Category: Oxygen Art Centre

ZOOM READING AND MUSICAL PERFORMANCE MARCH 31 KICKS OFF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH AT NELSON, B.C.’s OXYGEN ART CENTRE

Dark Times Come Again No More

Tom Wayman + John Lent

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

7:00 PM (PST)

Zoom

            Poetry and music take on the dark times Canadians are living through when Winlaw, B.C. author Tom Wayman and Vernon, B.C. author and musician John Lent present “Dark Times Come Again No More” on Zoom to kick off National Poetry Month at Nelson, B.C.’s Oxygen Art Centre on Wed., March 31.

            The event begins at 7 p.m. Those interested in attending need to R.S.V.P. by emailing info@oxygenartcentre.org to receive the Zoom link and accompanying event information. The reading is free and everyone welcome to attend. Donations are encouraged: $2 – $5 via Oxygen’s CanadaHelps page.

Oxygen Art Centre, at 320 Vernon St. (alley entrance), is Nelson’s only artist-run centre. Oxygen programming in a variety of artistic disciplines supports local professional-level artists and engages the wider community.

            The March 31 event revives a launch planned for last April for Wayman’s then-new collection from B.C.’s Harbour Publishing, Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems For a Dark Time.

            “The dark time the poems in that volume speak about wasn’t the pandemic, though the pandemic has exposed in more detail much of what the poems explore,” Wayman said. “We’re living through an era in which we’re experiencing a huge and ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Meanwhile, our area and the country as a whole are being steadily de-industrialized, and every large institution and enterprise acts more and more dysfunctional. Factor in personal debt, Canadian troops constantly at war overseas, and climate change, and you’ve got dark times indeed.

            “Music and poetry, though, are traditionally up to the challenge of dark times, and that’s what we aim to show on March 31.”

            Wayman’s recent books include a collection of his Slocan Valley short stories, The Shadows We Mistake For Love, which won the 2016 Diamond Foundation Prize for fiction. His previous books of poems include Dirty Snow, winner of the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award. A poem of his in the new book won the 2017 Confederation Poets Prize from Arc magazine.

            Lent is a perennial Nelson favorite as musician and author, stretching back to 1973-74 when he and his brother Harry Lent performed together for a year at the Sub Pub belonging to the students’ association of Nelson’s Notre Dame University, where John formerly taught English.

            In the Okanagan Valley, he has performed for more than 20 years in the folk/jazz/blues ensemble, the Lent/Fraser/Wall Trio, among other musical groups. His latest CD, Strange Ground, was released in September 2019. Highlight of his long career as an educator was serving five years as dean of the Vernon campus of Okanagan College. Lent most recently read in Nelson from a new book of his poems from Thistledown Press, A Matins Flywheel, at the Nelson Public Library in October 2019.

            The March 31 event is partially supported by the National Poetry Month program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian Poets.

            Other National Poetry Month programming at Oxygen includes the online courses April Poetry Challenge: 30 Days, 30 Poems with Rayya Liebich, and Reading and Writing Rilke with Susan Andrews Grace. For more information and to register: www.oxygenartcentre.org under the “Classes” tab.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Julia Prudhomme, Executive Director, Oxygen Art Centre: info@oxygenartcentre.org, 250-352-6322

Tom Wayman: appledor@netidea.com; 250-226-7390

CUTLINES: Tom Wayman (credit: Rod Currie), John Lent [above]

CUTLINE: “Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back,” Tom Wayman, book cover [below]

OXYGEN OFF-SITE ONLINE EXHIBITION FEATURES SEVEN REGIONAL ARTISTS AND COLLECTIVES

WEBSITE LINK: http://oxygenartcentre.org/offsite/index.html

1 – 30 April 2021
 

Artists: (ok vancouver ok), Alexa Black, Brian Kalbfleisch, Brian Lye, Lucas Myers, prOphecy sun, Adrian Wagner

Oxygen Off-Site is a digital project that brings together seven artists/artist collectives living and working in the Columbia Basin. Taking place throughout April 2021, Off-Site features artists, (ok vancouver ok), Alexa Black, Brian Kalbfleisch, Lucas Myers, Brian Lye, prOphecy sun, and Adrian Wagner, and web design by Deanna Peters (Mutable Subject).

