For the first of its dozen scheduled exhibitions in 2025, The Kube gallery in Gibsons turned its attention to an artistic hotbed directly across the street: Elphinstone Secondary School. More than 20 new works were contributed by senior students under the tutelage of art instructor MJ Hunt for a lineup titled Elphinstone Emerging Artists: The Next Generation.
“I always wanted to do a show with Elphinstone,” said gallery co-owner Jill Pilon. “Stoking the fire of anybody that is interested in art, knowing that you can make a living and that you can continue on with that, is super important.” Pilon and Kube co-owner Jody Youngren visited Hunt’s classroom to explain the process of presenting and marketing creativity in a commercial setting.
The month-long art show opened on Jan. 10 with a high-energy opening party that packed artists and admirers into the uptown Gibsons storefront.
Hunt is in her first year at the local high school after teaching art and English in New Westminster for over two decades. “I put on my old sweater and started teaching art again,” she said. “Jodi and Jill approached the school and this exhibition is the first of its kind for Elphinstone. Emerging artists is a great title — [Pilon and Youngren] are helping to feed the garden.”
In making selections for the showcase, students plucked selections from their portfolios of previous works. “The students here [on the Sunshine Coast] have a freedom,” added Hunt. “Even though they all rely on trends and what’s popular on social media, they’re not encumbered. There’s a freedom here for kids to play a little bit more. Rather than looking for instruction, they really ask me to take those chains off, and let them do what they want.”
Contributing artists Hunter Lewis-Perau and Emily Webster attended the opening wearing garments hand-painted by each other. Lewis-Perau’s large canvas Untitled channels the tormented rabble of Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement into a feathered flock of brightly coloured, comically befuddled birds. Nearby, his four untitled skateboard decks depict inverted salmon (one bloodily decapitated) set against urban backgrounds.
“My fish were a lot more fun,” said Hunter Lewis-Perau, “because I got to be involved with my environment while doing it, learning things about the fish and such.” He plans a future performance piece where he photographs the decks alongside spawning salmon in Roberts Creek. “My mediums switch a lot,” he explained. “It’s an ever-growing process of learning.”
Emily Webster’s works (like Sunlit Serenade and Moonlit Rhythm of her Galactic Band series) portray exultant women playing musical instruments, their nude forms adorned with celestial bodies. “I worked on perspective a lot,” Webster said, “different angles and features like hands and faces. The sun painting was me trying to push myself to paint instead of sketching and using markers. This series is what got me into painting and now [acrylics] are one of my favourite mediums.”
Painters Ashley White and Ashley Bruce (herself also an enthusiastic felting practitioner) decided to render one of the other’s eyes using acrylic paints. White’s version (Ashley’s Eye) is a close-up portrait that verges on landscape: the brooding brow hovers like a cloud bank over the glistening green starburst of her friend’s pupil. “I love the eye so I draw it a lot,” said White, who has previously contributed to the Gibsons Public Art Gallery’s annual youth exhibitions. “Every single time it’s just so different. It’s like snowflakes: everybody’s got a different eye.”
For his image of a mythological humanoid known as a Ningen, painter D’Arcy Donovan applied multiple layers of paint in icy-blue tones. “I painted a series before, but I’m still emerging,” admitted Donovan. “In Ningen, I wanted to raise questions about consciousness: how can I present thinking itself? It’s fluid, like water. And the Ningen creature comes directly from thinking, so it evolved from there.”
Many of the Elphinstone artworks are for sale; Atala Herrera’s mixed-media Heart (in which the organ pulses with radiant colour and an anfractuous jumble of arteries) had been purchased before the opening reception came to an end.
Elphinstone Emerging Artists: The Next Generation remains featured at The Kube until the end of January.
