RIVERSIDE PARK

Kamloops-based artists Doug Buis and Brad Harder transform the Riverside Park into a dynamic, audio-visual encounter that draws on and alters our experience of the local environment. Harder’s video and audio collage trace his explorations of familiar Kamloops sites and sounds (urban intersections, shunting trains and backyard chicken coops) through a computer generated mosaic. Woven into Buis’ built environment, permutations, disruptions and manipulated videos and sounds fly through the trees and congregate around the tree trunks. This collaboration of image, object and sound examine our malleable perception of environment and address the dramatic transformation of our landscape through natural and human intervention.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Rising up from the shores of the Beaufort Sea, the Pingo Canadian Landmark area near Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories has provided wayfinding for Inuvialuit travellers for centuries — not to mention lookouts for spotting caribou, whales and other wildlife. For LandMarks2017/Repères2017, artist Maureen Gruben explored this landmark (which is cooperatively managed in accordance with the Inuvialuit Settlement Agreement) and its legacy of change, drawing on local knowledge of ice conditions to drill ice fishing holes on either side of the channel surrounding Canada’s highest pingo — the Ibyuq Pingo. Gruben references the Inuvialuit delta trim pattern that is often used to decorate parkas, stitching through the ice with red broadcloth that zigs and zags across the ice through an act of adornment that is an act of valuing the land.

RIVERSIDE PARK

For this collaborative project, cinematographers Amy Kazymerchyk and Aaron Leon traveled to artist and curator Tania Willard’s BUSH Gallery in Secwépemculecw, the territory of the Secwépemc Nation, to trap rabbits in the winter of 2016. Traditionally, rabbits were an everyday staple of Indigenous communities and the animals were typically trapped and processed by women. Relatively uneventful as the women learn these traditions through the process of this project, the video captures the complexities of invisible labour and the strong bonds between this group of women. Playfully referring to popular culture by way of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny cartoons and subverting the notion of “bunnies” as a feminized diminutive name, Coney Island Baby engages with mythologies and stereotypes around women and rabbits.

RIVERSIDE PARK

The Splits offers a series of quick cuts showcasing 14 individuals and groups, each demonstrating some kind of skill. Offering a view into human proclivities, Hrabluik’s mesmerizing video collage showcases an idiosyncratic cast of characters performing their strengths, aptitudes and obsessive interests, including rope-jumpers, weightlifters, dog trainers, a hairdresser, an opera singer, a piano player, a prolific hot dog eater and a tap dancing crew.

290 Third Avenue

Saline reflects upon the disintegration and reconstitution of identity as experienced by a young mother. Layers of sea water, both turbulent and calm, wash over depictions of maternal exaltation, sacrifice and female potency.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Suspended high in the tree canopy, Comet MMXVIII’s self-luminous body is a combination of new and salvaged materials — high-tech LED lights streaming through a cluster of recently obsolete fluorescent light tubes that make up the “tresses” of the comet’s tail, a roll of Bubble Wrap glowing in front of the lights as the comet’s nucleus. Each of the roll’s 32,000 or so half-spherical bubbles is almost lens-like in itself, the assemblage as a whole playing into Donald Lawrence’s long-standing interest in historical understandings of optics in relation to emergent and obsolete technologies — most specifically the camera obscura.

TNRD LIBRARY

Animated Luminocity Map in windows of TNRD LIBRARY and at the Information Kiosk in Riverside Park

RIVERSIDE PARK

1001 Lights reveals the intimate and life affirming quality of the Sabbath candle-lighting ceremony. Over the course of several months, 100 women of all ages from across Montreal’s varied Jewish community were filmed sharing their spiritual practice. The video installation consists of individually documented ceremonies playing in synch with each other. This rhythm serves to unify the experience and encompass a diversity of expression, extending beyond Jewish religion. The project probes the profound nature of time and faith, and asserts the permeability of memory ─ re-affirming our communal imagination and considering intercultural hybridity.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Set in the year 2100, a blind ghost by the name of K enters a tatara steel factory in an unknown and yet familiar place. As she circles and circles what we know is a Giant, she realizes that they too share common knowledge and a deep connection to each other’s lives. The Giant makes an offer for her to get her vision back in exchange for one thing.

Scissors is the last chapter of a trilogy of short stories called Rock, Paper, Scissors (2017) which was originally commissioned by a residency called AIR 475 in Yonago, Tottori Japan curated by Makiko Hara. The final installation was a multi-media installation comprised of audio, video and animation that explores the mysterious life of narrator K who time travels across the shores of Yonago to the islands of British Columbia from the years 1900 -2100. Each chapter bridges Canada and Japan by way of early Japanese migration and the natural resources of coal, lumber and iron.

RIVERSIDE PARK

In Being Skidoo, Jeneen Frei Njootli explores the practice and aesthetics of reciprocity within the Gwitchin community of Old Crow, Yukon. Youth at Old Crow’s Chief Zzeh Gittlit School created embroidery, beadwork and textile arts to fit skidoos, creating regalia for the vehicles that acknowledges them like sled dogs and are honoured, as tools and partners in travel. With their regalia, the skidoos along with the artists, guides and a camera crew journeyed into Vuntut National Park, Yukon (cooperatively managed with the Vuntut First Nation). The video offers a look at intimate and connected relationships with the North ─ the elements, the land, its animals and one another.

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.

For this project, multiple participants worked simultaneously to create drawings inspired by the Surrealist drawing game Exquisite Corpse. Participants engaged in a visual correspondence forming a collaborative drawing that builds off of each participant’s ideas and automatic mark-making. The Office of Surrealist Investigations hosted a public drawing night where visitors contributed to live projected drawings that were projected in the windows each evening throughout the week of Luminocity.

