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Current
Exhibitions: |
Gallery #1: |
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Heidi Maddess, visual artist, has created through her current research hybrids of drawing, painting, printmaking and digital media. Artist Statement I feel the constant chafing of my uncomfortable skin: two degrees off course and dragging. If one could isolate that space, that damaged chromosome in words, in an image, then perhaps one could restore order by naming. Fugitive Pieces: A Novel. By Anne Michaels. McClelland + Stewart Ltd. Toronto ON Canada, 1996. I am exploring how personal demons – shadows – thread themselves through sensibilities of physiological, emotional and psychological landscapes. During two artist residencies I was initiated into the mythologies and landscape of my Icelandic heritage, in which mythical forces are believed to have a real physical presence. Formal elements used to support this idea include using traditional drawing materials of graphite, charcoal and ink for variation of line, occasionally photo collage, as well as ink/graphite washes and watercolours all of which are scanned at various stages and composed to be printed digitally on archival Rag paper. During my struggles with illness, all assumptions of self have been stripped away. Demons occupy spaces of peripheral vision and are at times tricksters purposefully keeping me off balance. At other times they are beacons for reintegrating dissociated fragments of self. If you dream about wrestling with the devil, it may only be yourself you are wrestling with. |
Gallery #2 |
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Cat Fink graduated from a three year diploma program at Victoria College of Art in 1999. She has been an artist, storyteller, and “shapeshifter” all her life, drawing from still life which she constructs, combining reality and imagination. She works in mixed media, using pastel, charcoal, graphite, coloured pencil, and acrylic on watercolour and printer’s paper incorporating original text. Her inspiration and subject matter are inspired by life experiences, which include her Tibetan Buddhist practice and multi-centred family heritage of Scandinavian, French Canadian, and Métis. The artist has shown her work in solo and groups shows, winning both juror’s choice and purchase awards. She has received education and residency awards from the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation and from the Banff Centre. Fink’s drawings have been published as magazine cover and illustrations. The artist lives in both Alexis Creek and Victoria, BC. |
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Artist Statement I have no home. Mostly. I move from place to place depending on the seasons. The place where I live right now has no address or two different addresses, depending on who you talk to. I tell people when they ask, “the big blue trailer on the hill behind the school”, and they nod. Everyone here knows where that is. I didn’t choose no-home. Or rather, I didn’t know I was choosing it. Either way, here I am. I feel like Coyote of the stories, caught in a chaos not entirely of her own making. I need to find a way through this. Go from chaos to wisdom. From no-home to home. I begin here. I define home--my definition, not the words in a dictionary. My home is made of both material and mind. I inhabit it and it inhabits me. House plus memory equals home. Sounds fairly simple. It’s not. Memory is never simple. It’s tied to emotion, and that’s not simple either. They are forever a tangle of process and change. But this gives me a kind of definition for home. Home overlaid upon house, trailer,apartment is of-the-moment and invented, not inherent, not constant. Each of us creates home for ourselves. It is movement of memory and emotion over a passage of time. Home is history. Home is family story, an accumulation of personal meaning layered upon a physical structure. Perhaps my definition should be memory equals home. I know what to do. I am Artist (and Coyote). I can shape chaos into wisdom. I will go into my studio in the big blue trailer, on the hill behind the school, with no address or maybe two addresses. I will stand before the paper on my easel, pick up my charcoal, open my heart. I will take the questions I am asking and wind them around what is familiar and what is new. I will translate this vision and draw out the answers I seek. My marks onto paper. Chaos into wisdom. I will find my way home. Having a home and having no home were the themes I began with in creating “Drawing Home”. Our society ties these opposing realities tightly into a knot of values and expectations. Having a home and having no home are concrete realities. Values and expectations are not, yet people are judged all the time by their particular rootedness or transience. These drawings are grounded in my personal experience of transience over the past seven years, and in my family’s long history of migration and multi-centred lives. The first drawing of this series, ‘Building a Sky to Shelter Me’, considered the physical reality of home. However, with the second drawing, ‘Laid to Rest 80,000 Obstructing Spirits (East)’, I realized I had rapidly moved into a consideration of home as a non-physical place of emotion, memory, and spirit. That is where my subject matter firmly remained until the series was completed with the seventh and last of the Archangel drawings, ‘Archangel for Mrs. St. Cyr (Uriel)’. After a year and a half of drawing home, it is clear to me now that the artist in me has defined home to mean home of the spirit. Not only that, but she has been busily creating that home of the spirit as a peaceful place to be. I drew out my answers. I can live with that.
