2021 Exhibitions

Embodied Ecologies is a traveling Retrospective survey of the work of Saskatchewan artist, Marsha Kennedy. Drawn from 25 public and private collections throughout Western Canada, this exhibition explores the conceptual basis and evolution of Kennedy’s art practice through multiple bodies of work that engage concepts pertaining to the body, motherhood, feminism, spirituality, nature, museology, ecology, environmental sustainability, and colonial impacts on the land, spanning Kennedy’s prolifix four decade career. This survey brings together over one hundred works in printmaking, painting, mixed media, installation and sculpture to present a richly layered picture of the diversity and yet unifying conceptual threads of Kennedy’s practice.

​Exposed! is the VPAG’s annual gallery members’ exhibition, which provides exhibition opportunities to established artists and those working outside the mainstream of artistic production. The exhibiting artists show various studio practice approaches, including figurative, landscape, still life, and abstract subject matter, producing artwork that includes oil, acrylic, and watercolour paintings, prints, drawings, and photography. All the artwork in the Exposed! exhibition is for sale for $150 or under!

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the music collective, The intersection of art and music is an installation comprised of 3 parts. The first being an ambient music track where each member of the Sounds Suspicious collective submitted one sound or rhythm, which when composed together, create a collaborative song. The second part of the installation is a video projection. Again in the spirit of collaboration, each Sounds Suspicious member took a short video of something that inspires or compliments their music. The videos were compiled together to create an abstract visualizer that coincides with the audio track and is projected onto a circular sheet suspended from the ceiling. This circular sheet creates an immersive space where viewers can view and interact with the video from inside the circular space, or outside of it. The walls of the gallery will be filled with lyrics from each Sounds Suspicious member, creating a poem that resembles the 1920’s Dadaist cut-up technique.

Shawn Serfas is presenting a new body of work pushing the edges of abstraction in the exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery. The large scale paintings are not only stunning to see at a glance, but with closer examination, the surfaces are extremely textural. Serfas added additional 3D elements built from pigmented polymer resin. The viewer is faced with the paradox of viewing 3D structures built on presumptively two-dimensional surfaces. Despite the abstract quality of Serfas’ paintings, there are obviously hints of narratives mostly implied in the paintings’ titles which serve as an entry point to invoke possible associations.

As a peaceful protest against the racist propaganda which was distributed around schools in the community in the fall of 2020, École Beairsto and the Vernon Public Art Gallery are excited to present a collaborative social justice project as a way to speak up against hate. In the fall of 2020, hundreds of flyers on pieces of white paper with the headline ‘Wake Up’ along with a list of several web pages that promote racism and Nazism were found scattered outside several Vernon schools, leaving many parents and staff seriously concerned, shocked and saddened. The 715 self-portraits will form a rainbow mosaic of diversity that highlights the differences that make each one of us unique. The project features 715 canvases with a self-portrait of each student; an anti-racist banner that will hang outside the school; and a special mini-documentary. The workshop portion and the mini-documentary portions of the project are sponsored by the Social Planning Council North Okanagan and funded by a provincial government grant through the Resilience BC program.

Gillian Willans presents a series of paintings that carry themes of the domestic realm. The paintings are based on found photographs, in which the camera lens also plays a role in the overall feeling of the image. Willans speaks of the domestic realm; she explains that she hopes is to capture her interest in social role-playing and her struggles to define her belonging within the home. The rooms are unidealized, not touched up to look pretty but as they were in that time and space. The rooms are empty without the people who may have occupied them; in this purposeful choice, Willans hopes to draw attention to the missing figures and the gaze of the photographer.

The VPAG has teamed up with the Silver Springs Senior community to showcase the diverse array of artworks. The image on the left is titled: Winter’s Edge by Barbara Wolf and is made of 53,000 beads.

The exhibition Emergence features the works of nine artists who have completed their studies at UBC Okanagan’s BFA program in 2021. This exhibition exemplifies carious approaches to research and studio practice and asserts an active hands-on attitude while creating their work. This exhibition includes painting, drawing, sculptural installation and videos of outdoor performances. Emergence participating artists: Sage Cannon, Pip Mamo Dryden, Lareina Mcelroy, Coralee Miller, Adrianna Singleton, Stephanie Tennert, Faith Wandler,  Tony Yu, and Jade Zitko.

#infodemic is an artist’s book project made up of text and image pairings that were created out of an interdisciplinary project between Sean Caulfield, Timothy Caulfield, and Sue Colberg. The images were first shared on social media in the hope they would make people stop and think before hitting ‘retweet’ or ‘share’, potentially spreading misinformation about COVID-19. More broadly the Infodemic project is also an attempt to explore creatively the sense of uncertainty and anxiety that has arisen out of the COVID-19 crisis. 

Through Our Eyes is an exhibition in partnership with members of the Teen Junction.

Artwork created by secondary students from School District No.22 displays a maturity of handling various mediums and more importantly, demonstrates a strong conceptual approach.

Artwork created by elementary students from School District No.22 displays creativity and various approaches to art making. 

Scott Bertram introduced a new body of large-scale abstract paintings in the exhibition titled We Cannot Say It Is There, And Yet We Cannot Say It Isn’t. Bertram’s paintings are ambiguous in the sense that they portray space which is often contradictory and the visual structures do not lend themselves to verbal interpretations which is always an issue with non-representational abstraction. His painting process relies on setting up circumstances for the chance and accidents to occur, then accepts the outcomes as a partial solution of his pictorial propositions.