March 20 to May 23, 2010  

Realist painter Joice M. Hall spent most of her career based in Calgary, before moving to Kelowna to live in 1999. This exhibition is a full-scale survey show that has been organized for the Kelowna Art Gallery by independent curator Patricia Ainslie, who also moved to Kelowna (three years ago) after a long career at Calgary ’s Glenbow Museum. Our smaller space, the Mardell G. Reynolds Gallery, will contain Hall’s works with Mexican subjects. The artist spent half of each year in Mexicofrom 1988-1998, and created works based on different themes there including the ofrenda, which is a table laden with offerings of food and flowers on the Day of the Dead. At the north end of the main gallery (Treadgold/Bullock) we will be installing her 1984 work, Floating (now in the collection of the University of Lethbridge). This work was painted following a residency at the Banff Centre, and depicts in sixteen six-foot-high consecutive panels, the pale nude body of a male, gently turning in space, hovering over a detailed and ethereal mountain landscape. The show will be hung more-or-less chronologically, culminating in Hall’s recent realist landscapes done in the Okanagan, including her works depicting the Okanagan Mountain fire of 2003. A full-length catalogue will be published with all works reproduced in colour. The show will give local residents and visitors the opportunity to consider the full career of this important and insightful artist who lives in our midst.

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