UBCO Creative Studies Virtual Gallery
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 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.
“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”
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.
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.
For this performance class assignment students were asked to choose a recording of someone that they admire, saying something they agree with and make a lipsync video performing this person’s text.
Students were asked to learn the movements, dress the part.
This is a study in imitation.
Check out the highlight reel:
and this student’s work:
The Arts Council of the Central Okanagan is delighted to present UBCO faculty members, Katherine Pickering, Briar Craig, Patrick Lundeen, and Conner Charlesworth.
The Laundry Room Collective Presents a pop-up exhibition celebrating queer artists of the Okanagan.
Many of the artists are UBC Okanagan students and alumni.
FIFTEEN features the works of 15 UBC Okanagan alumni from both the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts programs, in celebration of the campus’ 15-year anniversary.
These artists are featured in a catalogue, produced in partnership by alumniUBC and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, as well as part of an exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery. This project is part of the events happening for Homecoming 2020 at UBC Okanagan.
Artists included in FIFTEEN:
Moozhan Ahmadzadegan
Brit Bachmann
Scott Bertram
Arden Boehm
Sarah Burwash
Connor Charlesworth
Jon Corbett
Carin Covin
Jorden & David Doody
AJ Jaeger
Christian Nicolay
Ed Spence
Pamela Turner
Tania Willard
FIFTEEN will be on exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery in The Front Project Space from September 19 to November 15, 2020. UBC Okanagan alumni will receive complimentary admission at the Kelowna Art Gallery during Homecoming weekend.
The exhibition is co-curated by Briar Craig, Professor, Visual Arts, and Katherine Pickering, Lecturer, Visual Arts.
Moozhan Ahmadzadegan
BFA 2018
Where Are You From? شما مال کجا هستی؟(
(2019)
Cotton sheet, ink, spray paint
Dimensions variable
Where Are You From? attempts to navigate the complex intersections of ethnicity, culture, and nationality. This work questions the complicated implications of seemingly innocent questions, such as “where are you from?” when asked by strangers. This work is influenced by the ritual of this conversation; strangers will often ask me where I am from, noticing that I don’t look white, or that my name sounds very “ethnic”. I respond, as a second generation Canadian, that I am from Canada. The follow up question is almost always the same: “where are you really from?”
Brit Bachmann
BFA 2013
(The tall peach vase)
A visual arts program that doesn’t have a pottery studio isn’t worth the tuition (2020)
Clay, glaze
13 x 5.5 inches
(The shorter black and red vase)
Aggressively interrogate Eurocentrism in visual arts education (2020)
Clay, glaze
7.5 x 5 inches
There are seven years between my grad exhibition drawings and these clay vessels. While my social practice has been a frenetic transition through writing, publishing, radio and non-profit arts administration, my material practice has been steady in its stillness. From the repetition of my ink and vinyl animations, to inertia play on the potter’s wheel, I seek out quiet solutions for documenting movement in time. A drawing is as truthful as a photograph, and a pot is as truthful as a stone. My vessels are not usually titled, but those who know my work know that I never pass up an opportunity for institutional critique, as was my training at UBC-O.
Scott Bertram
BFA 2007
Untitled (19-15) (2019)
Acrylic on Canvas
63 x 60 inches
I strive to create paintings that embrace uncertainty and increase my tolerance for ambiguity. Through the use of improvisation, intuitive structures, and openness to possibilities, I am able to proceed in a painting without fixing my view or knowing what the painting will eventually be. The kind of painting that I aim for is one that I am not completely able to grasp, yet it doesn’t push me away, and so I want to stay with it and remain within its ambiguity—in not knowing.
Arden Boehm
BFA 2018
Crushed (2018)
Assorted metals, Baltic birch plywood
Dimensions variable
In a culture that is controlled by material accumulation, we are continually encouraged to look for gratification in the form of attainment. My work investigates the relationship that we humans have with everyday objects. I deal with concepts of production as well as categorization and the notion of the archive. The seeming banality of everyday objects is countered by the emphasis designated basis of my exploration. I am fascinated by the value placed upon specific objects, as well as the act of casting away the seemingly useless when something newer comes along. My investigation is fueled by the social concerns that arise from a continuously growing mess of mass-produced things that are often so quickly considered to be worthless.