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NOAA Members Wall Gallery: |
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Rosanna Marmont: Recent Work |
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New NOAA Member, Rosanna Marmont is exhibiting recent work on the Featured Member wall this month. Marmont is based out of Montreal and the Interior of BC. She completed her BFA at Concordia University, majoring in painting and drawing.The work is landscape-based and aims to exemplify the emotion that landscape invokes. Artist Statement I initially experienced Canada’s Western landscape at the age of six when my father found work as a shepherd on a ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills near Pincher Creek, Alberta. In many ways, the prairies corresponded to the Pacific seascape and rolling green hills of my original home—New Zealand—where my family had farmed sheep and cattle in the Waikato King Country. The sublimity of the horizons encouraged some form of longing, a wandering eye, a brighter future over the next hill. The vastness gave an illusion of eternity, an escape from the confines of reality. By the age of thirteen when my family immigrated to Canada, the prairies, along with the rural culture of Western Canada, had impressed themselves upon my imagination, soon to become the focal point of my art practice. My current work aims to explore the meaning and metaphor of land. ‘Growing roots’ versus escapism, restlessness, wandering. The working of the land inscribes belonging while the linear crop lines coax the eye to run away. Horizons are visions of sublimity and promise. The question of where to situate self is persistent in my thinking—the human condition caught between reality and desire, fantasy, and promise. Visual texture and the gaze are used as devices to induce self-consciousness, forcing the viewer to become aware of their own presence. In a similar fashion my portraits allude to an insider: outsider dichotomy. The familiar is defined by the negative space of the excluded intruder, the foreigner, the stranger. A child stares across the table in a dinning room. Children playing pause in a moment of disruption. A boy plays on the beach with his back turned. As the artist I have the unique opportunity to define reality. Ultimately my mark making is imparted and the role inverted, so that I too become a viewer, subjected to and determined by the realms before me.
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| Kalamalka Vertigo at Okanagan College: Sindri Hans Guðmundsson: Selected Works |
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Selected works from local artist, Sindri Hans Guðmundsson will be on exhibit at Kalamalka Vertigo until May 6th. These colourful paintings reflect the artist’s exuberant graffiti and mural work. Originally from Iceland, the artist currently has a studio outside Vernon. He is also a popular instructor at Gallery Vertigo’s SMARTIES, a family art-making program that runs from 2 to 4 pm every Sunday at the gallery. Sindri’s work can also be viewed at “Kush Organics” where a large wall mural is in progress. Since the crazy 80´s so many things have happened. I was one of those hyperactive kids, but instead of being medicated, my Grandma had other solutions. She would just keep me busy with all kinds of different things. So, as child, I took piano lessons, practiced soccer, basketball, badminton, chess and track and field, along with writing and acting in school plays and other cultural events. In my late teen years I started a crew with some of my friends and made hip hop mix tapes and graffiti. It was called T. M. C. or Twisted Minds Crew. By then I had started working in a coffee shop in Iceland called “Prikid”. In English that means “The Stick”. This coffee shop is the oldest coffee shop in Iceland, established in 1951. It is very dear to me, as it has been a second home for Icelandic artists since the 50´s. There, you can come at eight o´clock in the morning and have breakfast and join in on the city gossip or philosophical discussions. At night, it changes into a bar and on weekends it is a really popular popular hip hop/indy/electro club with the occasional live performance. It was a great place and still is. I started working there when I was 18 and continued until I moved away from Iceland at 23 years old. In those five years along with my job I would organize small concerts, do all kinds of different art projects, started a nightlife guide, and founded the first free newspaper just for girls called “Ordlaust” with four friends. I always knew I needed to travel a lot, which is hard when you live in Iceland because, as you probably know, it´s an island in the middle of the Atlantic! And the plane tickets are not that cheap. So, I finally figured it out. I found a job in Norway on a cruise ship which sailed between Norway and Denmark. It was great! I worked for two weeks a month on board and then I used my other 2 weeks for travelling. I had a little place on board the ship where I could paint (by then I had already started selling my work in Iceland). Most of the work made in Norway is still in Norway on the walls of my co-workers houses. I always had a new order when I came on board again and some extra pocket money. After 2 years of sailing and travelling, I had kind of fallen for Copenhagen. It´s such a beautiful city! But, I moved back to Iceland and started working at my little coffee shop again. But, after two years of travelling, I kind of felt that Reykjavik was a little small for me. My girlfriend at that time was an exchange student from Paris, France. After her year was finished in Iceland, I went with her to Paris and spent almost a year there. I was so lucky to be able to get this wonderful apartment on the hill just under the Sacred Heart (that is one of the most beautiful places in Paris). I started painting graffiti again in Paris, as well enjoying the city of arts on my long board looking for wood panels from houses under construction to paint on and sell outside in the “area of the masters”, where the painters lived in Paris during its many years of being the home of geniuses. After Paris I just really felt that I needed to live in Copenhagen. So that’s where I went. I started working as a backstage vegan and vegetarian cook in a concert house that hosted 70 % of all foreign bands that visit Copenhagen. I got to meet all kinds of different artists like Ac/Dc, Depeche, Mode, Moby, Air, The Mars Volta , and Hank Williams the III. I had two exhibitions while in Copenhagen. I came to Vernon in August 2010. My mom and my little brother had lived in the Okanagan for four years. I had visited a couple of times before and I found it to be a warm and welcoming place. I have never had time to start my education, and I have been alone and away from my family for so long. I figured I could hit two flies in one punch and so I chose a school here, close to my family. I have had one show here at Gallery Vertigo last November. I have also been having fun guiding the Vertigo art group for kids on Sundays called “Smarties”, as well as painting a big mural in a local store called “The Kush Organics”. So, if you like what you see here you can go there and see a giant-sized wall mural. This show is dedicated to my Grandmother, Ebba, who was the rock in my life. She moved to the next life last Christmas. She loved all animals, and inspired me to always paint beautiful things. She taught me how to love life and nature. Inspirations: Nature, spiritual guides, role models, forms, shapes, happiness, colours,music, psychedelic, beauty, feelings, imagination, love, vanity, molecules, space, infinity and galaxies…(Guðmundsson) |
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KALAMALKA VERTIGO |
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| Exhibition
Proposals: Please print a copy of our form and send
it off to us with the information requested. Previous Exhibitions: |
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