The Kelowna Art Gallery presents Quick Talks on Thursday, Sept. 18, from 7 to 9 pm, in conjunction with our current exhibition, Christos Dikeakos: Nature Morte.
Vancouver-based artist Christos Dikeakos and three other speakers will present a series of 10-minute-long talks, followed by a panel discussion on the theme Artists Speak to Topographical, Historical, and Environmental Issues in the Okanagan. Joining Dikeakos will be Kelowna-based filmmaker and multi-media artist Denise Kenney, Kelowna-based artist Lori Mairs, and Vernon-based poet Harold Rhenisch.
Talks will be back-to-back, after which a moderator will encourage discussion from the panel and audience.Quick Talks are free and open to the public.
Christos Dikeakos: Nature Morte is on view at the Gallery until October 5, 2014.
The Kelowna Art Gallery is located at 1315 Water Street in downtown Kelowna. For more information about current exhibitions, public programming, or special events, visit the Kelowna Art Gallery online atwww.kelownaartgallery.com or call 250-762-2226.
Speakers’ Biographies
Christos Dikeakos received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia in 1970. He was among the first group of young artists and art students to get involved with the experimentation in and around photography in the later 1960s. He organized the first exhibition of this sort of work while still a student at UBC. Over the past six or seven years he has concentrated on the conflict between run-away real estate over-development and the increasingly isolated and weakened traces of the earth it all sits upon. His current work explores vanishing rural farming and orchard landscapes and the shifting economic terrain of the southern Okanagan.
Denise Kenney is an associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Performance in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan. She works in live performance (applied, interventionist, devised) and digital media. In addition to her BA in Drama, B.Ed in Drama, and her MFA in Film Directing, she studied at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and has done workshops with artists all over the world. More recently she has directed her interest in translations and non-commodified live art practice toward environmental issues. She is also one of the principal investigators of the Eco-Art Incubator, a SSHRC-funded research initiative at UBC Okanagan.
Lori Mairs is an ecological artist-researcher who lives in a companion-species relationship with the twenty-two acres that is the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna. Her walking practice has taken her through the life of this particular forest nearly five thousand times over the past twelve years. As the human resident in Woodhaven, her exchange is centred in rich and deep ways of knowing and being that include animistic perceptions, intuition, dreams, moments of serendipity, and sentient awareness. Mairs disseminates the intimacy of this relationship through her work as a sculptor, filmmaker and writer. She is currently writing a memoir of place titled “In the Land of Seven-Thirty.” Mairs is an accomplished workshop facilitator and speaker. She is represented by the Ashpa Naira Gallery in Vernon, BC, and is a consultant to emerging artists. In 2013 Mairs received a SSHRC grant to support her research. She holds a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from UBC Okanagan.
Harold Rhenisch is a graduate of the Creative Writing Departments of the University of Victoria (1980) and the University of British Columbia (2007). He is a prolific author, accomplished editor, and the recipient of awards and prizes for poetry, memoir, drama and journalism. He has taught poetry and short fiction writing at Vancouver Island University and non-fiction writing at North Island College. He has conducted workshops for teachers, college professors, writers, and elementary and secondary school students throughout British Columbia. His writing places include the Interior grasslands, in which he lives, and the immigrant culture of its twentieth-century fruit industry, within provincial, national and international social, environmental and political contexts. He was the 2013 Roderick Haig-Brown Lecturer in Environmental Writing in Campbell River, BC. He writes daily on the blog Okanaganokanogan.com, to explore the landscapes and environmental challenges and opportunities of his country, on both sides of the US-Canada border. To this work he brings his experiences as writer-in-residence at Skriduklaustur, in East Iceland, in early 2013.