450/460 Victoria Street
VACANT LOT, 131 Victoria Street

SIGNALS is a collaborative project between artists Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva focusing on immersive audio-visual renderings of altered seascapes. Sassoon and Silva share an on-going theme in their individual practices: the depiction of wilderness and natural forms through computer imaging. Created by merging their respective fields of visual research, SIGNALS features oceanic panoramas inhabited by unnatural substances and enigmatic structures. The project draws from sources such as oceanographic surveys, climate studies and science-fiction to create 3D-generated video works and installations that reflect on contamination, mutation and future ecologies.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Parallax Chambers (White Camel Mountain) is a newly created work by Howie Tsui that debuts the next chapter of Retainers of Anarchy, a 25-metre, scroll-like video installation that references life during the Song dynasty (960–1279 Common Era). In this newest project, Tsui employs the same honed production process of drawing, animation and programming by way of an algorithmic animation sequence with stereo sound and applies this to a suite of intimately animated rooms within the Kowloon Walled City (situated geographically and administratively beyond the borders of both Hong Kong and China). This project serves as an avatar for the transitory state inherent to the diasporic experience.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Long View transports us to the rugged western edge of the country, the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, BC, with its wide-open view of the Pacific Ocean. For Yoon, who emigrated from Seoul, Korea to Vancouver in 1968, this view is a consideration of past, present and future relations between Asia and Canada. Long View presents contemplative still and moving images of the artist and three generations of her family on the beach. The project also includes a series of postcards, distributed nationally to universities, galleries, and community and artist run centres. Expanding on concerns previously considered in her 1991 postcard project Souvenirs of the Self, this work offers a lens through which to view self, place, belonging and race within the context of Canadian identity.

RIVERSIDE PARK

plúk̓wem (gather) is a collaborative public art project designed and created by participants in the Arbour Aboriginal Artists Collective Youth Workshops, led by Chris Bose (Nlaka’pamux /Secwepemc) and supported by the Kamloops Art Gallery.

450/460 Victoria Street

Patrick Bernatchez’s artistic practice is one of developing groups of works in projects realized over long periods of time, analogous to a work in progress. It draws upon varied traditions and aesthetics including mannerism, baroque, pop culture, horror movies, science fiction, even fantasy and the supernatural. This eclectic approach delves into our notions of collective and individual identity in a world increasingly shaped by capitalist culture, particularly as reflected in social pathologies and types of obsessive-compulsive behaviour such as hyper-consumption. The films in the Chrysalides Trilogy explore and depict themes of vanity, decline and alienation, revealing a disconcerting, timeless portrait.

RIVERSIDE PARK

The Deep Dark is a site-specific light installation intended to illuminate the interspaces between our sacred (and natural) environments and cultural constructs of darkness. Drawing from interviews with participants from various Banff Centre residencies where the work was initially installed, faculty, and staff were asked: why do we fear the dark? Is darkness a presence or an absence? What separates real fear from imaginary fear? Subsequently, each viewer is invited to participate in a solo night walk, alone in communion with the natural surroundings and their own thoughts. Utilizing domestic imagery (doorways) as a literal entry point, the installation imposes artificial light into the wild darkness─light by which the darkness grows darker and disillusions the night.

PADLOCK STUDIOS, 175 2nd Avenue

Kelsey Braun’s work Fragmentation is a multi-channel audio and video installation that references the fluctuating nature of memory, its documentation, projection and reception by way of an investigation into the relationship between identity, memory and environment. It explores how one’s perspective and identity are shaped by the surrounding environment and everyday experiences.  Fragmentation encompasses a combination of sound recordings made by the artist and her late father from the 1980s as well as abstract images that are projected across the gallery space and are refracted by mirrors. The projection and refraction of imagery establishes the possibility for a multitude of narratives.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Tales in the Trees presents a conversation, primarily visual with some auditory components, between a campfire and a gust of wind, that takes place within a tree, in a popular public space. The project is based on theories of how trees communicate, with other trees, and sometimes other species and natural phenomena. Arboreal communication, for the most part has a chemical basis, with information transmitted through root systems,  dependent on soil types, geological formations and moisture content. Trees occasionally will use wind to scatter leaves and seeds to send messages, but these tend to be for long-term communication,  relying  on  the chemistry of decomposition or new growth.  Phenomena such as fire or wind can appear to communicate, to a limited degree, with trees, fire through chemical means, and wind through auditory vibrations (or the arboreal approximation of sound). However, some theories suggest that trees merely use these phenomena as  conduits for their own forms of expression. 

KAMLOOPS ART GALLERY EXTERIOR WINDOWS

Through photography and video installation, Montreal-based artist Pascal Grandmaison explores techniques for capturing the image and scrutinizes the conditions under which it is produced. His practice re-imagines the photographic medium and its historical precedents to produce images anew. Grandmaison states that, for him, “the camera is just a tool through which the light passes.” Light and the process of capturing the image are intrinsically connected to time, a central focus in Grandmaison’s work.

DISSOLUTION I and NOSTALGIE 2 are part of the Kamloops Art Gallery’s onsite exhibition All membranes are porous on view until December 31. Grandmaison’s dual projection DISSOLUTION I suggests a fluid and abstract reference to the body by way of a manufactured means of child’s play (the soap bubble). NOSTALGIE 2 situates the human hand directly into a rich, fertile natural landscape. Both works are contemplative studies that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, referring to the complex relationship between our bodies and the world around us.