The Lake Country Art Gallery is presenting its new exhibit featuring the works of three Canadian female artists beginning next week.
Traces: The Dreamt, the Seen, the Remembered will from June 5 to July 19 at the art gallery in Lake Country. Traces is the fifth exhibit by the Lake Country Art Gallery this year and prominently features the work of three Canadian female artists.
Traces is an exhibition that celebrates the small fragments of life that leave everlasting imprints on us.
Sometimes the smallest things stick with you for a lifetime. Beliefs, people and memories; none are eternal but each leave small traces upon us that may never fade. Traces was a project conceived long ago by curator Katie Brennan. Over the past couple years Brennan met a couple of the artists in her travels across Canada.
“I had been waiting to showcase these women’s art for years," says Brennan. “It wasn’t until I came across the portfolio of Michelle Hall that I finally saw how all their work intertwined.”
Gallery manager Petrina McNeill anticipated the cross-Canada exhibit since its proposal last September. “Thematically the three women’s art layers quite beautifully," said McNeill. “However their three different mediums offer different lenses and contexts through which to interpret the central theme.”
Amy Friend is an artist based in St Catherine’s, ON that Brennan met in Banff. As the recipient of the Emerging Artist Windsor Endowment for the Arts (2012), Friend’s work has been growing increasingly celebrated and recognized. Her photography depicts family heirlooms, including the nightgowns of her deceased grandmother. This series of photographs explores what is left after her grandmother’s death. Friend blends elements of light and contrast with the flowing nightgowns’ forms, transparencies and colours to depict more than the ethereal, sheer materials themselves.
“The worn areas, marks of where her body had been, emit an aura of her presence,” wrote Friend.
Michelle Hall is an Okanagan artist whose multimedia work utilizes text to explore the conception of beliefs. Throughout her portfolio, Hall traces how her experience with others has created or proliferated beliefs within herself.
Laura Madera is an Ontario based artist. Her work utilizes the traditional mediums of watercolour and gouache, expanding the mediums in new directions. Madera’s watercolour paintings are abstracted patterns and surfaces infused with bleached out light. Her memories of events and time are evoked through transparencies and luminous forms.
The Lake Country Art Gallery will host the Opening Gala for Traces: the dreamt, the seen, the remembered Wednesday, June 5 at 6 p.m. The exhibition will close July 19.