What: BC Festival of Artist-Run Culture Where: 421 Cawston Avenue
 
Chatter and Whirr is a winter festival celebrating artist-run culture in BC. An initiative of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (PAARC), this unique festival connects events in Kelowna, Victoria and Vancouver scheduled throughout the month of February. Chatter and Whirr highlights the best of alternative culture through exhibition openings, festive cultural happenings and province-wide discussions, setting the tone for artist-run culture in BC.
 
Schedule of Events in Kelowna:
 
Friday Feb. 6 at 7pm
Opening Reception
Free
 
The festival showcases new media exhibitions featuring Plains Cree-Métis artist Jude Norris, and presenting two artists originally from Kelowna, Brian Gotro and Christian Nicolay.
 
Norris' Diary of a Nomad combines three projection screens to contrast digital landscapes, which both celebrate and offer a critique of western landscape traditions from an Indigenous perspective. Gotro draws his audience into the White Room, with a five-channel video and electric guitar while Nicolay's Atlantis challenges America's quest for freedom, using tv static to broadcast from turbulent waters.
 
These three alternative exhibitions will be on display until 2am during the music and media arts festival on Saturday Feb. 7.

Saturday Feb 7 from 12noon - 4pm
Chatter Conversation
Free
 
Members of artist-run organizations from across BC will be meeting to discuss the vision of artist-run culture. Participants from the Alternator (Kelowna), Ullus Collective (Penticton), Arnica (Kamloops) and Vertigo (Vernon) extend a warm invitation to anyone who wants to attend and is interested in finding out more about artist-run culture and the role it plays in our communities.
 
Saturday February 7 from 9pm - 3am
Music and Media Arts Festival
$5 recommended donation at the door
 
The Atrium will be transformed into a nightclub experience with interactive media-based visual art (audio, video, 3D, lights, performance) and local musical guest Djs. DJs create a lounge-friendly backdrop of groovy Electronic music perfect for mingling and dancing. Lola's multi-faceted Drum & Bass opens the evening, JGirl & Manousos journey through the laid-back grooves of Downtempo, World-beat rhythms, & groovy Deep House, while JPod (The Beat Chef) offers up Funk, Breakbeat, positive Hip Hop, & party rockin bangers giving this show just the right eclectic mix of style and a perfect flow.
 
Artists and Performers:
 
Kinshira: Okanagan based performance group performing expressionistic dance using everything from poi and staves, to hula hoops, fire fans, juggling, face paints, masks, stilt-walkers, and costumes.
 
Brian Gotro and Christian Nicolay: Intervention making use of one, all, or some of the following components: video, sound, sensors, amplified objects, contact microphones, beach balls, sun glasses, ice cream cones, red spotlights (but not green).

 
Marc Arellano and Jillian Garrett: Obsolescence - Interactive DVD and sculpture
 
Tim Fehr: The Screaming Circuit Circus - An alternative techno industrial video/audio work distructional walk in the walk.
 
Arthur Schwimmer: Interactive VJ performance
 
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The Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art, in partnership with the Independent Media Arts Alliance, the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, the Ullus Collective and UBC Okanagan, is proud to present On Common Ground in Kelowna BC, the traditional territory of the Syilx Nation.

On Common Ground is a four-day national conference and festival that allows artists, cultural workers, funding agencies and policy makers to celebrate national and international indigenous media artists and organizations. Participants from across Canada will pay tribute to the history of indigenous media art, with the goal of building new connections between geographically and culturally diverse communities. Keynote speakers include Alanis Obomsawin, one of Canada's most distinguished indigenous documentary filmmakers, and Barry Barclay, a leading Maori filmmaker from New Zealand.

This biennial event, a longstanding initiative of the Independent Media Arts Alliance, features screenings, exhibitions and panel presentations on topics important to the independent media arts sector. Independent media arts comprise film and video as well as new media, which includes other types of electronic and experimental interactive media. These dynamic forms of creative expression offer communities valuable ways to build critical discourses around experiences, cultures and belief systems outside the mainstream.

This event plays a vital role in supporting independent film, video and new media artists while showcasing cutting-edge works that reflect authentic stories from diverse communities. Please join us!

For conference registration, please visit www.imaa.ca, call 514-522-8240 or e-mail info@imaa.ca. For festival information please call 250-868-2298 or email us.