Off-Site looks outside, beyond the gallery walls. It seeks to create conceptual and procedural exchanges between artists working remotely during the pandemic. With a focus on process, this project is incited by the exchange of artistic “prompts” for another artist to interpret, creating a call and response between the artists and their works. By creating a circular exchange between the artists, this project endeavours to trace digital and creative connections during this time of physical isolation.

The website holds space to share and connect the artworks created over two-months across a variety of mediums, approaches, and practices. Off-Site is interested in moving beyond the institutional space of the art gallery and into site-specific or domestic spheres to explore the intersection of art and the everyday.

Off-Site is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance and Osprey Community Foundation. Learn more about the project by visiting Oxygen’s website and social media channels.

Artist Bios:

(ok vancouver ok)

(ok vancouver ok) is the natural extension and parallel artistic endeavour of the musical project Ok Vancouver Ok. Building on themes explored over their decade-long partnership, jeff johnson and laura house continue to find new ways to collaborate around class struggles, safer spaces, harm reduction, environmental justice, animal liberation, pink collar work, ableism, food sovereignty, anti-capitalism, parenting, decolonization, mutual aid, and intersectionality.

positioned somewhere between “art” and “craft” (ok vancouver ok) is interested in experimenting as self-taught musicians and artists. Working with textiles, film, found objects, performance, and writing, this project looks to explore the effect and extent technology has on work, art, and liberation. They pose the questions: do machines, tools, and technology help or hinder the creative process? When does labour and work become art and vice versa? How is traditionally feminized labour and art undervalued? How are hegemonic structures replicated in outsider spaces and the domestic sphere?

For more about Ok Vancouver Ok visit www.okvancouverok.ca

Alexa Black

Alexa Black is an artist of mixed Nahua, Pipil, Maya and settler heritage creating as a guest on traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Xwməθkwəyə̓ m (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Through self taught explorations in photography, drawing, painting and mixed media arts, Alexa found her passion deeply embedded in antiquated techniques of photography and classical illustration. Enamoured with tintype and wet plate collodion processes, she learned the foundations through a brief mentorship with Quinn Jacobsen.

Black seeks to reveal the magic of hidden realms that exist in parallel to our terrestrial and colonially defined reality. Her art is ignited by the energies of her indigenous ancestral territories, animism, and being an ally to marginalized populations. The work is built by reconnecting the seams of her fractured identities, by reclaiming and amplifying the voices of the silenced ancestors of her matrilineal blood lines. Black divines dreams and visions shrouded in haunting atmospheric aesthetics that are symbolic of life’s beauty and cosmic initiations. Her work is primarily dedicated to deconstructing the disconnected and damaged societal tissue imposed by colonial standards of living.

Alexa has been a featured artist in galleries across BC and internationally in Los Angeles. Her drawings, films, and paintings have been featured in published works such as Invisible City and Discorder Magazine. Recently she was awarded the Research and Creation Project Grant by the Canada Council of the Arts to produce her upcoming 78 piece innovative and intersectional tintype/mixed media collage oracle, based from a traditional tarot deck. This evolving body of work is to be featured in SEITIES analogue print publication this upcoming summer.

Website in progress

Instagram: @alexa.black.art

Brian Kalbfleisch

Brian Kalbfleisch is a visual artist and musician based in Nelson, BC.

Visually, Kalbfleisch’s primary medium is reclaimed lumber sourced from heritage buildings, old fences, decks, and sometimes random locations. He crafts Wood Tile Mosaics, usually abstract images reflecting aspects of the natural world like celestial constellations, cell membranes, motion, and flower gardens.

A piano player, ukulele-ist, and singer, he draws on influences such as Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Portishead, and Neil Young.

For this project, Kalbfleisch will capture the creation of a series of mosaics in stop time video accompanied by original musical compositions.

Kalbfleisch is also active as an independent events coordinator and curator of both the visual art and music. Among other things, he established the art gallery at Kaslo Jazz Festival in 2017 and developed the Blue Night Arts and Culture Crawl in Nelson. In 2018 he was given the Sustainability Leadership Award by the City of Nelson for his contributions to the Arts sector.

I am grateful to live and prosper on unceded traditional territory of the Ktunaxa, the Syilx, and the Sinixt peoples.

