Keith Langergraber: Rattlesnake Island

October 9 to December 12, 2010

Keith Langergraber is a Vancouver-based multi-media artist who spent his formative years in Kelowna. This exhibition is comprised of a cluster of distinct elements that explore local lore, beginning with the Ogopogo. In his film Rattlesnake Island (included in the show), Langergraber himself plays his protagonist, a young man on a quest for a sighting of the Ogopogo. He paddles his kayak from Kelowna down Lake Okanagan to Rattlesnake Island, across the shore from the town of Peachland. While there he discovers the 1970s project construction remains left there by Eddie Haymour, and the film then delves into that man’s aspirations and struggles.

Installed in the Gallery’s Rotary Courtyard space is a shack structure with accompanying debris that seems to have once been inhabited but is now abandoned. This shack is at once an archetype, standing in for the self, but also is an indicator of a solitary life lived by someone who removed him or herself from society. An artist’s book is on display, containing images in the vein of botanical illustration, as well as a vitrine with layers of diagrams and images relating to past sightings of the Ogopogo.

In this exhibition Langergraber can be seen as channeling and paying homage to the twentieth-century Dutch conceptual artist, Bas Jan Ader, particularly with the deliberate and only slightly tongue-in-cheek parallel to Ader’s In the Search of the Miraculous, a 1975 solo ocean voyage from which he never returned.