Edges of Diversity is a commissioning program to facilitate development of original contemporary media artwork by Dana Claxton, Jayce Salloum and Henry Tsang. These artists, who have exhibited nationally and internationally, demonstrate a commitment to working with challenging social and political topics while bridging cultural understandings between diverse communities within Canada and beyond.

Dana Claxton - The Mustang Suite
Dana Claxton is one of Canada's most influential indigenous media artists. Claxton's work blends traditional knowledge and contemporary art practices with the goal of building understanding between indigenous and non-indigenous communities. This new work will pay homage to Black Elk, a Lakota spiritual leader, and the Horse Dance.

Jayce Salloum & Khadim Ali - A Very Narrow Bridge
Jayce Salloum's work engages social manifestations and political realities. Salloum travels to Pakistan and Afghanistan for four weeks to work in collaboration with Pakistan-based artist Khadim Ali. The project's focus will be Afghanistan's Bamiyan valley, where the Taliban destroyed two ancient giant statues of the Buddha in 2001.

Henry Tsang - Napa North
Henry Tsang's work explores relationships between community, cultural identity and the self under globalization. Tsang will examine recent successes of the B.C. wine industry and the accompanying boom in agri-tourism, which has helped catalyze rapid urbanization in the Okanagan Valley.

Edges of Diversity is also supported through partnerships with local and national organizations, including the South Asian Visual Arts Collective in Toronto and the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Final works will be exhibited at the Alternator from June 9 to July 31, 2008 in conjunction with the On Common Ground national media festival and conference.

A new commissioning project, Fault Lines, is supporting local production of seven short videos about the evolution of media communication. Participants include Alternator members Cherie Stocken, Danielle Dickson, Joanne Gervais, Jorden Doody and David Doody, as well as Tracey Jack, Victoria Baptiste and Marlene Squakin from the Ullus Collective, an aboriginal media group based in the South Okanagan. Alternator members explore how different media-based information sources are refracted through various cultural and social structures. Ullus Collective participants examine the impact of new media technologies on representation, dissemination and preservation of traditional practices and cultural property rights. The works will be compiled on DVD and screened during the Independent Media Arts Alliance national conference and festival On Common Ground in Kelowna from June 10 to June 14, 2008.

The videos selected for the salon represent the increasingly hybrid nature of our culture and the diverse and often marginalized perspectives within it. These works challenge historical stereotypes while demonstrating the ongoing, often complex process of identity exploration and formation.
 
While all the featured artists are Canadian, their work addresses the negotiation of self in a variety of social contexts ranging from politics of Israeli conflict to more personal issues of aboriginality, gender and sexuality.
 
The salon will feature Terry Haines, a non-status Aboriginal who has lived in Vancouver for over twelve years but is from British Columbia's interior. His works have been presented at many film festivals including the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (2007), the Dawson City International Short Film Festival (2007), the IMAGeNation Aboriginal Film and Video Festival in Vancouver (2006) and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto (2006).
 
Artists names, titles and length of work:
- Steve Reinke, The Mendi, 9:00
- Adam Garnet Jones, Demonstration of Indianess #31, 3:30
- b.h. Yael, A Hot Sandfilled Wind, 13:00
- Terrance Houle, The Metrosexual Indian, 4:00
- James Diamond, Private Property, 6:00
- Terry Haines, The Walk, 3:30
- Terry Haines, Dragonfly, 4:07
- Thirza Cuthand, Love and Numbers, 8:03

Theme: Converge
The 2007 edition features:
 
Class Clown by RoseAnne Archibald
TBA by Melanie Rands
$4 Indian by Darlene Naponse (2:00)
Black Pearl by Lonnie Hutchinson (2:00)
Me+D=Ahh by Gail Maurice (11:00)
10 by Dana Claxton (7:20)
I want to know why by Dana Claxton (6:20)

This annual event is meant to broaden the local community awareness of media arts practice in Canada and internationally. The 2006 edition took place on February 11th and featured works by:
 
Zachary Longboy
Ingrid Mwangi
Joanne Gervais
Sang Ho Shin
Diane Borsato
Stephen Foster
Emily Vey Duke
Cooper Battersby
Mona Hatoum

A city's centennial is, by definition, an arbitrary affair. The symbolic resonance of 100 years is typically subsumed by celebrations that aim to enhance a shared spirit of community. But centennials can do more than serve up fireworks and nostalgia. Although there is a place for celebration, such anniversaries also offer opportunities for meaningful dialogue and thoughtful reflection about the complexities of the past. Such conversations can provide opportunities for reconciliation among people by exploring distinct histories and unique voices. Understanding and empathy are bridges to future cooperation and, ultimately, inclusiveness strengthens a community. Temporal Transmissions does not pretend to be a comprehensive or objective review of Kelowna's history.
 
The Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art gave seven artists the freedom to explore aspects of local history that interested them and to tell stories from different esthetic and cultural perspectives. Five emerging artists - Patrick Connelly, Portia Priegert, Christian Nicolay, Karen Tam and Randy Grskovic - created an eclectic mix of social history, poetic meditation and ironic humor. Their projects, respectively, deal with urban development, historic homes, the post office, the disappearance of Chinatown and sightings of the reputed lake serpent Ogopogo or N'ha-a-itk.
 
Two internationally known Canadian artists also participated in Temporal Transmissions. Dana Claxton, a Lakota Sioux based in Vancouver, used 1950s footage of the Kelowna Regatta to comment with subtle metaphor and rich visuality on aspects of this community's identity and history. Slow-motion images of beauty queens on parade floats - moving first in reverse and then forward - along with stunning platform dives into Okanagan Lake, speak eloquently about celebration within a specific geographic and cultural locus. Particularly telling is the review of the crowd gathered to watch the parade - it is almost uniformly white, with few, if any, Aboriginal or visible minority faces.
 
Jayce Salloum, a Vancouver-based artist raised in Kelowna, engaged in an ambitious exploration of the First Nations community he barely knew as a youth. Salloum videotaped some 24 hours of interviews that often dealt with difficult realities - the sad legacy of Canada's residential school policies and the creation of reserves, as well as social issues such as suicide, homelessness and alcoholism, familiar themes in Aboriginal communities across Canada. But Salloum's artwork also contains a message of hope - through first-person accounts, he portrays a history of survival and, ultimately, the reclamation of culture.
 
That he chose to work in a longer format than the other artists represents a generous gift of creative energy by one of the most significant artists the Okanagan has ever produced. Like a conversation with old friends, Temporal Transmissions explores particularities of a shared history. But it is also like a discussion with new acquaintances who offer alternative visions of what has transpired. As with the best of both such dialogues, Temporal Transmissions raises questions, prompts thought and, ultimately, allows us to reconsider our own assumptions about the complexities of the past.
 
A community's willingness to engage in this process and to confront sometimes-problematic aspects of its history is a testament to its maturity. Whether or not such an exercise is undertaken in conjunction with a centennial, it is something truly worth celebrating.

When the gallery proposed its video project, Temporal Transmissions, to the City of Kelowna it included the work of Jayce Salloum, a Kelowna-born artist of international renown. I would encourage members to google Salloum. A rudimentary search into this artist's work offers insight suggesting that 'terra incognita', Salloum's contribution to Temporal Transmissions, is consistent with videos made throughout his career. I would like to offer some personal thoughts, brief contextual and general ideas about public art. I would also like to mention that I am very grateful for the unwavering support for the gallery's position from the artists that participated in the project and for support letters from all over Canada.
 
Public art by definition exists outside of the secure confines of the gallery or museum setting. The art is out there, mingling with its environment, open to criticism from art enthusiasts and passersby alike. Public art is a difficult terrain to tread and nothing can please everyone. And if it does, the work ends up being vapid with its meaning diluted, like a politician that tries to please all sides in his/her speech, or a Hollywood movie with too broad a target audience. But those artists that have the courage to take on public art commissions are motivated by the idea of taking their art and its message to a public that would not normally be exposed to it.
 
A well-known example of contentious public artwork was conceived by American artist Maya Lyn in 1982. Lyn was commissioned to produce a memorial in Washington D.C. to celebrate and honor veterans of the Vietnam War. For her work, she conceived of a minimalist inspired black wall, engraved from top to bottom with the names of all the soldiers who lost their lives in the Vietnam conflict. When one encounters the wall, the sheer number of names indexing lost lives feels overwhelming. At the time of its inauguration, the public's reaction to Lyn's work was mixed.
 
