Join Deer Lake Gallery in a dialogue about community, art, and artist with their first exhibition of 2022 at the Deer Lake Art Gallery: Art Talks I. The artists featured in this exhibition include Emily Carr University alumni Olga Campbell (BFA 1992), Dorothy Doherty (BFA 1971), Sande Waters (BFA 2006), Faye Gordon-Lewis (BFA 2002), and Julie Pappajohn (CS) alongside artists Ellen Pelto, Carolyn Sullivan, Terry Rammell, and Vicki Scudamore.
Whenever people are engaged in conversations about art, interesting things happen. Regardless of age or ethnicity, talking about art and viewing art energizes people. We perceive the world in new and exciting ways.
Art Talks intends to show there are many ways to engage us in conversation. There is a dialogue between artist and artwork — a continual visual exchange develops until the artist feels the work is complete. Then there is a discourse between artist, artwork, art curator and viewing space. Lastly, the viewer joins the conversation by responding to the artwork.
The artists in this exhibition met online during the pandemic through a chat group designed for artists, funded by a Responsive Neighbourhood Small Grant. The group evolved out of a desire to stay connected with other artists, the art world, and the world in general during the pandemic.
Each artist offers a unique perspective and creative focus. Some are community minded. Others are motivated by the exploration of memory, self-discovery and healing. Some explore process and materials. The group represents all skill levels and works in a variety of media — photography, 3D, fibre/textiles, painting, drawing, collage and mixed media. The isolation caused by Covid reveals there is a powerful desire for artists to communicate; to engage in discussion, to share art, knowledge, skills and to help each other navigate areas that are unfamiliar. These artists wish to convey that art can be an extraordinary unifying force and bring inspiration and meaning to people’s lives.
Dates: February 19 – March 27, 2022
Venue: Deer Lake Gallery, 6584 Deer Lake Ave, Burnaby, BC.
Opening Reception: February 25, virtual via Zoom from 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Exhibition Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 12 PM to 4 PM
Cost: Free General Admission
About the Artists
Olga Campbell is a visual artist and writer. She creates art because the process allows her to connect with something greater than herself resulting in a feeling of dipping into magic.
In addition to having multiple solo and group shows for the past twenty five years, she has written two books, “ Graffiti Alphabet” and “ A Whisper Across Time”, her family’s story of the Holocaust told through art and poetry, which has won four awards.
Olga first discovered her passion for art at Emily Carr School of Art and Design almost thirty years ago. She works in multiple mediums: photography, sculpture, mixed media and digital photo collage. She is drawn to alternative processes and uses layering in much of her work. The alternative process takes an art piece and transforms it into something else entirely, some other reality.urban shots, graffiti on walls, an alley way layered with the texture of a wall and more.
Dorothy Doherty received her art education from Vancouver School of Art (currently Emily Carr University of Art & Design) and Capilano University. She holds an MA in Art History (University of Victoria) and a PDP (Simon Fraser University). She is a life-long resident of British Columbia, Canada, spending the majority of her life in and around Vancouver, BC. She paints at Portside studios in Vancouver, and works with ceramics at the Shadbolt Art Centre in Burnaby, BC.
Sande Waters lives and works in Deep Cove, North Vancouver, BC as a guest on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, Stó:l?, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute, California. She was Vice President, Board of Directors at the Seymour Art Gallery, North Vancouver, BC and on the Board of Directors for the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver as Chair of the Artist Prize. Her artwork has been shown and collected in Canada, USA, and Europe.
Although Faye has worked in many media: printing, photography and sculpture, painting is her main focus – choosing to paint mainly in acrylics as she enjoys the quickness of its application. She works from her own photography of scenes that she knows she will enjoy to translate into paintings. Many of her works are landscape scenes from Vancouver Island which is the area of her origin.
She has had solo shows of her painting and printmaking in Vancouver and Vancouver Island and she regularly participates in juried shows.
Her work has been published on the cover of the 1995 UBC Summer Calendar and as book illustrations in Children of the Rivers and in Artists of B.C. Volume 2. She has worked as an art teacher in the British Columbia schools system and has given workshops in community centres and in the B.C. prisons. She is an active supporter of the arts, having been on the ECUAD Alumni Committee, an Active member of the FCA, and a contributing member of the Surrey Art Gallery, The Seymour Art Gallery and the North Vancouver Community Art Gallery.
Faye is a graduate of Emily Carr University and the University of British Columbia, holding a B.A. in Studio Arts and a B.Ed.
Her work is in collections in Canada, the US, Europe, Taiwan and Zambia in Africa.
She continually strives to improve her art, having a portrait solo show, florals solo show landscape shows and, also enjoys painting abstracts. She continues to study with artists whose work interests her – most recently with Mike Svob, Val Nelson and Eri Iishi.
Born in Vancouver, raised in Richmond and currently living in North Vancouver, Julie Pappajohn is a graduate of UBC with a Bachelor of Education in Art. She spent 5 years attending night classes at Emily Carr University of Art and Design while she worked in positions outside the art and education professions. After an invitation to teach an art class, Julie became a member of an extraordinary team of office staff and art educators at Artists for Kids, North Vancouver School District. She wore many hats within the organization—from assisting in the office, selling and shipping art prints, cataloguing the permanent collection to developing curriculum for annual exhibitions and enrichment programs. For nearly twenty years, Julie worked with thousands of children and their teachers and had the incredible opportunity to meet and work with some of Canada’s influential artists.
Now retired from Artists for Kids, Julie transformed her backyard garage into an art studio. She enjoys discovering associations between things and follows an intuitive flow of ideas using a variety of art media and processes. More recently, writing and research have added another dimension to her art making and she loves the learning and storytelling that comes along with it. A firm believer in life long learning through art, Julie frequently visits galleries, listens to artist talks and attends artist workshops.
Ellen Pelto is an abstract painter who works in acrylics, oils and cold wax medium. Her work balances complexity of surface with succinctness and simplicity.
Her approach to painting is spontaneous and intuitive. She applies multiple layers of paint and paper and continues to manipulate the surface to reveal visual depth and texture. Her focus is on neutral colors, surface, texture, and mark making.
For the past 30 years she has balanced a busy professional career with creating art. She discovered the joy of clay and ceramics before transitioning to painting. She studied visual arts at the University of Victoria and has subsequently taken many courses and workshops with many renowned artists.
Carolyn is passionate photographer with talent in a wide array of photographic and image processing. Technically minded with a many modern artistic skills, for digital manipulation and layered composition. She also enjoys the mingling of the older analog techniques with photography, to produce collages and multimedia presentations.
Carolyn’s photography radiates the pureness of one floral petal in the moment of now, to the concerns of the modern conversation with the mixed media collages, to the tale of false comfort and confusion with digital layered composition.
Victoria Scudamore, born in Seattle and raised in San Francisco, makes paintings and mixed media artworks. Intuitive painting is the unfolding of mystery. Victoria uses various materials to explore her thoughts and memories of places visited and lived. Multiple layers are applied, representing the many layers of life. While painting abstractly, Victoria remains aware of compositional elements required to bring forth a successful design. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted.
Victoria Scudamore currently lives and works in Vancouver BC, and is an active member of the Federation of Canadian Artists. Her work is in private collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Terry was born in British Columbia growing up in remote logging camps in the rugged beauty of Vancouver Island and the interior of the province. Influences come from family, other artists work, both historical and contemporary, life drawing, on line presentations and workshops.
Traveling diverse physical landscapes throughout her career have also provided boundless sources of material and inspriation for her art practice. Work spaces can be outdoors in nature, working with plants in the back garden or ‘in studio’ experimenting with textiles, dyes and paint.