Kelowna Art Gallery
3^rd Annual Members’ Exhibition
Convergence
November 17, 2007 - January 13, 2008
Opening reception: Friday, November 30, 2007

This year is the Kelowna Art Gallery’s 30th anniversary, and we invite you to join the celebration by submitting a work of art to our 3rd annual members’ exhibition.

The theme of this year’s members’ show is inspired by our permanent collection exhibition entitled Nexus: Histories and Communities.   This exhibition will contain both historical and contemporary works, which have been grouped under loosely defined themes.  These themes are relevant to our local history and reflect changes in artistic attitudes and practices over the decades.

Over the past thirty years the Kelowna Art Gallery has gone from a small gallery located in the Kelowna Centennial Museum to a vibrant contemporary gallery with a rich and varied collection of over 500 objects. The Kelowna Art Gallery's permanent collection reflects Kelowna's artistic development and contains lasting bodies of art, which our community can call their own, and look to as a source of pride, inspiration and intellectual enrichment.

A celebration of local artistic talent along with an opportunity for artistic growth and development has always been the premise of the member’s exhibition. With this mind, artists are asked to reflect on one of the permanent collection themes, and to use it as a basis for inspiration or further research. Some of the themes are as follows:

Out in the Orchards
Kelowna is inextricably linked to the orchard industry whose history has formed the backbone of the Okanagan Valley’s economy for many decades.

Routes to Abstraction
Abstraction in Western Art began in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and despite its longevity remains misunderstood and sometimes baffling to an audience.

Graphic Mark Making: Drawings and Prints
This section is devoted to works on paper created in either printmaking or drawing. These media have often traditionally been seen as secondary to painting, yet each have their own working methods, history, and important roles in many artists’ productions.

From the Figure to the Body
Beginning with the Academic traditions of the eighteenth century, artists have honed their visual and drawing skills by working with the nude model. In the twentieth century, the so-called figure was reduced, even debased to a physical body in the practices of artists who distilled into distorted fragments, such as, bones, or bodily fluids.

Private Worlds
This section groups together artists who draw on their own imaginations to generate their imagery. Some of the levels of meaning in these pieces remain tantalizingly beyond our grasp, while others are readily apprehended, and entice us in to the artists’ inner worlds.