Art
Campbell River Art Gallery hosts moving exhibit opening – Campbell River Mirror – Campbell River Mirror
A packed house bore witness to a powerful pair of ceremonies at the Campbell River Art Gallery on Saturday, May 7.
Guests squeezed themselves into every available nook and cranny in the gallery’s lobby and awaited the 2 p.m. start.
Reserved murmuring went silent when Shawn Decaire’s booming voice filled the small space.
He joined with Cory Cliffe and Avis O’Brien in a smudging/unveiling ceremony, setting the tone for what would be a moving afternoon for all present.
In the centre of the room was a blanketed artwork, which was revealed to be a small child’s school desk, covered with elaborate cedar weaving.
The installation is part of the Distant Relatives exhibition, which will be running at the gallery until November. It is meant to represent the desks sat in by residential school attendees, and the medicinal cedar covering is an attempt to heal the wounds still held by survivors of the institutions.
It was conceived of by Haida/ Kwakwakw’wakw artist, Avis O’Brien, and brought to fruition with the help of Liǧwiłdax̌w youth and elders from Cape Mudge on Quadra Island.
The art gallery’s executive director, Sara Lopez Assu, said the gallery received funding from the BC Arts Council to run workshops in remote indigenous communities, and this was one example of its success.
“The goal was not for the Campbell River Art Gallery to determine what those workshops were going to be,” she said. “It was really community lead, and community informed.
“Avis was our artist facilitator for Cape Mudge, and she felt in speaking with elders, and youth, and residential school survivors that they needed to process some of the feelings coming out of the discovery of the 215 in Kamloops, and Avis works in cedar ,and she knows the powerful medicine in cedar, so that’s what they decided to do there.”
Following that, the two new murals which grace the front and rear entrances to the gallery were unveiled.
The identical pieces were inspired by a recently deceased lady who was a member of the city’s unhoused population.
Her name is currently being withheld, as she is a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth community, where tradition dictates that the deceased name not be spoken or printed until a year has come and gone since their passing.
“She was well known,’ Assu said. “She would spend most of her nights on our doorsteps, and most of her days were spent at Spirit Square.
“She always had the biggest, brightest smile.”
The idea for the murals came from the mind of her partner, Charles Jules of the Ka:’yu:’k’t’h’/Che:k:tles7et’h’ First Nation. He had some difficulty creating the artwork itself, so recruited his uncle Paul John of the Ehattesaht-Chinehkints First Nation to help with the design.
Once he put those on paper, local Liǧwiłdax̌w Kwakwaka’wakw artist, Sonny Assu, took the drawings and digitized them to come up with the final product.
Assu, John, and Jules embraced, and many tears were shed at the unveiling.
A blanketing ceremony was also performed for Jules, who was joined by his brother visiting from Courtenay, as well as his community’s hereditary chief, and her daughter.
The event was filled with people from all walks of life, which Assu was very pleased by.
“It was amazing to have people here physically,” she said, noting there were politicians sitting next to unhoused people.
“Everyone was welcome, and had a reason to be here and come together.
“It was the beautiful mix of people that I found impactful, more so than the actual number of people who came.
“People were drawn and wanted to witness and raise their hands to these incredible artists and the work that they’re doing within the community.”
ronan.odoherty@campbellrivermirror.com
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Art
Unique art collection on display – CTV News Vancouver
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
Art
Niagara quilt expo to explore history of modern art form – Welland Tribune
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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