Artwork created by secondary students from School District #22, displays a maturity of handling various mediums and more importantly, demonstrates a strong conceptual approach.

Pickering’s exhibition titled lean, stumble, spill, sway, fold at the Vernon Public Art Gallery consists of shaped paintings and three-dimensional structures built entirely from canvas.Despite the fact that at the beginning the works start as two-dimensional paintings, the finished paintings are cut and shaped into three-dimensional sculptures. One can argue that these paintings / sculptures transcend both disciplines; the paintings are liberated from its rectangular format, and the sculptures are not defined solely by the physicality of media, but carry an additional meaning encapsulated in the painting on canvas from which it was created.

Katherine Pickering’s studio practice has always been focused on painting and a search for inventive ways of producing works of art that contribute to the contemporary discourse about the nature of painting and its propensity to communicate meaning. While her works are abstract in appearance, they conceptually reference visual phenomena and the psychological dimension of a human condition. In this sense, one can view Pickering’s work as an extension of existentialist ideas by providing the viewer with the physicality of space together with the objects of art in order to trigger associations about the possible meaning encapsulated in the work.

As Syilx People when we speak of health or healthy relationships, we speak of our connection to our tmxʷulaxʷ (land) and our timixʷ (Four Food Chiefs). Without our sacred connection to the land, the animals, and waters, we could not live in a healthy existence. Siwɬkʷ (Water) as it is known to the Syilx People, is our relative, and as such is carried as a sacred entity. Water is the most sacred of medicines; it nourishes, purifies, and heals. All of life requires water, but as it has now become a commodity, the respect for water has been lost among western society. As water sheds and supplies have become clear cut, mined, allocated or polluted for industrial endeavors, it is evident that the corporate relationship with water is one of exploitation. We are in a time where the mismanagement of our most important resource has now gone beyond the realm of a First Nations concern, and has grown into a global concern.

Within this exhibition we reflect on the sacredness of Siwɬkʷ, we acknowledge and honour our relationship with Siwɬkʷ. We delve into the deep relationship with that which gives us all life. We share traditional conversations with you in hopes of awakening the rivers within.

“For generations, the relationship between the First Nations People and the rest of Canada has been damaged. Can water be the common ground that begins to reconcile this relationship? …Begin the dialogue.”

Julie Oakes, a Vernon-based artist and gallerist, will exhibit a selection of works from her large sculptural installation originally exhibited at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in Waterloo, Ontario. This exhibition will feature three installation-type multimedia sculptural works installed as individual stand-alone pieces which address ecological issues and concerns.

Kelowna-based artist Lucas Glenn’s sculptural installation contains found objects and assemblages which create an autonomous space within the gallery space. The conglomeration of objects and text and their implied meaning address the issues of societal history. Glenn’s installation creates a narrative about the existence, practices, and ecological impact of large companies and wildlife conservation.

The Kelowna-based Cool Arts is a support group for variously abled individuals whose primary focus is art education and art practice through process oriented and experiential activities. The exhibition Bio Diverse Ability is the result of a project guided by a professional artist where the works were created by the participants over the period of several months.

The Artist-in-Residence Program began in 2010 and over the years participating artists have been Angie Francis, Edie McIntyre, Joyce Devlin, James Postill, Michael Markowsky and Jan Poynter. This year the Artist in Residence is Luis Fuentes, a Peruvian-born artist with an international exhibition record. Fuentes’ work include still lifes, urban architecture and landscapes. Fuentes’ focus in his painting is the quality of light and rich shadows in his Realism-inspired painting methodology. After his artistic residency at the historic lake house, Fuentes’ work will be exhibited at the Vernon Public Art Gallery in partnership with the Mackie Lake House Foundation.

Vancouver-based artist Brad McMurray has produced large-scale photographs for the exhibition titled Urbicus Topia. Despite the exhibition title which might suggest utopian urban settings, McMurray’s images reveal the dystopian quality of his urban subjects. His sensibility is focused on urban environments that no longer function as their original intended purpose and his images often conjure up the narratives of neglect, decay, and abandonment sometimes juxtaposed with new urban development. McMurray’s images are carefully composed in-situ and printed uncropped with a minimal digital manipulation.

The artwork in the annual exhibition by elementary students from School District #22, delights viewers with their creations, under the guidance of their art teachers.

Nicole Young’s exhibition Rivers and Roads to Find You consists of paintings and sketches that she produced during her artistic residency in Iceland together with larger paintings produced after her return to Kelowna. These paintings produced in her studio are based on photographs, en plain air sketches, and Young’s memories of geomorphology of places, rock formations or ice floes and icebergs. This exhibition documents a personalized narrative of the artist and the new landscape together with her memories of places and the people who inhabit them. The installation of the artworks has a diaristic quality which is also referenced by the display of Young’s sketchbook which contains an itinerary of her time spend in artistic residence.

The exhibition Coevolution produced by Edmonton-based artist Lyndal Osborne consists of two sculptural installations which brings into focus the current discourse surrounding the consequences of unrestrained genetic engineering. The objective of this exhibition is to address the issues of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their impact on traditional food growers, especially in the Okanagan Valley region with its extensive fruit and vegetable production.

The Vernon Public Art Gallery creates this annual exhibition to showcase VPAG members and to present their works of art in professional gallery setting. The members’ exhibition is also Gallery’s annual fundraiser and the visitors can purchase displayed artworks.

