Fernandes deconstructs popular representations of African culture, transforming objects and images, both found and created, in ways that question the ideological construct of Africa as primitive and exotic. His work encourages the viewer to question what is real and how cultural experience and identity are formed through the media and within systems of commercial exchange.

Fernandes' installation includes a kiosk with a helium tank and balloons printed with images of African masks. These masks distort as the balloons are filled with air, a reflection on the ways culture is affected when it is marketed for tourism. By offering the balloons to gallery visitors, Fernandes draws attention to the practice of gift giving versus the sale of cultural artifacts.

Fernandes will also present two other works including Slow Kill, a video installation of appropriated imagery from National Geographic, and Neo Primitivism 2, which features a herd of decoy deer.

Fernandes was born in Kenya and raised in Canada. He holds a Master's degree in Visual Arts from the University of Western Ontario and has exhibited at Artspace (Peterborough, ON), the Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax) and the Barnsdall Art Gallery (Los Angeles). He recently took part in Project Row Houses, a site-specific venue in Houston, and is participating in a residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Sumell's five-year collaboration and correspondence with Herman Wallace, a Louisiana State Penitentiary inmate, tried to answer the question: What kind of house does a man who has lived in a six-by-nine-foot cell dream of after 30 years of solitary confinement? Sumell's installation includes a wooden scale-model of Wallace's dream house, a Computer Aided Design video, as well as dozens of letters, drawings and diagrams.

Sumell was born in Brooklyn, NY, and currently lives in Dublin. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University. Her interdisciplinary work transcends the boundaries of art and activism in its attempt to connect people in provocative and meaningful ways. Sumell has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Cuba, Ireland and Germany.

Dana Claxton, one of Canada's most influential aboriginal media artists, investigates the impact of colonialism and imperialism on indigenous cultures past and present as well as the commodification and appropriation of aboriginal culture.

Drawing upon notions of spirituality, mobility, history and power, this new photo based and video installation mixes the traditional with the contemporary, suggesting that tradition is contemporary and that the contemporary is traditional. Through the blurring of definitions, ancient philosophies and cutting edge representations of the aboriginal body and image, Claxton attempts to pay homage to Black Elk and the Horse Dance. "They are dancing. They are coming to behold you. The horse nation of the west is dancing. They are coming to behold."

Claxton's work is held in numerous public collections, including the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Art Bank of Canada. Her work has been screened and exhibited at international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis), the Sundance Festival (Utah), Microwave (Hong Kong), Rencontres Internationale (Paris/Berlin), Caixiforum Fundacio la Caixa (Barcelona), Biennale d'Art Contemporain du Havre (France), WRO 03 Media Arts Biennale (Poland) and the Guangdong Museum of Art (China).

This project was commissioned by the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation.

Vancouver-based artist Jayce Salloum collaborates with South Asian artist Khadim Ali on an installation of video, text and objects collected during travels in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The project focuses on Afghanistan's Bamiyan valley, where the Taliban destroyed two ancient statues of the Buddha in 2001, as well as geo-political issues related to migration, culture and imperialism. Bamiyan, 230 kilometers northwest of Kabul, has a history of occupation yet remains a destination for creative and spiritual pilgrimage.

Salloum, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, grew up in Kelowna, BC. He has a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of California and has lectured and exhibited worldwide in venues ranging from small storefronts and community centres to major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Khadim Ali is based in Pakistan.

This project was commissioned by the Alternator Gallery for Contemporary Art in partnership with the South Asian Visual Arts Collective with assistance from Arts Partners in Creative Development and the Audain Foundation.

This representation of war concentrates on the motivations that fuel ongoing military and economic conflicts within the ever-changing alliances of international politics. Hand-processed, speed-manipulated 16 mm film loops of a guard dog lapping water, a nuclear blast and an oil-filled nodding donkey blended with appropriated imagery from the movies Wall Street and MacArthur are projected on to a rotating screen. Audio of motors blends with the noise of the projectors to create a feeling of confusion and chaos.

Faith Moosang and Christoph Runne are based in Vancouver. Moosang holds a Master's degree in Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University. Runne is a video and installation artist and a graduate of Simon Fraser University. They have exhibited locally and internationally at venues including the InterUrban Gallery in Vancouver and the Prague Contemporary Art Festival in Czechoslovakia.

A bellwether is a herald or a harbinger. ThreeWalls brings a group of artists, all based in or formerly based in Chicago, whose work imparts a kind of warning or predication. Riding the line of disaster prophesy, the work suggests both cultural and environmental decline, as well as simultaneously deconstructing the meaning of art or the avant-garde as a pilaster of faith in the abstract. Positioning a group of artists whose work creates disruption within the accepted narrative of modern art alongside work that proposes a menacing or hesitant narrative, Bellwether is both a document of current doubt and anxiety in the face of cultural disrepair, as well as a provocation from a group of artists working outside the traditional poles of the avant-garde.

ThreeWalls is a nonprofit organization dedicated to contemporary art practice and discourse. Through the residency program, SOLO project and quarterly publication, Paper and Carriage, ThreeWalls aims to provide opportunities for experimentation, chance, and critical dialogue as well as context for artists, curators and writers at pivotal points in their careers.

Exhibition at the ThreeWalls Gallery, Chicago

"every human has the ability to dream" --Sarah Fuller
"let animals party and exist in awkward situations with man" --Scott August
"this piece started first with the story: 'The Boy Who Turned into a Salmon,' an oral story from home. In this story I found similarities to my own story" --Bracken H'anuse Corlett

The Alternator will be sending in November three dynamic, emerging artists to Chicago's Three Walls Gallery: Scott August, Bracken H'anuse Corlett, and Sarah Fuller.

August, a Kelowna-based artist, will be exhibiting "Wildness"--a series of prints that further the artist's fascination with animals and, more generally, with popular conceptions of 'nature.' August's work is playful but also highly disconcerting as it tends to reshape binary divisions between human and animal, interior and exterior, cute and sinister.

H'anuse Corlett is also an Okanagan-based multimedia artist and a member of the Wuikinuxv, Heiltsuk, and Klahoose peoples. He will be exhibiting his new work "Quqva" in Chicago. This meditative and urgent piece includes painting, video, and performance elements. "Quqva" was born out of H'anuse Corlett's documentary video work in his Wuikinuxv home territory. Interwoven with images of the landscape is a captivating soundscape and a carved mask (also by the artist) that tells a version of the traditional story about "The Boy Who Turned into a Salmon."

Fuller is a Winnipeg-born artist whose work is primarily photography-based. At Three Walls she will be exhibiting, "Dream Log"--this is the artist's utterly intriguing investigation into the mystery of dreams. In "Dream Log," Fuller creates her own sleep lab, of sorts, in which she invites people to take a pin-hole camera and a journal home with them in order to record their dreams.

Whether interested in the reshapings that the night-mind works on the day's events, or the reinvention of a boy as a fish, or even the changes to our conventional ways of seeing animal-human relations, each of the Chicago Exchange artists is also preoccupied with questions of transformation.

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.

This year we're doing something a little different with our members show. We've asked local artists to take the gallery to the streets! Members were encouraged to create/perform/distribute/install artistic interventions within the public spaces throughout the interior. Visit the Alternator to see documentation of their unexpected disruptions from Dec. 12 - 20, 2008.