Oxygen Art Centre presents an artist talk and book launch with artists Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis. Oxygen hosted Daedalus and Davis for a remote residency throughout the month of August, during which the artists produced photographic works exploring the Sitka swamplands of the Grays River.
Daedalus and Davis are a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist team and cofounders of the former Roll-Up Gallery, an artist-run, contemporary exhibition space in Portland, Oregon. Having relocated in 2019 from Portland, Oregon to a rural hamlet on the Grays River, the artists live and work next to 55 acres of Sitka spruce swamp protected by the Columbia Land Trust. Over the past year Daedalus and Davis have been working with local organic materials and photographic processes to initiate a new body of work about this relatively obscure corner of the natural world.
Conceived under the title, “Palūs,” the Latin word for marsh, the residency is a continuation of their work with the Columbia River through alternative photographic and print processes such as the fugitive plant-based process of anthotypes that document flora and fauna, photograms documenting the swamp tides, and Japanese Gyotaku print methods. These material explorations, alongside the artists embodied reflections on the process, are included in an artist monograph published by Oxygen Art Centre.
The monograph chronicles Daedalus and Davis’s remote residency alongside an introduction by curator Rachel Lafo, an ecological perspective of the Sitka spruce swamp by environmentalist Andrew Emlen, and a poem by Robert Pyle. The book will be available to the public in print and online formats mid-October 2021.
Join us on Saturday October, 23, 2021 at 1:00 PM PST (Zoom) to celebrate the launch of the artist monograph, Palūs (2021), and learn more about Daedalus and Davis’s artist practice. This event will feature the artists Deadalus and Kerry discussing their artistic practice, as well as the remote residency more specifically. A question and answer period will follow the discussion. Admission is free or by donation. Everyone is welcome to attend. Registration required via EventBrite.
Artist Bio: Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a married artist team whose multidisciplinary individual and collective work spans photography, installation, assemblage and book arts. Their four major projects have focused on themes of interdependence, environmental crisis and resilience, the Anthropocene epoch, and geologic time. Their work often employs alternative photographic techniques to foreground physical, tactile experience and the ideas of presence and immediacy. Davis studied photography and filmmaking at Portland State University and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Daedalus earned her BA from Reed College. Their collaborative projects have been supported by grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and shown regionally, including Portland State University’s Littman Gallery and Southern Oregon University’s Schneider Museum of Art. Their individual work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. Cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery, an erstwhile contemporary exhibition space in Portland, the team lives and works in Southwest Washington State near the mouth of the Columbia River.
Image Credit: Palus, anthotype using elderberry and skunk cabbage, 2021; Courtesy the Artists
OXYGEN HOSTSONLINE ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION FEATURING OCICIWAN CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTIVE
Oxygen Art Centre presents an online artist panel discussion alongside the current exhibition, “Body and Water” on view from 3 September to 2 October 2021. Join us on Saturday, September 11 at 1:00 PM (PST) for an online artist panel discussion to learn more about the exhibition, artists, curators, and artworks. Admission is free or by donation, everyone welcome to attend. To register, visit EventBrite https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/body-and-water-artist-panel-discussion-tickets-167484690217 or Oxygen’s website for more information.
“Body and Water” is a group exhibition curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective featuring artists Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin. Opening on Friday, September 3, 2021 and running until Saturday, October 2, 2021 the exhibition considers connection with waterways through video, performance, photography, and textile installations. The online panel discussion will be moderated by curators Becca Taylor and Halie Finney from Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and featuring the four participating artists.
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective are based in in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta. The core collective support and present Indigenous artists through collaborative contemporary art projects, as well as at their artist-run Indigenous contemporary arts centre. Previous projects include “A Parallel Excavation: Duane Linklater & Tanya Lukin Linklater” at Art Gallery of Alberta (2016) and “Current Terrain: Bruno Canadien, Brenda Draney, Jessie Ray Short, Adrian Stimson, and Alberta Rose W.” at A Space Gallery (2018). Ociciwan are currently developing an Indigenous pollinator and medicine garden research project in collaboration with Finding Flowers Project entitled, kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan (2021).
