A new exhibition at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre is calculated to provoke double-takes, with commonplace and castoff items transfigured to achieve startling relevance.
“Rise. Recover. Repeat.” features the work of Vancouver-area artists Rosemary Burden, Connie Sabo, and Debbie Westergaard Tuepah. The month-long show opens on Feb. 11 at the Arts Centre in downtown Sechelt.
Individually, each artist has created mixed-media artworks for dozens of galleries. Collectively, the trio—all graduates of Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design—discovered a shared enthusiasm for recycled materials during a joint residency at the Coppermoss retreat centre in téwánkw (Tuwanek) in March 2018.
“It’s absolutely gorgeous up there [in the Sechelt area],” said Rosemary Burden, whose drawings explore the precarious beauty of short-lived objects like cardboard boxes, spools and snakeskins. Between treks to the Sunshine Coast’s ecological highlights, the residency included a trip to the landfill.
“I was completely blown away by the garbage dump,” said Burden. “I would rather work with found objects than with new things, and something that can actually be recycled. The work I’m doing for this show is all based on weird stuff I’ve collected and been given.”
Debbie Tuepah, whose assemblages of wood, yarn and found objects suggest the disintegration of identity, also finds inspiration in the landscape—particularly the Fraser River estuary of her Richmond childhood. “I’ve always always been compelled by the transformative effect of physical objects in the environment,” she said.
She collaborated with artist Roxanne Charles of the Semiahmoo Nation on a previous work, Unwhitewashed, that considered cultural fissures in the history of White Rock’s iconic beach boulder. During preparation for the Sechelt installation, she discovered similar ruptures while stripping bark from sections of cut timber.
“Where the branch meets the actual trunk, it looks like human wrinkles,” Tuepah said. “When I was working on this piece, I thought: oh my God, this is like a human body. It was like honouring the tree’s life: a cleansing ritual, a death ritual.”
Trees are an indispensable ingredient of Connie Sabo’s artworks as well: she bisects tightly-spooled sheets of old newsprint, exposing arresting colours and textual juxtapositions like geological strata from a bygone age.
“I always find it fascinating, as I cut through, what comes out,” said Sabo. “So it’s really very serendipitous when things sort of appear—like words or images—in the thin slices of the newspapers.”
Apart from her mixed-media sculptures, Sabo’s expansive field of work includes drawing, photography, and ephemeral landscape installations. The common thread—linking her own works and the co-exhibitors of “Rise. Recover. Repeat.”—is the fact that appearances can be deceiving.
“[Visitors] will have to get up close to see what the work is about,” she said. “For all three of us, it won’t be until you get intimate that you will see that we’re all using materials that have had a life before now.”
Burden believes that the need for proximity is connected to pressing environmental and COVID constraints. “I think the two years have affected people a lot,” she said. “Now, a lot of people are looking at their immediate surroundings as opposed to the bigger surroundings that we’ve all been used to accessing. As artists, we’re staring at these things in our vicinity and thinking, ‘What can I do with that?’”
Burden, Sabo and Tuepah will appear at a public reception on February 12 at 2 p.m. at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre. Attendance is limited and reservations are required. Visit sunshinecoastartscouncil.com to register.
