118 Victoria Street

PayDirt offers a visual representation that furthers Lindsay’s interest in interacting with light, colour and sound by transforming a space with multiple projected images and audio. By placing the projected images in strategic places Lindsay creates windows or portals into the landscape featured. Manipulating the left and right audio channels, Lindsay creates a conversation between the sounds of nature and the interruptions of heavy machinery. Using subtle animation paired with the audio, PayDirt presents a possible outcome for the site of the proposed Ajax mine after it has been exhausted of its precious metals. Lindsay is a recent graduate of the Thompson Rivers University Fine Arts program.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Taking the form of social science fiction, Pitching Tents in Terra Nullius imagines the fall of civilization and the near extinction of the planet─thirty years or so into a not-too-distant future. Pitching Tents in Terra Nullius looks to raw materials and basic conditions—of stories and of survival—to consider opportunities for meaningful exchange amid territorial disputes.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Plänterwald is filmed on the site of a former German Democratic Republic amusement park built in 1969 and abandoned after unification. Its rollercoaster and ferris-wheel sit motionless at the edge of the city of Berlin. After being closed to the public for almost a decade the rides and fairground structures─once providing a distraction from everyday realities─are left to a gradual process of decay and overgrowth. Paradoxically this derelict site is patrolled and protected by security guards who on the one hand attempt to maintain its separation from the public sphere and contemporary life yet on the other hand position it in the present social and economic conditions.

207 Seymour Street
TNRD BUILDING NORTHEAST CORNER WINDOW

Drive Thru uses kitsch and nostalgia to explore the role of convenience within our local food systems. Advertisements, news segments, and promotional videos from local and online media archives juxtapose themes of transportation, suburban sprawl, industrial food production, and media consumption. Drive Thru asks us to consider our own history and relationship with an undeniable necessity: food.

Interpretive Dance for Ordinary Tasks provides alternative solutions to face the challenges of our everyday lives.

OFFICE OF SURREALIST INVESTIGATIONS, 135 Victoria Street

Collaborative Corpse is a series of projected exquisite corpse drawings on the windows of the Office of Surrealist Investigations. Office of Surrealist Investigations is a collaborative art studio taking the form of a film noir private investigator’s office within which participants are invited to collaborate in Surrealist activities.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Set 500 years in the future, Quickeners tells the story of Human Atavism Syndrome (H.A.S.), an obscure disorder afflicting a tiny portion of the Quantum Human population, making them desire and feel as their Human Being predecessors once did. A species wirelessly interconnected to The Hive, Quantum Humans have evolved to operate solely on pure rational thought and they have achieved immortality. Quickeners is set against a cinéma vérité aesthetic, reworking archival documentary footage from a gathering of Pentecostal Christian snake handlers to illustrate the story. As the film unfolds, an authoritative Quantum Human narrator comments on what we witness: indecipherable testimonials, sermons, songs, prayers, convulsive dancing, speaking-in-tongues, serpent handling and ecstatic states that Quantum Humans define as “Quickening.”

VACANT LOT, 131 Victoria Street

Dancers In The Dark is a simple, participatory project. The public is invited to contribute dance moves and poses in form of short video clips. These clips are then assembled into a sequential collage, then played back the same evening as a laser-projection.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Reflecting Mark Twain’s famed quote, “The past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes,” Several Circles is a project that investigates the many “revolutions” that link the 19th century riverboat steam-engine with the 20th century automobile combustion engine: two forms of rotary-driven mechanical power that bookend a hundred year arc of American industry.

The work is set to a thundering soundtrack of Detroit techno, a uniquely American form of folk music. Invented in the ’80s in Motor City with the advent of imported drum machines, the music’s foundation on electronic rhythm eerily parallels the replacement of labor itself by machines in the factories and assembly lines that surrounded the makeshift clubs of early techno.

RIVERSIDE PARK

The second episode of 2084 is the latest in a three-part science fiction show, directed by Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle. Filmed on location in Tripoli, Lebanon, this video is set in a future where the Artists’ Republic, an artist-run city-state, has collapsed and art has become a thing of the past. Despite the demise of art, artists inexplicably continue to exist, albeit as animals. These new animal-humans are trapped in a cement dome where they ponder questions of labor, economy, religion, art and literature, while trying to come to terms with their new condition.

290 3rd Avenue 

Lure is a light installation utilizing screen-printed wallpaper and black lights. The display is meant to generate thoughtfulness towards the shortening of days and the symptoms of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) or “winter blues.” This includes depression, irregular sleeping patterns and overeating; symptoms that many people struggle with in varying degrees. In many cases, sufferers of SAD are prescribed light therapy. The window display at Barnacle Records is aglow with graphics of fictional microorganisms generating luminescence for pedestrians at night. These creatures are heavily influenced by the biological research and drawings of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, philosopher and artist.

TNRD LIBRARY WINDOWS

This collection of images and written contributions is a Kamloops Art Gallery initiative to capture a visual representation of the cultural diversity that exists in BC and in the Thompson Nicola Regional District. The KAG asked people in the region to submit photos and text to represent a diverse perspective on who we are. The project is a means to break down barriers, change preconceptions and share a commonality that we are all residents of this region.

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.