“Body and Water” is the culmination of a year-long curatorial research project exploring connections with waterways regarding colonial, physical, and embodied borders. Anishinaabe-Finish artist Jaime Black slips and shifts between elemental water waves in three photographs included in the exhibition, as well as a poem that connects waterways with the cosmos. Similarly immersed in water, Black’s photographic explorations are echoed in Kanien’kehá:ka-Acadian-Irish artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin’s video “Transitory Fish” (2021), which features a performance in the Bay of Fundy, Wabanaki Territory that honours “our aquatic origins by following the continuity of body and water.”
In parallel, Kanienkehá:ka-English artist Hannah Claus presents a looped video entitled “all this was once covered in water” (2017) that is transfixed by the movements and transformations of water, suggesting a slippage between interior and exterior worlds. Also included in the exhibition is an installation by queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist Paxsi that shares memories of skipping rocks through fragments of story, denim, and chain. In their narrative artist statement, Paxsi offers, “I want you to know that I miss skipping rocks together, and I miss you, too.”
“Body and Water” is curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and will be on view from 3 September 2021 to 2 October 2021 at Oxygen Art Centre. The exhibition includes artworks by Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin, who will engage in a panel discussion on 11 September 2021 at 1:00 PM (PST) via Zoom. An exhibition catalogue will be published in print and online formats.
This exhibition is generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
Curator Bio:
Based in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective supports the work of Indigenous contemporary artists and designers and engages in contemporary critical dialogue, valuing artistic collaboration and fostering awareness of Indigenous contemporary art practices.
Paxsi (they/jupa) is a queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist based in amiskwaciywâskahikan. Drawing inspiration from folk icons such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, and Violeta Parra, Paxsi’s songwriting echoes folk revival with an alternative twist. Alongside their career as an emerging singer-songwriter, they create energy-informed beadwork which embodies Indigiqueer celebration and resistance. Paxsi uses their art, music, and writing as a means of connection and self-discovery, holding space for both healing and celebration. They hope to share this tenderness and joy with others in all that they do. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe and Finnish descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Through her art practice, Black creates space and time to connect with and enter into a relationship with the land in which she works, creating images and impressions from a space of connection.
Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships in her transdisciplinary practice. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, her installations have been included in exhibitions across Canada, including Àbadakone: ContinuousFire at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018, Des horizons d’attentes at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2021, and Written on the Earth at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021. She is a board member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and is a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous artist-run centre in Montreal. Claus is a member of Kenhtè:ke, next to the Bay of Quinte in Ontario. Having grown up away from her grandfather’s community, she is privileged to live and work in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal].
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice is a living process—following curiosity rather than form, the way of water, with the intent of understanding and kinship. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, health and resilience in meeting waters. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, music, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity, and explores the connection between the environment and the body, engaging in a sensorial intimacy with the land and water. Dobbin aims to bring attention to the natural world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
Image Credit: Paxsi, Courtesy the artist, 2021 (left); Lindsay Dobbin, Courtesy the artist, 2021
Oxygen Art Centre acknowledges with gratitude that we are located on the tum xula7xw/ traditional territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx/the Sinixt People. As uninvited guests we honour their ongoing presence on this land. We recognize that the Sinixt Arrow Lakes, Sylix, Ktuxana, and Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples are also connected with this land, as are Métis and many diverse Indigenous persons.
GROUP EXHIBITION CONSIDERS CONNECTION WITH WATERWAYS AT OXYGEN ART CENTRE
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to present “Body and Water,” a group exhibition curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective featuring artists Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin. Opening on Friday, September 3, 2021 and running until Saturday, October 2, 2021 the exhibition considers connection with waterways through video, performance, photography, and textile installations.
Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective are based in in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta. The core collective support and present Indigenous artists through collaborative contemporary art projects, as well as at their artist-run Indigenous contemporary arts centre. Previous projects include “A Parallel Excavation: Duane Linklater & Tanya Lukin Linklater” at Art Gallery of Alberta (2016) and “Current Terrain: Bruno Canadien, Brenda Draney, Jessie Ray Short, Adrian Stimson, and Alberta Rose W.” at A Space Gallery (2018). Ociciwan are currently developing an Indigenous pollinator and medicine garden research project in collaboration with Finding Flowers Project entitled, kamâmak nihtâwikihcikan (2021).
