Category Archives: FCCS Artwork
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Cool Cats Project
The Cool Cats Project is a partnership between Cool Arts Society and the Okanagan Cat Coalition (OKCC). The project is aimed at increasing awareness about the estimated 18,000 feral cats living in the Central Okanagan. The OKCC assists by spaying and neutering cats, then re-homing or releasing them to live out their lives without perpetuating the overpopulation problem.
Cool Arts artists have created art, using cats as a theme, in various mediums (painting, clay sculpture) under the mentorship of local artists Lee Claremont, Sharilyn Kuehnel, Sarah Parsons, Potters Addict Ceramic Art Centre, and Rena Warren.
Check out @coolartssociety #coolcatsproject on display now @fccs.ubco FINA Gallery. The Cool Cats Project in partnership with the @okanagancatcoalition is aimed at bringing awareness about the feral cat issue in the Okanagan. Do you think art has a role to play in bringing awareness to important issues? Share your voice. View the exhibit, add your creativity to the collaboative work, take a selfie with your favourite Cool Cat artwork and share your thoughts. #Coolcatsproject #artforchange #coolartssociety #diversabilities #outsiderarts
The project will culminate with the hosting of four public exhibitions of the artwork, (including the FINA gallery here at UBCO), each with an educational element focusing on increasing public awareness of feral cat issues in our community and how the OKCC is working to address these issues.
Faculty Staff Show
MFA thesis Exhibition – Tania Willard
Anthro(a)pologizing
Drawing from multiple anthropological sources that framed Secwepemc culture/language and governance my work explores specific sites of rupturing the ethnographic gaze. Citing ideas of refusal and Indigenous futurity to locate agency and land rights struggle within the possible readings of ethnographic subjects this body of work attempts to reassert naming, locating, negotiating and connecting to material culture and ethnographic data in museum and institutional collections.
BFA Grad Exhibition 20
Objects in Suspension
Meg Yamamoto is an MFA student at UBC Okanagan, completing her degree in the summer of 2018.
Meg’s research explores the process of connecting to place through creating place-based art, particularly in the perspective of an artist surrounded by an unfamiliar environment. Her work looks at the various lifeforms observed in the Okanagan (both native and alien) and how they contribute to the Okanagan’s place identity. She examines how the process of encountering, observing, identifying, and appreciating the lifeforms of the environment in order to establish familiarity over time plays an important role in the development of one’s “sense of place”. Through heuristic reduction (the method of overcoming the taken-for-granted attitude by viewing the world through the eyes of wonder), Meg illustrates the ordinary and commonplace of nature as significant and definitive aspects of the Okanagan.
Meg ‘s MFA thesis exhibition, Objects in Suspension was in the FINA Gallery from June 16 to 29, 2018.
She installed a previous installation of Objects in Suspension in the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art from April 13 to May 5, 2018. 
2nd Year Sculpture with Renay Egami
Jo-Anne McArthur and We Animals
Jo-Anne McArthur & We Animals
Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning Canadian photojournalist and the founder of We Animals. For fifteen years, she has travelled the world, documenting our complex relationships with animals. We Animals images have been used by hundreds of organizations, publishers, and academics to advocate for animals. McArthur is a sought-after speaker and is the author of two books, We Animals (2014), and Captive (2017). She was the subject of an award-winning documentary, The Ghosts in Our Machine, released worldwide in 2013. In 2017, McArthur and the We Animals team launched the We Animals Archive, a resource where thousands of images are made available for free to anyone helping animals.
Please Don’t Turn Away
“Powerfully disturbing. These images take us to dark and hidden places visited by only a few determined and courageous individuals like Jo-Anne McArthur. They reveal the secret practices that many people will not want to know about. For the animals’ sake, I beg that you will not only look but feel.” – Dr. Jane Goodall
Images of animals as they exist in the human world show the depths of human cruelty, but also the boundlessness of our compassion. Looking at – and truly seeing – the pain of animals trapped in cages on factory farms, held in chains behind a circus tent, reaching out from between the bars of a zoo’s exhibit; seeing these realities is the first step towards acknowledging humanity’s complicity with the suffering experienced by these individuals. To simply show suffering is not enough, however; the storyteller who seeks to make change for animals must create images that challenge the viewer to look, but compelling enough that the viewer does not turn away. The dark reality of our treatment of animals is contrasted by the tireless work of those working to liberate them, and by the lives of the rescued, rehabilitated, and respected animals. Through both stories of suffering and stories of hope, McArthur’s images are crafted to inform and to inspire. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for not turning away.
2nd Yr Painting (VISA 225) with Katherine Pickering
