Gallery #2:
Wheeltown: Noel Bullock

Gallery Vertigo presents a photo essay of urban dynamics within the city of Vancouver. This series of photographs by Vancouver artist Noel Bullock depicts shopping carts belonging to the homeless of Vancouver's Eastside. A graduate of St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario, Bullock has also had teaching appointments at this institution. He has exhibited extensively both in Canada and abroad. The artist has been the recipient of many grants, bursaries and project funding including an Ontario Arts Council Project Award this year.

The city has grown and continues to grow at a great rate. The problem is that Vancouver has no where to go but up. Since I have been there, the building has never stopped. The last two years has seen a doubling of its building efforts to accommodate the Olympic projects, particularly within the Creek Side area. Largely an industrial low-rent area it has been transformed into a high density condominium district. The displacement of the original population has resulted in a very sharp and observable increase in the cities homelessness. The dynamics of this urban development vs. the people that inhabit the same space and the consequences of vast monetary movements is the study.
The documents and prognoses are not pretty. If cities are to be the dynamic centers of creativity, culture, and wealth, and supporting the work this entails, this critical problem must be addressed.
The visual focus subject is the lowly grocery shopping cart which has evolved into a live-in vehicle of transportation, sheltered housing and the preserve of personal property. Displaced urban habitats congregate nightly in specific walled areas. A sort of rolling town on wheels; hence Wheeltown. Ultimately, up against a wall for warmth and protection, Wheeltown is movable, rolling from one area to the next and then being dispersed by various civic authorities. The actual subject itself, the shopping cart, is as varied in design and objects as the people who push them around the town. They tend to expand and contract as they move around, like an urban performance of kinetic poverty. (Bullock)

NOAA Members Wall Gallery

Kelowna artist Cathy A. Renoe began painting as a form of therapy and as a means of coping with a stage four cancer diagnosis in 2006. Three years and six reconstructive surgeries later, the artist is grateful for the many opportunities she has had to share her story.

Painting first started out as a way to keep busy, but then it became so much more - a way to forget about my cancer, a way to express my feelings. As time has passed, it has become a passion. I paint with bright, happy colours - the colours that bring joy into a room. I paint to give inspiration, courage, and hope to those who are experiencing a horrible disease, such as breast cancer. My message is that something good, perhaps wonderful, can come out of something terrible. If I had not had breast cancer, I would never have discovered the hidden artist in me. (Cathy A. Renoe)

Vertigo Window Gallery:
disagreeable objects: Shauna Oddleifson

Artist Statement:

My work affixes a subtext narrative to a common object or idea in order to provoke a societal response. This current body of work allows for a commentary on the existing interaction process between the self and the reach of control. My work is subversive in nature, containing deranged visuals and a schizophrenic sense of humour, appropriating from our childhood desires and patterns of thought. The growth of our present status is contingent upon the reach of dominance, the compliancy of others and our desire to submit in order to move forward without effort.

About the Artist:

Kelowna artist Shauna Oddleifson holds a BFA from the Okanagan University College Fine Arts program. She has been producing art and actively exhibiting her work for the past few years throughout BC. Oddleifson is currently employed by the Kelowna Art Gallery as Program Coordinator.

Artist Statement:

One Thing Leads to Another is a selection of work created between 2007 and 2009, that demonstrates the progression of changes that occurred in my work during this time. - from smaller non-referential paintings to larger canvases that began from found visual motifs. There were other tangents that I explored during this time, including large paper works and painting installations, but throughout I kept up a strong sketchbook practice. This was were ideas morphed from one tangent to another and copious numbers of variations were explored.
During this time my painting practice moved into a practice, that at its core, courts the unfamiliar through flirtations with the familiar, as a means of investigating how visual forms claim meaning. This interest comes out of a sense that images actually do much more than we are acutely aware of. I feel that abstraction, as it was employed at the height of modernist painting, is a suitable form of address – as it has the ability to detach forms from meanings they may have previously claimed.
I work with the repetition of visual motifs to suggest an order or logic that simulates other motifs, such as logos and diagrams, which communicate information through images. In using repetition, I make everything familiar and unfamiliar at once, pulling images from their contexts, and pushing their associative connections to the periphery to reveal something different and newly unfamiliar. I paint in a somewhat performative manner, mapping things out by hand, allowing painterly moments to occur, such as drips and visible brush strokes, while still maintaining the graphic quality of the forms.