Brian Lye

Brian Lye is a filmmaker and visual artist from Vancouver, Canada, now based in Nelson. His lens-based works are preoccupied with magic, humour, and the everyday. He holds a BA in Film Studies and Japanese Studies from the University of Victoria, a Diploma in Screen Production from Sydney Film School, was a guest student at The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and recently completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual art from The University of British Columbia.  His films and animations have won awards and screened internationally at venues such as Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, The Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona, and LIVE! Vancouver’s performance art biennale. He has been an artist in residence with the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.

https://www.brianlye.com/

Lucas Myers

Since graduating from the National Theatre School in 1998 Lucas has performed in many of the major theatres across Canada as well as touring internationally to the US, England, France, Switzerland, Mexico, Singapore, New Zealand and Brunei.  He has created and performed in many new plays as a member of the Victoria-based independent theatre company TheatreSKAM and studied physical theatre and collaborative creation with The SITI Company in New York and Boca del Lupo Theatre in Vancouver. In 2007 he returned to Nelson, BC to raise a family and form PilotcoPilot Theatre with a mandate to create work which is accessible, thought provoking, and highly theatrical in an effort to attract a new generation of theatregoers.  He also performs as a post-modern Vaudeville duo, The Amazing and Impermeable Cromoli Brothers, which won the Best Comedy Award at the New Zealand International Theater Festival.  In 2013 he was appointed as Nelson’s Cultural Ambassador in recognition for his achievements in Theatre Arts.

prOphecy sun

Dr. prOphecy sun is an interdisciplinary performance artist; queer, movement, video, and sound maker; mother; and current Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University. Her practice celebrates both conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance, and life overlap. Her recent research has focused on ecofeminist perspectives, co-composing with voice, objects, surveillance technologies, and site-specific engagements along the Columbia Basin region and beyond.

sun hosts Tapes and Beyond on Kootenay Co-op Radio and is the Arts Editor for Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities. She performs and exhibits regularly in local, national, and international settings, music festivals, conferences, and galleries and has authored several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and journal publications.

https://prophecysun.com

Adrian Wagner

Adrian Wagner began exploring composition and improvisation on the piano at the age of 5. He grew up surrounded by both classical choral music and southern gospel jazz. Living in one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the US, he simultaneously sang in a choir and as pianist for a dominantly black gospel choir and jazz orchestra

At the age of 17, he moved to New York City to study classical composition, jazz piano, and improvisation. He later furthered his studies of jazz and audio production at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, MA. In 1999, he travelled to Zimbabwe, where he spent 6 months writing a thesis on improvisation in traditional Shona music

This project seeks to explore the influence of the environment on performance. What is the inner creative dialogue that forms between artists and the space they inhabit. How far can this relationship be taken, so that the work itself is prominently influenced and given life to by the environment.

The medium of music and improvisation using battery powered electronic audio production and looping allows for the entire work to be created in the moment, existing as a reflection of the time and more importantly the space in which it was created.

Image Credit: Oxygen Off-Site Poster, 2021

UBC OKANAGAN WRITING PROFESSOR MATT RADER AND SELKIRK COLLEGE CREATIVE WRITING STUDENTS PRESENT THEIR WORK AT A ZOOM AUTHOR READING MARCH 24

 OXYGEN ART CENTRE PRESENTS ARTIST TALK WITH BRIAN LYE

Artist Talk: Saturday, March 13, 2021 at 12:00 PM (PST)

Oxygen Art Centre presents an artist talk with Brian Lye on Saturday, March 13, 2021 at Noon (PST). The talk will be presented on Zoom. R.S.V.P. by emailing info@oxygenartcentre.org to attend. Everyone welcome. Admission is free.

The artist talk will share information about Lye’s residency and current exhibition, ABOVE ABOVE BELOW BELOW, as well as his artistic practice. This online event will also feature discussion on the topic of Lye’s exhibition, crystals.

Lye conducted research for an experimental documentary on crystalline minerals across scientific, mining, and healing fields, which this exhibition and new series of films are derived. Utilizing discussion-based research, Lye investigated human and natural relations to crystals. Interviewing experts on crystals from the region forms the foundational material for Lye’s experiments in 16mm analogue film.

Fascinated by the semiprecious stones and their capacity for transmission, amplification, and new age applications, Lye draws upon his background in filmmaking and installation to create an immersive body of work on view in the exhibition, ABOVE ABOVE BELOW BELOW.