“Body and Water” is the culmination of a year-long curatorial research project exploring connections with waterways regarding colonial, physical, and embodied borders. Anishinaabe-Finish artist Jaime Black slips and shifts between elemental water waves in three photographs included in the exhibition, as well as a poem that connects waterways with the cosmos. Similarly immersed in water, Black’s photographic explorations are echoed in Kanien’kehá:ka-Acadian-Irish artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin’s video “Transitory Fish” (2021), which features a performance in the Bay of Fundy, Wabanaki Territory that honours “our aquatic origins by following the continuity of body and water.”
In parallel, Kanienkehá:ka-English artist Hannah Claus presents a looped video entitled “all this was once covered in water” (2017) that is transfixed by the movements and transformations of water, suggesting a slippage between interior and exterior worlds. Also included in the exhibition is an installation by queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist Paxsi that shares memories of skipping rocks through fragments of story, denim, and chain. In their narrative artist statement, Paxsi offers, “I want you to know that I miss skipping rocks together, and I miss you, too.”
Join us on Saturday, September 11 at 1:00 PM (PST) for an online artist talk to learn more about the exhibition, artists, curators, and artworks. Admission is free or by donation, everyone welcome to attend. To register, visit EventBrite https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/body-and-water-artist-panel-discussion-tickets-167484690217 or Oxygen’s website for more information.
“Body and Water” is curated by Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective and will be on view from 3 September 2021 to 2 October 2021 at Oxygen Art Centre. The exhibition includes artworks by Paxsi, Jaime Black, Hannah Claus, and Lindsay Dobbin, who will engage in a panel discussion on 11 September 2021 at 1:00 PM (PST) via Zoom. An exhibition catalogue will be published in print and online formats.
This exhibition is generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
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Curator Bio:
Based in the region of amiskwacîwâskahikan [Edmonton], Alberta, Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective supports the work of Indigenous contemporary artists and designers and engages in contemporary critical dialogue, valuing artistic collaboration and fostering awareness of Indigenous contemporary art practices.
Paxsi (they/jupa) is a queer, disabled Aymara and Welsh-Irish multidisciplinary artist based in amiskwaciywâskahikan. Drawing inspiration from folk icons such as Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joni Mitchell, and Violeta Parra, Paxsi’s songwriting echoes folk revival with an alternative twist. Alongside their career as an emerging singer-songwriter, they create energy-informed beadwork which embodies Indigiqueer celebration and resistance. Paxsi uses their art, music, and writing as a means of connection and self-discovery, holding space for both healing and celebration. They hope to share this tenderness and joy with others in all that they do. You can find their work and more on their Instagram, @paxsi__.
Jaime Black is a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe and Finnish descent who lives and works in Winnipeg. Black’s practice engages in themes of memory, identity, place and resistance and is grounded in an understanding of the body and the land as sources of cultural and spiritual knowledge. Through her art practice, Black creates space and time to connect with and enter into a relationship with the land in which she works, creating images and impressions from a space of connection.
Hannah Claus is a Kanienkehá:ka and English visual artist who explores Onkwehonwe epistemologies as living transversal relationships in her transdisciplinary practice. A 2019 Eiteljorg fellow and 2020 Prix Giverny recipient, her installations have been included in exhibitions across Canada, including Àbadakone: ContinuousFire at the National Gallery of Canada in 2018, Des horizons d’attentes at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2021, and Written on the Earth at the McIntosh Gallery in 2021. She is a board member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and is a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous artist-run centre in Montreal. Claus is a member of Kenhtè:ke, next to the Bay of Quinte in Ontario. Having grown up away from her grandfather’s community, she is privileged to live and work in Kanien’kehá:ka territory, in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal].
