1st & Victoria

Uprooted
Recent technological changes have transformed natural and rural environments, to the point of producing uniform, ever-more polluted environments in their stead. Uprooted probes these territories fashioned by man, deciphering in them his relationship to his environment, thereby questioning his ways of being. Critical of environmental and urban developments, this video explores the peripheries of some North American cities, strangely alike from one to the next, in that none of them feels like somewhere. Their excessively wide spaces, standardized and shapeless, generate a sense of uneasiness. Urban upheavals can turn the most familiar locale into an unrecognizable, anonymous, even forbidding place. On this blank slate, local memory is forever erased.

Losing Ground is a critique of urban sprawl and the resulting erosion and homogenization of the countryside across the world. With its negation of city history, of geographic particularities, and thus of cultural memory, this standardized urbanization imposes its amnesia, individualistic lifestyle, and jarring presence in nature. Filmed in Quartier DIX30 in Brossard, the biggest lifestyle center in Canada, the video sounds out recently man-made territories so as to decipher humanity’s relationships with the environment. It confronts us with the dizzying spectacle of our diminishing local references, as they give way to cultural stereotypes, now become universal through globalization.

4th & Seymour

For his series of photographs Kamloops Daily News, 2014, shot in Kamloops in the spring of 2014, Howell documents a ghost like scene of a once bustling newsroom and busy printing press. Projected as a slideshow in the windows of the old Kamloops Daily News building as part of Luminocity, these images of what remained inside the building convey a poignant reminder of this past and a palpable sense of loss experienced by the community of Kamloops.

ROTARY BANDSHELL, RIVERSIDE PARK

Working with the basic principle that we are hard-wired to receive and distinguish certain unique hues of colour, the artist collective Instant Coffee prod to heighten pinkish sentiments. Their ongoing research project Pink Noise drives at colliding and provoking the basic sensory mechanics of colour and sound to form temperamental emotional connections. Their cursory research takes its initial form as part of Luminocity as a gathering place and a series of music performances. Instant Coffee will turn Kamloops’ Rotary Bandshell at Riverside Park into a vibrant pink-washed venue from which to host four evenings of events. Come through the back and delve into a material investigation of pink noise.

7 Seymour Street West

Peregrination is a live cinema work reflecting on the nature of sound and its visual and material nature. A meditation on Joynes’ visual experimentation using historical scientific instruments and anachronistic musical technology. Peregrination combines compositional sound with an improvisational use of video footage of live play of the wave driver machinery he uses to create in the studio.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Clarence Jules is a former Thompson Rivers University student. He is currently studying film production in Vancouver. Jules’ film Bus Stop was recently accepted to the LA Skins film festival. Psychology Studies and You: Dubbing, is an absurdist mockumentary about a man whose mental condition dubs over everything he says with something completely irrelevant. We follow the man as he tries to cope with his condition while he goes about his everyday life.

KAMLOOPS ART GALLERY, EXTERIOR WINDOWS

Khan Lee’s video Shunt focuses on the iconic image and sound of a freight train—a feature of the local landscape that is steeped in Canada’s growth as a nation and that resonates locally on many levels, as a key source of employment and a constant sign of the movement of goods. In relation to A Terrible Beauty: Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr, on view at the Kamloops Art Gallery at the same time, Shunt contributes to ongoing dialogues about the sublime and industrialized landscape.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Devon Lindsay is currently in his 4th year of visual arts studies at Thompson Rivers University. At the top of Greenstone mountain there is only the sound of the wind. A vast panoramic landscape dominates the view so that it is possible to see the curvature of the earth. As a high point in Kamloops, Greenstone is also the site for numerous radio towers. Radio waves travelling at the speed of light bounce off the repeater; they are invisible and unheard at the summit. Greenstone Repeater is a contemplation about the myriad of electronic signals and the active, yet silent, communication present at this site.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Dasha Novak works as a writer, story editor and producer/executive producer under the banner of her company, Snow Crow Productions in Vancouver. She co-produced and co-wrote the animated series, the Adventures of Artie the Ant, the TV pilot and comedy series Health Nutz for APTN, including a social media campaign and an interactive website for Health Nutz. Novak has taught visual art at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and her artistic practice includes multimedia and installation based work. She has created photographic images ranging from pinhole camera cyanotypes and murals to digital prints, abstract paintings, short experimental films and video installations, exploring themes such as “sense of place”, “liminal space”, “lucid dreaming”, “interactivity” and “art as research”. Novak has also been investigating “synesthesia” and working on an exhibition and a short film “Sugar High Rhapsody” based on the subject of multisensory perception and interactivity.

4th & Seymour

Bodies of Water combines the fluidity of life drawing with video footage of urban reflections in water. It intertwines narratives of human journeys with those of travelling waters in a vivid expression of colour, energy, and motion. Animated figures of rippling water portray an ongoing flow of humanity, a testament to both constant change and continued endurance. A wide range of emotion is conveyed by the fluctuating character of the water, and through the posture and movements of the individuals.