Lye is a filmmaker, artist, and educator who lives and works in Nelson, BC. His practice is focused in analogue film production, merging the everyday with formal experimentations in play, special effects, and psychogeography.

Brian Lye’s Artist Talk will take place on Saturday, March 13, 2021 at 12:00 PM NOON (PST) on Zoom. To attend R.S.V.P. by emailing info@oxygenartcentre.org. ABOVE ABOVE BELOW BELOW is currently on view at Oxygen Art Centre until Saturday, March 20, 2021, Thursdays and Fridays 1:00 – 5:00 PM and Saturdays 1:00 – 7:00 PM, by appointment only. To make an appointment visit Oxygen’s website.

Artist Bio:

Brian Lye

https://www.brianlye.com/

Brian Lye is a filmmaker and visual artist from Vancouver, Canada, now based in Nelson. His lens-based works are preoccupied with magic, humour, and the everyday. He holds a BA in Film Studies and Japanese Studies from the University of Victoria, a Diploma in Screen Production from Sydney Film School, was a guest student at The Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and recently completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual art from The University of British Columbia.  His films and animations have won awards and screened internationally at venues such as Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival, The Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona, and LIVE! Vancouver’s performance art biennale. He has been an artist in residence with the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation.

Image Credit: Courtesy the Artist, Brian Lye

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MEMOIRS BY WOMEN-IN-TRADES’ KATE BRAID AND THE WEST KOOTENAY’S VERA MALOFF FEATURED AT ZOOM AUTHOR READING FEB. 24 FOR NELSON, B.C.’s OXYGEN ART CENTRE
 

The authors of two new memoirs—one on the experience of a journeywoman carpenter, and the other on growing up in a Doukhobor activist family—will be featured at the third Zoom reading in the 2020-21 author reading series presented by Nelson, B.C.’s Oxygen Art Centre. Reading from and talking about their work on Wed., Feb. 24 will be Victoria, B.C.’s Kate Braid and Shoreacres, B.C.’s Vera Maloff.
The event begins at 7 p.m. Those interested in attending need to R.S.V.P. by emailing info@oxygenartcentre.org to receive the Zoom link and accompanying event information. The reading is free and everyone welcome to attend. Donations are encouraged: $2 – $5 via Oxygen’s CanadaHelps page.
Oxygen Art Centre, at 320 Vernon St. (alley entrance), is Nelson’s only artist-run centre. Oxygen programming in a variety of artistic disciplines supports local professional-level artists and engages the wider community.
Braid’s new memoir, Hammer & Nail: Notes of a Journeywoman, arises out of 15 years she worked in construction and as a contractor and trades instructor. The book is a collection of essays and stories that reflect on her career in a very male-dominated profession. Hammer & Nail is a follow-up to her 2012 memoir, Journeywoman; Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World.
Braid, who also taught writing for Nanaimo’s Malaspina University-College, has published seven collections of poems as well, most recently Elemental from B.C.’s Caitlin Press in 2018. In 2015 she received the Vancouver Mayor’s Literary Arts Award for her contribution to the city’s cultural community.
Maloff’s memoir, Our Backs Warmed by the Sun: Memories of a Doukhobor Life, deals with her grandparents’ and other Doubkhobor families’ activism on behalf of peace and justice during the past 100 years, as lived through and remembered by her mother.
Maloff was born in Nelson, and taught in the Kootenay Lake and Kootenay Columbia school districts for more than 30 years. She has remained active in Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ functions, and has taught after-school Russian classes. One chapter in Our Backs Warmed by the Sun won first prize in the non-fiction category of the Kootenay Literary Competition.  Other material in the memoir was published in Nelson’s literary magazine, The New Orphic Review.
Both Braid’s and Maloff’s memoirs appeared from Caitlin Press in 2020.
Forthcoming Zoom author readings in the 2020-21 series include UBC Okanagan author Matt Rader along with students from Selkirk College’s creative writing courses on March 24. Kicking off National Poetry Month on March 31 will be a previously postponed book launch by Winlaw, B.C. author Tom Wayman, including readings and music provided by Vernon, B.C. writer and musician John Lent.
Oxygen’s author reading series is supported in part by the B.C. Arts Council and the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, and is co-presented by Nelson’s Elephant Mountain Literary Festival.