Mail Art Show in the Community Window. Mail art uses the postal system as a critical part of its process. Mail artists typically exchange illustrated postcards, letters, zines, decorated envelopes or even 3-D objects, often through international networks that involve thousands of participants. One common theme in the many types of mail art is that of commerce-free exchange prompted partly in response to the exclusivity of galleries, juried shows and the like. Mail art networks are a form of conceptual art, a movement with no membership and no leaders. Mail artists, like graffiti and poster artists, often work anonymously or collectively under aliases.
 
Participants included:
Gerry Garrett – Westbank, BC
Minart Pascal – Ouistreham, France
Bill Thomson – Burnaby
E.F. Higgins III – New York
Charles Gustina – Richmond, Virginia
Arno Arts – Arnhem, The Netherlands
Kris Boggild – Vancouver
Aidan Urquhart – London, Ont.
Alanna Wood – Sechelt, BC
Chevalier Daniel C. Boyer – Houghton, Michigan
Bill Friesen—Bowser, BC
Marci Katz – Bowser, BC
Lou Pocklington – Kamloops, BC
Angel Bortot – Venezuela
Shauna Haider – Portland, Oregon
Maurizio Follin – Venice, Italy
Clemente Padin – Montevido, Uruguay
Gail Whitter – Trail, BC
Michel Della Vedova – Limoges, France
Bill Wilson – New York
H. Hurard – Verviers, Belgium
Demos Charmot – Marnaz, France
D.D. Manewaarde – Aalter, Belgium
R.F. Cote – Quebec, QC
Rene Alavie – Lille, France
Pati Bristow – Los Altos, California
Anne Braunschweig – Vancouver
Eddie Willson – London, England
Carmen Salgado – Campinas, Spain
Jaromir Svozilik – Oslo, Norway
John Bennett – Columbus, Ohio
Gail Anderson – Lubbock, Texas
Iara Simonetti – Munich, Germany
Schoko Casana Rosso – Berlin, Germany
Anne Braunschweig – Corrales, New Mexico
Vittore Baroni – Viareggio, Italy
Danel de Bulla – Burgos, Spain
Dan – Portland, Oregon
Caleb Lorsen – Seattle, Washington
Bernhard Zilling – Berlin, Germany
Chuck Stake / Don Mabie – Nakusp, BC
Jenn Hamm – Salmo, BC
State of Being – Oberlin, Ohio
Don McNulty – Coquitlam, BC
Gruppo Sinestetico – Italy
Giovanni Strada – Ravenna, Italy
Lorraine Kwan – Vancouver
Sheila Murphy – Phoenix, Arizona
Schmuel the Phuel – BatTleboro, Vermont
Joey Know – Oakland, California
Ryosuke Cohen – Osaka, Japan
Guido Capuano – Ragusa, Italy

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.

Gu Xiong, Barrie Jones, Phillip McCrum, Manuel Piρa, Richard Prince, Nancy Nisbet, Marina Roy, Barbara Zeigler

This exhibition seeks to promote a community dialogue in response to the evolution of the Fine Arts Department of Okanagan University College into the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies of UBC Okanagan. The artists collectively address concerns of relevance to today's society and further contemporary artistic discourse.

They explore social, cultural and political issues impacting their lives and the lives of others through engagement in the dialogue of visual culture and politics, through an examination of intangible systems and ephemeral phenomena, and through consideration of individual and cultural identity within urban and ecological contexts in the age of globalization. Cognizant of the social history of the media in which they work, these artists attempt to push boundaries to develop new forms of visual expression particular to this time.

Diyan Achjadi's See Girl is an ongoing series of digitally generated drawings and prints. Achjadi's imagery of landscapes fraught with peril are inspired by the graphic, seemingly benign style of representations in survival guides, airplane precautionary pamphlets and warning labels. These backdrops are inhabited by the recurring image of a single protagonist: a young girl in a pink dress. Far from innocent, the girl is equipped with military hardware and looks poised and resourceful. Achjadi's juxtapositions create an ambiguous narrative that addresses present day alarmist politics and envisions a female post-apocalyptic proto-pop culture.