About the Artist:

Katie Brennan is a BC artist, currently based out of Vernon BC. She recently completed her MFA at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. She complete her BFA at Emily
Carr University in Vancouver BC.

Recent exhibitions include
Surround at Island Mountain Arts in Wells, BC – a show that used the characteristics of the landscape of Wells as a source for a series of abstractions that investigated the formal make-up of Wells

1:15, a group show at Georgia Scherman Projects in Toronto.

Her writing has appeared in Border Crossings. Currently, she is a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus.

KALAMALKA VERTIGO
All are invited to view the works at Kalamalka Vertigo, located at Vernon's Kalamalka Campus of Okanagan College. The gallery is located just past the college lecture theatre in the main building adjacent to the college office.
"Kalamalka Vertigo" , located at the Kalamalka campus of Okanagan College, represents a joint venture between Gallery Vertigo and Okanagan College. This is the newest incarnation of the ongoing partnership between the two institutions. The exhibition can be viewed during college hours from now until November 15th.

Exhibition Proposals: Please print a copy of our form and send it off to us with the information requested.
A selection committee reviews proposals once a year, usually in the spring.
Contact us for more information.
info@galleryvertigo.com
proposal form and information for exhibitions in gallery #1 and gallery #2
members wall application
window displayPrevious Exhibitions:
2009:
Philomena Caroll, Margarita Alejandre, Sookinshoot - Sep.10 to Oct.3
Almost Famous Auction - August 22
Microbial Tales - Arthur Desmarteax and Allison Moore - July 2 to July 25th
Pfannschmidt, Newell and Mace - May 26 to June 23
Heidi Thompson and Stephan Bircher - Apr.21 to May 15
Lucky Number 7: NOAA juried exhibition - Mar.17 to Apr. 9
Social Spectrum: A Group Exhibition by UBC Okanagan Photograpy Students - Feb.10 to Mar.7
Fusion: Fourth Annual High School Exhibition - Jan 13 to Feb 17
2008:
Picasso's Cupboard/ Book Fair - Nov.25 to Dec.13th
not with a Bang, but with and SUV - The 7th Annual NOAA Members Open Exhibition - Oct.7 to Nov.1
the coming night - Jorden and David Doody / Typoportraits - kevin mcpherson eckhoff
Almost Famous Auction - August 17
Ten - Studio Artists - Current Work - July 29 to August 9 / Joanne Sale-Hook:Introduced Species - July 29 to August 17
Katie Brennan - Stasis Strategy / Floribunda - June 23 to July 19
Space (re)Constructed - Miranda Aschenbrenner / Memory/Recall - Suzanne Phillips - May 27 to June 21
March to May - Faith Moosang/Candies - Sabrina Ovesen
Sixth Annual NOAA Members Juried Exhibition - March 18 to April 12
Drawing Conclusions - UBC Okanagan Student Exhibition - Feb.12 to March8
The Wheel: School District #22 High School Students - Jan.15 to Feb.2
2007:
Picasso's Cupboard and Even Dozen
Mellow Yellow - The 6th Annual NOAA Members Open Exhibition - Oct.16 to Nov.10
Look What we Have Done.. Carolina Sanchez de Bustamante / Mutation - Howard Brown - September 11 to October 5
Almost Famous - Ken Jeanotte - August 7 to August 24
Zotz Collective - Kurt Hutterli - July 3 to July 28
Flesh nor Meat - Ila Crawford /All our Ancestors - Tanya Dubick - May 29 to June 23
Spectacles of Intimacy - curated by Lora Carroll - April 24 to May 18
Green - The Fifth Annual NOAA members juried exhibition - March 20 to April 14
Pressing Engagements - UBC Okanagan Printmaking Students - Feb.13 to March 16
Bugs - School District #22 High School Students - Jan.16 to Feb.3
2006:
Picasso's Cupboard, Studio Artists - Nov.21 to Dec.9
Fall Forward - Oct.21 to Nov.10
Helm, Seward, Began - Sept.8 to Oct.6