The Collection + Fundraiser
Doris Ritchie
January 17 – February 7
Main Gallery
Local, well-known artist, Doris Ritchie, created a great body of work that includes watercolours, drawings and portraits of the island landscape, flora, and people. The Campbell River Art Gallery graciously accepted the donation of more than 240 original works from the Ritchie estate that were sold in support of Gallery fundraising initiatives. We commemorated this artists’ work by exhibiting the collection of paintings, selling the artworks over the course of the three-week exhibition at a Salon style reception on January 17.
Timberline Secondary School
Jesse Green, Brooklyn Beitel, Justine Lowgood, Ashlyn Ouellette, Laura Corbett, Sierra Alexander, Hayley Probyn, Birklee Landelis, Hannah Read, Jacob Stobbe, Angel Lapise, Jocelyn Joseph, Jordyn Goodwin, Jessica Hynes, and Leigha Fane
January 19 – February 19
Discovery Gallery
A selection of artworks from Jim Hesketh’s Timberline Secondary School art class; from acrylic painting to character drawings; this wonderful collection was a little glimpse into this talented group of students’ artwork.
Memento Mori: Remember you must die
Rachel Yoder
February 12 – March 27
Main Gallery
Yoder’s colour field paintings play with the biological tension created within the eye when two colours at specific tones are presented side by side. Yoder is concerned with this brain interpretation and how this is translated into the current aesthetic of the traditionally termed “conceptual” and “minimal” artworks in contemporary art. The interactive component urges the audience to answer a series of questions related to mortality and being that will in turn create a unique colour field to represent that person.
Stuck
Nathalie Quagliotto
February 12 – March 27
Discovery Gallery
Conceptual found object sculpture that reconfigures everyday pre-fabricated public objects that are associated with disuse, strict social regulations, safety, and risk. Quagliotto’s sculpture offer a whimsical, yet complex view on everyday objects. Toronto-based conceptual artist Quagliotto apprenticed under Martin Creed in London England and has shown nationally and internationally. Her work is in various collections in North America.
Richard Calver
February 19 – April 2
Satellite Gallery
Well-known artist and a founder of the Campbell River Art Gallery, Richard Calver presented a selection of his lino cut prints, with natural forms as the foundation of many of his most striking prints. As a part-time gardener, botanical images seen in “Thistle”, “Dandelion”, “Sun Flowers”, and “Skunk Cabbage” are Calver’s favorite subjects. The effect of movement, achieved through the use of strong diagonals and undulating lines, is also an important component in all his compositions. Each colour is printed individual and each image may be printed from as many as four or five blocks, with each block registered to align perfectly. Calver lives and works from his home on Quadra Island.
33rd Annual Members’ Show
April 2 – May 8
Main Gallery
The Campbell River Art Gallery and The Campbell River Arts Council presented the annual Members’ Exhibition showcasing our community’s artists. This celebration featured 87 regional artists working in a variety of mediums.
Award recipients:
Technicality Award: Catherine Martha Holmes – My Dear Old Friend, Poured Watercolour on Paper
Innovation Award: Kathryn Botsford – Echoes on the Shore I, Fibre Art
Originality Award: Heather Koning – Liminality, Pine, Medical gloves, Cable ties
Juror’s Choice Award: Bob Sivertson – US II, Acrylic
Honourable Mentions: D. Ross Fischer – Paddling Through History, Ruth MacLaurin – Cubic Zoom, Karen Martin Sampson – Pushing the Envelope, and Melissa St. Louis – The Jellies
People’s Choice Award: Jill Paris Rod – First Glimpse of the Kingdom
People’s Choice Award Honourable Mentions: Karen Martin Sampson – Pushing the Envelope and Heather Koning – Liminality
Jurors: Sew Sisters Artist Guild Society
Sponsored by: CR Lawyers, Shook Wickham Bishop Field
Award Sponsors: Impressions Custom Framing + Gallery, Needle + Arts Yarn Craft Centre, Photo Tech, Pier Street Gallery, PJ’s Arts + Custom Framing.
Cyber Fibres
April 2 – May 8
Satellite Gallery
The international quilting collective brought together by the internet, Cyber Fibres exhibited together on this rare and special occasion. Each Satellite Cases represented a theme in which each artist reflected upon and created an original textile work. Themes were: Spicy, Inspired by a Master Artist, Chocolate and the poem, Desiderata.