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien’kehá:ka – Acadian – Irish water protector, artist, musician, storyteller, curator and educator who lives and works in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of Lnu’k (Mi’kmaq). Dobbin’s relational and place-responsive practice is a living process—following curiosity rather than form, the way of water, with the intent of understanding and kinship. As a human being with intersecting identities as well as personal and ancestral displacement and trauma, their practice honours direct experience as a way of coming to (un)know while listening for the shared beingness, health and resilience in meeting waters. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, music, performance, sculpture, installation, social practices and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity, and explores the connection between the environment and the body, engaging in a sensorial intimacy with the land and water. Dobbin aims to bring attention to the natural world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
Image Credit: Transitory Fish, 2021, Lindsay Dobbin, Performance, Bay of Fundy
OXYGEN HOSTS REMOTE RESIDENCY FEATURING ANNA DAEDALUS AND KERRY DAVIS
Remote Residency: 2 – 28 August 2021
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to announce Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis as Artists-in-Residence throughout the month of August. Daedalus and Davis are a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist team and cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery, an artist-run, contemporary exhibition space in Portland, Oregon.
Having relocated in 2019 from Portland, Oregon to a rural hamlet on the Grays River, the artists are fortunate to live and work next to 55 acres of Sitka spruce swamp protected by the Columbia Land Trust. Over the past year Daedalus and Davis have been working with local organic materials and photographic processes to initiate a new body of work about this relatively obscure corner of the natural world.
The artists state, “We are grateful for the opportunity the residency affords us to develop this work and deepen our intimacy with this place through our artistic practice. More than capturing moments, we imagine the project as witnessing flowing time and meditating on impermanence, both in process and outcome.”
During their remote residency, Daedalus and Davis will transmit updates through Oxygen’s website and social media channels to share a close view into their methods, mediums, and practice. Conceived under the title, “Palus,” the Latin word for marsh, the residency is a continuation of their work with the Columbia River through alternative photographic processes such as photograms, diazotypes, cyanotypes, and fugitive plant-based processes such as anthotypes of lichens, ferns and other flora and fauna.
These alternative photographic explorations and their embodied, experiential reflections will later compose an artist monograph wherein Daedelus and Davis’s residency will be further considered alongside authors, ecologists, and poets. The book will be available to the public in Fall 2021, accompanied by an online book launch and artist talk, which will be announced at a later date.
Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis will be Oxygen Art Centre’s Artists-in-Residence from 2 – 28 August 2021. The work and experiences developed throughout this month will be published in book form as an artist monograph. To learn more information about the artists, the residency, and the monograph, visit www.oxygenartcentre.org or contact info@oxygenartcentre.org.
Artist Bio: Anna Daedalus and Kerry Davis are a multi-disciplinary, collaborative artist team and cofounders of Roll-Up Gallery, an artist-run, contemporary exhibition space in Portland, Oregon. Davis studied photography and filmmaking at Portland State University and Oregon College of Art and Craft. Daedalus earned her BA from Reed College. They began working together in 2011 as part of 13 Hats, a collective of artists and writers in Portland. The team’s first major collaborative project, “Shadows,” was developed with the help of a 2013 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council; and their related projects, “Leaping Darkness” and “Columbia River Shadows,” showed at Portland State University’s Littman Gallery in 2015 and The Schneider Museum of Art in 2016. Their 2017 project, “Bas-Relief,” was supported in part by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Their individual work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.
Image Credit: Torii Tidal Screen, Diptych, May 2021, Courtesy the Artists
Oxygen Art Centre acknowledges with gratitude that we are located on the tum xula7xw/ traditional territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx/the Sinixt People. As uninvited guests we honour their ongoing presence on this land. We recognize that the Sinixt Arrow Lakes, Sylix, Ktuxana, and Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples are also connected with this land, as are Métis and many diverse Indigenous persons.
