Members of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council this month responded to a call for submissions in record-breaking numbers. The council’s Friends of the Gallery exhibition opened on Jan. 5 at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre with an exuberant reception that highlighted a 30 per cent surge in images, sculptures, textiles and multimedia works prepared for the annual show.
“I feel like there’s a lot more experimentation this time,” said Sadira Rodrigues, the gallery’s curator and director. One hundred and three artists each contributed a piece created during the past year.
“A theme that did occur to me is reusing,” added Rodrigues. “People are returning to old work and repurposing it or finding materials already in their studio and rethinking it. To me, those are pushing out of their comfort zone.”
Some of the exhibits, like Courtney Galloway’s miniature sculpture Mary’s Space and Derek von Essen’s Excavation and Deliberation, gather everyday materials and tools into evocative patterns. Others transform them entirely, as with Marianne Hansen’s Red Tail Hawk, in which felted fibres form a brown-winged raptor.
The exhibition was coordinated by the arts council’s new assistant curator, Keely Halward. Halward herself is a painter who in December displayed works during a solo show at The Kube in Gibsons. Her tenure at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre began officially only three days before the Friends of the Gallery exhibition opened. Both Halward and Rodrigues described the compressed setup timeline as a “baptism by fire.”
“It was a dance between looking for themes in subjects but also wanting to stimulate the senses through different media by pairing paintings with something sculptural or digital,” Halward said. “It also means looking at the palette — wanting things to be cohesive and harmonious — and contrast.”
Interpretations of forest and seashore landscapes are prevalent in the exhibition. Whether in delicate-hued watercolours like Bruce Edwards’s fern-draped Singing Stream or the austere potency of Samantha Willes’s digital print Tulip, nature takes centre stage.
Halward’s sensitivity to colour and composition is evident in her groupings of works like Lori Pickering’s acrylic Millennium (many-fronded greenery exulting in an umber dawn) with David Kilpatrick’s 21st Century Amazon (an unflinching portrait of a jacket-clad woman gripping a cell phone in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, set against an urban cacophony of russet and turquoise).
Complementing three-dimensional sculptures (like Gisele Perrault’s seductively brooding Dark Mermaid), many instances of wall-hung art extend beyond its traditional two dimensions. In a collage by Janice Williams (Return Flight to Earliest Garden of Soul: A Spiritual Rewilding Trip...), feathers punctuate a gilt frame overflowing with foliage. Cindy Buis’s Seashore Treasures - Davis Bay Beach contains a new angle on trompe-l’oeil: the pier itself is airbrushed into a recessed portion of the canvas. A portrait by Emily Picard (Perspective) has ruby-like protuberances that splay from its subject toward the viewer.
One day after the exhibition opened, a water main breakage in the rear of the gallery complex forced a week-long closure for utility repairs. A few dozen steps from the excavation, an artwork contributed by M. Simon Levin (Water Ways) features an antique tap that juts portentously from its canvas.
Friends of the Gallery remains on display until Feb. 3. Gallery hours and details are available online at sunshinecoastartscouncil.com.
