VACANT LOT, 131 VICTORIA STREET

Tania Willard’s work is presented in conjunction with #callresponse, a Canada Council {Re}Conciliation initiative. #callresponse supports the work of Indigenous North American women and artists through five site-specific art commissions that incite dialogue and catalyze action between individuals, communities, territories and institutions. The project poses possibilities that ground art in responsible action, value-lived experience and demonstrates ongoing commitment to community building, responding to re/conciliation as a present day negotiation and ongoing consequence of colonial trauma. Running at the same time as Luminocity, Willard’s Only Available Light will be a part of an exhibition at grunt gallery in Vancouver, opening October 28 alongside selections from each commissioned project.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

In this collaborative video, Atkins and Egers were guided by the notion of making a visual-auditory scaffold for the audience to temporarily re-perceive the nonthingness of time and space. This occurs before we enter into language, when the “stuff” or “things” of the world are more alike than different and when experience is fresh, engulfing, confusing, and unarticulated. Nonthings is an invitation to enter into a space of p-l-a-y with the // signaling an unconventional binary opposition. hairball is the only word in the work, which acts as a linguistic symbol of the finale of Freud’s fort-da game and our human entrance into the symbolic-language―a primordial word from which cascades an endless chain of words separating ego from embodied sensory experience. The opposition-paradox between nonthings and hairballs is one of the main experiences we invite our audience to slip into as a re-perception before linear time and language.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Plot is a durational performance for the camera, documenting the artist digging a grave from beginning to end. The resulting six-hour video operates as a tableau, registering the shifting light and weather conditions throughout the day. In addition to his many breaks and subsequent fatigue, Brunen’s labour is featured, eventually finding resolution in the artist’s disappearance. The work also expands to other iterations, including a scale photograph of the empty excavation, a tombstone marking the public location (which reads as a museum object label), as well as a more recent rubbing of this stone. Taking its cue from early conceptual works of the 60s and 70s, Plot contemplates perceptions of time and the relationship between duration and subjectivity. The video also tests the attention span of the average viewer, while at the same time questioning contemporary spectatorship and the expectations placed on artists today. Plot challenges Western society’s obsession with health and its imperative to control chance outcomes, ultimately striving to embrace or proclaim the very thing beyond our control.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Doug Buis is currently Associate Professor in the Visual Arts program at Thompson Rivers University. He previously taught at Cal State University Long Beach, where he was head of the Sculpture BFA and MFA program for seven years. His current interests are related to landscape transformation through volcanic and glacial activity.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Paolino Caputo is from McBride, British Columbia.  He is entering into his third year of studies in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at Thompson Rivers University with an interest in acquiring a Creative Writing Minor. His visual arts practice draws from interest in conceptualism and explore the human condition. Zenith is a philosophical investigation into romantic relationships.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Wanderer originated while listening to music. The places depicted in the video are drawn from real places, fictional locations and dreams, layered and combined in a series of chambers. As the wanderer moves slowly through the chambers the camera looks forward and backward in time on a single line and is the only active element in the scene. Arranged as a single continuous movement, it takes on the viewpoint of the minds eye following a thought.

CURATED BY TANIA WILLARD

RIVERSIDE PARK

Video Tipi, first featured in the Your Kontinent: Richmond Int’l Film and Media Arts Festival, is a two channel projection inside a 24 foot in diameter teepee that shows footage of an ancient and sacred site, Writing on Stone, in Southwest Alberta as well as images of Sioux-Lakota bead work from the turn of the century and a shifting audio-scape of electronic music that gradually shifts into a drum song.

450/460 Victoria Street

Cosplayers
This cinematic work is an experiment that employs a surrealistic plot to give COSPLAYERS (young people dressed as game characters) the ability to traverse the city at will, and to engage in combat within their imaginary world. They expect their costumes will grant them true magical power, enabling the wearer to transcend reality and put themselves above all worldly and mundane concerns.

Whose Utopia
With the background of Pearl River Delta’s economic development, OSRAM Factory, as one of the new space promoters, is taking part in the process of China’s integration into the global system. On the other hand, the power of global market is penetrating the local areas by means of multi-national corporations. As a result, local economy is forced onto a global stage while young laborers from many inland provinces are entering this new international labor division.

LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK

Tara Gardner explores her family history through a digitally recorded performance of herself playing a Celtic instrument called the bones. The instrument was one of the few creative endeavours passed on to the artist by her father who valued hard work and utilitarian skills over creativity and artistry. The movement required to play this instrument and the framing of the work draw the viewer in while the practice of playing the music serves as a reminder of the artist’s father and a way of dealing with the grief of his passing in 2009. Gardner blends traditional with contemporary music playing along to country songs on her MP3 player.

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.