Most were surprised at the artist's approach, deeming it formally too contemporary and its focus too negative. The initial questioning that arose at the time of the inauguration eventually faded: for the Vietnam veterans, the work engendered difficult emotional experiences, but experiences that were meaningful and took into account the reality of what they had been through. Lyn's work remains in people's consciousness and, to this day, people come from all over North America to find the names of lost loved ones and experience the artwork.
 
Closer to home, Joy Kogawa, born in Vancouver in 1935, wrote a novel titled Obasan. The novel recounts her family's and other Japanese-Canadian families' experience during the Second World War. Because of political fear-mongering, Japanese immigrants were targeted, dispossessed and displaced, interned and persecuted. The book was selected for One Book One Vancouver, a program initiated by the Vancouver Public Library. In talking about Obasan, Richard Hopkins, a professor at the UBC Library School, said succinctly, "Joy Kogawa teaches us to be better Canadians."
 
Also this year, in conjunction with the Vancouver Public Library's program, the Vancouver Opera company is producing a work based on Naomi's Road (Kogawa's adaptation of Obasan into a children's book) to be presented in elementary schools across the province. The Obasan novel and the opera based on Naomi's Road are not public art, per se, but certainly share with 'terra incognita' by Jayce Salloum, a desire to acknowledge some aspects of Canada's less illustrious past and perhaps begin to redress wrongdoings that have repercussions for generations. Certainly we can look to Vancouver as a cultural leader for embracing a difficult work such as Obasan.
 
Speaking of art in a broad sense, the author Andre Malraux said, "Art is a defiance of man's faith." This quote can be understood as a life-celebrating statement. It describes people who rise up, if only symbolically, beyond human finitude. They leave symbols, markers, testaments, first-hand accounts, so as not to be forgotten. 'terra incognita' contains a message of hope and is a part of a process that honors resilience as conveyed in Malraux's quote. It also points to a grave problem in our society today: that of "historical amnesia."
 
The importance of knowing our history comes from the fact that forgetting or ignoring it leaves avenues open for us to repeat ill trajectories. If we have learned anything from the past, it is that people must speak up when --- under the guise of what is politically or socially appropriate -- minority voices or critical thoughts are perceived and treated as transgressive.
 
David Ross is the Exhibition Coordinator of the Alternator Gallery.

Hanan Harchol (New York / Israel) has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Jersey City Museum, the Chicago Cultural Centre and the Hebrew Union College Museum in New York. Harchol's animations have been screened at the Brooklyn Jewish Film Festival, the San Diego International Film Festival, the Syracuse International Film Festival and the San Diego Jewish Film Festival.

Julie Lequin (Montrèal) has an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. She has exhibited her work at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Diego Rivera Gallery in San Francisco and the Sandra Goldie Gallery in Montrèal.

Adad Hannah (Montrèal) has an MFA from Concordia University in Montrèal. He has exhibited at Dazibao in Montrèal, TPW in Toronto, the Museum of New Art in Detroit, the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, and SAW Gallery in Ottawa. His work has been included in film festivals in the Netherlands, Bosnia, Poland and Korea.

Bryan Zanisnik (New York) has a BA from Drew University in New Jersey. He has exhibited his works in Brooklyn at the Dumbo Arts Festival and the Brewster Project.

Cory Bildstein (Vancouver / Kelowna) has a BFA from Okanagan University College. He has shown his work at the Images Festival in Toronto.

Jaye Rhee has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rhee has participated in the Goat Island Summer Performance Workshop in Chicago and has exhibited at the Baths Gallery in Belfast, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, the Andrew Bae Gallery in Chicago and Gallery St. Eustache in Paris.

The original brochure is available in PDF format.

In October 2003, the Alternator Media Arts Centre sought participants for Under Arid Conditions. This video production project focused on the site of the Okanagan as its theme and participants were free to address this topic literally or obliquely. Following are excerpts from an associated essay by Donna Szoke.
 
Under Arid Conditions opens with Out of the Depths. Here, the spirits inhabit the "landscape" and the characters' direct relationship with the land enables the healing of cultural trauma. Place, is constructed as cultural, familial and psychic, not geographic nor geological. Within this context, the violence exacted upon the individual through the loss of proper relationship to the environment is enormous. In transgressioN, an audioscape of water is joined with abstract imagery that gradually reveals sparse new growth in a decimated landscape.
 
