Riverside Park

Here Is Everything, 2013
single channel video and animation
14 minutes

In Here Is Everything, collaborators Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke attempt to address the big questions—the existence of God, abjection and redemption, the problem of suffering and death—through what has been called their “literary post-punk film style.” As with many of their past works on topics including beauty, the opioid crisis, and gun violence, they share a sense of wonder about the natural world to unpack deeper questions about the human realm.

Riverside Park

Pran Kouraz (Take Courage), 2019
2K Digital 16mm single channel video
14 minutes, 48 seconds
Originally Commissioned by Art Night London + Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)

Through his interdisciplinary art practice, Shiraz Bayjoo explores the socio-political and historical conditions integral to Mauritian cultural identity and the wider Indian Ocean region. His work traces the social and historical contexts of colonization in ocean spaces, which have been used for empire expansion, economic and cultural control, and resource extraction. Through experimental approaches and a decolonial lens, Bayjoo’s work looks at the darker histories of the stunning island archipelagos of Mauritius and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, known more widely as a popular tropical locale in mainstream entertainment.

Riverside Park

Transcendence Engine, 2023-a, 2023
wood, acrylic mirrors, Mylar mirror film, LED lighting
13.5 m long by 3.5 m tall

Transcendence Engine 2023-a is an interactive artwork by Blaine Campbell that acts as a focal point for Luminocity in Riverside Park. Measuring 13.5 meters long and 3.5 meters tall, Transcendence Engine 2023-a is a larger-than-life kaleidoscope that viewers are invited to move through and experience. As one enters the kaleidoscope structure, duplicated and mirrored reflections dance at the end of the passage. The kaleidoscopic image shifts as one’s vantage point shifts, other viewers pass in and out of the reflections, and as LED lights modulate through the specular patterns. The exterior of the structure also acts as a source of spectacle, reflecting the sky and the passageway’s surrounding environment.

Riverside Park

Fuel to Fire, 2023
single channel, HD video, sound and color video
7 minutes, 28 seconds
Commissioned by Sharjah Art FoundationCourtesy of the Artist, Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles/Mexico City), and Instituto de Visión (Bogota/NYC)

Fuel to Fire is part of the larger installation Agua Pesada /Alma' Althaqil (Heavy Water) commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present. This project draws on Carolina Caycedo’s extensive research into mineral mining in relation to labour, environmental extraction, and the energy conversion processes required to meet the rising need for energy transition.

Riverside Park

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy, 2018 - 2019
single channel HD video
30 minutes
Produced with the support of Arts Council England (UK), Hannah Barry Gallery (UK), and the University of British Columbia Social Justice Institute (GRSJ) (CA) and the Critical and Creative Social Justice Studies Research Excellence Cluster (CA)

4 Waters: Deep Implicancy is a collaborative project by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in which they bring together “a set of fragments drawn from a reimagined cosmos.” They explain, “These fragments, sounds, and stories help us convey the experiential moment of entanglement, or rather, they describe an entangled moment prior to separation, what we call ‘Deep Implicancy’.”i

Kamloops Art Gallery

When will my hands become roots?, 2016
single channel HD video
3 minutes, 40 seconds    

Luciana Freire D’Anunciação’s experimental video When will my hands become roots is filled with movement, as bodies attempt to connect and overlap with each other and their surroundings within a forest. As a starting point for this project, Freire D’Anunciação considered the word “displacement” in relation to her diasporic experience as it describes the act or process of removing something from its usual place. Originally from Brazil and now living in Vancouver, she contends, “As part of this process, cultural identity can be understood not as a combination of imported habits and characteristics, but rather as the reflection of how the new place sees the displaced.