Diyan Achjadi (Vancouver) was born in Indonesia and has an MFA from Concordia University in Montréal. Her work has been shown at Open Studio in Toronto, Articule in Montréal, the Forest City Gallery in London, Ont., Gallery 101 in Ottawa, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art. Her website is www.achdiyan.com.

Jennifer Linton presents drawings and etchings that fuse emotion with religious iconography to explore themes of female sexuality, the concept of virginity and the difficult territory of child abuse. St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins features images of Linton masquerading as St. Ursula, the patron saint of schoolgirls. Blood transforms into flowers and kilt-clad schoolgirls behead monsters in fantastical works that combine camp and catharsis.

Jennifer Linton (Toronto) holds a BA from the University of Toronto. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions at the Red Head Gallery and the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts in Toronto. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Lindsey Moore uses images from 1950's portrayals of idealized femininity as a way to deconstruct and explore gender-based stereotypes and to confront identity- forming conventions as well as notions of femininity, sexuality, innocence and romance. Pin Me Up, Pin Me Down features large vibrantly colored paintings that incorporate fabric, sewing patterns and found text.

Lindsey Moore (Kelowna) holds a BFA from Okanagan University College and has exhibited her paintings in the BC Interior.

Teresa Ascençao is a video, film and photo artist based in Toronto. With works such as Portrait of a Young Bullfighter, Maria and Glowing Madonna, Ascencao explores questions relating to the conflicting gender values that face contemporary women, especially through the lens of gender constructs from the cultural perspective of her Portuguese Azorean family. She combines poetic realms with kitsch elements, often in innovative new-media interactive formats.

Teresa Ascençao (Toronto) was born in Brazil and has a BFA from the University of Toronto. In 2004, she had solo exhibitions of her work at Videographe and Articule in Montréal as well as at A Space in Toronto and SAW Gallery in Ottawa. She has participated in group shows at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ont., and Gallery 1313 in Toronto. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

When entering the gallery, visitors are greeted by a wall of laser light. These are the strings of the Harp; phase 2. Audio comes from speakers attached to the wall. The beams or "strings" can be played as a harp by breaking the beams to activate corresponding audio. In this case, the tones produced are phonemes – the building blocks of language, enough to account for the identified sounds of English, French, German and Dutch.

The viewer, through the use of this technology, can access and compose with these human utterances. At first glance, such a technology lightheartedly foresees a universal language, but the babble produced undercuts this vision, suggesting the romantic and synchronic nature of such a proposal.

Robyn Moody (Halifax), an installation artist with an MFA from NSCAD University, has shown his work at AKA in Saskatoon, DARE DARE and Articule in Montréal, Access Gallery in Vancouver, the Forest City Gallery in London, Ont., the Eastern Edge Gallery in Saint John's, Nfld., and the New Gallery in Calgary.

Kristi Malakoff situates her work at the intersection of 2D and 3D space by inflating imagery from two-dimensional objects back into three-dimensional format. Malakoff is inspired by the iconography of the Victorian fairy tale, Tinykin's Transformations, a book by Mark Lemon. The story is about a boy with whom Titania, Queen of the Fairies, falls in love. Because she is so besotted, she grants him any wish he desires. And so, he wishes to be, in turn, a buck, a fish, a raven, a horse, a mole etc. The story follows his transformations and the ensuing adventures they cause.

All the transformations and periods of enchantment happen in a mysterious glade filled with flowers in the middle of a dark forest. For her installation at the Alternator, Malakoff creates a set comprised of some 20 different, free-standing elements covered with more than 400 varieties of cut-out paper flower that give physical form to various manifestations of Tinykin's transformations.

Kristi Malakoff (Vancouver) grew up in the Okanagan Valley and graduated from the Emily Carr Institute with a BFA in 2005. She has exhibited her work in Vancouver, Kamloops and Penticton.

