UBCO Creative Studies Virtual Gallery
The Advanced Practice in Sculpture exhibit Behind a Head explores the theme of the human head and psyche. Each student developed their concept through a learning process of creating a sculpture armature, oil-clay original sculpture, multi-part silicone mold, and casting the works in plaster.
Makeena Hartmann
Jordan MacDonald
Sara Richardson
Bruce Zhou
Crystal Przybille
Sea Dreams
An exhibition by alumni Joanne Gervais (BFA ’06, MFA ’10) and Shauna Oddleifson (BFA ’98)
This animated tale that tells a story of a little girl character wearing an octopus mask and her interactions with sea-creatures, underwater plant life and the impact of human negligence. With increasing temperatures brought about by climate change, and the accumulation of plastics, the health of the oceans is under threat. With this work we are referencing the affect we have on our environment, and how the way we interact with nature can have consequences. The naive drawing style allows for a buffer for the deeper meaning of our human condition and interactions with each other and natural environments. The elements that make up the animated narrative are hand drawn and sewn creatures along with photographs that are cut out, staged and brought to life through a combination of stop motion and digital media.
Sea Dreams was on display in the Project Gallery at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from January 28 to March 12, 2022.
Photo courtesy of the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.
Homescape
UBCO BFA Students
Under the instruction of David Doody, this group of Introduction to Painting (VISA 215) students present these paintings that explore the interior landscapes of one’s “own space”. Homescapes consists of portraits of physical and psychological residuals left in the wake life lived indoors, during a year of global pandemic and self-isolation. These works were created during the first semester back to in-person classes during the September semester of 2021.
Caity Dueck
Nick Tai
Chandler Burnett
Amy Marui
Peyton Lynch
Lauren Johnson
Hannah Palomera
David James Doody
Jenna Cooper
Serena Arsenault
Ella Cottier
‘Collective Relevance’ can be interpreted in two manners. Meaning can be attributed to seemingly unconnected works through mutual exhibition, but also that the collective remains an important strategy for sharing ideas and values.
This term’s component of the Advanced Practice in Photography course is dedicated to independent research, and some of the pictures here were produced in recent weeks. Others were created during autumn, 2021. Regardless of their date of creation, the work speaks to strategies for coping with the trauma associated with a global pandemic, and celebrates a return to face-to-face learning and physical photography.
Often considered a solitary medium, especially in its digital form, photography benefits from collective experience. The primary success of this exhibition lies in our ability to come together and consider these images in a new context.
One Chair
What is a chair? Visa 105 sculpture students were asked to reflect on the manner by which we define objects, but also on how objects also define us. Using as a point of departure Joseph Kosuth’s seminal 1964 installation ‘One and Three Chairs’, they had to create a chair that would reveal something about them. These self-portraits in the form of common furniture had to be personal and unique, but beyond anything, they had to be constructed well enough to support the weight of their instructor (exact weight not disclosed). This proposal led to the creation of 19 unique pieces, thoughtfully created with materials of their choosing, relevant to the ideas they wished to share.
Samuel Roy-Bois, VISA-105 Instructor
Students: Maddy Bohnet – Faith Bye – Nadia Fracy – Cady Gau – Hailey Gleboff – Elly Hajdu – Asahna Hughes – Jordin Kolmel – Laura McCarthy – Connor McCleary – Grace Nascimento-Laverdiere – Kate Nicholson – Damla Ozkalay – Freddie Thacker – Telina Wales – Wenjing Wang
By UBCO Master of Fine Arts student Michaela Bridgemohan
Rooted sentiments seek our individual memories as a point of origin. In Sisters of the Yam: black women and self-recovery (1993), bell hooks assert that “knowledge of who we are and where we come from…is an act of political resistance.” In this exhibition, four Okanagan artists explore identity and place through rooted self-determination and testimony. As we continue to endure the pandemic, social calamities and multiple emergencies, how can Black, Indigenous and artists of colour define presence in the Okanagan through personal creative power? Is there comfort within this sentimentality?