The tension between sound and image creates a subtle meditation on the right relationship between the elements. Like delicate seedlings, we depend on the fragile balance of the ecosphere for our existence. In Born of the Fire, the spirit of fire as a pathological destroyer is manifest. Yet this almighty destroyer has become a ghost and is now a homeless dead shadow that wanders through the burnt terrain as it ruminates on its own existence.
 
Skinscape is set to music composed by the artist. We escape the arid landscape, submerging beneath the liquid surface of skin. We find ourselves amidst breathing blister packs of red meat, video abstractions and cameo appearances by Barbie. The Master Project speaks to the cultural aridity caused by monoculture. The artists poke fun at the BC Bible Belt through their interaction and play with the witticisms, admonishments and sage advice purported by the signage of numerous Christian churches. The performances range from witty to bizarre and disturbing.
 
Untitled uses the medium of video itself to construct an audio-visual odyssey. Scan lines, bit-rate artifacts and sampled fields provide the stark visuals. Though largely abstract, the predominantly horizontal composition evokes a brutish landscape. These bare and barren architectonics of video evince the artists' own "emotional response to the equally stark and cold winter months experienced while living in the Okanagan." Television is a predominant character in the disjunctive, and claustrophobic work, from 83 dreams. As the title suggests, a series of unintelligible scenarios unfold, suggesting an arid psychic terrain.
 
Arid Excesses returns to the body as a landscape. The body is poked; the body is prodded. This exploration moves from the banal, to the silly, to the laugh-out-loud goofy. Even the soundtrack has an excellent combination of humor and restraint. A sea of Caucasian skin in far too much detail becomes at once repulsive and ridiculous. In addition, the skins surface is blown with such force that mock orifices are created in unlikely places.
 
From land, body, psyche and video machinery, the artists of Under Arid Conditions find fertile inspiration in the most unlikely places. Their work reflects a variety of concerns, aesthetics and visual strategies. They respond critically to their terrain, investigating how we know a place, how we interact with it and how we assess our relationship to it.

Video Salon 2004 features the videos by six artists from Australia, Great Britain, the United States and Canada.

Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo (New York) Video Title: Labyrinth. Beck and Calvo are influenced by early experiments in performance video, the plays of Samuel Beckett and the screams of Artaud. Beck has her MFA from the Parsons School of Design. Calvo attended the Sydney Center for Photography in Australia and The Drama Studio in Sydney.

Graham Clayton-Chance (Manchester, England) Video Title: Airbath. Originally commissioned as an installation in a decommissioned underground reservoir, Airbath explores ideas related to suspension, light and air.

Emma McRae (Melbourne) Video Title: Spandock (urbanik). Part of a project commissioned by Cocosolidciti, Spandock (urbanik) considers communities that live on or under bridges, imagining a span with extended structures to allow for parasitic architectures.

David Poolman (London, Ont.) Video Title: a little bit of nothing. Poolman experiments with viewer positioning within a narrative and the deconstructive or transient nature of metaphor in the production of meaning. Poolman has an MFA from the University of Windsor and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Sue Bizecki (Kelowna) Video Title: Straight Line Curve. Bizecki is a student at Okanagan University College. She uses sound and image repetition in a process of visual construction and deconstruction.

Lateral Motion was a series of six locally produced artist videos by 10 artists working as part of the New Video Initiatives Project, which was funded by the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Stephen Foster and Guenter Schulz: Pristine Distortion.
An abstract video art work set to an ambient sound score and featuring vibrant color and German text. Foster, former president of the Alternator Gallery, is a professor of new media at Okanagan University College. Schulz is a former member of the German band KMFDM and currently is part of Slick Idiot.

Marcell Leblanc and Ian Cowan: Nothing
A meditation on the concept of nothing that tracks the experiences of a fictional character named Alice.

Stacey Makowetski: Window Ordinary
Follows the ordinary/extraordinary lives of four local residents in a multi-screen format. Makowetski holds a BFA from Okanagan University College.

Jason Pettyjohn: Opposite Octave
Focuses on an individual's struggle with mental illness by exploring the blurred territory between memory and medicated experience.

Jeff Horn: Time Well Spent
Depicts a personal struggle about the uncertain future after graduating from college. Horn has a BFA from Okanagan University College.

Leslie Brown: eloquent
Focuses attention on the visual distortion of image, audio and idea. Brown has a BFA from the University of Victoria.