Overburden Exhibition Hosts a Weekend of Programming
Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson BC and Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar BC announce a unique collaborative group exhibition. Overburden: Geology, Excavation and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age will take place in two art centres in two rural communities, with exhibition schedules as follows: Oxygen Art Centre: 1 June – 10 July, 2021, Kootenay Gallery of Art: 18 June – 21 August, 2021. A weekend of special online programming featuring artist panels, performances and workshops will be held on Saturday June 19 and Sunday June 20, 2021. All events and workshops are free and open to the public. To register for events, please visit www.overburden.ca. Programming events will be recorded and accessible online following the live events. Please find full schedule and descriptions here: Saturday June 19, 2021: 10:45-11:00 – Opening words from curators Maggie Shirley and Genevieve Robertson 11:00 – 12:00 – Keynote Speaker – Patti Bailey Patti Bailey, qʷn̓qʷin̓x̌n̓ is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation sn̓ʕay̓čkstx (Sinixt), in Inchelium, Washington and practices traditional and contemporary weaving. The last twenty years of her career were spent working as an Environmental Planner for the Colville Tribal government to develop and implement strategies and cooperative working relationships to deal with decades of impact to river communities, Tribal people, and natural resources from Columbia River pollution sources in Canada. Patti Bailey shares this story through a discussion of downstream toxicity, environmental advocacy through citizen science, and lack of corporate accountability. 1:00 – 4:30 – Panel Talks Panel 1: 1:00-2:30 Documenting Change: Place-based knowledge, resource extraction and shifting climate patterns Artists Tara Nicholson, Carol Wallace, Sarah Nance, and Gabriela Escobar Ari More information on each artist’s work found at: www.overburden.ca Panel 2: 2:45-4:30 Imaginaries: Speculative and embodied ways of relating to rock, mineral and mountain Artists Jim Holyoak + Darren Fleet, Randy Lee Cutler, Asinnajaq, Keith Langergraber More information on each artist’s work found at: www.overburden.ca 4:30-4:45 – Closing remarks
Sunday June 20th
11:15 am – Zoom Window Open
11:30 – 12:00 pm – Marseille Tidal Gauge Ariaperformed by artist Sarah Nance Marseille Tidal Gauge Aria is a vocal performance composed from tide level data collected over the past 130 years from a tidal gauge in the bay of Marseille, France. The artist converted each yearly average tide level into a note within her vocal range and set the resulting atonal composition to a poem from Rasu-Yong Tugen’s Songs from the Black Moon. Nance performs the piece operatically, drawing on the genre’s propensity for magnified human emotion; the rising sea levels in the bay can be heard in the increasingly higher pitches of the aria.
1:00 – 2:30 pm Writing Workshop: ‘Listening to the Stones’ with Randy Lee Cutler This writing workshop engages with mineral specimens for the purposes of condensation and displacement. What this means is that we will listen to a collection of geological formations through a series of responses, writing genres and breathing exercises. By collapsing these approaches together, our aim is to connect with deep time, unknowing as well as those informal knowledge practices that might shift our thinking to one of interdependence in a more than human world.
3:00-4:30pm Comic Workshop: ‘Storytelling Across Deep Time’ with Jim Holyoak and Darren Fleet After introductions and a brief presentation, participants will be guided through the process of an ‘856’ writing circle, with an aim of generating spontaneous, free-associative creative writing. Selections of this will be used as material for dialogue and narration within comics, drawn in the second half of the workshop. This drawing segment of the workshop will also include stretching, warm-up exercises focusing on mark-making, line weight and techniques for drawing comics. Please come prepared to share, with several sharpened pencils and a pad of paper. Organized by artist and curator Genevieve Robertson on behalf of Oxygen Art Centre and Kootenay Gallery curator Maggie Shirley, the exhibition will feature eleven artists, including 2020 Sobey Art award winners Tsēmā Igharas and Asinnijaq. Other participating artists are Gabriela Escobar Ari, Patti Bailey, Randy Lee Cutler, Darren Fleet, Jim Holyoak, Keith Langergraber, Sarah Nance, Tara Nicholson and Carol Wallace. The included artists are from the Kootenays, across Canada, and the US. The title of the show, Overburden, references the topsoil and vegetation that is removed before mining takes place. It also references our earth’s current condition and the psychological burden that many people experience in the face of climate and other ecological changes.
