leier (BFA 2012), Carin Covin (BFA 2003, MFA 2010); and Christian Nicolay (BFA 2001).

The exhibition will be on display in the FINA Gallery at the UBC Okanagan Campus from October 15th to 26^th.

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Carin Covin is a drawer and a painter, her current research interests are in the intersection of creative writing and visual language.

Heather Leier is an artist and Assistant Professor based in Calgary. Her printmaking and installation work has been exhibited in many national and international exhibitions.

Christian Nicolay is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver BC. His diverse body of work employs a wide range of media and techniques including drawing, painting, sculpture, video, sound, performance and installation – to create works that explore themes of paradox, politics, social activity, cultural identity and the origins of things.

Dylan Ranney is an oil painter, sculptor, and drummer. With the combined mentorship of painter Shawn Serfas, and local sculptor Byron Johnston, Dylan found a voice in both mediums and enjoys inventing new ways to engage people with his work.

Carin Covin | Lengths and Spools

Lengths and Spools explore the gendered politics of the everyday. My gaze was redirected to these ideas by the printmaker Laura Widmer, who introduced me to Bronwen Wallace, the late Canadian Poet and Feminist thinker, writer and scholar[i].

These works exhibited here resulted from a collaboration with Widmer, when we worked towards a project titled “Pulp Fiction Paper Jam[ii]”, and this research came out of prior exhibitions[iii] that we have worked together on. Widmer has been investigating paper and the making of paper over the last five years and much of the work here is a result of repurposing sheets of her handmade paper, made from cotton clothing and harvested fibres from her garden.

Bronwen Wallace wrote and worked during the 1970’s and the 1980’s, and her feminist writings and poetry is placed within the second wave of Feminist ideas. In a published correspondence with Erin Mouré[iv], Wallace articulates her personal and professional frustration regarding the limits of Academic discourse and the limits of Deconstructionist’s theoretical ideas with regards to anything and anybody outside of the Western European Male lens.

Through reading Wallace’s works and ideas, I was re-directed and re-acquainted with the ideas of the politics of the everyday, the repetitive and ritualistic work of frequently performed tasks. These are not new Feminist tropes, however, the politics of the everyday continue to affect the quality of our lives in this busy 21^st Century. Wallace was intent on framing Feminist thought as a relocation, insisting that Feminism was for all of us and our families.

[i] Bronwen Wallace was born in 1945 in Kingston, Ontario. She died of cancer in 1989.

[ii]“Pulp Fiction Paper Jam” was an investigation of the ritualistic aspects of women’s work – the objects and persons that women attend to, the dishes in the sink lit by a passing storm, the dust that settles upon a crocheted lace, the tabloids one reads while waiting in the checkout line at the store, the grandmothers and grandchildren surrounding the table at mid-day- our exhibition was a visual poem dedicated to Bronwen Wallace.

[iii] Our first collaboration was my curatorial project titled “Local(i)ty” in 2015, which discussed the work of Nora Curiston, Brenda Feist and Laura Widmer. This project was exhibited in Gallery 2, Grand Forks Art Gallery in 2016 as “Local(i)ty 2”, and in 2017 was exhibited in Headbones Gallery, Vernon in 2017 as “Local(i)ty 3”. http://localityproject.weebly.com

[iv]“Two Women Talking Correspondence 1985-1987” was published in 1994.

Length IV – (for the bells that still can ring) by Carin Covin

Detail of Length IV – (for the bells that still can ring) by Carin Covin

Cyano Length II
Knitted Widmer cyanotype paper 14 x 15 inches
2018

Cyano Length I
Knitted Widmer cyanotype paper
13.5 x 12 inches
2018

Length Ill -(for Carroll)
Knitted Widmer Paper 25 x 42 inches
2018

Spooled Widmer and Stonehenge Paper 10 x 16 inches
2017

Heather Leier | Young Lady

Through the consideration of traumatic experience as unrelenting, Young Lady is a portfolio of works centred on two coping mechanisms I continually employ: looking down and projecting happiness outward. By recording my experience negotiating public space through writing and gathering objects and ephemera I see while looking down, I have developed an archive of material in which these prints are derived.

By pairing collected items and internal utterances with celebratory imagery, I am creating visual and conceptual relationships between internal struggles and outward projections of joy and am asking what goes unnoticed and unattended to when we are merely coping.

Ironically titled, Young Lady, this work suggests the consideration of the depreciating language we use to frame our complex identities and the subtle ways in which this continually oppresses.

the numbness starts in my baby toes
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

prepare
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

it was the only think I could do
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

I wonder if anybody knows
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

he overstayed his welcome
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

that I didn’t really want it at all
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

go back
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

we protected his horns with sponges
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

it was the only think I could do
Inkjet, chine-colle, screenprint
14 x 18 inches
2017

Christian Nicolay | The Day Job

The Day Job started in 2003, this is the first excerpt from hundreds of hours of footage over the years. What started out as a day job has now become part of my routine, hiding art in hard to find places. To notice the unnoticeable, to look where no one does, like a quasi-archeological expedition of absurdity and truth, quixotic adventures of surprise and play. Remember, whatever you are looking at is just the surface layer. Peel it like an onion and see what you can find.

(First excerpt, 2016)
Single channel video
06:56 min
2003 – Ongoing

Dylan Ranney | Homecoming 2018

Homecoming is a series of self-critical visual musings. I would love to leave them mostly open to interpretation, however I can provide pieces of context, fragmented as the sketchbook thoughts therein derived: A study of the psychological state of a try-hard artist and charismatic intellect descended from his moral high ground. A memory of Jerusalem- the ramblings of a holy-rolling prophet of God self-assured of his significance; the hint of a disturbing question. The longing for familial connection when you find yourself performing on the road for weeks; the struggle within. These struggles are connected by the pathways paved around ‘higher education’ and the conclusive realization of a world with no answers. What questions will we dare to ask?

Homecoming #1 – Come Down From the Mountains by Dylan Ranney