PAST EXHIBITS

Greetings from Nelson: Historic Postcards from the Collection

Before Instagram and Facebook, postcards were a popular way for travelers to send a quick note and image to friends or family. Postcards can be a window on the past, showing us people, places, and even cultural attitudes, as they were at that moment in time. This exhibition will feature many reproductions of postcards from the Nelson area, along with some of the brief and at times humorous messages from the back. Also included will be a “Collector’s Choice” section, featuring notable cards and personal favourites that three local postcard enthusiasts have chosen from their own collections.

Bridget Corkery: Retrospective

For much of her life, art making was part of Bridget Corkery’s everyday existence. After moving with her family to Nelson in the mid-1990s, she was an instructor in Mixed Media at the Kootenay School of the Arts, and later a founding member of the Nelson Fine Arts Centre (now the Oxygen Art Centre).  

This exhibition will present work spanning nearly two decades of her creative practice, from the early 90s through to her untimely passing in 2013 at the age of fifty two. Through various media including painting, printmaking, sculpture and woodworking, it will show an artist whose work continued to change and evolve to reflect not only her personal sensibility, but the people and events in her life.

Regeneration

Regeneration is an exhibit by Tsuneko Kokubo & Toru Fujibayashi, two senior artists with extensive, fascinating and variant backgrounds, who have been part of the Kootenay arts and culture fabric for many years.

Regeneration evokes a minimalist design and aesthetic – like a Japanese-style garden of contemplation – with its tightly bounded compositions of gravel and rocks and sparse vegetation. Regeneration, at its heart, is a way of seeing; a study of memory and the motivations and methods with which we are able to understand lives lived. As the title tells us, these works are about life and death, but they also give us a glimpse of the doing in between.

Out of the Ordinary

Out of the Ordinary examines everyday household objects and questions our relationship to them.  It reinterprets the common, the mundane – buttons, fasteners and kitchen utensils – into exaggerated objects of questionable usage.

Unfamiliar Selves

Who are we and what is the nature of identity? In Unfamiliar Selves, artists Jude Griebel and Tammy Salzl explore this question. Griebel’s fantastic sculptural beings contrast with the quieter, more introspective qualities of Salzl’s small scale watercolour paintings. Together, they offer a diverse and engaging perspective on the uncertain notion of identity

Youth Art 2016

Celebrating the emerging talent of young artists, this exhibit showcases selected student work from LV Rogers, Mount Sentinel, Reach and Self Design High.

The Poetry of Objects

A dress covered in spoons, a garment composed only of sleeves, an arc of lampshades….in the Poetry of Objects, artist Leah Weinstein invites you to celebrate unexpected connections and discover the extraordinary in the everyday.

Using new and re-purposed materials and forms, Weinstein creates assemblages that use the familiar in surprising ways, blurring the lines between the ordinary and the profound.

Roll on Columbia

Roll On Columbia: The Landscape and Culture of the Columbia River Treaty explores the complex legacy of the 50 year-old Columbia River Treaty. With the treaty up for possible renewal or renegotiation in the near future, the exhibition provides present-day understanding of the region’s trans-boundary watershed ecosystem, a vast landscape draining water from B.C.’s Rocky Mountains to Astoria, Oregon. Winner of the Canadian Museum association award of excellence and funded by the Columbia Basin Trust and FortisBC, the exhibition explores the local and national controversy over a treaty that authorized four mega projects for flood control and increased hydro-power efficiencies, but also negatively impacted ecosystems and human communities without local consultation.

Lost Orchards: A History of Fruit Farming in the West Kootenays 

Fruit ranching in the West Kootenays? Unlikely though it may seem, fruit ranching once played a prominent role in the local economy. In the early 1900s large areas of land were being cleared and cultivated by newly arrived residents, often lured by the promise of a mild climate and easy growing conditions. Many orchards grew and thrived in the decades that followed, but by the 1940s only a few remained. Today, long neglected fruit trees in overgrown fields are almost all that remain of a once thriving industry. Come and discover the promise and hope, the endurance and despair of this nearly forgotten chapter in our local history.

Pendulum/Pendula  

Living in the tension between beauty and repulsion, playfulness and danger, Pendulum/Pendula is a series of paintings produced collaboratively by artists John Hall and Alexandra Haeseker. With colourful subject matter drawn largely from  Mexican culture, the work is rendered in the stunningly photorealistic style they’re both known for.  

Hall & Haeseker met when they were students at the Alberta College of Art and Design in the 1960’s. During their years of collaboration in the early 1990’s, they spent half of the year in Calgary and half the year in Guanajuato, Mexico. This influence can be seen in their use of objects from both traditional Mexican culture and modern consumer culture