Sarah Burwash
BFA 2009
Grain of sand in my boot (2020)
Watercolour and collage
18 x 24 inches
Situated in non-specific yet decidedly natural landscapes, my work depicts figures experiencing the spectrum of life: creation, destruction, rest, play, curiosity, sorrow, exhilaration, death. Landscapes appear as outlying settlements in which I research the realm of physical and emotional experience including struggle, hard work, failure, and vulnerability. These dreamlike environments celebrate and question a range of gendered interests and identities with undertones of humour, fantasy, and performance. Nature perseveres regardless of its hardships—a disjunctive labyrinth to traverse in search of a meaningful path. In contrast to the virtual languages that saturate us, my intricate cut-and-paste style reflects an inclination toward the tactile and rudimentary.
Connor Charlesworth
BFA 2015
Push Up, Yellow (2020)
Oil on canvas
68 x 38 inches
The work Up Arms, Yellow is part of a series of paintings that are all the same dimensions. The figurative source imagery is derived from photographs I took and collaged together. All the works in this new developing series emphasize the verticality of the canvas and, for the most part, the forms remain contained well within the frame. I arrived at the subject matter and contained composition during the spring of 2020 during isolation and the various ongoing civil rights movements. During such times, I hope this network of gestures opens up a dialogue for consideration of our relationship to these events.
Jon Corbett
MFA 2015
Nohkom (2020)
Digital print on canvas
18 x 24 inches
Nohkom is from a series of digital portraits of my family and is the central image from my video work titled Four Generations that was exhibited at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and Canadian (2017-2018) Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) (2020). This portrait of my paternal grandmother was computationally generated using 3D virtual beads and is the origin of my current PhD research that involves the development of a more suitable digital media toolkit for Indigenous artists. This includes an Indigenously-based programming language (currently Cree), physical hardware designs for Indigenous orthographies, and software/application solutions that use Indigenous Storywork as programmatic code.
Carin Covin
BFA 2003, MFA 2010
Easel Quartet XI (2020)
Oil and enamel on canvas
38 x 54 inches
The Easel Quartet began as observation and response drawings that reflect my interest in the politics of the everyday. Second Wave Feminism allows me a poetic understanding of the politics of the everyday and of the home. The easels provide an entry point through their function and inclusion as observed objects. The resultant drawings are manipulated through changes to scale and mediums used. These new works are then photocopied. The resultant solvent transfers push the images past their original intentions.
These images are re-translated into a new suite of paintings; Easel Quartet XI and XII are the beginnings of these new investigations.
David & Jorden Doody
BFA 2008
Virtually Empty, 2020
Mixed Media Assemblage, printed fabric, printed reflective film aluminum dibond panel and ironing board.
Artist statement: As sculptors, We wade in the brackish waters between image and materiality, investigating the tactile qualities of sculpture and three-dimensional space in the virtual light of screen culture and the post-internet age of image explosion. With a genuine commitment to experimentation and improvisation, We construct material assemblages that respond to the constant deluge and saturation of visual information. Our work explores the migration of contemporary culture and imagination into the realm of the virtual network, where We are forced to reconsider presence, absence, and reproducibility as We sculpt our understanding of authenticity. Blurring the boundaries between the rational and the absurd, the measurable and the metaphysical, We strive to dislodge our creative practice from the dogma of prescriptive understanding. By wrapping the immaterial and the subconscious in a blanket of contemporary psychedelia, We seek to cultivate an unbridled space where contemplation and entertainment mingle freely. We encourage rogue collisions between icons, symbols, and materials that forge new and vibrant networks of associative meanings within the vast nebula of the Post-American Imagination.
AJ Jaeger
BFA 2013
I believe that art is visual storytelling: communicating a needed message and showcasing beliefs, heritage, and vision. My work has deliberately evolved to depict the complexity and contrast of life through a combination of mediums, symbolism, and surface patterns. I am inspired by creating poignant works of art that catch the attention of people distracted by everyday life—as a rally-cry to remind us all to focus on what matters most. Intuitively acknowledging the uncertainty of life fuels my creative mind and heart to keep expressing candid emotions that positively transform our collective future.
