William Bock
William Bock is an Irish born interdisciplinary and socially engaged artist working internationally. His work is fundamentally collaborative and responds to the complex relationships between people and the environments they inhabit. Working over time with individuals in particular places, roots his lens based work, sound, installation and performance work in a delicate interplay of identity, displacement, ecology and belonging.
William was awarded a 2022 Arts Participation Bursary from Arts Council Ireland for his Land Art Meitheal research project. RISING, his recent body of work commissioned by Ormston House Limerick 2022 has been shortlisted for Belfast Photo Festival and William is also winner of the UK Sustainability First Art Prize. William is a member of the Wilderness Art Collective and a founding member of award winning artist group Dig Collective.
Image Credit: William Bock, Rewilder II, Andrew, Traharta, Ireland
Andreas Rutkauskas
Andreas Rutkauskas has made photographs of landscapes for over twenty years, four of which have been dedicated to the aftermath and regeneration following wildfire. His past projects have focused on sites that have undergone change due to a range of technologies, including surveillance along the Canada/U.S. border and cycles of industrialization & deindustrialization in Canada’s oil patch. Andreas was the inaugural artist in residence at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment (2020), a Research Fellow with the Canadian Photography Institute (2018), and currently teaches photography at UBC’s Okanagan campus, on the unceded traditional territory of the Syilx.
Jon Corbett
Jon Corbett is a nehiyaw-Métis computational media artist, professional computer programmer, and assistant professor with Lived Indigenous Experience in the School of Interactive Art & Technology, Simon Fraser University.
He holds a BFA from the University of Alberta in Art and Design, an MFA from the University of British Columbia in Interdisciplinary Studies, and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of British Columbia.
His research focuses on Indigenous forms of expression through “Indigitalization,” which he describes as a computational creative practice that braids together Indigenous and decolonial computing practices facilitated through traditional and computer-based expressive media art forms. He explores and (re)constructs Indigenous digital identity by prototyping computational models of Indigeneity using culture, kinships, histories, and relations with land.
His research products thus far include a nehiyaw-based programming language, physical hardware designs for the nehiyaw syllabic orthography, and software/application solutions that use Indigenous storywork as design tools. In addition to being showcased in several books and articles, his artwork has been featured at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, NY, and the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone / Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) in Montreal, QC.
Image credit; Jon Corbett, Big Brother is Watching You
Patrick Lundeen
Patrick Lundeen is an artist born in Lethbridge, AB (traditional Blackfoot Confederacy territory). He currently lives and works in Kelowna (unceded Okanagan Sylix territory) teaching drawing, painting and sculpture at UBC Okanagan and sits on the board of directors at the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art. His artistic interests span traditional visual art-making mediums and extends to include sound art, music, food, performance and public art. His approach to visual art employs humour, sensory experience and a rough and visceral aesthetic to elicit a complex response from viewers. Recent projects include a solo exhibition of kinetic and sound-making sculptures called “CHEAP!” at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Patrick Lundeen was selected to be the City of Kelowna Artist in Residence for 2022. His socially engaged project HAPPY DAY FREE GIFT TRUCK was parked downtown on Saturdays for six weeks in October and November and gave mysterious gifts to all visitors. In addition to visual art, Patrick is also a dubiously talented recording, and rarely performing, musician his fifth EP – also called “CHEAP!” – was released on vinyl in conjunction with the exhibition at the KAG.
Image credit: Patrick Lundeen, Ketchup Lions, 2022
Rylan Broadbent
Rylan Broadbent is a sculptor, designer, and fabricator, who holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and resides in the North Okanagan. Employing an array of techniques, ranging from traditional to digital, he is primarily interested in examining the interconnected relationships between object, form, material, and meaning.
Graham Gillmore
Through his visual use of language, Graham Gillmore shows us that communication can both connect and distance us at the same time. His text often examines conflicting sources of knowledge as well as personal and universal human experience.
The raw and the refined, the absurd and the profound, acceptance and rejection, risk and restraint; one trusts these paintings because they seem to reflect lived, felt experience.
Gillmore lived in New York for over 25 years and has positioned himself internationally. His reputation extends across Canada, the United States and in Europe with recent exhibitions held in Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, Miami Beach, Madrid and Berlin. Earlier exhibitions include “Learn to Read” at the TATE Modern alongside John Baldessari and Carol Bove. His work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Audain Art Museum, British Columbia; the Ghent Museum, Belgium; Gian Enzo Sperone, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; RCA Records, New York; The Royal Bank of Canada; The Bank of Montreal; The Vancouver Art Gallery; and numerous other institutions and private collections worldwide. He has been featured in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, W Magazine, Art News, ArtForum, L.A. Weekly, C Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
Image: Graham Gilmore Why I Write Such Big Hits, 60×40”, Oil on Panel,2023
Buck Walker
BC artist Buck Walker is living the dream, making art in various mediums over the decades from his studio in Winlaw BC.
Alison Trim
Alison Trim is a visual artist and arts educator/administrator born in the UK, but resident in Ireland for most of her life. As a perennial “blow-in” her art practice explores our relationship with place through a physical engagement with the land in which she finds herself. Her work is an exploration of the complexity of boundaries and richness of surface that inform all our interactions with that which is not us. Her expanded drawing practice often includes collage, photography and installational elements.
Alison now lives in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia where she is involving herself in place and community as Operations Manager of the local community services. She has exhibited across BC and Ireland and was recently featured in Becoming Feral, an international publication with Objet-A Creative Studio, Scotland. She spent 15 years working for Uillinn, a contemporary community arts centre in Co. Cork before relocating to Canada, and has taught drawing as a sessional lecturer for UBC Okanagan. Alison has an MFA from UBC Okanagan, and a BA(Hons) from DIT/Sherkin Island, Ireland.
Image credit; Alison Trim, detail of Tethered at the Alternator Gallery, 2022.
Seamus Gray
I was born 50 years ago, in the small community of Vallican, BC, near the south end of the Valhalla Mountains. Both my parents were creative people and loved nature. My father has done photography since before I was born, and my mother, a talented artist, painted some of the images which he captured. I was encouraged to follow my heart and develop my artistic talents. After learning and practicing in Canada, I met my wife in 2001 and travelled with her to Switzerland the following year to meet her family.
There, I studied for 5 years at a sculpture school, when we returned to Canada (with two new children) in 2008. The time I spent at the Goetheanum, School of Spiritual Science was a huge influence in my life and work. I also trained to become an art therapist, and since 2012 have practiced in the Slocan Valley and continue to work as a sculptor. I am continually inspired by the magic of life and nature, as well as the teachings I received during my training in Europe.
Nelson Miller
Nelson Miller is a poet who has lived right here in Slocan for many years, and still does. His Book of Cool, published in 2015, is a series of epigrammatic statements that approach cool as a philosophy of life and a way of living. Inspired by, and dedicated to the spirit of late jazz saxophonist Lester Young, the man who created the term cool, these brief verbal solos reveal to the attentive reader a groove of certain qualities, that emerge from, and give definition to, the principle of cool.