Overburden brings together a group of artists whose shared concerns address geology and its relationship to shifting climate patterns and resource extraction, in both a regional and global context. Artists respond to mining histories in the Kootenay area, arctic ice melt that is uncovering paleontological data, mining reclamation practices and glacial seismic events. While some artists bear witness to harmful extraction practices and an ever more unstable world, others seek to find caring, embodied and imaginative ways to come into relationship with the geologic material under our feet and interwoven into our everyday. For further information contact Oxygen Art Centre at info@oxygenartcentre.org or the Kootenay Gallery at kootenaygallery@telus.net. Oxygen Art Centre and the Kootenay Gallery of Art would like to thank the primary funders, Canada Council for the Arts, the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, British Columbia Arts Council and the Government of British Columbia, as well as sponsors Teck and Columbia Power. -30-
Image Credit: Patti Bailey qʷn̓qʷin̓x̌n̓, Photo by Diane Beals
For more information contact:
Maggie Shirley
Curator, Kootenay Gallery of Art
250-365-3337 kootenaygalery@telus.net
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COLLABORATIVE CONTEMPORARY ART EXHIBITION ON GEOLOGY TO OPEN THIS SUMMER
Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson BC and Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar BC announce a unique collaborative group exhibition. Overburden: Geology, Excavation and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age will take place in two art centres in two rural communities. It features an online exhibition with virtual tours, information about the artists and their work, links to exhibition programming, and more. Organized by artist and curator Genevieve Robertson on behalf of Oxygen Art Centre and Kootenay Gallery of Art curator Maggie Shirley, the exhibition features eleven artists, including 2020 Sobey Art award winners Tsēmā Igharas and Asinnijaq. Other participating artists include Gabriela Escobar Ari, Patti Bailey, Randy Lee Cutler, Darren Fleet, Jim Holyoak, Keith Langergraber, Sarah Nance, Tara Nicholson and Carol Wallace. The included artists are located in the Kootenays, across Canada, and the US. The title of the exhibition, Overburden, references topsoil and vegetation that are removed before mining takes place. It also references our planet’s current condition and the psychological burden that many experience in the face of climate and other ecological changes.
Overburden brings together a group of artists whose shared concerns address geology and its relationship to shifting climate patterns and resource extraction, in both regional and global contexts. Artists respond to mining histories in the Kootenay area, arctic ice melt that is uncovering paleontological data, mining reclamation practices, and glacial seismic events. While some artists bear witness to harmful extraction practices and an ever more unstable world, others seek to find caring, embodied, and imaginative ways to develop relationships with geologic materials.
The respective exhibitions take place on different dates but overlap between June 18 and July 10 for those who wish to experience the complete physical exhibition at both sites. Local residents will be able to visit the Oxygen exhibition from June 1 to July 10, 2021. The Kootenay Gallery of Art exhibition will open June 18 and run until August 21, 2021. Please consult each gallery to learn about hours of operation and COVID-19 protocols. The exhibition will also be accessible online through the domain, www.overburden.ca. The site offers the exhibition experience virtually, launching May 15, 2021. In addition to the online exhibition, a series of online events take place throughout the weekend of Saturday June 19, 2021 and Sunday June 20, 2021. The online events feature panel talks, workshops, and performances. Please consult the website for the full schedule and registration. Recordings will be made available following the live events on the website. An exhibition catalogue featuring the artists and their artworks, curatorial statement, and exhibition essay will be published in August 2021. It will also be available digitally at overburden.ca. For further information contact Oxygen Art Centre at info@oxygenartcentre.org or the Kootenay Gallery at kootenaygallery@telus.net. Overburden: Geology, Excavation and Metamorphosis in a Chaotic Age will be on view at Oxygen Art Centre from June 1 to July 10, 2021 and Kootenay Gallery of Art from June 18 to August 21, 2021. Educational and artistic events take place via Zoom from June 19 – 20, 2021. The online exhibition will be on view beginning May 15, 2021. Oxygen Art Centre and the Kootenay Gallery of Art would like to thank the primary funders, Canada Council for the Arts, Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, British Columbia Arts Council and the Government of British Columbia, as well as corporate sponsors Teck and Columbia Power.
Image: Overburden exhibition poster, 2021 For more information contact: Maggie Shirley Curator, Kootenay Gallery of Art 250-365-3337 kootenaygalery@telus.net
