The Comox Valley Art Gallery launches their fall exhibition season with three new shows running from Sept. 19 to Nov. 6 along with two Make Art community workshops on Oct. 3. The three concurrent shows feature contemporary artists Farheen HaQ, Amelia Epp and Bronwen Payerle, along with Fine Arts sculpture students from North Island College.
The opening reception for the exhibitions will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 18 at the gallery. The evening will begin with an artist talk at 6 p.m., offering the public an opportunity to learn more about the individual projects and the workshops that will be offered by the exhibiting artists.
The opening events are family friendly, free and open to the public. Everyone is welcome.
In the Window and South Contemporary Gallery, CVAG is presenting Farheen HaQ’s installation “Being Home.” In this new work the artist combines sculpture, photography and video to explore the psychic, spiritual and emotional territories within domestic spaces. Drawing on a history of feminist art practice that claims and makes space, HaQ uses household objects, images, actions and rituals to express the overlapping identities of motherhood, feminism, gender and ethnicity.
HaQ also works as an art educator delivering professional development workshops. On Oct. 3 from 2-5 p.m., the artist will be co-facilitating “Making Motherhood,” an art-making workshop for mothers of all ages at the Comox Valley Art Gallery. Psychotherapist Rachel Maclaren will join HaQ as a co-facilitator to present the workshop, which invites participants to uncover the many faces of motherhood.
In CVAG’s George Sawchuk Room, collaborative team Bronwen Payerle and Amelia Epp are showing their site responsive work “Shelter, Cover, Claim.” In this new body of work the artists use processes drawn from printmaking, bricolage, painting and sculpture to explore the widespread human impulse to create shelter.
Payerle and Epp have been making art together over the past two years, sharing a curiosity and interest in natural and built environments. They describe their collaborative project as being focused on the “physical, emotional and aesthetic materiality of enclosures, the perceived protective quality of fabrics and environment-specific textures found within both built and natural spaces.”
“Being Home” and “Shelter, Cover, Claim” are both part of CVAG’s exhibition series “In This Body: Journeys in Places of Meeting.” CVAG Curator Angela Somerset describes the projects as sharing an interest in “artistic research residing at the intersection of art and everyday life.
On Oct. 3 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., the artist will be co-facilitating a shelter, cover, claim community art-making workshop. Epp and Payerle invite participants to “play with elements of domesticity and construction to create a ‘purpose –built house, fashioned with pieces of the unexpected.”
North Island College Fine Art students will be showing a collection of sculptural objects in CVAG’s Community Space. Inspired by everyday objects that have been interpreted through traditional and alternative materials, the exhibition “Translation” proposes new ways of understanding our relationship with the things we create and encounter.
Featured students include: Lisa Petrunia, Sarcy Geddes, Sarah Bergeron, Maddy Cornish, Chueh-Yu Chen, and Kiani Evans.
All three shows open to the public on Sept. 18. The gallery will be open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for statutory holidays. Admission to the gallery is by donation.
The CVAG gift shop is open Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more details about events at the gallery, or to register for workshops, visit comoxvalleyartgallery.com