Some of the art by the En’owkin Centre’s National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training program student artists is on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Author Catherine Jameson gave a reading and talk about her book Zoe and the Fawn on Jan. 24. The pages and art from the book are on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
The pigments and the sources used by local artist Autumn Kruger to make the paintings displayed at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Autumn Kruger’s paintings, made with traditional paints, at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Some of the art by the En’owkin Centre’s National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training program student artists is on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Art by the En’owkin Centre’s NAPAT teachers is also on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Phyllis Isaac, a student at the En’owkin Centre, made all of the clothes, the moccasins, and the necklace on her piece “The Dancer”, as well as the woven mat it stands upon at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
‘Forgotten Warriors’, by En’owkin student Shianna Allison greets visitors as they enter the exhibit at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Featured artist Scott Price has several sculptures on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
One of feature artist Corinne Theissen’s paintings, currently on display at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
One of Scott Price’s sculptures, with the art of Corinne Theissen in the background at the Penticton Art Gallery. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
Corinne Theissen’s art is currently on display at the Penticton Art Gallery until March 15. (Brennan Phillips – Western News)
The Penticton Art Gallery opened its latest exhibits on Friday, Jan. 24. The three different exhibitions will be open to the public until March 15.
In the main gallery, the artists of the Penticton Indian Band’s En’owkin Centre had the centre stage with their Messages from the tmxʷulaʔxʷ and the sqəlxʷɬcawt Renewed.
The art on display is a mix of students and their teachers from the En’owkin Centre’s National Aboriginal Professional Artist Training program. This year’s exhibition features eight first-year students and nine second-year students, alongside some selected pieces from their teachers, alumni and one invited artist, many of who are having the first public showing of their works.
“For a lot of our students it’s the first time it is the first experience they have in being able to showcase their work in a contemporary art gallery that is a public art gallery with more well-known national shows,” said Michelle Jack, one of the professors at the En’owkin Centre.
“It’s a huge opportunity to them, that opens their eyes to what is available in the greater contemporary art world, and how it works to showcase those things and what goes into the curatorial process.”
The students at the En’owkin Centre come not only from the Penticton Indian Band and the other bands in the Okanagan, but from other bands far and wide.
“We have a lot of people from across Canada who come to the En’owkin Centre to study and do the NAPAT. ” said Jack.
“There used to be a lot more aboriginal centres like ours, but due to funding stipulations and all of that. We’re not federally funded, we have to do grants and all of those things to make our programs run. Because of that a lot of secondary institutions like En’owkin in other parts of the country have had to close their doors.”
The artists at the En’owkin Centre have a wide variety of styles and mediums, from painting using traditional pigments to sculpture and more modern forms of art such as photography.
“Last year we had a piece and everyone was saying, ‘Oh, that’s a really traditional pattern,’ and [Joe Feddersen] was, that’s ‘Parking Lot A,’” said Jack.
“It was the parking lot pattern painting, how they paint the spaces, and he made a pattern of that for his basket. So he’s thinking of modern ways and what we see as would be patterns and petroglyphs, and that’s just one example of the mesh of the traditional and contemporary.”
Walking through the front door of the gallery, the first thing that will first catch your eye will most likely be the small prints lining the main hall. These pieces are the pages from local publish Theytus Books’ printing of Zoe and the Fawn, a children’s book written by local Indigenous author Catherine Jameson, and illustrated by Julie Flett.
Jameson is herself an alum of the En’owkin Centre, with her book being the product of her time there.
“One of our projects was to interview a six-year-old, and my niece at the time, Zoe, was six. This story was the one she told me, with some creative changes,” said Jameson at the talk on Saturday.
The story in Zoe and the Fawn follows young Zoe and her father, as they go outside to take care of a newborn fowl, and see a lonely fawn outside. As they look for the fawn’s mother, they find many other animals along the way.
The words in the Sy’ilx language are emphasized with the colour of Zoe’s boots, along with the English translation to help readers learn as they read along.
Copies of the book are also available at the gallery’s shop.
The third exhibition currently on display in the Project Room gallery features the works of two very different artists, with Scott Price’s found material sculptures of rusted metal, stone and wood a sharp contrast to Corrinne Thiessen’s at-times grotesque paintings of once-human figures.
Price does not approach his work with an eye for a single meaning, but rather lets the pieces speak for themselves.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” said Price during the artists’ talks on Jan. 25. “If the ball in [the Project Room] talks to you of big or small, of the microscopic or the cosmic. If by having the void in it, that talks to you of breaking down or building him. All those things speak to me. Whether I’m looking for those fascinating things in nature and including them in my art, I can’t answer that question.”
Thiessen and Price were selected as part of the Penticton Art Gallery’s 13th year of collaboration with Island Mountain Arts and the Toni Onley Artist Project to highlight a Canadian artist. This year, the decision was so close between the two, that they were both selected to showcase their works.
The three exhibits at the Penticton Art Gallery are on display until March 15. The Gallery will also be hosting the third annual Loving Mugs chili-cook off fundraiser on Feb. 20.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
