UBCO Creative Studies Virtual Gallery
Twenty-three 4th yr BFA students are showcasing their mid-year work in two separate exhibitions. This first group’s exhibition, ephemeroptera features the following students:
Walking in the Woods, paintings by UBC Okanagan BFA graduate, Christina Knittel, are currently on exhibit in the CUBE space of Art@KTC. Art @ KCT is a professional art exhibition within the lobby of the Kelowna Community Theatre.
Christina’s work features colourful renditions of wooded landscapes. These images allude to memories and imaginations of forest walks.
https://www.kelowna.ca/our-community/arts-culture-heritage/artist-opportunities/art-kct
Remember When…? by Bailey Ennig is a BFA graduate from the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan.
This exhibition in the RISE space at the Art @ KCT, a professional art exhibition within the lobby of the Kelowna Community Theatre, combines photographic work with poetry.
https://www.kelowna.ca/our-community/arts-culture-heritage/artist-opportunities/art-kct
One thing is certain and the rest is lies is a continued exploration on navigating queer culture as a person connected to the Iranian diaspora in so-called Canada. Using common formal visual elements of Persian miniatures such as intricate patterns, flat 2D compositions, and architectural elements as a reference point, I aim to bring these illustrations into a physical space through interdisciplinary practice. My intentions are to disrupt these traditional forms to establish an intimate space as a means of queering these spaces.
By queering spaces through imagery derived from traditional Persian miniatures, I critique the ongoing struggle for freedom in Iran. These historical artifacts often told poetic stories of royalty, love, and allegory through a gaze where it uplifted the powerful people who commissioned these works or the guilds that controlled the practice. This interests me as it resembles the historic and current exclusion of queer narratives across many areas around the world. Specifically, I relate this to the ways queer people are invalidated, erased, and willfully disregarded by the current government of Iran, the contemporary location from where much of this historic practice derives. By transforming the metaphorical architectural constructs that surround us, I assert queerness to counter dominant structures that seek to invalidate and erase queer narratives and consider the ongoing displacement of queer Iranians and other marginalized groups.
https://www.artscouncilofthecentralokanagan.com/onethingiscertain
Gao Yujie is an interdisciplinary media artist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her generative participatory performance work studies the materiality of duration and explores the elasticity of space and time in rule-based interactive environments.
Learn more about Gao’s work on her website.
Artist Statement:
Unsettling is home,
life is improvisation,
the present is not future enough to live with.
Flowing to Unsettle invites participants to explore the elasticity of experiential time through a durational performance that takes place over six weeks in the Project Gallery at the Alternator.
As a Chinese media artist, performer, and researcher working in Canada, Gao Yujie uses time as a primary artistic material. Through performative actions such as drawing with different timeframes, her work delves into the essence of experiential temporality, both physically, digitally, and interculturally, examining how it can be stretched, compressed, and reconfigured in ways that challenge our taken-for-granted notion of time. Her research focuses on how performative computational art can inhabit and evoke different sensations of time, and how we can collectively hold space while experiencing individualized temporal perceptions. The central ideas are the concept of flow and a sense of wandering in relation to time and how these ‘states of being’ affect our perceptions.
Flowing to Unsettle is the final phase of a PhD research-creation project at UBC Okanagan initiated in 2020. In the previous phases Yujie has performed in a total of 72 livestreams, repeatedly implementing the same improvisation prompt ‘fill a canvas from empty to full’ with variables like duration, materials, platforms, and scales. For the first time ever, through her six-week-long performance at the Alternator, Yujie will use the exhibition space as her canvas, performing every day, collaborating with a variety of technologies and inviting participants to engage with their own temporal perceptions in an embodied experience where they are encouraged to slow down, reflect, and connect with the environment. The process of being – including thinking, wandering, playing, making, failing, problem-solving, and reflecting – forms the ‘whole’ of the work. The work itself is in the process. The performance will be broadcasted and recorded. By performing extensively for six weeks, she is also questioning what defines the boundaries between art time, machine time and life time and how they intertwine with each other.
