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Erin Scott // 9/3

This three channel exhibition by Erin Scott is being shown at the Alternator Gallery.

https://www.alternatorcentre.com/events/9/3-erin-scott

Erin Scott is a poet, performer, and UBCO PhD candidate living on the unceded territory of the syil’x/Okanagan Peoples (Kelowna, BC).

9/3 consists of nine videopoems across three projectors. These poems represent an exchange between the artist’s life and art, playing on voyeurism, spectacle, intimacy, and feminism. Through an interactive, old-school overhead projector, the visiting guests are invited to add their own words, drawings, ideas, and languages to the exhibition.

In addition to being a student at UBC Okanagan, Erin also works as Co-Executive Director of Inspired Word Café, a community literary-arts nonprofit organization. Her research and artistic work focus on community art practice, humour, motherhood, and identity.

 

In Search of Lost Memories by Ziv Wei

Ziv Wei is a fourth year BFA student. In this exhibition, In Search of Lost Memories In Search of Lost Memories, Ziv deconstructs and reimagines nostalgia by providing new contexts for found vernacular family photos and frames.

This exhibition is on view in the Members’ Gallery of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art until February 10, 2024.

For more information please visit the show in person or at the Alternator’s page.

Wander // Katya Meehalchan

Katya Meehalchan is a UBC BFA graduate. This work of hers is being shown at the Member’s Gallery of the Alternator Gallery, to

www.alternatorcentre.com

Meehalchan’s work captivates through its interplay of mediums. Her prints evoke a sense of nostalgia, bridging the past and present, while her multimedia collages challenge the boundaries of traditional artistic forms. Her installations immerse viewers in thought provoking environments, inviting them to engage with her narrative in a tangible way.

Meehalchan seeks to create an environment packed with delicate details that allows for many access points for the viewer to relate to through the sense of nostalgia or curiosity. Her work is representative of the feeling of going through a vintage store, or estate sale and experiencing a sense of wonder or curiosity that lies in objects that hold a personalized history.

On Exhibit at the RCA: Selected Works

Selected works from Patrick Lundeen advanced painting class (VISA 312) are featured at theThe Rotary Centre for the Arts!

On exhibition are works from:
Serena Arsenault
Taylor Carpenter
Paige Coleman
Ella Cottier
Nadia Fracy
Hailey Gleboff
Stephen Ikesaka
Lauren Johnson
Rhea Kjargaard
Connor McCleary
Mariah Miguel-Juan
Kate Nicholson
Damla Ozkalay
Hannah Palomera
John (Jack) Prendas
Sara Richardson
Fredrik Thacker
Christine Wakal
Odelle Walthers

 

Chloe Chang – 4th Year Bachelor of Media Studies Student

The Distance in Heart is a video installation in Chloe’s apartment. It is formed by 4 cubes of furniture and an external speaker. Videos, animation and text are projected onto the cubes in a controlled order. The duration of the whole performance is less than 4 minutes, but designed to be played as a loop.

Chloe Chang

Intro to Video Production

The course is an Intro to Video Production class. Students learned various fundamentals of aesthetics (composition, shot types, lighting, etc), as well as technical and editing skills this term through several exercises and one large project. These videos were their large/final projects, and were fairly open-ended in that they could explore any topic or theme they wanted. The requirements were that the final videos had to be between 3 and 5 minutes in length, include a title and credit screen, use at least some diegetic sound, and be composed of a minimum 75% original material created by the student for this assignment. Any music and archival material had to be utilized from approved creative commons sources, and credit provided. Other than that, students got to make the video of their choice: narrative/fiction, documentary, experimental/artist’s video, music video, or a hybrid of these forms. They all came up with their own ideas and shooting plans, edited it all themselves, and many of them were shooting with iPhones.

ZIRAK – A shadow puppet production by Karina Nardi

 

PLAYBACK by Maura Tamez

 

DEPRESSIVE EPISODES by Josie Hillman

 

ISOLATION by AmandaMcIvor

YOKE

YOKE is a multi-disciplinary show gathering recent works by fourfirst-year MFA students at UBC-Okanagan: Michaela Bridge-Mohan, Natasha Harvey, Xiaoxuan / Sherry Huang, and Scott Moore.

Art is a practice of yoking as much as it is the very material by which things come together and continues to hold us together.Gathering under the exhibit’s name, these works collectivelycontemplate the apparatuses and affects that bring us together, anidea made fraught by the pandemic. How should we be when we’re together? And how can art help us imagine ways to continuebeing together that are sustainable, caring, forgiving, loving – to ourselves and to each other?

