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.