PAST EXHIBITS

The Tablets

With an international reputation for large scale sculpture spanning more than four decades, The Tablets represents the Saskatoon-based sculptors’ first full-fledged gallery installation. The Tablets presents a collection of metal assemblages of richly textured bronze and brass panels constructed from an array of salvaged materials, an homage to memory and monumentality, language and culture.  

Kiltie Band: 100 Year Anniversary

402 Anderson Street: A History 

402 Anderson Street: A History served as a celebratory, commemorative show dedicated to the old museum site on the corner of Anderson Street. This exhibition marked the legacy of those who have contributed to the arts, culture and heritage in Nelson, BC, notably those directly involved in the establishment of the museum society’s previous location. 402 Anderson Street elaborates upon storied beginnings such as the building’s construction, the Mildred Erb Gallery and the infamous fire of 2003. This exhibition further identified and synthesized the museum society’s history, and a continued effort in ‘looking forward to the past’.

Lost Thread

Lost Thread is a group exhibition bringing together several regional, provincial and National artists who are creating on the forefront of contemporary textiles in Canada and are practicing in respective spaces that push the boundaries between craft/art, and the historical/contemporary in relevant and intriguing ways. The exhibition was the first of an ongoing series of medium-centric group exhibitions. Followed by THROWN and SHUTTER, these types of exhibitions enable us to see the expansive possibilities within a given medium and create opportunity for dialogue amongst a diverse range of artists.

WORD

WORD is a group exhibition that investigates text as the subject matter and also the vehicle for meaning and method. This exhibition explores, refutes and blows open the threads of commonality through the work of artists: Graham Gilmore, K.C. Hall, Nicole Dextras, Joi Arcand, Don Mabie, and Shane Koyczan. The intent is to illustrate how art allows for inexhaustible iterations of expression via myriad disciplines, aesthetics and artistic interpretations.

A Mountain Biking Retrospective

The History of Mountain Biking is an exploration of the culture, characters, infrastructure and landscape of mountain bike culture in the Kootenays. This exhibit is truly a community-curated exhibition, and is the result of a wide range of outdoor enthusiasts sharing their stories about the legacy and impact of mountain biking in the Kootenay/Columbia Basin. From the mossy overgrown bridges and tracks in the forest to the high tech gear and industry sponsored events.

Heather Benning: Field Doll

The Field Doll will be taking up residence at Touchstones during the late summer and fall of 2018 and will also be making an appearance at several iconic spaces throughout the city of Nelson, including the Big, Orange Bridge (BOB). Benning has exhibited the Field Doll both in Canada and the US by placing the work in the context of each specific place via photographs which is an essential part of the process and presentation. The work is an irreverent ode to place and change and the proportion of both to the viewer and their perspective. The doll is dropped into scenes, as if by the whim of a petulant child, and there is a whimsy and wackiness to this large scale installation piece which underlies the inherent sadness (and down-right creepiness) of the cast off doll in unexpected places.

Sonny Assu and Brendan Lee Satish Tang: Ready Player Two  

Brendan Lee Satish Tang and Sonny Assu combine elements from science fiction, comic book, and gaming cultures to consider how these forms alternately reinforce and transcend racial boundaries in youth culture. In their individual practices, Tang and Assu frequently negotiate the material and conceptual dynamics of culture and ethnicity. Informed by their mixed-race backgrounds and experiences of Canadian life in the 1980s and 1990s, for this exhibition the artists bring together found objects, selections from previous bodies of work, and new collaborative pieces to create immersive spaces that evoke the adolescent sanctuaries of their time: the basement, the arcade, and the comic bookstore. This exhibition is touring to Touchstones from the Reach Gallery in Abbotsford, BC

Listening to Fir

Artist, improviser, beat writer, and electronic music producer DJ Olive brings his inimitable art sound sensibility and installation experience Listening to Fir. A combination of natural elements and electronic technology: water – wood – movement and sound – both audible and ambient, this sound art installation elucidates the art of listening

Paul Seesequasis: Indigenous Archival Photo Project

The Indigenous Archival Photo Project comes from three sources: regional Indigenous photographs from the Nelson Museum Archives and the Royal BC Archives and photographs selected from the work of photojournalist Rosemary (Gilliat) Eaton (1919 – 2004) that are with Library and Archives Canada. The result of this project has been to emancipate images from
obscurity and let them see the light and be seen – and
importantly named and acknowledged. The images are
powerful in their straightforward and candid beauty – moments
of time lost in a catalog.