Tag Archives: Sculpture

Making A Scene! Victoria’s Artists in the 1960s

Gods of the Sun Dogs, Margaret Ellen, c. 1960

April 2 – June 27, 2015

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Emerald Johnstone-Bedell

The 1960s marked the emergence of a vibrant contemporary art scene in Victoria. Events such as the BC centennial celebrations and Expo ’67 foregrounded regional and national artistic production, and the newly formed Canada Council for the Arts around a source of financial support to practicing artists. The politically charged spirit of the time, born out of war experiences and social justice movements, generated a desire for change and experimentation. This included artistic movements towards anti-hierarchial approaches inclusive of applied and non-Western art.

This show brought together ceramics, film, printmaking, painting, and sculpture to give visitors a glimpse of what the art scene of the 1960s would have looked like. Making a Scene! also highlighted the importance of growing institutions and movements of the 60s like the budding University of Victoria Art Collection, the birth of the Limners group, and the establishment of rights for First Nations artists.

View the exhibition website here

Similar Exhibitions:

Karl Spritz: Self-Propelled

IN SESSION – ONE

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.

Epiphany: Highlights from the Legacy Permanent Collection

Image: Maxwell Bates Circus People, 1969

May 1 – July 15 2014

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Mary Jo Hughes

An epiphany in its broadest sense is the experience of sudden realization or insight. Through an epiphany, our world broadens and new understandings and ideas are unlocked. Indeed, this widening of perspective remains the ultimate goal for most artists. The experience of epiphany is what the exhibition aims to engender in viewers through highlights from the extensive permanent collection held by the University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Galleries. It is intended that each piece will offer a unique insight or a fresh experience that was not entirely expected. Artists in the exhibition include, Robert Davidson, Emily Carr, Norval Morrisseau, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Myfannwy Pavelic, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jack Shadbolt, among others.

Honoris Causa: University of Victoria First Nations Artist Honourands

Henry Hunt, Kwagiulth Chief and Frog

February 2014

First Peoples House at the University of Victoria

Curated by Emerald Johnstone-Bedell

Twice yearly at convocation the University of Victoria awards honorary degrees to those who have demonstrated distinguished and extraordinary achievements. During its 50-year history UVic has granted honours to seven First Nations artists who have contributed not only to the arts but also to the community at large as leaders, activists, visionaries, role models, and groundbreakers. This exhibition features works from the University of Victoria’s art collection and an excerpt from the citation that was read at the occasion of granting the degree.

Paradox

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 (2013)
Visual Arts Department Faculty Group Show (1979)

Core Samples: Visual Arts Faculty 1966-1986

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:

Paradox: Vikky Alexander, Lynda Gammon, Daniel Laskarin, Sandra Meigs, Jennifer Stillwell, Paul Walde, Robert Youds (2013)
Visual Arts Department Faculty Group Show (1979)
Faculty of Art Education 30th Anniversary (1998) featuring John Dobereiner
John Dobereiner: Retrospective (1986)
White on White (1982) featuring John Dobereiner

Transformation: A Retrospective

: Untitled I, Duncan Regehr, 2010

June 13 – August 24, 2012

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Nicholas Tuele

View the online catalogue:

Transformation: A Retrospective Catalogue

For the summer months the Legacy Art Gallery Downtown presents a full retrospective of Duncan Regehr’s “Transformation” body of work. Through a wide-ranging presentation of media the viewer will become acquainted with the artist’s working method: to develop a series of paintings, sculptures, drawings and writings that project and explore a common theme or philosophy. By delving into the collective subconscious and the psyche, Regehr produces images of an intense personal nature, which invites reciprocal identification by the viewer.

Poetry Reading and Curator’s Talk, Saturday July 14 at 1:30pm – 3:30pm.

Divergence: Insights into Studio Practices

: Bill Zuk, Opal Ice

February 29 – April 14, 2012

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

From the studios of 19 University of Victoria art education instructors in the Faculty of Education comes a rich and diverse exhibition of images and objects that range through traditional and newer media. Working independently in their studios, these artist/educators collaborate and exchange ideas on a daily basis while working with students, engaging them in creative problem solving, and assisting in the preparation of work for exhibitions.

What they hold in common is a commitment to both the classroom and the studio as sites of research and dissemination. Teaching informs studio practice and studio informs teaching practice in the daily ebb and flow of professional life. This exhibition invites visitors to experience that dynamic interaction.

In Her Own Words

Chill Day in June, Emily Carr, oil on paper, 1938-1939

October 5 – November 19, 2011

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Caroline Riedel

View the online catalogue:

In Her Own Words Catalogue

This exhibition explores the artistic visions and words, both spoken and written, of three of Victoria’s best-known artists of the 20th century: Emily Carr, Katharine Maltwood, and Myfanwy Pavelic. While their artistic expression led them along different trajectories each as a painter, sculptor and portraitist, they also crossed paths in a number of instances as supporters of one another’s artistic pursuits, in their shared search for iconic imagery from the point of view of artists on the West Coast of Canada and in their exploration of both modern and traditional means of expression.

Convergence/Divergence: Landscape and Identity on the West Coast

Head of Canada, Katherine Emma Maltwood, sandstone, 1912

August 17 – October 1, 2011

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

Curated by Caroline Riedel

View the online catalogue:

Convergence/Divergence Catalogue

Click here to read more about this show on the University of Victoria’s website.

This exhibition explores how a selection of artists from diverse cultural backgrounds respond to the West Coast landscape as a means of expressing identity, while also suggesting ways in which an artist’s identity provides a lens for presenting or interpreting landscape.

The works highlight contrasting artistic approaches and ways of relating to local landscapes, illustrating both First Nations and settler’s complex relationships to the places they live. Through a selection of prints, drawings, sculpture, paintings and mixed media works, this exhibit shows some of the many ways in which West Coast artists express identity in terms of a sense of self, place, or community.

The title of this exhibition refers at once to both commonalities in how people relate to, identify with, inhabit or “resonate” with a particular place (convergence) and the different ways artists see, experience, represent and interpret that place (divergence).

Northern Lights: Inuit Art From the Dr. Hal Knight Collection

Dancing Bear, Qavayanu Ashoona, Cape Dorest, soapstone, 1960s

June 9 – August 8, 2010

Legacy Art Gallery Downtown

This exhibit presents the recent acquisition of Inuit sculpture from the estate of Dr. Harold Knight. The Knight Collection represents the work of more than eighty artists, whose production spans over forty years from the 1960s to 1990s.

Teachers of Teachers: 30th Annual Art Education Faculty Exhibition

Bow Glacier, Bill Zuk

January 9 – March 17, 2010

Legacy Maltwood (at Mearns Centre – McPherson Library)

Curated by Dr William Zuk and Dr Robert Dalton

For the 30th consecutive year, the Art Education Faculty will display a rich and diverse collection of images at the McPherson Library Gallery at the University of Victoria.

The exhibit, with the largest group of contributors on record, will show the work from 22 studios of art educators who practice what they teach. The work comes from a range of backgrounds, from retired professors to masters students working as teaching assistants. On view will be themes capturing traditional and realistic perspectives to newer media explorations that are ephemeral and mystical.