Behind the gold veil
Rande Cook
May 15 – June 26
Main Gallery
Rande Cook (K’alapa), originating from Alert Bay, presented a solo exhibition of new contemporary art works utilizing wood sculpture and metal, entrenched in Northwest Coast First Nations traditions.
Rande Cook and Dr. Andrea Walsh collaborated on a critical essay that accompanied the exhibition in print form, derived from regular studio visits and discussions taken place during the process of creating this exhibition.
Rande Cook
Chief Rande Cook (K’alapa) was born May 1977 in culture-rich Alert Bay, a small village on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Surrounded by the beauty of land and art, Rande found the passion of creativity at an early age. With the strong teachings from his grandparents Gus and Florence Matilpi, Rande learned the strong values of life and culture. In 2008 Rande inherited his grandfather’s chieftainship and now carries the name Makwala, which means moon. Rande is very involved in his culture and has hosted a Potlatch and two feasts for his family and community. Rande is also known for his traditional dancing and singing in Potlatches.
Rande has worked with many great mentors such as John Livingston for his mastery in wood sculpting, Robert Davidson in metal work, Calvin Hunt for his amazing craftsmanship in wood and most recently Repousee and Chasing master Valentin Yotkov. Rande has been expanding his capacities with new creative ideas and in 2010 traveled to Italy to study under Yotkov. Most recently he travelled to New York to study in Yotkov’s studio to increase his craft in Repousse and Chasing. Rande pushes himself in all his mediums looking for perfection of each technique. Rande’s works can be seen in many galleries in the United States and Canada, and is now in collections around the world.
Rande now resides in Victoria where he continues to push himself in his creativity by finding many new inspirations in new mediums.
Andrea Walsh
Andrea Walsh is a visual anthropologist who specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary aboriginal art visual culture in Canada, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to visual research.
Walsh is also an artist who works in photography and video in addition to producing social practice based works. In her development as an anthropologist, Walsh has been inspired by the long history of anthropological studies of art and material culture, and ethnographic film and photography, as well as more recent developments in the field of visual anthropology that have embraced the strengths of interdisciplinary visual culture studies.
Her research and teaching acknowledge and utilize her undergraduate training as a studio based artist (photo-lithography and intaglio printing) and graduate training in documentary and ethnographic film and video production. Walsh’s training as an anthropologist is integral to her approach as an artist. Historical and contemporary community-based cultural research and action is the foundation of her art practice in which she is interested in engaging memory, senses of space and place, history and identity.
Funded by: Canada Council for the Arts
Sponsored by: Vicar Electric, Storey Creek Trading Ltd.
Waking Giants
Max Streicher
July 2 – August 7
Main Gallery
Streicher’s inflatable works move the viewer from a playful and ironic headspace towards a physical connection to his or her most vital forces. Lightweight materials are brought into volume by air that animate the figures giving a sensation of deflation, shrinking, ephemerality; once coined an “antimonument” by gallerist Abhay Maskara. Streicher’s work has been shown internationally and nationally, imbuing a specific immersive experience to each space and figure.
Waking Giants is an homage to the terracotta soldiers and horses of China’s Shaanxi province (200 BC). This life-size army was made to accompany Emperor Qin Shi Huang to his grave and was ultimately intended, I assume, to assist in contunuing his earthly glory in the next life. In bringing my horses and figures to life by breathing air into them, I feel that I share something with the creators of that terracotta army. My motivation is likely of a different sort. I am not interested in an expression of might or eternity. On the contrary my, work with inflatable sculpture is always about bringing the viewer back to the body, to breath, to an inner, quiet power, and to an awareness of the tenuousness and fleeting nature of our existence. (Written by the Artist).
Exhibition Tear Sheet by Clay McCann
Sponsored by: Denise Mitchell Interiors
The man who never was
Stephen Laidlaw
July 2 – August 7
Discovery Gallery
Mixed media installation, The Man Who Never Was is an exploration into personal identity, questioning and re-evaluating the idea of self. How is the normative social activity learned and engendered within one’s identity and everyday routine? How is this contrasted with the understanding and subsequent classification of what is ‘different’?
