Natasha Harvey | Cameron Gelderman

Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna

Natasha Harvey, With Love, 2022, linocut print. Image courtesy of the artist.

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present its final exhibitions of 2023: Natasha Harvey’s Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics and Love, and Cameron Gelderman’s Yarnlandia, on view from November 3 through December 16, 2023.

Natasha Harvey spends time deepening her connection with the land in the unceded territories of the syilx peoples, walking and connecting through place-based research. Over time, during these walks, she has found the expansion of dwellings and homes pushing up the mountainsides around and over wetlands, impacting wildlife habitat and ecology. Construction cuts into the land. Culture and economy reshape the horizon, thus rendering ‘space’ politically complex. Therefore, achieving the colonial landscape sublime is not a simple image of beauty without erasure.

Harvey’s artwork consists of a series of collaged landscape paintings and linocut prints, which seek to represent and communicate the effects of human interference on the environment while evoking the participatory spirit of love and beauty of nature. Her work and research are specifically place-based in the Okanagan Valley. She hopes her depictions of the landscape illustrate this complexity and thus encourage a conversation about our expanding contribution to the detriment of the land.

Cameron Gelderman, detail of Place of Many Yarns, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

While Harvey’s exhibition encourages guests to look outwards and reflect on our collective impact on the land, Cameron Gelderman’s Yarnlandia prompts guests to look inward; To use our individual, internal turmoil, and turn it into something constructive and positive.

Following his instincts, Gelderman creates site-specific installations as a means of working through depression and anxiety by entering a flow state of creation. These transformed spaces, while chaotic, create an intimate space that invites viewers to engage and collaborate. In Yarnlandia, Gelderman fosters an exchange between artist and viewer by inviting guests to add their own knots and weave into the large-scale web. He hopes to empower gallery guests to work through inhibitions, worry, and self-doubt by embracing their creative instincts. Through this experimental approach, Yarnlandia highlights the beauty of spontaneity and the unpredictable. As the installation evolves with each contribution by gallery guests, it echoes the impact community and collaboration can have on an individual’s growth.

Both Layered Landscapes: Landscape Art, Politics and Love and Yarnladia will be on view from November 3, 2023 to December 16, 2023.

About the Artists

Natasha Harvey holds a Master of Fine Arts from UBC Okanagan and a Bachelor of Education from UBC Vancouver. Her artistic practice and research are specifically place-based in the Okanagan. Working with large-scale collage and lino-prints, Harvey explores the paradox of living and revering the beauty of natural spaces while being overcome by its cancelling through rampant development.

Cameron Gelderman is a self-taught, emerging, interdisciplinary artist currently living in Kelowna, BC. His process-based practice embraces spontaneity, breaking through one’s inhibitions, worry, and self-doubt to enter an intuition-driven state. The result of this process is large webs of woven textile installations and artworks.

About the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of our creative community.

Since 1989, the Alternator has shown the work of emerging Canadian artists and helped develop the talents of local artists by providing a network of collaboration and sharing. The Alternator fosters energetic, creative, critical discussion on art & culture. The Alternator believes in the greater positive potential of our creative community and values our role as a key contributor to the cultural life of Kelowna and beyond.

The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art respectfully acknowledges its presence on the unceded territory of the syilx (Okanagan) people.

Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art
#103 – 421 Cawston Ave, Kelowna B.C.
www.alternatorcentre.com
info@alternatorcentre.com
(250) 868-2298

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Accessibility:
The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art is situated within the Rotary Centre for the Arts, which is fully accessible.