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Myth of Fishes

Sybil Andrews, Claire Falkenberg, Meghna Haldar, Olia Mishchenko, Nadia Myre, Wendy Red Star, Jennifer Stillwell, and Holly Ward

January 21 – March 3

Main Gallery

Bringing together diverse artists from different backgrounds, Myth of Fishes examines eight radically distinct feminist interpretations of nature. The exhibition, in part, takes its name from Rhonda Abrams’ 1985 short film of the same name, in which a woman’s first fishing experience results in a comic-opera of uncertainty where everyone involved as well as the objects emerge with physical and emotional contusions. 

A near-rhyming alliteration, Myth of Fishes is a tongue-twister, stretching the imagination, flipping the lips and slipping the S’s as the mind grasps at the species of fishes in the seas, streams, oceans and lakes, evoking the North Vancouver Island community’s history (and prehistory) with fishing.

Myth is a story passed through time, person to person, linked here with the fish or the symbol of shared plenty. Myth of Fishes is the expression of eight artists speaking through their diverse practices and conceptual engagements. Notions of nature as a pure realm apart from the human are redefined through political ecology, indigenous rights struggle, and feminism. Myth of Fishes is a woven whole comprised of collective vision, bound by each of the artists’ practices and conceptual logic, through which the past and present collapse onto each other, reflecting, refracting, fuelled by the warp and weft of what we have come to know and unknow of “nature”. Within the gallery space, the female is extolled as natural, simulation, (un)controllable, irrevocably linked with politics and social convention. Myth of Fishes heeds the necessary call for change in our current environmental and civil rights situation in Canada. This exhibition reflects the call through creativity, exposing the cynical, the blunt, and the nuanced truths from eight artists. The core question of the human-nature relationship as interpreted through a feminist perspective, mirrors a recurrent discourse in contemporary art at large, and corresponds to the overall focus of the gallery’s program.

Sponsored by: Denise Mitchell Interiors

Myth of Fishes was curated by Julia Prudhomme

welcome you’re welcome

Greta Hamilton

January 21 – March 3

Discovery Gallery

The installation is a juxtaposition, contrasting bits of my adolescence parallel each other in this space. to recreate my bedroom in a big empty case. quaint and personal, poorly lit, there are wrinkles in the sheets from sleeping. Old poems and scraps. my experience in adolescence. A mirror. Personal photos composed of the vast, hollow walls of the city. less than picturesque architecture, grey matter, for once sweet.

bedroom on display in a big empty case///big empty walls of the city are personal photographs in my bedroom

an entire town became ephemera to me.

grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup. fried bologna sandwich, vegetable soup.

The time behind the shed, the time you let me walk home in the dark, the time I almost puked.

On the roof in the summer, when we snuck into the pool and the cops came.

This is my bedroom, and this is the town where everything happened to me. (Written by the artist)

34th Annual Members’ Show

March 11 – April 14

Main Gallery

The Annual Members’ Exhibition is a popular benefit of being a member of the Campbell River Arts Council and Campbell River Art Gallery. The exhibition features regional artists in the Campbell River Art Gallery’s Main Exhibition Hall. 

Award recipients: 

Innovation Award (interesting or unique use of material and success in realization of project): Cherie Dobbie

Originality Award (originality in concept, approach, and presentation):
Janis Guthy

Originality Award Runners up: Jeff Hartbower and Cherie Dobbie

People’s Choice Award (favourite overall artwork in exhibition): Judy Hilgemann

Award sponsors: Impressions Custom Framing, Photo Tech and Pier Street Gallery

TRACE, a special new component of the Members’ Exhibition
A number of participating artists created an original artwork that were available for sale in the Discovery Gallery throughout the exhibition for $50. Proceeds went toward costs associated with the reception and exhibition. 

Flower Faces

Aubrey Burke

March 11 – April 14

Discovery Gallery

This work by artist Aubrey Burke is created in response to capturing the dreamers in our society and the lucid state where the waking body dips into the dream reality – the place where the two realities meet.  This is explored through the mediums of flowers – which in ancient times were thought to shine through into the inner worlds where the spirits, devas, ancestors, and guardian angels live.

Aubrey Burke has a diversity of mediums following ideas and impulse to be created.  He has worked with photography, video, performance, print media and installation art.  Aubrey Burke is from Victoria BC, where he almost completed his education.  He has spent a good number of years making art as well as working with artist-run centres in Victoria.

The Braid Harvesters

April 28 – June 2

Amalie Atkins

Main Gallery

Amalie Atkins is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Saskatoon. She creates cinematic fables through a blend of film, textiles, installations, performance, and photography, imprinting a fictional world onto everyday life. Atkins’ work has shown nationally and internationally and toured with major survey exhibitions, most notably, Oh, Canada (MASS MoCA) and DreamLand (The Textile Museum of Canada). Her photographs have appeared on the covers of Canadian Art Magazine, Visual Arts News, Grain Magazine, CV2, and in MUZE magazine (Paris).  Atkins was the recipient of the Locale Art Award for Western Canada in 2011 and long listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2012 and 2013.  Recent exhibitions include We live on the edge of disaster and imagine we are in a musical at the MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina), SAAG (Lethbridge) and the College Galleries (Saskatoon), Wundermärchen, at the Kenderdine Art Gallery (Saskatoon), and Little Black Listening Hut, commissioned by Remai Modern for Nuit Blanche (Saskatoon).  In 2015 her work appeared in exhibitions at the Gerald Moore Galley (London, UK), Schleifmühlgasse 12-14 (Vienna), and at NPAK/ACCEA in Yerevan, Armenia. 

Sponsored by: Tremain Media

Amulet

Kiarra Albina

April 28 – June 2

Discovery Gallery

An amulet is an object whose most important characteristic is the power ascribed to it to protect its owner from danger or harm.