The subthemes explored in Flowing to Unsettle include accumulation and decay, boredom and freedom, repetition and variation, rules and autonomy, endurance and intuition and how each aspect shapes our time perspective. By creating an open-ended live setting, Yujie invites multiple perceptions of time to coexist and foster meaningful shared experiences that celebrate uniqueness and differences. In doing so, she hopes to open up new possibilities for artistic expression of understanding and relating to time and to deliver this message for the audience:
“Take your time.”
Sofie Lovelady is a British Columbia-born artist and recent BFA graduate from UBC Okanagan.
In this work, Lovelady amalgamate found images and text to express her experience growing up in a digital age that exploits the female bodies through imagery.
What’s Mine is Yours will be on view in the Alternator’s Members’ Gallery from February 24 – March 18, 2023.
This work by Julia Pearson is being showcased in the Kelowna Art Gallery’s glass gallery window space. It brings together photography, serigraphy, and installation to create multiple explorations of self-portraiture.
Julia is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the University of British Columbia.
This work will be on display at 1315 Water Street, Kelowna, BC until July 2023.
Nasim Pirhadi is a multi-medium artist and current MFA candidate at UBC Okanagan.
As part of this two person exhibit, Nasim explores the current political discourse of what it means to be an Iranian woman both in a diasporic sense and as through lived experience. This important work includes a video addressing misogynist fears of traditional spaces and a painted textile representing protestors on the streets in Iran who are fighting for the lives of women and girls.
It is on view at the Kelowna Art Gallery from January 21 to April 16, 2023
The Distance of the Sun is a series of five vertical painted diptychs. The work was conceived after a summer art residency inLos Angeles in which I was struck by the height and stability of these thin, spindly trees. Upon returning home to Kelowna, my paint pots in my studio had dried from the summer heat leaving various circular paint skins. I harvested these circular colourful disks and applied them to these panels in the place of the sun. They are sandwiched to the panels with rare earth magnets, presenting the work with a kind of charge.
Conceptually, this work deals with our relationship to our current climate moment. I have consciously distorted the sense of space by placing the sun and various “cloud-like” shapes in front of these tree-like forms. Typically, we know the sun and clouds as backdrops to the landscape. My line of inquiry with this work poses the questions “what would the world look like with that figure-ground relationship distorted, and what value is there in imagining this? I am interested in the potential of presenting these alternative realities as ways of familiarizing ourselves with possible futures. In my work, I try to balance these concepts with allowing the painting to dictate its own outcome and maintain its own authority.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Connor Charlesworth is visual arts instructor, in UBC Okanagan’s Creative Studies Department.
A central aspect of Charlesworth’s work considers the nature of painting and representation. He is interested in taking things that are familiar, and challenging that familiarity through the process of painting. This epistemological approach provides ample space for him to pose questions about the nature of perception; how we understand images, objects, and things. Most recently, Charlesworth has been researching this in relation to the landscape. His appreciation for nature stems from a youth spent birdwatching with his brother, and plein-air painting with his father.
Behind My Mask, I Am Secure is an exhibition by UBCO MFA Alumni Rylan Broadbent
This exhibition was shown at the
Rylan Broadbent is a sculptor, designer, and fabricator, who resides and works out of the North Okanagan. Employing an array of techniques, ranging from traditional to digital, he is primarily interested in examining the interconnected relationships between object, form, material, and meaning.
Objects, like images and language, can hold information; they are utilitarian in their function and also symbols that reference bodies of meaning. And just as physical forms can be modified, so too can the semiotic attachments. Context can be skewed, shifting definitions, and complicating the interpretation. The objects he selects often speak towards notions of masculine identity, relationship to violence, and social fragmentation.
for more information: https://www.alternatorcentre.com/events/behind-my-mask-i-am-secure-rylan-broadbent
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