Riverside Park

Birds in the Earth, 2018
single channel HD video
10 minutes, 40 seconds  
Courtesy of AV-arkki, the Centre for Finnish Media Art 

Dolastallat – To Have a Campfire, 2016
single channel HD video
5 minutes, 48 seconds  
Courtesy of AV-arkki, the Centre for Finnish Media Art  

Suodji, 2020
single channel HD video
4 minutes, 25 seconds  
Courtesy of AV-arkki, the Centre for Finnish Media Art    

Marja Helander’s playful video works explore the contradictions between the traditional Sámi ways of life and modern society. The Sámi are the Indigenous people of Europe; their homelands stretch across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In focusing on postcolonial topics in the Sámi area, Helander brings particular attention to the global mining industry and its impacts on ecology. She explores the deeply intertwined relationships between Sámi people and at-risk animals, including reindeer and willow grouse, and how these relationships have been impacted by forced borders, ecological destruction, and consumption. Although Helander recognizes that today’s encounter between nature and humankind is not harmonious, and can be destructive, her works emphasize the interdependence of people and nature. She uses aspects of surrealism, free association, Sámi legends, and Sámi customs and traditions to highlight the shifting relationships in the northern landscape.                         

Kamloops Art Gallery

Mullyanne Nîmito, 2022
single channel HD video
16 minutes
Photo: Rachel Topham

Mullyanne Nîmito explores concepts of protection, movement as healing, ancestral knowledge, traditional practice, and Nehiyaw fashion. Here, Cheyenne Rain LeGrande dances in a “Bepsi” tab shawl made of beer and Pepsi can tabs that she and members from her community collected over the past five years. Weaving the tabs and pastel ribbon together, LeGrande created a long shawl with fringe similar to the fancy shawls worn at powwows. Translated from nêhiyawêwin, Nîmito means “she dances.”

Kamloops Art Gallery

Tsanizid, 2019
single channel HD video
6 minutes

In the contemporary dance work, Tsanizid, Beric Manywounds presents a Two Spirit transformation journey and metamorphosis. Situated amidst the full moon, the night, and the first thunderstorm of spring, which marks the new year, a dancer ventures into the unknown in search of new beginnings. Through an exploration of the spiritual terrain of being a multi-gender being, this work offers a space of healing. Manywounds gives shape and form to their futurist visions of Indigenous performance art and decolonized representations of gender by hybridizing performative video, contemporary dance.

Kamloops Art Gallery

Ai Ikebana, 2021
animation made using GAN (Ai open source software)
2 minutes

Natalie Purschwitz draws on modes of making that include collecting, accumulating, arranging, editing, and transforming materials. Her work explores the ways that landscapes are shaped by humans and non-humans through systems of organization, networks of support, and ruptures within these systems.

Riverside Park

Lift Off, 2018
3 channel animation
3 minutes, 25 seconds
Commissioned by visiting curators of The Commute, QAGOMA

Well known for her collaborative work, Ahilapalapa Rands’ practice is dedicated to affirming Indigenous epistemologies, weaving contemporary technologies and realities with historical Indigenous knowledges. Rands’ 3-channel animation Lift Off explores Hawai’ian relationships to sacred lands and cultural practices, and the possibilities of these practices to be powerful forces of refusal.

Riverside Park

Still Running Water, 2017-2019
single channel HD video
12 minutes

Still Running Water  follows the Columbia River over nearly 2,000 kilometres from a spring west of the Kootenay Glacier in southeastern British Columbia, to Astoria, Oregon, where it connects with the Pacific Ocean. At the river’s source spring, water gently gurgles up from blue-grey mud, past bunch grass and wild camus, eventually sending rivulets of silt towards the sea. The Columbia River is over six kilometres wide at the mouth and is known as one of the most hazardous waterways to navigate in the world.

135 Victoria Street

French artist Bertille Bak is known for her commitment to the collaborative process. She gathered footage for Transports à dos d’hommes while living in a Roma camp on the outskirts of Paris. Bak and members of this Roma community created a playful folktale that hints at the many challenges her subjects face: ongoing demolition of their camps by French authorities, homelessness, the possibility of expulsion from France, poverty and unemployment. 

RIVERSIDE PARK

An Excavation of Us recalls the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)—the first slave-led insurrection that successfully led to liberation. The film’s narrator is Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, a legendary freedom fighter, who bravely fought in male disguise against the French during the Revolution. Melding shadow puppetry with footage of the Haitian caves named after this national hero, An Excavation of Us evokes the everyday horrors of slavery where “techniques of torture [were] written down like recipes.”  Shirley Bruno uses the caves’ complex cavities as a potent metaphor for the labyrinthian recesses of Haitian collective memory and cruel colonial history. While paying homage to Lamartinière, Bruno reflects on the brutal hypocrisy of French revolutionaries fighting for the democratic values of liberty, equality and fraternity in France while French armies waged war against the slave uprisings in Haiti.

