Portal/Portage is a multi-media collaboration of four artist friends that will go on show at the Doris Crowston Gallery at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt Aug. 3.
The unifying theme revolves around the four artists negotiating their places as humans in nature, in a West Coast environment. The exhibition combines former Sunshine Coast resident, artist and film-maker Meg Torwl's work in photo-based video installations, Claudia Medina-Culos's video installations and sound-scapes, Liliana Kleiner's video work based on her photography, painting and mixed media and Diane Tanchak's abstract-realist style of paintings. Each artist explores the nuance of location and the universality of story in her own way.
These are the stories, Torwl said, who is curating the show, that we collect, create and carry from LAN (Local Area Network, an internet term) to land, to language, or if you like, images as a language, a kind of poetry, bypassing spoken language altogether.
Sources of inspiration for the women's work come from all over the globe: Torwl's video covers Roberts Creek to Rarotonga, and it sits alongside work by Kleiner from Galiano Island to the Gulf of Mexico. Tanchak has painted a series of trees from Okeover Inlet to New York. Claudia Medina-Culos's Powell River work was completed as part of a masters in media from Barcelona. It involves a video called On the Trail in which she interviewed hikers on a popular local coastal trail that was being threatened by development.
Two of the artists, Medina-Culos and Kleiner, had worked together before on art projects. They met Tanchak when she was on holiday from New York last summer and she and Torwl were enjoying vacation time in Okeover Inlet near Powell River. Each artist was inspired by the other's work, and the idea for a collaborative show was born in a cabin on Desolation Sound over dinner.
As a viewer at the gallery you will see four video screens attached to DVD displays, one screen for each artist, and in front of the screen, natural materials of significance: pebbles, seawater and sand. Using headphones you can watch the videos run for five to 14 minutes - all four amount to 90 minutes.
"If you like you can watch the entire 90 minutes on a screen at another part of the gallery and just let it wash over you," Torwl said.
It's designed to be meditative: "The thing with my other work is it can be very political and is designed to make people think, ask questions. With my meditative installations, they are designed to make people stop thinking, toresttheir mind and soul," she said.
Since Torwl left the Coast in 2006 she's been busy. She completed her film Towards the Day We Are All Free, a 90-minute documentary, then returned to her native New Zealand for a while to work on the country's radio network where she broadcast a weekly show about disability issues. On her return to Canada she worked for two years with community outreach on KickstART, a disability arts and culture organization, and is currently at Simon Fraser University's Writers' Studio working on video and photography.
"It's the poetry of the new media world," she says earnestly.
The show runs until Aug. 28. A reception takes place Aug. 3 from 7 to 9 p.m.