The exhibition titled Along the Way consists of a selection of paintings from 1970s to 2011 produced by Joyce Devlin, currently Ottawa-based artist who grew up in Vernon where she started to study and produce art. Later she attended Vancouver School of Art working under Jack Shadbolt.

Despite her experimental paintings, Devlin devoted herself to a wide variety of subjects and developed interest in portraiture, figurative painting, landscape, and symbolic imagery. The selection of her work contains portraits of people whom Devlin interacted with while living in Vernon, examples of landscape paintings, and semi-abstract works.

Some of the paintings in the exhibition are from the gallery’s permanent collection, with a  few additional works borrowed from the Mackie Lake House collection and one large-scale work borrowed from the artist.

Jordan Bennett is a contemporary artist of Mi’kmaq descent currently based in Kelowna, British Columbia. His artistic production includes performance, drawing, painting, carving, video, and new media. His exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery titled Mniku addresses a wide array of issues within contemporary indigenous discourses regarding history and indigenous artists’ practices both contemporary and historical. The exhibition consist of paintings on carved yellow and red cedar and paintings on cradled panel surfaces, all accompanied by participatory sound installation. An additional suit of smaller paintings and drawings on paper document Bennett’s creative process and development of abstract images leading to be executed in larger paintings.

Kelsie Balehowsky is a Kelowna-based artist whose artwork is focused on the lens-based studio practice and digital assembly. The body of images in her exhibition titled conscious | unconsciousness is an inquiry into the states of being and the human condition mapped through Freudian investigation into subject of aesthetics and its propensity of invoking feelings. Balehowsky focuses on the quality of images which can be considered both Surreal and uncanny as a proposition – and contrary to Freud’s thoughts – that the strange combination of visual elements can in turn reveal the true state of our existence.

Extracurricular features the work of four tattoo artists from Vernon’s Five Fathoms Tattoo shop. For Nick Matovich, Andrew McDonald, Jessie Beans (Miss Beans), and Jeremy Mathieson, getting creative is their nine to five. Clients come into the shop and commision the artists to create an image that is symbolic of their personal stories and experiences. The client’s bodies become a walking art gallery exhibiting a collaboration of both the artist and the client. Extracurricular is an exhibition that provides viewers the opportunity to see what the artists at Five Fathoms create when not bound by the clients desires and wishes. The exhibition space will feature a variety of artwork done beyond their regular duties as tattoo artists while also providing a small contrasting glimpse of their work lives at Five Fathoms Tattoo.

Shinsuke Minegishi is a Vancouver-based artist working across several print media, including woodcut, linocut, wood engraving, lithography and screen printing. He often combines various print technologies and creates images which reference the human condition through the use of symbolic pictorial elements. Minegishi’s images often portray archetypal forms from the natural world in combination with a portrayal of ambiguous spaces that are at once earth-like while they also communicate the vastness of the cosmic space. Other images in this exhibition juxtapose results of human activity with the images of natural growth and renewal. An additional series of ten prints feature non-representational abstract colour field works which offer the viewers a ground for associative engagement and the resulting feeling of luminous voids and spaces. Juxtaposed simple geometric line-like shapes placed in the centre of each print provide a visual cadence for a symbolic reference for the beginning and the completion of a cycle.

Minegishi’s exhibition recurring cycles is a contemplative and philosophical engagement with the universal cycles of the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ transposed to human lives, births and deaths of people, namely Minegishi’s close family members and friends. As he points out, the exhibition recurring cycles is based on his life experiences and reflection on the cyclical nature of a universal phenomenon.

The exhibition Third Drawer Down was produced by Amber Powell, a Vernon, BC, based artist. Her exhibition includes a body of mixed media and collage works on paper addressing existential aspects of the human condition in  contemporary society both on global and individual levels. The context of Powell’s work is conceptually married to the tenets of the Dada movement, specifically of its mockery of materialistic and nationalistic attitudes. Powell’s images create narratives that often contain serious messages which are in turn subverted by a gentle humor and general sense of lightness. The objects and characters in Powell’s narratives are often suspended mid-air and liberated from the predictable influence of the Earth’s gravity. This leaves an implied narrative in flux and is interpretable according to the viewers’ associations based on visual clues contained in the work of art.

The exhibition titled Diversity was produced and juried by the members of the North Okanagan Chapter of the Federation of Canadian Artists. The exhibition celebrates the members’ works of art while focusing on diversity of different approaches to art making. The exhibition presents the viewers with representational and abstract works of art created in genres of figurative, landscape, portraiture and still life traditions.

Originally from Kelowna, Malcolm McCormick is currently a Vancouver based artist focused on the production of non-objective painting. His exhibition addresses issues of representation, abstraction, and materiality in contemporary painting.

The Gallery annually hosts the UBC Okanagan BFA Graduation Exhibition, creating exhibition opportunities for a group of emerging artists. The artwork in the exhibition Stranger in Your Pocket, reference tendencies, concepts, and strategies in contemporary art making.

The artwork in the annual exhibition Art from the Heart, by elementary students from School District #22, delights viewers with their creations, under the guidance of their art teachers. The students often portray the world that surrounds them, or in other cases, they directly reference their experiences through the language of visual forms. Their uninhibited approach to art-making reflects the students’ natural inclination and desire to communicate.

Calgary-based print artist will exhibit a body of work focused on the imagery derived from her personal experiences. The exhibition titled The Body, Stranger, explores Huston’s interest in social constructions of illness and the greater narratives employed to understand and define these experiences. The work also questions the assumptions about the identity of a patient who presumes and fears certain limitations and qualities that are associated with chronic autoimmune condition.