RIVERSIDE PARK

Re(Housing) the American Dream is a documentary project by Kirsten Leenaars and a group of young students from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with whom the artist has collaborated since 2016. Freedom Principles, the third video from this ongoing project, was inspired by the city’s civil rights movement, including the contributions of the youth chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) during the 1960s. This vibrant video features the youth engaged in a series of collectively performed gestures—skipping, secret handshakes, call-and-response cries, tug-of-war and clapping games. These outdoor vignettes are interspersed with broadcasts from the utopian Radio Freedom, an imagined radio station. Framed by colourful sets built from cardboard, construction paper and masking tape, Leenaars’ young collaborators discuss such pressing political issues as the migrant experience, abortion rights and the necessity of voting. 

503 Victoria Street

Composed entirely from edited-together clips sourced from Canada’s National Film Board archives, Mobilize celebrates Indigenous knowledge, technologies and labour, highlighting the innovative techniques and virtuosic skills employed in everything from wood carving to steelwork and high-rise building construction. Featuring the impassioned vocals of Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq, Mobilize paints a sweeping history of the resilience and brilliance of rural and urban Indigenous peoples, in the face of the crushing and ongoing effects of colonization.

450/460 Victoria Street

Pulpo (Octopus) features a group of Mayan men who fought in the Guatemalan Civil War of the 1990s. The video was shot in a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles, California, where these men, now undocumented migrants, would meet to find work as day labourers. Popular re-enactments of the American Civil War are typically played out by hobbyists who recreate historic battle scenes in fetishistic detail; in contrast, Pulpo (Octopus) evokes its subjects’ past experiences and present vulnerability through a silent performance of simple choreographed gestures, far from home, without heroic spectacle. 

RIVERSIDE PARK

The collection of works in Luminocity 2020 presents a portal to complex and often dark histories that inform present contexts. Isabelle Pauwels’ work reveals the challenges of coming to terms with one’s own history. In W.E.S.T.E.R.N, 2010, Pauwels juxtaposes film footage of her parents' home in Richmond with home movies shot in her grandfather's home in the Belgian Congo. Still moments and text act as objects of evidence that simultaneously complicate and provide fragmentary disruption towards an understanding of the videos.

RIVERSIDE PARK

Family Matters, 2017, is an Afrofuturist video and sound installation that follows a mother and son who have escaped 19th century slavery in Canada by time travelling to contemporary Toronto, Ontario.

A collaborative project by Camille Turner and Camal Pirbhai, this work addresses aspects of Canadian history that are not predominantly discussed or taught in schools. In the context of current widespread uprisings against systemic racism this work illuminates important histories that inform the present.

465 Victoria Street

In the context of the global pandemic, our bodies and the environment have become dominant sites of conflict and anxiety. Expansive globalized travel and the exploitation of nature for human needs are contributing factors to the widespread nature of the pandemic. Marina Roy’s One Hundred Years Later offers space for considering this present condition and futurities. Using altered ukiyoe prints as backdrops, her animation was made in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake in 2011.

207 Seymour Street

Tania Willard’s artistic practice and her community-engaged projects cultivated through BUSH Gallery on Secwépemc territory near Chase, BC, are invested in conversations about Indigenous knowledges, traditions, aesthetics, performance and land-use systems. Her work addresses land-based Indigenous contemporary art as a survival strategy for contemporary socio-political upheavals. This series of works made for Luminocity, installed in the window of the Kamloops Museum and Archives, builds on recent projects which address the current moment of transformative energy that has the potential to destabilize colonial institutions and realize de-colonial futures. This installation draws from Willard’s previous work with Secwépemc archival material from the Kamloops Museum and Archives and the American Museum of Natural History. As the title suggests, in response to the complexity of current social, political and economic issues, including community division over the Trans Mountain pipeline, Willard has re-positioned slogans as an archive for a radical future. Tied to intuition, Willard’s imaginings reflect the political present while projecting the potential of a transformed future.

RIVERSIDE PARK

For her Bachelor of Fine Arts graduating project at Thompson Rivers University, Ruba Alshoshan explored the relationship between individuals and places by filming in her hometown Unaizah, Saudi Arabia. Void of people, Alshoshan’s imagery evokes the smells, sounds and emotional resonance of Unaizah and the surrounding desert as a way of exploring the social and intangible aspects of this particular place. Reflecting upon the experience of being away from home for long periods of time, the work considers how memories, experiences and lived events change a geographical location to place of significance.

207 Seymour Street

Each day and night commences with a short period of brilliance that transforms the neutral palette of our built environment and surroundings. Within the Kamloops Museum & Archives bay window a manipulated representation of the sun’s daily cycle invests in these fleeting moments, celebrating the quiet glorification of the mundane.

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.