• MAKE ART PROJECT WORKSHOPS  continue Oct. 15, Oct. 25, Nov. 26, and Dec. 10 including:
  • Resilience workshop, facilitated by Sandra Semchuk on Oct 15 11am–1pm
  • Imprinted Relationships workshop, facilitated by Amelia Epp and Bronwen Payerle on Oct 29 11am–3pm
  • Collage Party Workshop, facilitated by Sonia Stastny on Nov 26 11am–3pm
• Mapping the Terrain of the Heart workshop, facilitated by Margo McLoughlin on Oct 23 1pm-4pm
• Tickets are on sale for CVAG's fall film series.
• Community news.

Boris Cyrulnik said that “almost any experience can be reshaped if those who have endured it are given the power to write their own narrative.”  The stories we tell ourselves and those that deny our stories within culture–all shape identity. In this exhibition, The Stories were not Told, I juxtapose, contemporary photographs, video and texts with the historical to engage the audience in acts of memory and place–to assert the possibility that stories can emerge to reshape identities even after a century of willful forgetting on the part of the nation and the near silence of those incarcerated and forced to labour.

At the start of WW I, in August of 1914, the Borden government passed the War Measures Bill, giving the government sweeping powers during “war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended”. A permit system was developed to control the movements of 88,000 enemy aliens or prisoners of war in Canada, those people who had the misfortune to be born in or have passport from nations at war with Great Britain. Then, 24 internment camps were built across this country, to contain those deemed of danger to the nation, largely men in urban centers who had no work or lost their jobs because of fears, but also homesteaders and whole families. They had no recourse to justice.

Many communities in Canada that internees came from who do not know these stories–Ukrainians, Alevi Kurds, Armenians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Ottoman Turks, Polish, Romanians, Russians, Serbians, Slovaks, Slovenes amongst others.  Most internees were Ukrainians and most were civilians. This exhibition creates a space to remember internees as well as those who contained them in recognition of harm done to the identities of prisoners, those who imprisoned them and their descendants.

MAP: WITNESS / DOCUMENT / COLLECT
Community Space Project

As a continuation on the community response exhibition from our MAP summer program, CVAG invites documentation from artists, writers, collectives and groups, which explores variations on mapping practice and visual interpretations of place.  The project begins with a visual dialogue in relation to understandings of the Comox Valley, First Nations Territory and satellite artistic research locations where interconnected projects are taking place. The large scale maps, made directly on the walls of the community space, identify the locations, boundaries, migration behaviours and pathways of mapped experience and terrain being explored through this thematic intersection. Documentation as a form of witness practice, comprised of images, texts, symbols and objects is embedded in the space in relation to the paths and places identified by the maps articulated on the walls. This accumulative community MAP project continues to expand over the course of the fall program.

Everyone is welcome. Admission is by donation and materials are provided. For more information about these or other CVAG events and volunteer opportunities email info@comoxvalleyartgallery.com or phone CVAG at 250.338.6211.

COMMUNITY NEWS

Filmmaker and visual artist Claudia Medina spent her childhood alternately inventing worlds in the backyard forests of her pulp mill hometown and listening to stories of naguales (shapeshifters) in her mother’s Mexican village. As a teenager a cousin initiated her into goth culture in her father’s home country of Italy, after which she finally fled her hometown to figure out how all of these realities fit together. Moving images seemed like the best way to try and do this, which led to making short fiction, documentary films, installations and projection designs - all guided and shaped by family stories, histories and lived experiences in cities and rural places throughout the world. The natural landscape of the west coast kept calling, as well as a desire to explore a reconnection to ecological as well as cultural roots as the world heats up. She now lives with her four year old daughter, partner and assorted non human animals in Powell River, BC, and continues to work with moving images in ever evolving ways. She has recently returned from a journey to the autonomous region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea to meet with and document a community relocating their village due to rising sea levels in their home atoll of the Carteret Islands.