Category Archives: Seen About
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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. 
Focal Points an Exhibition of Work by Photography Students from UBCO – At Rotary Arts Centre and Alternator Gallery
From black and white photographs hand printed in the traditional darkroom, to digital images montaged and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop, this exhibition highlights the wide diversity of content and form in the work being done by photography students at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. This collection of photo based artwork has been created by students in second, third and fourth year and is being shown in both the Alex Fong Galleria, March 2 – March 30, and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art’s Member’s Gallery, from March 3 – March 17, 2018.
Gary Pearson: Short Fictions
Gary Pearson, painter, drawer, video artist, freelance writer and curator, recently opened a solo exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery.
The exhibition, titled Gary Pearson: Short Fictions features a selection of the artists work drawn from the past fifteen years. Short Fictions is accompanied by a substantial publication, illustrated, and with critical essays on the artists work.
Pearson is a recently retired associate professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan, and lives in Kelowna. He has had numerous exhibitions internationally, and was recently elected as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
little mother
little mother (2018)
Patricia Leinemann
Artist Statement
In late 2016 at the UBC Museum of Anthropology, Patricia Leinemann viewed a textile display that was inspirational. She wondered how to create a layered installation of textiles that a viewer could wander through. After returning from Vancouver, she came across her collection of doll dresses. Along with her sisters’ collections, these mostly handmade dresses carry fond memories and made her question why we hold on to particular childhood objects. Patricia had to make assumptions to her questions because her mother died eleven years ago. Trough conversations with extended family, their mother’s desire for her girls to have a doll was because she never owned one. There was limited money when Patricia was young so she finds it fascinating that money was available for these dresses. She wondered if her mother was training her and her sisters to become mothers because being a mother was her greatest joy. Patricia questioned if buying had dressing her dolls influenced here future interest in dress-up, costumes, and good quality clothing in her professional life. She never had children of her own but maybe Patricia experienced being a mother while playing with her dolls. This supports her query if perhaps she always lived her life out of order.
Chasten My Fantasies
Chasten my Fantasies of Human Mastery (2018)
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
The project takes an object-oriented perspective on the material agents that construct the gallery experience, complicating traditional relationships between the audience and the artworks. By shifting the experiential nature of the gallery, the exhibition will look at how the space operates on experience. The objects in the space are rendered non-utilitarian, familiar material processes become unrecognizable, and the viewer becomes an object among an assemblage of objects without hierarchy.
Artists:
Angela Gmeinweiser
Arden Boehm
Carmen Winther
Reta Stevenson
Curated by Mathew Glenn & Evan Berg
Scary Instructor & Terrifying Students!
For 14 years the Caravan Farm Theatre, located outside of Armstrong, has created a Halloween-themed production, The Walk of Terror, that engages community in an event that Artistic Director Estelle Shook says “blurs the line between artist and audience”.
This highly interactive production incorporates the artistry of professional and non-professional performers who are part of the Caravan community. This year artists came from across Canada as well as from within the Okanagan region to perform in the show, including UBCO students from the Creative and Critical Studies Department directed by performance instructor Sonia Norris. Norris began performing with the Caravan Farm Theatre twenty years ago and teaching at UBCO this fall provided the opportunity to share this experience with her students.
Norris and seven students, Dora Chen, Sage Cannon, Peter Navratil, Hawk Mendoza, Joel Evans, Avril Wood, and Breanne Ruskowsky, performed in four different vignettes along the Walk of Terror and also spent the day working as part of the production team setting up the farm for the performance.
This “terrifying” experience was an amazing opportunity for the students to perform in a professional production, but also to work collaboratively with a theatre company that is deeply committed to, and supported by, community engagement. Hopefully this experience shall lead to future creative collaborations between the Caravan Farm Theatre and UBCO students!
Photo credit: Zev Tiefenbach
Tradition
Patricia Leinemann is in her final year of her BFA degree.
Her art installation features drying walnuts, walnut wood bowls, zucchini walnut bread, pickled walnuts and walnut ink.
It all began with tradition… harvesting walnuts for zucchini walnut bread.