In a variety of forms and mediums such as fabric, wax, installation and wall pieces, four local emerging artists represent a facet of the regional art scene. The thread binding these works is one of deformity.

Through their work, Shauna Oddleifson, Margo Yacheshyn and Kyle Zsombor illustrate the damaging effects of societal stereotypes and actions while Angie Marchinkow de-forms the conventional framing structure in which we think about and view art.

Socio-economic issues faced by North America's consumer culture inspire the content of KC Adams' work. Her main focus has been investigating the dynamic relationship between nature and technology. Adams draws her inspiration from popular culture, the Internet, television, sci-fi and biology to create work that blurs the line between fact and fiction.

Some of her sources are the movie The Matrix, Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, nano-technology and genetic research. The exhibition includes two bodies of work called Cyborg Eggs, a multi-media installation based on genetically modified foods, and Cyborg Hybrids, a series of digital photographic prints.

KC Adams (Winnipeg) has a BFA from Concordia University and has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, The Annex in Winnipeg, The Other Gallery at the Banff Centre and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg. She received an Aboriginal Creative Development Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council in 2005. Her website is www.kcadams.net.

David Khang and Carrie Paterson use projection, sculpture and text to create consonant and dissonant pairings of overlapping ideas in disparate mediums. Common to the works are themes of violence related to language and the performative nature of racialized and gendered identities. Both artists investigate the destabilization of fixity within the fugitive and in-between spaces of identity.

Khang's Bleeding Book / Linea Lingua is a multi-channel video installation showing a book's blank pages ruptured and polluted with sudden swirls of ink as well as a performance by Khang, who holds a raw cow tongue in his mouth as a calligraphic brush, drawing simple lines and circles with used motor oil. Paterson's blog <seepy1> weaves found and fictional accounts into a narrative that confronts the abusive practices and right-wing agenda of her boarding school. Her process enunciates a female "self" through a phallic language that taps into Freud and systems of magic, delusion and insanity.

David Dahl Khang (Vancouver) is a performance and video artist based with a MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He had a recent solo show at the Grunt Gallery in Vancouver and has participated in group exhibitions at the Richmond Gallery, Tokyo Keizai University and the Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles.

Carrie Paterson (Los Angeles) is a visual artist and writer who holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. Recent installations and performances have been held at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna, Calif., The Office - An Art Space in Huntington Beach, Calif., and the Paxico Gallery in Los Angeles.

Liza Nguyen explores the tragic long-term trajectories of war in Vietnam at the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Nguyen presents two bodies of related work. Surface includes photographs of dirt samples taken at historically significant locations such as My Lai, Khe Sanh, Hué and Dien Bien Phu, all sites of battles with either American or French forces.

Referencing the notion of soil as a symbol of home, the samples become a visual index of social, political and historical events. A second body of work, Postcards, presents vestiges of wartime experiences as tourist souvenirs – photographic evidence of war museums, cemeteries and spent weapons disrupt the conventions of contemporary notions of the sanitized histories presented to foreign visitors.

Liza Nguyen (Paris) is a French artist of Vietnamese descent whose work explores representation, memory and aesthethics. She holds a Masters degree from the Sorbonne and has exhibited her work in Europe, including the Cultural Centre Auguste-Dobel and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the International Biennial of Art in Sweden and Salon Carlson in Wismar, Germany.

Kyle Zsombor, Cindy Desnoyer, Katherine Pickering, Jordan Doody, Mical Garner, Mikela Etter

One of the most significant developments in the Okanagan visual arts community in recent years is the evolution of the Fine Arts Department at Okanagan University College into the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies of UBC Okanagan.

Exhibition coordinator David Ross started a pilot project – casual critique night – that successfully engaged students in a dialogue with the gallery and culminated in this exhibition, which offers deserving candidates a professional arts experience. This exhibition is the first of a two-part series this year to consider the future of arts education in the Okanagan at this critical juncture. The second part, in the fall of 2006, features work by faculty members from UBC Vancouver.