Special Exhibition: SOOKINCHOOT : The Seeing of Oneself
An exhibition of works from SOOKINCHOOT Youth Centre
October 6th and 7th 2009 @ Gallery Vertigo (11am to 4pm both days)
Exhibition Reception: October 6th from 7 to 9pm
Reception features complimentary refreshments and entertainment by the artists.
Everyone is welcome.

SOOKINCHOOT: Seeing Oneself  is a multimedia arts exhibition featuring eleven aboriginal youth artists between 14-19 years of age will be featured at Gallery Vertigo next week. 

This exciting project was made possible through the 2010 Legacies Now Arts Innovations Program which is helping Sookinchoot Youth Center to develop its First Nations Youth Art Foundations Program and supportive partnerships within the arts community. The Foundations Program Coordinator is Lynn Phelan with key partners including Enowkin Center, the Alternator Gallery and Gallery Vertigo.  The exhibition also features Sookinchoot Youth Center’s Pine Needle Productions Program. Supported by Aboriginal Arts Development Awards funding, Pine Needle Production Manager/ Mentor Mariel Belanger and Multi-Media Arts Mentor Chris Bose worked with the youth to create eleven short films.

"The youth began this arts exploration project by choosing a personal story or legend from their cultural background.  They were then challenged to depict the story they had chosen in a mixed media visual art format; materials included incorporating canvas, acrylic paint, gypsona masks, natural and/or other material.  Next they had to research and produce a piece of traditional art that connected to their story.  Photo Shop Art was a transition between the Youth Art Foundation Project and the Pine Needle Film Production Program.  Their techno art exploration of the story connected to their digital film project.  Youth were asked to visualize their story in either a literal or abstract manner and encouraged to think about how they interpret the meaning of the story.  Each youth produced an individual digital film less than 5 minutes long." (Lynn Phelan)

The exhibition also includes photography work where professional photographer and photography instructor Lorna McFarlane engaged the youth in using photography to encourage the youth to consider who they are and what makes them unique without relying on their physical appearance.

Additional art work includes group work from Sookinchoot’s After School Program.

Featured youth artists are:  Caitlin O’Leary, Trae Phelan, Thunder Mitchell, Daniel Clark, Gina Tso, Justen Peters, Zaynah Stewart, Fraser Cowan, Kaitlyn Phelan-Alexis, Jordaine Tallio, Clara Hovan.

"Gallery Vertigo is very pleased to present this excellent body of work produced by talented young artists. The exhibition also marks a budding partnership between our two organizations."
(Judith Jurica)

Sookinchoot Youth Center is a program of the First Nations Friendship Center whose mandate is to provide supportive, meaningful, social and cultural opportunities and experiences for aboriginal and metis youth.  The Center works primarily with high school age youth and older youth are involved as peer mentors.  The youth center has been providing strong personal development and arts related programming for the past ten years. 

Artist Statement:

Alchemy: the translation of something common into something precious or beautiful. Dipping into an Alchemist's Jar, current photographic work seems to explore what is profound, provocative, elusive and extraordinary among what is common and everyday. (Carroll)

Work for the Alchemist's Jar began as objects placed on a flatbed scanner. Layer by layer these photographic images became unknown and familiar landscapes. Displaced surface, texture and colour are folded through light and shadow, deliberately made obscure and abstract; common to the eye and familiar to the mind becomes beautiful and yet disturbingly out of place in our everyday world. We are rarely aware of how much we see, feel, think within shades of abstract form or, within our field of vision how much is ebb and flow between light, layered through textile, tactile emotion, material, object, surface and our emotional, rational concepts of the worlds around us. The work seeks to explore those intangible layers through a personal journey into what is beautiful, profound, sacred and yet everyday. (Carroll)

About the Artist:

Yukon artist Philomena Carroll was born in Ireland and emmigrated to Canada in 1994. She holds a Diploma/Degree in Fine Art from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. She also holds a Post Graduate Certificate in Secondary Education from the Northern College of Education in Aberdeen, Scotland. The artist has received several awards, notably the Advanced Artist Award from the Yukon Territorial Government and first prize in the Guiness Brewery Art Competition. Carroll has had solo exhibitions in the Yukon and in England in as well as numerous group exhibitions in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and in Ireland. She has work in private collections in Europe and Canada and is a founding member of Studio 204, an artist-run gallery and collective studio space in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Gallery #2:
Margarita Alejandre: Uninterrupted

Artist Statement:
My current body of work, Uninterrupted, revolves around the repetition of one positive shape and its transition from one level to the next. My process takes an inanimate object and continously repeats it layer upon layer. The result is a high density cluster of positive shapes placed throughout the entire canvas. Each shape is slightly transparent, allowing the creation of multi-layered, lustrous kaleidoscopic effect.

What began as a simple study of personally resonant shapes grew into an exploration of how shapes interconnect with each other and how they are repeated in multiple aspects of nature. From the anatomical makeup of our population to the air bubbles that are formed in water; the circle is an incredibly strong and reliable shape duplicated over and over again and is the basis and stepping stone for many of life’s entities.

I have employed vibrant colors and fragments of various materials to allow a unique build-up of colours and textures, each peaking to the surface. Creating this body of work has been an exciting, creative, and imaginative process where my skills as an artist have been put to the test and where I have travelled beyond the boundaries of what is comfortable.  (Margarita Alejandre)

About the Artist:
Margarita Alejandre was born in the Canadian Rockies, Jasper, Alberta, and moved to Vernon, British Columbia in 1991. After receiving a District #22 Scholarship Award, Alejandre attended the Fine Arts Program at Langara College and from there went on to join the Downtown Vernon Association Mural Crew in 1998. Under the direction and mentorship of mural artist Michelle Loughery, the crew painted a total of five large murals in downtown Vernon. After travelling overseas for one year, the artist returned to Vernon and proceeded to paint from her experiences in exotic locations. Alejandre is a former Gallery Vertigo studio artist and has participated in numerous exhibitions throughout the region. She has received numerous awards for her accomplishments. The artist is currently a student at Okanagan College.

NOAA Members Wall Gallery

Artist Statement:
I enjoy the randomness painting.  When turned upside down this piece reminded me of the Oshawa Yacht Club on Lake Ontario where I spent a few happy years. Some day I will be serene and maybe produce more 
disciplined abstract paintings like Wilhem de Kooning's whose work I admire. Meanwhile it's fun and sometimes my kids or grandkids will ask for one -  now that's sweet. (Helen Valk)

About the Artist:
Helen Valk has lived in Toronto, Montreal and in many other cities across the country as well as overseas. Vernon is the artist's home now and she has been a resident for the past 8 years. Valk enjoys the climate and scenery of the Okanagan Valley and participates in skiing and other outdoor activities. Valk is an active volunteer at Gallery Vertigo and exhibits her work regularly at the gallery. Her vivid and lively abstract oils on canvas are remarkably fearless and fresh.

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:
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