Amulet is a new suite of works on paper by Kiarra Albina created in night, in cautionary origins of magical fairy tales, in shape shifting, in ceremonial transformation, in the charged amulet, in soft musings, in portraiture, in behind the darkness so that even we cannot see.  

Red powder was taken out of one of the bottles, and with it was touched the crown, ear, elbows, knees, and feet of the applicant; a black powder then followed, and with it were anointed the shoulder, crown, knees, hair, feet, and head. 

Calgary-born artist, Kiarra Albina, works within and between the disciplines of drawing, painting, traditional animation, bookmaking, installation, and sound. Both a solitary and collaborating culture worker, she reintroduces nature, magic, and notions of wildness and unbridled play through her work. In 2010 she participated as a NFB/ONF Hothouse Director. Her drawings and book works have been exhibited and her films screened in galleries, artist-run centres, theatres, and non-ordinary spaces throughout Western Canada, London, Ontario, Montréal and Vienna. Her work has also been exhibited through: EMMedia, Arbour Lake School, Straw Gallery, Stride Gallery and recently at Contemporary Calgary, curated by Kim Dorland.

Sponsored by: Sandy Baker and RE/MAX Check Realty

Home Coming

Sonny Assu

June 16 – July 21

Main Gallery

Exhibition statement can be found here.

Home Coming was a solo exhibition by contemporary artist, Sonny Assu. This survey-style exhibition featured specific artworks pertaining to Assu’s familial lineage and the Northwest Coast. Assu is Ligwilda’xw (We Wai Kai) of the Kwakwaka’wakw nations and has recently relocated to Campbell River, British Columbia. The exhibition featured sculptures, paintings, and digital intervention installation which comprised a spatial exploration of Assu’s autobiographical artistic practice.

Odes to Who We Were

Emily Liteplo and Alexa Fahlman

June 25- August 25

Discovery Gallery

Exhibition Statement

The exhibition explores a feminist narrative on adolescent relationships through digital prints, photographs, text and small publications, while addressing the post-internet culture they are created in.

Liteplo and Fahlman discuss the socio-political implications of womanhood through their experiences navigating relationships in a patriarchal context. Their work deals with the inherent lack of closure in social media’s ability to perpetuate relationships and their wounds.

A sense of humour emerges through their often disheartening experiences, as they turn the lens onto themselves to find closure and empowerment.

In addition to the exhibition, Emily Liteplo offered a zine making workshop during Campbell River’s PRIDE events.

Aja’Sit

July 28 – September 1

Jordan Bennett and Amy Malbeuf

Discovery Gallery

Exhibition Statement is available here.

The Campbell River Art Gallery is delighted to present contemporary artists, Jordan Bennett and Amy Malbeuf in the duo-exhibition, Aja’sit, from 28 July – 1 September 2016 in our Main Gallery. Aja’sit presents the two artists’ current works demonstrating how their practices overlap and challenge each other through the exploration of mobility and notions of place.

Also on exhibition in the Discovery Gallery is artwork created by youth who have been working with Bennett and Malbeuf week in the final youth engagement workshop of the year, generously funded by the BC Arts Council and the Campbell River Community Foundation.

Darya Akay: Remnants

Darya Akay

September 4 – October 18

Discovery Gallery

Film photographs and physical remnants from visiting artist Derya Akay’s event held on 3 September 2016. Ephemera from the special event acts as research and document as Akay’s project leads into the artist’s forthcoming 2017 exhibition. Akay created a temporary installation and hosted a dinner to local farmers, gardeners, artists and the like.

STEAM DONKEY

Samuel Roy-Bois

September 22 – October 27

Main Gallery

Samuel Roy-Bois (b. Quebec City, 1973) is a Vancouver-based installation artist who builds environments that evoke complex notions of presence, absence, denial and longing. His art provokes questions about divisions between institutional, artistic and exhibition spaces—for instance, What and who is invited into and kept out of each space? Sometimes, his ambiguous constructions simultaneously invite and block audience participation. The 2013 Roy-Bois work Not a new world, just an old trick at SFU Gallery in Burnaby is a large-scale model that viewers are invited to enter, whereupon they encounter works from the university’s permanent collection. This installation conjures both domestic and institutionalized space. Other projects include I had a great trip despite a brutal feeling of cognitive dissonance, which constructed a free private living space for a stranger at Vancouver’s Artspeak in 2012. Roy-Bois’s art has also been exhibited at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among other venues. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan

Supported by: Canada Council for the Arts

Sponsored by: Broadstreet Properties Ltd

A Selection from the Permanent Collection

Judy Betts, Richard Calver, Liz Carter, and George Littlechild

October 21, 2016 – January 12, 2017

Discovery Gallery

The Permanent Collection of the Campbell River Art Gallery currently comprises over 78 works of art by Canadian artists with strong ties to the North Vancouver Island region. The collection represents a wide range of artistic practices, including painting, sculpture, prints, and multi-media art. Artists whose work is represented within the holdings of the collection are among others, Sybil Andrews, Liz Carter, Richard Calver, Danny Coon, Lyn Farquharson, Gordon James, and George Littlechild.

New works are acquired for the collection on an ongoing basis through private donations, as well as support from the Campbell River Arts Council. The Arts Council assisted in the acquisition of our most recent work of art by Suzo Hickey, which is currently on display in the Gallery Offices. Other recent acquisitions include work by David Kilmartin and Doris Ritchie.

This collection is generously housed within the Museum at Campbell River where the works are preserved in a proper humidity and temperature-controlled room.

The Permanent Collection exists to support the Gallery’s academic use in research and teaching and community outreach. It is intended to be accessible to audiences today while being preserved as a cultural trust for the benefit of future generations.