Category Archives: Visual Arts

Exhibitions that draw from the University of Victoria’s Visual Arts Department and Faculty.

Victoria and Expressionism’s Second Wave: The Point Group

 January 11 — April 5, 2025

Legacy Downtown | 630 Yates St.
Lekwungen territory

Victoria and Expressionism’s Second Wave: The Point Group exhibition features works of art owned by the University of Victoria. This group of modernist artists emerged in 1959 and cultivated a sense of cohesion through exhibitions of their work at the Point Gallery on Fort Street. They held open space for modern art in Victoria, first initiated by Emily Carr and then picked up by the Society Limners. Although many group members had long and illustrious careers, the artwork that appears in this exhibition is contemporary with The Point Group’s active period — the 1960s.

Featured artists:

Robert de Castro

Richard Ciccimarra

Nita Forrest

Flemming Jorgensen

Duncan de Kergommeaux

Virginia Lewis

Elza Mayhew

Michael Morris

Molly Privett

Herbert Siebner 

Sylvia Sutton

William West

Curated by Carolyn Butler-Palmer, Williams Legacy Chair & Associate Professor, Art History & Visual Studies, UVic.

Image: Michael Morris, Untitled (Pat Bay Highway Renovation Series), 1962, U996.18.1, (detail).

Latent

January 6 – April 6, 2024

Legacy Downtown | 630 Yates St.
Lekwungen territory

The exhibition Latent emerges from conversations between artist Lynda Gammon and curator Carolyn Butler Palmer over the past several years about how artists who identify as women are often overlooked, ignored and sidestepped. At the Legacy Art Galleries, over the past decade the majority of solo exhibitions have featured the work of women artists and this exhibition furthers a desire to bring forward their work by honouring the many women who remain hidden in the University of Victoria’s Art Collection and the mechanisms that conceal them from view: the vault, accessioning, and the catalogue.

Artist bio: Lynda Gammon
See all events: Latent events & programs

Image: 12-minute meditation on untitled (serigraph), Elza Mayhew, n.d., Lynda Gammon, 2023. 

Piers

September 28 – December 22, 2022

Legacy Downtown | 630 Yates St.
Lekwungen territory

Curated by Kim Dhillon

Piers is a group exhibition showing contemporary artwork ranging across media by 18 artists spanning generations, nationalities, and backgrounds, exploring how artists’ practices change through teaching, learning, and mentorship.

Artists:
Katie Bethune-Leamen, Cedric Bomford, Lauren Brinson, Yan Wen Chang, Megan Dickie, Laura Dutton, Annika Eriksson, Daniel Laskarin, James Legaspi, Christopher Lindsay, Evan Locke, Danielle Proteau, Hollis Roberts, Arlene Stamp, Jennifer Stillwell, Beth Stuart, Grace Tsurumaru, Paul Walde.  

Exhibition booklet: view
Artist bios: view

Image: James Legaspi, still from magnolia, 2020, HD video, 18 minutes 13 seconds.

Learning Through Looking: Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Art History and Visual Studies at UVic

February 4 to April 13, 2017

Legacy Maltwood (at the Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

Curated by faculty members with graduate students Jaiya Anka and Atri Hatef

Using diverse historical and contemporary cultural objects, members of the Department of Art History & Visual Studies show how history, learning, and community interweave to support the mission to teach inter-cultural understanding through the study of world arts.

Image credit: EVA CAMPBELL, UNTITLED, 1992-93, MIXED MEDIA & OIL ON CANVAS. FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

 

LearningThroughLooking

Event Panel Discussion

March 8 | 5 – 7pm | Rm. 025 | Mearns Centre – McPherson Library

TOPIC: Why Art Matters in Dangerous Times

We live in a visual world where images define our lives. Yet, are we in danger of taking the visual for granted? This lively panel discussion argues that with xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and censorship on the rise, art has more to offer society than ever before in human history. The panel accompanies the exhibition “Learning Through Looking – Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Department of Art History & Visual Studies at the University of Victoria.” Part of Ideafest.

 

Bridge Over Troubled Water: Yoko Takashima with Ruby Arnold

Still from Bridge Over Troubled Water, Yoko Takashima

Still from Bridge Over Troubled Water, Yoko Takashima

April 9 – May 30, 2015

Legacy Small Gallery

View the online catalogue:

Bridge Over Troubled Water – Catalogue

Bridge Over Troubled Water is an interactive video and sound installation created by Victoria artist Yoko Takashima, with technical assistance in collaboration recent UVic graduate, Ruby Arnold. Takashima filmed about 40 volunteers signing the Simon and Garfunkel classic Bridge Over Troubled Water. Her manipulation of these recordings allows for the faces and voices to blend and transform over time in such a way that no identical image or performance will ever be seen. Unexpected narratives and raw human connections are forged between performer and viewer in this constantly self-generating installation.

Bridge Over Troubled Water is the second installment of IN SESSION, a series of exhibitions featuring UVic sessional instructions in the Visual Arts Department.

Similar Exhibitions:

IN SESSION – ONE

d. bradley muir, The Supernova Scene

d. bradley muir, The Supernova Scene

Megan Dickie | Laura Dutton                       d. bradley muir | Tara Nicholson

January 17 – March 28, 2015

Legacy Art Gallery

Curated by Mary Jo Hughes

View the exhibition catalogue here

This is the first part of an on-going series of exhibitions over the next few years featuring the artists who work as Sessional Instructors in the UVic Visual Arts department. This exhibition looks at the recent practice of four artists who work with photography, video, and digital media arts. In Session – One celebrates the significance and power of photo-based art in an age where social media and advertising threaten to inundate and numb us with visual overload. These artists also investigate themes including the relationship between the photographic image and its physicality as an object, light as a material presence, and the time/space/memory relationship of digital media arts.

