UNPRECEDENTED – Bachelor of Media Studies VR Exhibition

Unprecedented is a showcase of third year Bachelor of Media Studies (BMS) student works that explore the realms of virtual reality, dreamscape, and interactive experiments.

This exhibition presents a unique opportunity to delve into the minds of these emerging artists and designers, who have brought their visions to life through innovative mediums. The world of virtual reality has captivated audiences with its ability to transport us to new and exciting places. In this exhibition, our students have pushed the boundaries of this technology to create immersive experiences that blur the lines between reality and imagination.

Through the use of 3D modeling and coding, they have created virtual worlds that are both visually stunning and interactive, allowing the viewer to explore and engage with the environment. Dreams have long been a source of inspiration for artists, and our students have tapped into this rich tradition to create works that explore the surreal and otherworldly. These pieces offer a glimpse into the subconscious mind, where reality is distorted and the impossible becomes possible. These works engage the senses and encourage exploration and play, creating a dynamic and engaging experience for all who visit.

We invite you to join us on this unprecedented journey through the worlds of virtual reality, dreamscape, and interactive experiments. We hope that this exhibition will inspire you to explore new frontiers in the world of art and design, and to embrace the limitless possibilities of the digital age.

 

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PRINTMAKING

Printmaking at UBC Okanagan is extremely varied.  In our modest print studio, students work with five different media areas – stone lithography, zinc-plate etching, ultra-violet screen printing, relief printing, and letterpress.  Not only do students become adept at whatever print media they are studying but they learn how to work cooperatively in what can sometimes be a bustling and chaotic environment.  Everyone is constantly being influenced by everyone else in our close-knit print community.

The exhibition PRINTMAKING (February 20 – March 9, 2023 in UBCO’s FINA Gallery) was comprised of prints selected from each of the five major print media practiced in the BFA program.  Most of the works were made throughout the last year.

 

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Flowing to Unsettle – work by Ph.D. candidate Yujie Gao

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.”

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Sofie Lovelady // What’s Mine Is Yours

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.

421 Cawston Avenue (unit 103)Kelowna, BC

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Diapositive – Installation by Julia Pearson

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.

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We Are Countless – Rehan Yazdani and UBC MFA student Nasir Pirhadi

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

 

 

 

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Hearts Together: Cool Arts Society Group Exhibition

HEARTS TOGETHER

Cool Arts Society Group Exhibition

Together with art educators during the weekly programs held in the Cool Arts Studio in the RCA, artists worked on the concept HEART, digging into the question – what does HEART mean? Artists discussed their feelings, thoughts, and ideas; then began their step-by-step big picture planning. These pieces are all representations of these collaborative ideas.

Each piece was created with a group of 6 to 8 artists working together. This process encouraged and affected constructive communication and sharing ideas; including skill-building, listening, problem-solving, and planning.  

The concepts that were shared covered a broad variety. Heart symbolism often conjures up a wide range of emotions, from joy to pain, love and devotion to moral courage and physical strength. The shape is securely embedded in western culture. Represented by an anatomically inaccurate shape, the heart is often used to represent the center of emotion, including affection and love.

Cool Arts looks forward to our annual partnership with the FINA Gallery at UBCO where artists get the opportunity to professionally exhibit their art. Creating these important opportunities in the arts for people with disabilities, neuro-diversabilities, and other exceptionalities aids in broadening connections and creating relationships with other artists on campus and beyond. 

Furthermore, It is important to have this recognized and well-funded FINA space to share the work done by people in our community who are seriously passionate about art and who want more public opportunities. What you will see are 24 artists working together on art of all kinds that includes painting and collage. 

Please share with your friends! And if you would like to learn more about how you can get involved withCool Arts, please visit our website at https://coolarts.ca/

More on the Cool Arts Studio

The Cool Arts studio is a safe, inclusive art studio that offers programs and artistic mentorship with a variety of professional artists who share their skills and lead classes. Cool Arts is a registered not for profit charitable organization managed by a volunteer Board of Directors and others who share their time in many ways; as classroom assistants, event supports, exhibition installations, and so much more.  Cool Arts relies heavily on sponsorships and donors; we welcome your support. For more information, please visit our website at https://coolarts.ca/

 

Please also take a look at the artists at work for this exhibition:

https://fccs.ok.ubc.ca/2023/02/01/hearts-together-cool-arts-society-group-exhibition/

 

 

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The Distance of the Sun – work by Connor Charlesworth

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.

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Cultivations: Advanced Painting, Term One

Cultivations is an exhibition of paintings created by students in VISA 312S: Advanced Practice in Painting. Students in this class determined their own subject matter and explored different approaches to scale, space, value and materiality as a method of refining their body of work throughout the semester.

Cultivations includes work by Katya Meehalchan, Sara Richardson, Tin Laam Au (Eunis), Taylor Carpenter, Melissa Clark, Makeena Hartmann, Josie Hillman, Chloe Jenkins, Carly Johnson, Amy Marui, Karina Nardi, Julia Pearson, Christine Wakal and Abigail Wiens.

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Rylan Broadbent // Behind My Mask, I Am Secure

Behind My Mask, I Am Secure is an exhibition by UBCO MFA Alumni Rylan Broadbent

This exhibition was shown at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (421 Cawston Avenue (unit 103) in Kelowna, BC

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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