RIVERSIDE PARK
(entry 6pm to 10pm nightly) 

Cineorama is an 8-channel, panoramic cinema that merges architecture, cinema and installation to investigate perspective. The interior of the cinema immerses viewers in a full 360-degree series of projections, bringing together virtual reality and multi-linear perspective in an audience-engaged, cinematic setting. The video projected on all eight screens is entitled Baptizo (Latin for “to immerse”). The Cineorama structure itself is a study of the 15th century Baptistery of Saint John in Florence, Italy. It was used by Filippo Brunelleschi to study and formulate his concept of linear perspective, a mathematic system for creating the realistic illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface. This system had a long-lasting effect on the history of picture making and our understanding of perspective. 

RIVERSIDE PARK

On March 14th of this year, Vancouver–based artist Adad Hannah found himself feeling frustrated and paralyzed by the ensuing pandemic and decided to respond by making artwork to share other’s experiences. The project has now amounted to over 200 collected videos made in his identifiable tableau-vivant style, accompanied by statements from the people in them describing their experience of the pandemic. Hannah's “living pictures” appear like still photographs, but in fact, show the subject attempting to stay still for a few minutes, frozen in time. Using a long camera lens from 5 metres away, Hannah approached strangers in public places from a distance and asked if he could record a video of them standing still from far away. He reflects, “I wanted to see if I could capture this strange and tense in-between moment we are currently in. Things are changing fast yet we're also sort of stuck in time not knowing what comes next.”

RIVERSIDE PARK

The inclusion of Sky Hopinka’s work Dislocation Blues reflects this exhibition’s exploration of power and resistance and specifically acknowledges the Canadian context of national Wet'suwet'en protests opposing resource extraction on Indigenous land. Dislocation Blues offers a view into the grassroots Dakota Access Pipeline protests. These protests began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. The pipeline was projected to run under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Many in the Standing Rock tribe and surrounding communities consider the pipeline to constitute a serious threat to the region's water. The construction is also seen as a direct threat to ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of historic importance.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Sandeep Johal’s animation, For Jyoti speaks to this year’s curatorial focus on themes of power and resistance, strength and fragility. For Jyoti was originally made for the Façade Festival in Vancouver in 2019 where it was projected on the façade of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It tells the story of Jyoti Singh, a young woman whose attack and subsequent death in 2012 united India in heated protests and debate around women’s rights and gender equality. Singh was dubbed Nirbhaya (Fearless) by the media and became the subject of the 2015 film India’s Daughter. Employing her signature graphic style, through her collaborative animation project Johal uses colour and symbolism to represent this tragic event. The work communicates an empowering, uplifting message that honours not only Jyoti Singh but survivors of gendered violence everywhere.

131 Victoria Street

Incorporating her background in dance and choreography, Karuhanga engages with her body and the bodies of other Black women as a gesture of empowerment and a critique of the Black body as entertainment. Her work offers meditations on the geopolitics of Blackness.  In her 2017 video installation being who you are there is no other,  Karuhanga subverts common associations with Black bodies and the urban landscape by positioning herself and her collaborator Ahlam Hassan within a pastoral natural landscape. Their brightly coloured hair and clothing and rhythmic flowing movements appear in synch with their surroundings and connected to the landscape. Through the inclusion of Black women within nature, Karuhanga recognizes the absence of the Black female body in representations of the Canadian landscape and creates space for Afro-Diasporic alterity. She asks, "Who gets to experience, witness and revel on the earth here? In what ways can Blackness as urbanity be called into question?"

290 3rd Avenue

Jessie Kobylanski’s new work made for Luminocity 2020, Sustain, is a response to undefinable yet palpable temporal shifts brought on by the global pandemic. The installation incorporates a video taken by her young son, capturing an everyday moment during an unusual time. The video was mistakenly shot on a slow-motion setting, creating both a sense of humour and unintentional majesty. Kobylanski’s installation reflects on how this period of global shutdown has allowed for a new consideration of the mundane, with a focus on the home and a new appreciation for what is in front of you, in the face of fear and uncertainty.