Liz Wylie

contributor

The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased to present two inter-related exhibitions mounted specifically for pleasurable summer viewing.

Seventy-five digitally output images of antique, hand-coloured lantern slides originally commissioned by the CPR make up the Magic Lanterns exhibition, which has been co-curated by Michael Lawlor and Bill Jeffries, and circulated by the Simon Fraser University Gallery.

With the completion of the CPR railroad link across Canada in 1885, an explosion of painted and photographic images began that was supported and then promoted by the CPR, both to potential tourists across Canada, and to possible immigrants in other parts of the world.

Visitors to the show will see picturesque images of many famous sites along the route of the railway, nation-wide, as well as street views of cities along the way, and landscapes photographed from the railway cars as they made their trans-continental voyages.

The notion of national pride underlies many of the images, and indeed, the post-Confederation Canadian ethos was one of nationalism and nation-building, and the CPR and their promotional images played a central role in this mood and activity.

We are hoping that tourists visiting the Okanagan this summer who visit the exhibition may engage with a different way of thinking about vacation travel, while enjoying a nostalgic look at our shared past.

In the same gallery space, but confined to its own distinct area, is a second, related exhibition, a solo show of work by Vancouver-based photographic artist Carol Sawyer, entitled Natalie Brettschneider in British Columbia.

Carol Sawyer is known nationally for her own work as a photographer and has recently received and completed important and successful public art commissions in the City of Vancouver. However, she has also spent several years involved in the career of a little-known but ground-breaking woman artist who died in 1981: Natalie Brettscheider.

By amazing coincidence, this avant-garde artist, who was also a singer and proto-performance artist, has been captured in a selection of additional lantern slide images, dating from a train trip she made in 1913. As well as these photographs, other images of Natalie Brettscheider will be included, some of which are from little-known performances in Paris in the 1920s.

Artist Carol Sawyer came to Kelowna earlier this year to conduct research around a visit Natalie made to Kelowna in the 1930s. It is the material resulting from this investigation that forms the content of the show that will likely most fascinate Kelowna-based gallery visitors.

Sawyer’s findings and related images will be included in the exhibition, but were still under wraps at press time for this column. We are most pleased to include the unruly edginess of contemporary art, which lends a tantalizing note to our more straightforward and traditional exhibition of beautiful images from a bygone age.

Liz Wylie is Kelowna Art Gallery curator. Reach her at 250-762-2226.