Sponsored by: Poppy Steele and Hans Op de Beek
verstehen
Amy Modahl, Clayton McCann, Kiarra Albina, Shannon Lester, Michael V. Smith, Terra Poirier, Corie Waugh, and Kevin McPherson Eckhoff
July 9 – August 18
Satellite Gallery
The note(sketch)book is a coveted item, a talisman often presented behind-glass post-mortem as a means for the viewer to gain further insight on process, the person (artist), the artwork. The musings, in time and space transferred onto a dimensional surface is an object carried fetishization. This private space is regulated to the ruins of the individual.
This is the first incarnation of the project, and is approached as an experiment in seeking culling knowing sharing. Verstehen: to “understand in a deep way;” when a researcher aims to understand another person’s experiences, means to understand, perceive, know and comprehend the nature and significance of a phenomenon; to grasp or comprehend the meaning intended or expressed by another. The exhibition will feature a selection of note(sketch)book pages from working artists and writers.
Like the back of my hand
Suzo Hickey
August 12 – September 25
Main Gallery
Suzo Hickey is a painter and multidisciplinary artist. Born in 1959, she migrated from coast (Prince Rupert) to desert (Kamloops) before settling in Vancouver in 1991. She graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1994, and has exhibited around BC and the US on themes of urban landscapes, queer mothering, namecalling, narrative and death in the family.
Suzo paints the West Coast urban landscape – the streets of Prince Rupert, where she grew up, and the neighbourhood of East Vancouver, where she lives now. This work is a reference to her cultural history, recognizing her antecedents as a Canadian painter, experiencing the joy of manipulating paint in this landscape.
Suzo is interested in how human meaning shows in the landscape and how painting makes it possible to see that meaning. She says, “We get comfortable with power lines and ordinary houses in less-than-picturesque communities, and this might be where we see ourselves most clearly. When I looked more closely at what was around me, I saw its importance and its beauty.” Tourists are not visiting these streets, but this is where people live. There are no iconic buildings in Suzo’s paintings and no landmarks.
By using layers of light and weather, Suzo builds landscapes over complex underpaintings of shape and colour. Even when meaning is buried, it casts a shadow.
Sponsored by: Penny + Roger Gosselin
Are you sure?
Terra Poirier
August 13 – September 25
Discovery Gallery
Poirier explores the intersections, overlaps and disconnections between personal memory and others’ versions of events, exposing pitfalls of memory, and the shiftability of history. These ideas manifest as new assemblage works composed from Poirier’s real and fictional memories, as well as her personal and communal stories.
Terra Poirier is a filmmaker turned photographer currently working in analog and other low-fidelity formats to create graphic memoir concerned with memory slippage and distortion. Her image/text work and award-winning films have explored themes of trauma, mothering, poverty and home. Terra’s films have screened internationally, and she has taught video production at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, Access to Media Education Society and through the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
Sponsored by: Photo Tech fotosource
Community Partner: Campbell River Women’s Resource Centre
We are young and life is long
Participants from Terra Poirier’s Photographic + Text Transfer Workshop
August 27 – October 8
Satellite Gallery
Over three days, a group of young artists worked with current exhibiting artist Terra Poirier to learn the technique of Photo + Text-based transfer to compose autobiographical artworks.
Phantom Limb
Shyra de Souza
October 1 – November 5
Main Gallery
This porcelain installation was a corporeal representation of found objects that is at once familiar and alien, calling upon the viewer to combat their opposing desires in their physical and psychological relation to the work. Phantom Limb was large in scale, reminiscent of a dinosaur museum as well as a domestic display.
This work consists of a large central piece made of several smaller components, and arranged to emphasize the idealized, body-like structures. The source of the forms are various decorative objects and trinkets, and their combination into masses and resurfacing the resulting sculptures. Each item is added in such a way that they begin to erase one another, and take on forms reminiscent of mounted, overgrown deer antlers, or three-dimensional inkblots. The resulting forms are then be combined and displayed in such a way the pieces appear to form a skeletal structure of an alien sort, implying familiar body forms in an unfamiliar composition. Each piece will be carefully integrated into the overall structure over the first two months of the exhibition. (Written by the Artist).
Sponsored by: Broadstreet Properties Ltd
Structure of a Substance: Cluster
Twyla Exner
October 1 – November 6
Discovery Gallery
Twyla Exner‘s Structure of a Substance: Cluster was an immersive installation using discarded telephone wires of both material and conceptual inspiration. The installation engaged with many current social, political and environmental issues, but was also whimsical imaginings of an alternative ending for the residues of the electronic evolution.
Sponsored by: Healthyway Natural Foods Market