Xiaoxuan / Sherry Huang is an interdisciplinary poet who plays in the mediums of music, photography, and print. She conceives of poetry as both a happening (an event with a time and a place,) and an art object. She seeks to create poems that are immersive, embodied, and experiential works of art in their own right.
Her recent full-length publication, Love Speech, (Metatron Press 2019,) is an intersection between poetry and epistolary auto-theory.
Across her body of work, she is interested in love, speech act theory, epistolary address, and écriture féminine.
Connect with her online at xiaoxuanhuang.com and on instagram as @xiao_xuan_huang

Artist Statement:

IF YOU ARE / CERTAIN OUTLINES
vinyl-cut poem on transparent inkjet film, two-channel projection of 35 mm photos, ambient guitar drone (6 minutes / looped forever).

The text in IF YOU ARE/CERTAIN OUTLINES belongs to a larger collection of anti-narrative love poems currently being written, called ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME explicitly triangulates the relationship between love, queerness, and time by presenting traces of love over long distances, long terms, and of longing that persists despite separation.The seamless looping of sound and image in IF YOU ARE/CERTAIN OUTLINES evade compositional linearity, recreating queerness’s anachronism in three-dimensional space.

 

Natasha Harvey – Artist Statement

Natasha creates both abstract and representational works of art. She is a mixed media artist and collage is a key element in her work. Mixed media gives her an immense platform of creativity and expression. Natasha is passionate about two dimensional disciplines in visual art. Drawing, painting, photography and printmaking practises are combined and layered in her art making process. Natasha has discovered throughout her education and career, that the process is as important as the completed work of art.

The paint is given a voice. The energy of the medium, expressed in pools of paint, dripped across the canvas, springs to life without the intervention of a brush or knife. Energetic mark making illustrate a feeling of vitality, spirit and spontaneity. Her most recent mixed media paintings depict landscape. The landscapes are abstracted and large scale. It is her intention to evoke an emotional response through her use of colour, texture, atmosphere and composition. Collage brings forth areas of photography. Photographic images are torn up and reassembled to create a new world, a local landscape that doesn’t really exist. Photographs work harmoniously with the more abstract areas of the composition. Texture, drips and puddles blend with representational images, creating an ebb and flow, a push and pull between reality and the imagination.

Action and Object Drawings from VISA 300 001, Advanced Practice in Drawing

“This selection of drawings is intended to function as a conversation between two opposing but interrelated definitions of drawing as both verb and noun that the students considered this semester.

When considered as a verb drawing can be understood as a temporal, process-based action, something that we do. When considered as a noun, we focus more on its role as an autonomous art object or image, something that is there, to be viewed. Most of the time both definitions apply.

In focusing on drawing as a conduit between self and other, both through its making and its viewing, themes emerged of relationships to and perceptions of time, place, and bodies.”

Alison Trim, Instructor VISA 300O001

List of works

01 Jen Poodwan, Computer Biology, digital, 1758 x 1324px, 72dpi

A crossover of the digital and the biological.

02 Madison van der Gulik, Queen Lucy, Copic markers, prisma color pencil crayons, 14″ x 10.5″

A personal drawing meant to put emphasis on the importance some people give pets.

03 Ari Sparks, Two Boys Kissing, plastic fuse beads, 27” x 19”

Our already increasingly virtual experience of interaction and connection has been deeply exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. This work explores the experience and mediation of pixelated information in a digital era by representing an act of intimacy, through the physical process of individually placed beads.

04 Angela Wood, One Place After Another, ink & watercolour on paper, 11 x 15” each

1 Apartment, 2 Backyard Neighbour, 3 Cul-de-Sac, 4 City Kid, 5 Prairie

This series is an exploration of past self and existence in place. These spaces are personal to my life but are rendered with little detail aside from architectural structure, allowing room for each viewer to place themselves within the works and more openly interpret them.

05 Sidney Steven

(We) Move in Unison, graphite with bingo dabbers on paper, 18” x 24”

Time only goes in one direction, so I wanted to visualize that even though we all move in different ways in life, we are still connected to time.

06 Brett Dopp, Die Kirche, digital, 3600 x 5400 px

What’s more spooky than an old church?

07 Shelley Sproule, Spectacular Fall at Billie Bear (Muskoka), watercolour and gouache, 22″ x 15 ”

Billie Bear is a resort outside of Huntsville Ontario in the Muskoka Highlands. Fall colours are spectacular giving the viewer an almost surreal experience.