Christian Nicolay
2000
On the Horizon Line (Shipping Pallet No.3) (2015)
Light jet photograph, salvaged Plexiglas, MDF, acrylic paint, found detritus paper, collage, ink, pencil, tape, correction pen
31 x 30 x 4 inches each (Diptych) (78.74cm x 76.20cm x 10.16cm)
Statement:
liminal
adjective
On the horizon Line explores current issues of globalization and climate change through the lens of the liminal – a place betwixt and between. Our cultural landscapes are becoming increasingly crisscrossed and blurred through shifting borders and boundaries, directly impacting the growing challenges of migration and the transitory movement of people. Materials, images and objects reflecting concepts of liminality visually demonstrate transition and transformation – the visible and the invisible – the seen and unseen. The notion of ‘space’ and ‘place’ occurs in conjunction with idea ‘temporary’ and ‘permanent’ creating a play between the real and the unreal—the No Where and the Now Here.
Ed Spence
BFA 2005
Tunnelling (2020)
Pigment print and adhesive on paper
25 x 32 inches
This piece is one in a long series of experiments involving the dissection of photographs. Beginning as a single photograph that is subsequently cut into small units and rearranged, the image is abstracted, transformed and the original subject is effectively denied to the viewer. No information is lost or gained in the process, only rearranged. Designed as a metaphor for our subjective sensorial experience, the process invites thoughts about how we interpret information based on idiosyncratic personal and cultural patterns, and additionally, how information can be decontextualized and manipulated.
Pamela Turner
I am focused on expanding the idea of fibre to include anything that can be linked or woven together, thus re-examining how fibres and materials function. It is important that my materials are only altered through the process of cutting, maintaining subtle but recognizable aspects of what the materials once were.
By choosing to keep my work monochromatic, my aim is to create an emergent image thatresults in a contemplative response from the viewer, both from a distance and up close.Blackness has been described as the definitive void, but it also marks the ultimate space ofcreative possibility. Monochromes both veil and reveal, as the expectations of objects weregularly associate with are given new potential through this method of material transcendence.
Tania Willard
MFA 2018
Gut Instincts (2018)
Digital print
~32 x 24 inches
Gut Instincts is an affirmation of women’s intuition, gut instinct, and ancestral voices that collapse the past, future, and present into an embodied and visceral experience of the present. This work takes its origin in a design from a cedar-root basket collected as part of the North Pacific Jesup Expedition (1897-1902) from Stl’atl’imx territories. In many collections, basketry from this period is unattributed to a maker. As an expression of Indigenous women’s art forms, this disappearance of named makers and ancestor artists represents the colonial disappearances and dispossession of Indigenous women, communities, and lands. My work seeks to bring these ideas, expressions, and questions that challenge the legacy and histories of anthropological framing of Indigenous art into connection with lived Indigenous experiences.
Jorden Doody is an interdisciplinary artist who is examining the transitional spaces between tangible material and digital media within the framework of spatial installations. By utilizing new media technologies in combination with traditional modes of craft, she choreographs sculptural installations that focus on blurring the boundaries between the theatrical stage and the architectural framework of the gallery. Jorden investigates how our contemporary culture responds to notions of presence and absence of the body in the digital age where illusion, escape and distraction are at the forefront of the collective consciousness.
As an artist whose practice is heavily steeped in intuitively relating to her surrounding environment, she actively responds to the mercuriality of digital image with the resonant qualitiesof physical materiality by remixing and re-contextualizing the realms of Craft and Pop culture. With the dematerialization and fragmentation of the self in the digital era, Jorden’s sculptural installations evoke and hold space for new and alternate perspectives of connectivity.
Jorden’s recent work is focussed on creating an iconic visual language where lived experience and theatrical metaphors intersect within the exhibition space. Here the alchemy of form, texture, pattern and material presence are synergized and activated by a hand painted mural that wraps and warps around the gallery. By showcasing an objective shift in scale between the platforms of a handheld digital device and the spatial constructs of the gallery space, she acknowledges and incorporates specific modes of display that include large hand fabricated objects with digitally mediated images.
Jorden Doody’s installations explore the tangibility of sharing tacit knowledge through art by offering a relational yet surreal experience of dynamic visual encounters. Jorden’s interdisciplinary method of making is relevant to subjects surrounding contemporary communications where the evolution and the stability of our expanded communities are challenged through the exponential growth and the impact of digital technologies and social medias.
Follow