KAMLOOPS MUSEUM & ARCHIVES, 207 Seymour Street
(watch for this installation to change daily)
135 Victoria Street

Forum is an exploration of object-based, archival text specific to Kamloops culture and history. It is a mash-up of almanac information and local artifacts drawn from the Kamloops Museum’s collection and presented in the museum’s display window on Seymour Street. This combination of text and object transcends time and the artwork takes shape as a present stream of visual information that will change daily.

In Silver Aqueous, Patsula uses her body and sculptural materials to create an aesthetic of visual disruption in the landscape. By inserting herself into a natural environment she is able to perform and document her artwork. In this work Patsula creates “temporary sculpture” out of reflective mylar blankets, originally manufactured for use in emergency situations. The mylar surface interacts with the space around it to produce a striking visual break in the landscape. While working from within the mylar blankets to manipulate this lightweight and lustrous material, the artist documents her interactions with the wind and surrounding landscape with photographs and video. Silver Aqueous situates two related projections of a documented performance in the corner of a room. The relationship between each projection located on converging planes communicates the subtlety of self-awareness in one’s habitat.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Time has been a recurring theme in Robison’s work. Her work in video, film, animation, sound, photography and drawing is suffused with meditations on time, motion and stillness. These works have been an exploration in pursuit of an expansion/expansiveness of media. Video and film, though recorded, are seen as if in the present tense in that we actually see one frame at a time although there is the illusion of fluid and natural movement. Drawings and animation are a more static form and engage with stillness. Robison’s work generally has a peculiar relationship with popular culture and commercial advertising, both of which work on the subconscious and come to us in quick timely bursts.

5th and Victoria

Lit Pix is a series of images made with a custom android app created by the artist that activates the LED flash of an Android device as a flashlight and takes a picture. Matt Smith’s day job is working as an audio visual technician at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Many of these images show views of the small spaces behind walls in which Smith works everyday.

Frolapse is a time lapse animation over the course of 5 months, documenting CSA’s Curator Steven Tong’s hair growing into its trademark shape. Steven took a picture most mornings over the time period and Matt Smith assembled it into an animation specifically for the “Birdtrap” exhibition at CSA in August 2013.

5th & Victoria
LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

In Radical Rupture the visual of the creation of a universe, one star at a time, is combined with an audio recording of a lecture given by Herbert Marcuse in 1968 on the nature of aggression and repression. At the mid-point of the lecture, the stars begin to disappear one by one, ending with a black screen. This installation consists of a projection screen tilted between the wall and the ceiling, five beanbag chairs and a large shag rug. Viewers should lean back in the chairs to orient themselves towards the screen.

Sunrise / Sunset: Three Early Modern Utopias, Revised
In this video, a paperback copy of a book titled Three Early Modern Utopias is raised into the frame. The lower right hand corner of the book is central in the frame, when the person holding the book starts flipping rapidly through the pages. Random words from the text are briefly legible, while a bright yellow ink-splotch on the bottom of the page becomes animated by the action of flipping the pages. The ink-splotch comes to resemble a sun rising and setting on the horizon, as the person holding the book repeats his action from front to back, then back to front numerous times.

Loheland
Inspired by the Loheland Colony, a radically utopian, all female school founded in Weimar Germany, this video focuses on the relationship between modern dance and Great Danes, two disparate enterprises for which the colony became well known. While the tenants of modern dance developed at Loheland, such as non-rhythmic, asexual movements, were curtailed due to criticality towards the gaze in performance, their commercial success at breeding Great Danes (which enterprise funded the school) lives on today: Loheland Danes are still the top prize winners for the breed. Loheland Dance Rehearsal Research Residency is a video document of an experiment in movement combining human and animal bodies, wherein an exploration of physical repertoires and an intersection between radically different bodies creates a speculative connection between the creative and commercial enterprises of this historical example of feminist utopian pedagogy.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Vincent Viezzer is a former student at Thompson Rivers University. Viezzer works in video and has acted in TV productions. In his short film seen through the eyes of a youth, Young Kairos meets a familiar grown-up and begins to realize that their relationship is not as it seems. As the potentials of a past and future self discover each other, they face the consequences of existing together in a time that is neither past nor future for either of them.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Siqi Xu is currently a fourth year student at Thompson Rivers University, working on 3-D animation and video projects. He is an international student from China. The Gu Zheng is one of the traditional Chinese musical instruments, one of the oldest instruments in China. Gu Zheng music has an over 5000 years history and is played to reveal human emotion. In this video, Siqi Xu explores this part of his heritage, wherein the music is transmitted through body language, using the human torso, with hands, feet, face and eyes.