The annual members' show allows local artists to exhibit their work in a professional space, creating a dialogue about current artistic production in the community. The exhibition, held in conjunction with the annual membership drive, is a fundraising event for the gallery.

Toronto-based installation artist Lee Goreas presents recent work comprised of interactive sculptures based on games and sports, poetic text works derived from film and advertising, and documentary videos shot at a race track and golf course. Viewers are invited to race custom remote-control toy cars around a Figure-8 track and play a round of golf on a miniature course. The artist explores his relationship to institutional and popular culture, using humor both to entertain and as a vehicle for criticism.

Artist Jo Cook combines, balances and stacks drawings, cibachromes and digital images of thrift store objects to explore the role of farce, chance, irony and humor in art making. By playing with contradictions in scale between large drawings and small sculptures, she challenges assumptions about the incomplete, imperfect or untidy, while at the same time forging links and altering relationships between the thrift store sculptures and drawn images.

In an installation combining audio, multilingual text, audio, and a 'reading lounge', Vancouver artist Paul de Guzman physically deconstructs books and catalogues by cutting away blocks of text to create abstract visual architecture of the remaining words and phrases. The audio component functions as ambient noise, containing sound fragments from films such as Run Lola Run and Night on Earth, while the 'reading lounge' in the middle of the galllery invites viewers to immerse themselves in an environment of language. The artist's work emphasizes the universal and poetic qualities of language that support linguistic multiplicity.

Calgary artist Diane McGeachy juxtaposes photography and minimalist painting in a series of works depicting small cartoon-like ceramic animals she has collected at flea markets and garage sales. Each animal is photographed portrait-like in black and white, then mounted above a minimalist field of color that directly references the original ceramic piece. The viewer is thus confronted with issues of consumerism, nostalgia and low art vs. high art.

The focus of P. Roch Smith's work is the creation and perception of the North American masculine identity as reflected in the physique, uniforms and costumes of various models of GI Joe action figures. Sixteen wood panels support solvent-transfer images from original photographs of GI Joe archetypes including firefighter GI Joe, Air Adventurer GI Joe, Talking Navajo GI Joe and French Foreign Legion GI Joe, each fully or partially clothed and nude. The viewer is faced with the essential paradox of North American boys establishing male gender roles by playing with dolls.

Susan Detwiler collects and works with road kill that she encounters daily near her home in Southwestern Ontario. Detwiler creates aluminum moulds from the animals using recycled car pistons. The animal shapes are then painted with the luminosity of a car and given names of trucks or other vehicles that might have run them down. Detwiler is interested in the moment of impact between car and animal as a metaphor for the transition from life to death. The black rubber mats supporting the sculptures resemble pools of blood and vehicle tires. Although her approach is lighthearted, Detwiler respectfully addresses these helpless victims and provokes reflection in the minds of viewers.

Saskatoon artist Bart Gazzola's digital photographs portray historical, religious, sacred and profane cultural attitudes toward the body. Drawing on his training as a printmaker, Gazzola scans organ meats such as liver and kidney, manipulating and incorporating them into images of the body to create both elaborate and delicate arrangements reminiscent of floral bouquets. The resulting works transform the repulsive into an aesthetic that challenges the viewer's sense of beauty.

First Nations artist Lee Claremont, an instructor at the En'owkin Centre in Penticton, curates an exhibition by emerging aboriginal artist Dolan Badger, a recent graduate of Okanagan University College. Badger, a Cree from northern Alberta, explores his cultural heritage.

This is the culmination of an artistic exchange between the Alternator Gallery and Circa Centre d'Exposition Art Contemporain in Montréal. The exchange allows four Kelowna artists to exhibit their work in Montréal, and four Québec artists to exhibit in Kelowna. Guest curator Susan Edelstein, the curator of the Kamloops Art Gallery, has chosen works by Kelowna artists Renée Burgess, Briar Craig, Byron Johnston, and Jeffrey Norgren, exhibited at Circa from June 1 to June 28. Circa curator Maurice Achard has selected works by Michel de Broin, Valerie Kolakis, Manuela Lalic and Eve Tremblay for exhibition at the Alternator.

Michel de Broin uses painting, sculpture, installation, collage and photography to explore ideas of energy transformation and resistance. His industrially finished mechanisms appear functional but at the same time seem to serve no purpose. Symbolically, this raises questions about fine art itself and the desire of people for functional objects. De Broin encourages interaction with his work as he is also interested in the human as a resistor to the circuit.

Valérie Kolakis' work refers to the passages of time. She is interested in the ever changing yet repetitive qualities of time and space. For her, absence seems like a continual loss located somewhere between memory and oblivion or appearance and disappearance. Working obsessively and repetitively with materials such as wax, wools and ropes, Kolakis creates a faint aura of impressions like the subtle tinges left by one's distant memories.

Manuela Lalic sculpts by repetitively connecting banal items such as adhesive tape, elastic bands and toothpicks to themselves to create labor-intensive work that speaks of tensions in society. Lalic focuses on daily functionality and stereotypical social desires. Her work evokes issues of conformity and questions our individuality.

Éve Tremblay blends autobiography and fiction in a series of photographs imaging young plaid-skirted girls in the dorms, corridors and ivy-clad courtyards of a private school. Revisiting her own memories, Tremblay captures in still-life portraiture the charm and reverie of adolescence and youthful introspection against a backdrop of social and institutional structures. The scholastic environment parallels and contrasts with the mysteries of self-growth and the formation of personal identity.

Kelowna artist Patrick Rosen paints large abstract canvases informed by emotion, intuition and childhood memories. After living in Toronto for several years, Rosen has returned to the Okanagan and is completing a new body of work for this exhibition.

Toronto photographer David Hlynsky captures his images by creating impromptu "studios" in the forest or wild garden behind his home in Little Italy. Using props, lights, models, taxidermy, rubber animals and artificial plants, he creates landscape tableaux that reference popular science, kitsch cosmology, Hollywood sci-fi movies and classical mythology. Hlynsky's images are shot on Polaroid type 55 film, processed in a single chemical bath, altered in a digital studio and printed using the Giclée process on Arches paper. Both neo-romantic and painterly, his images "seek to reconcile the cultural and the natural by giving them equal debate on the photographic stage."

Vancouver interdisciplinary artists Rebecca Watt and Biliana Velkova collaborate in an installation that combines photography and video to satirize the process of applying and being interviewed for a job. Ten photographs depict each artist dressed in a series of five different occupational garbs, while the two video monitors show each artist answering typical interview questions. Help Wanted explores issues of identity and control by commenting on the stereotypical roles one must play in the often humiliating and disempowering search for a job.

Maymee Ying Lum's installation incorporates a variety of visual media including video, photography, ornate fabrics, wax castings of her own feet and chocolate-dipped shoes. Viewers remove their own footwear to walk across astral turf, knotted chiffon, and a bristled coco mat to encounter cast feet, shoes and a video of the artist's own feet standing still on a cement floor for three-and-one-half hours. Lum, currently based in Calgary, explores the nature of memory in the context of personal identity by referencing the historical Chinese practice of foot binding.

Senior photography students from the Fine Arts Department of Okanagan University College exhibit traditional photographic prints as well as digitally manipulated work that raises questions about veracity in photographic imagery. This exhibition, a partnership between the Alternator and Okanagan University College, offers students an opportunity to learn about exhibiting in artist-run spaces.