We notice these artistic gestures of the ‘self’ located within land and space. Some pieces explore this diasporic experience through film and sculpture. Maura Tamez examines how to be at home when such a place is rooted in a physical relationship with Land, while Moozhan Ahmadzadegan’s suspended textile piece Where Are You Really From? evokes a floating place of cultural in-betweenness. With Promises in Vacationland, Shimshon Obadia interrogates the ways our Okanagan home, as a tourist destination, is crafted and presented for outsiders, and the intersections of gender and sexuality in such a performance of place. Cassandra Adjetey’s intimate portraits speak to the idea of home as a site in the imagination—making home is an act of creation, revealed through the material production of familiar faces.
All exploring these intimate details as intersections of diasporic belonging, Stuart Hall’s essay on Cultural Identity and Diaspora, reminds us that “diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235). So, within each artwork’s intimate detail, creative power begins at hybridity and testimony. Cultivation and Language. Land and Body. Spectatorship and the Gaze. Each work looks back at you and then away.
Rooted Sentiments is a self-reflexive exhibition; that is, is a contemplation. I invite you to consider the ways we make home for ourselves–the sentimentalities of understanding how the home fits within the land where we currently reside–and the ways we invite or exclude others from doing the same.
By Connor Charlesworth
Upon entering the gallery, visitors are greeted with a wall drawing. I came across this funny passage a while back in Roland Barthes memoir where he lays out some of his most favourite, and least favourite things. They appeared pretty random and lots of them made me laugh. In charcoal on the wall, I copied his list over. I liked how it set up a binary; likes and dislikes, good and bad, right and wrong. I then went through and annotated his writing with snippets of my own thoughts; some doodles in the margins, erasing things I didn’t know, calling him out. Earlier that day I was listening to Joni Mitchell in my studio. Her classic “Both Sides Now”, read different than usual. Something about the importance of nuance, bridging divides (and probably a bit of the charge from her and Neil Young pulling out of Spotify over Rogan’s delusions).
The work in the show is a combination of recent drawings and paintings. Ranging from abstractions, to suggestions, to more naturalistic depictions. I consciously chose to contrast works that are more urgent (like The Dome Drawings), alongside works that are much more slow (like Giant Looks Down to Consider the Lives of Others). The content of the works differ. Some are concerned with sustainability and the climate crisis, others are concerned with art history and aesthetic decision making. It is my hope that viewers are able to make some personal meaningful connections, but also just enjoy the various surface qualities in the works.
Connor Charlesworth is a contemporary visual artist currently based in Kelowna on unceeded Sylix territory. He received his MFA from the University of Victoria (2018) with a specialization in painting, and his BFA from the University of British Columbia in Kelowna (2015) with a minor in Art History and Visual Culture. His subject matter varies, however his current work is primarily concerned with the space between painted images and objects; often looking back at the history of modernist painting. Connor has taught drawing and painting at the University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University, and the University of British Columbia in Kelowna.
Abstract
As a Haudenosaunee artist/researcher, my work and thinking are influenced by community-based, Traditional Indigenous Knowledges (TIK) and my responsibilities as a mother. My objectives are to create artwork expressing survival of land-based identity, ethics and values, (Simpson, 2014), such as seven-generation sustainability. The art produced will create a visual, physical environment and invite viewers to reflect on Water and stories shared in this thesis. I argue that TIK embodied through art can transform how individuals see, value, and develop a relationship with Water. Indigenous art can teach humans to recognize that Water is a human right and more; Water is sentient and has rights independent of humans. Water needs to be understood beyond its current subjugation to capitalism, war, and unceasing domination. (Tamez, 2015) (Syilx Youth Water Group, 2014) (Nielson, 2014) The thesis exhibition consists of a series of 7 art pieces, two large mixed-media paintings and installation. Some reflect the threads of Water in our traditional stories, the centrality of women and embody Haudenosaunee mothering practices transmitting knowledges for future generations, specifically with my children and immediate kinship in mind. In my research I have valued the principles and teachings of Water through many distinct Indigenous Nations’ and Territories.
Andreas Rutkauskas has been using photography and video to document the aftermath and regeneration following wildfires in Western Canada since 2017. This body of work, collectively titled After the Fire, takes on a new format in The Alternator’s window gallery. Working with imagery sourced exclusively from the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx, he creates a form of diorama that allows the viewer to navigate through a composited forest consisting of trees that have burned and survived fires that took place between 2015 and 2020. Consequently, visitors may witness the process of regeneration from recently burned forest through varying degrees of succession, and contemplate how wildfire can lead to ecological renewal. After the Fire will be on view in the Window Gallery between September 10 and October 23, 2021.
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