Megan Dickie, Laura Dutton, d. bradley muir, and Tara Nicholson are four excellent artists who also happen to be excellent teachers; this combination of talents is rare, and as such they represent true assets to the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria. We are very fortunate to be able to hire professional artists from within the community to teach on a part-time basis. Sessional instructors enliven art departments across the country with their professional experience. They enable us to expose our students to a much wider array of professional practitioners that would be possible if teaching duties were left to full time faculty alone. Often students do not realize that many of their favourite instructors are in fact successful professional artists who leave their busy studios to come and teach a few times a week. As teachers, these artists are instrumental in shaping and preparing the next generation of artists. Their contribution in this role cannot be overstated.

IN SESSION - ONE - FEB focus adIN SESSION - ONE Poster IN SESSION - ONE - focus ad

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Paradox

Daniel Laskarin, blue chair :: if this

Daniel Laskarin, blue chair :: if this

October 31, 2013 –  January 11, 2014

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Mary Jo Hughes

par-a-dox n. 1. A statement that seems to contradict itself but may nonetheless be true.

The notion of paradox provides an apt means of curating seven divergent artists who make up the University of Victoria’s Visual Arts department. Despite their widely varying practices, they share fundamental interests in the contradictory nature of our very physical and psychic experiences in, and of, the world around us.

Paradox presents the recent work of the artists teaching in department of Visual Arts of the University of Victoria. The seven faculty members (Daniel Laskarin, Sandra Meigs, Robert Youds, Vikky Alexander, Lynda Gammon, Jennifer Stillwell, and Paul Walde) are mid-career and senior artists with national and international careers. Each artist will be represented by work characteristic of current practice relating to the theme of the paradox implicit in our experience of art.

Paradox aims to bring wider understanding to the particular strengths of this nationally acclaimed academic program, which is rooted in explorations of phenomenology and in the perceptual, conceptual, and interactive contexts of contemporary visual art.

Events:

An opening reception was held on November 1, 2013 with the seven artists and public in attendance.

On December 1, 2013 an experimental concert titled Music for Mycologists was held in support of Paradox. Paul Walde’s large mushroom spore prints (Interdeterminacy, 2012) also act as musical notation. Tina Pearson (flute, voice), George Tzanetakis (bass clarinet) and Paul Walde (bass guitar) interpreted the prints sonically and also played pieces by John Cage and Vaclav Halek.

American composer John Cage was an avid mycologist. Cage often quipped that music and mushrooms have nothing to do with one another except for the fact that they appear next to each other in the dictionary. Experimental Music Unit put this statement to the test.

Similar Exhibitions:

Core Samples: Visual Arts Faculty 1966-1986

Don Harvey, Black Diamond #3

Don Harvey, Black Diamond #3

June 19 – October 25, 2013

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Caroline Riedel

View the online catalogue:

Core Samples – Catalogue

This exhibition presents an overview of the University of Victoria’s Visual Arts department from its earliest days as a breakaway department from the Faculty of Education to the individually and collectively earned reputations for innovation in painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and sculpture.

Thirteen artists who were also appointed faculty members are included in this exhibition including John Dobereiner, Donald Harvey, Pat Martin Bates, Gwen Curry, Douglas Morton, Roland Brener, Mowry Baden and Fred Douglas. Primarily drawing on work from the university’s permanent collection, this exhibition reflects a range of media and groundbreaking artistic practice.

Similar Exhibitions:

MFA Visual Arts Exhibition

Allison Cake, Woodpile House
Allison Cake, Woodpile House

May 13 – August 16, 2009

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

This summer the Legacy Art Gallery and Café brings a mixture of imaginative artworks from the studios of five young artists. Recently graduated MFA students Allison Cake, Katie Lyle , Shelly Penfold, Sara Robichaud and Ethan Wills share their top explorative pieces in their final thesis exhibition for the Fine Arts Masters program at UVic. The exhibit features a variety of works, from soapstone sculptures in the form of every day objects, to paintings of ghostly young women, to abstract wooden structures.

“Looking over these works, we see five artists committed in their disparate manners to a similar end: the creation of possible itineraries of the imagination. … A parallel universe, if you will, summoned forth from studio space.”
-Kitty Scott from Studio Space, UVic MFA 2009

UVic’s Visual Arts Department Alumni Show (BFAs 1963-1993)

April 2 – June 13, 2002

Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery

Curated by Pat George and Phyllis Serota

Exhibition of UVic Visual Arts alumni. Thirty years’ worth of Visual Arts BFA graduates have been invited to participate in this exhibit, the first of its kind at UVic. Over sixty artists’ pieces will be included in the exhibit. The works chosen will reflect the diversity of the artists’ interests and artistic explorations in painting, drawing, sculpture and other mixed media work.

Honour the Women: Portraits by Manon Elder

Ann Mortifee (portrait), Manon Elder, 1999

Ann Mortifee (portrait), Manon Elder, 1999

February 29 – March 12, 2000

Maltwood Art Museum and Gallery

Features portraits of outstanding B.C. women by Oak Bay artist Manon Elder. Coincides with International Women’s Week, March 5 to 11. The woman were chosen four years prior to the opening of the show and were painted in their homes or workspaces to get a sense of their individuality.

The shortlisted women are: Nelly Auersperg, doctor and medical researcher; Jeannette Armstrong, writer; Rosemary Brown, human rights advocate; Rose Charlie, lawyer; Shush Datt, television producer; (the late) Dorothy Lam, philanthropist; Silken Laumann, Olympic rowing medalist; Ann Mortify, singer; Wendy McDonald, businesswoman; and P.K. Page, poet and artist.