08 Pip Mamo Dryden, A Momentary Life, pencil crayon and watercolour, 12” x 16”

A Momentary Life is an examination of how we remember people who have died, and the way we perceive people we’ve never met.

09 Faith Wandler, Silhouette, 11”x 15”x 3, acrylic ink on watercolour paper

My theme is dealing with inhabitants of space and how the plants I have in my studio can create their own imagery from the shadows that they cast on my walls. I hope to bring the viewer a sense of calmness and nurturing just as my plants do for me in my studio space.

10 Andrew Halfhide, Familiar Figure, marker on Bristol board, 6’x 1.5’

The aim of this work was to draw without the biases of habit and focus more on the figure I was trying to capture. Drawn using my weaker (left) hand and at this life-size scale made the figure seem more tangible during the drawing process.

11 Adrianna Singleton, Dys Connect, charcoal, ink, oil pastel on canvas, 3 ft x 1 ft

This piece is about the distortion of my perception due to body dysmorphia. Struggles of my ‘problem’ areas are amplified; face, chest and thighs.

12 Candice Hughes, Nana Says, graphite on paper, 28’’x30’’

A recreation of the only image of my Nana in the remaining years of her life.

13 Susan Protsack, Moving ~ Memories I, mixed media on cartridge paper, Moving ~ Memories II, mixed media on handmade paper, Moving ~ Memories III, mixed media on drafting film, each 20” x 30”


These works are based on textural rubbings of surfaces in a home from which I recently moved. Many of the surfaces are associated with personally meaningful events and so, for me, these works are souvenirs evoking moving memories.

13 Amily Wang, Aquarium, ink and watercolour on paper

To make this work I began with looking at the different shapes of the fluid ink drop to give it more meaning.

Art Apart – celebrating what our disability arts community can create together from a (social) distance

Although many of us have had to be separated during this time — which has been especially hard on those of us with disabilities and health issues — we at Cool Arts still managed to come together to make art as a community. Art/Apart, much like the manner it was made in, might feel disjointed at first, discombobulating, even a little bit of a hodgepodge, if you like. Look closer though and you might just see inspiration leap. Page to page, brushstroke to crayon, there is not one single piece in this gallery that has not been inspired by another here. Why? Because these many pieces were made together by our tight-knit community of dedicated artists with developmental disabilities and other exceptionalities. Here, we’re advocating the legitimacy of this collectively created aesthetic that is the byproduct of a unique set of lived experiences. But most of this work this wasn’t created in our downtown Kelowna, BC studio, nestled in the Rotary Centre for the Arts. Instead, for the first time in our organization’s nearly two-decade-long history, every artist featured in our latest show has had to work in isolation. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, we knew it was essential to keep our Cool Arts community together, even from a distance. We started with moving our community programming to pre-recorded video lessons and rapidly progressed to live video conferencing and even a few limited attendance in-person programs behind clear plastic sheets. The shift in platform naturally changed the relationship between facilitators and our membership into a more intimate mentorship focused one. Some artists worked on scraps of paper out of the recycling bin, others started filling up notebooks long forgotten. We began delivering art supplies using physically distanced techniques picked up from the food curriers we’ve become so dependant on over the past few months. And every day, here at Cool Arts, we were receiving a plethora of emailed photos of these artworks from our artists, their families, and support workers. Before we knew it, we’d amassed a significant collection and knew we had an obligation to share it. Looking back, it seems obvious that one artist’s mentorship session would influence the others on the same screen and so on and so forth. However, for us, we didn’t get to see the interplay of intersecting interests influencing each work until we started laying out the pieces for this show. Originally, we were going to present this collection virtually via social media. Then when we saw how stunning all the pieces looked, we decided to put them up in digitally overlaid frames printed on posters around Kelowna’s Cultural District. But seeing those pieces together made us realize this show had to go up in a gallery. Which direction would we take this show? If this pandemic has taught us anything as disabled folk, it’s that different barriers of access exist differently for different people. Nothing taught us this more than the different ways each of us had to engage in our art making individually over these past few months; coming together under new restrictions, whether live virtually, in physically distanced in-person lessons, or exchanging pre-recorded video letters. So in the end we decided that with all the sacrifices our community has had to make during these tumultuous times, Cool Arts deserved all three. Because this is a celebration of what our community can do, even apart. And at Cool Arts, that means everyone gets to join in the celebration. We hope you enjoy the show.