Forever & For Never
Omid Afarinzad
Lauren Brinson
Rande Cook
Mona Hedayati
Jordan Hill
Clare Lannan
Leanne Olson
Liam O’Sullivan
Dani Proteau
Graham Wiebe
January 17 to February 15, 2020
Forever & For Never arose out of the possibilities created by the forced proximity and specific focus of graduate research. Ten strangers from near and far convene and overlap for a brief period of time on an island located off the westernmost part of Canada. What do they see from this temporal and conceptual window? And in what language, visual or otherwise, do they choose to make their reportage? The artists who make up this enquiry have committed to a sort of fantastic experiment where addition is naturally seen to create expansion even as outcomes remain uncertain. The work in this exhibition—emanating from so many distinct sources—nonetheless shares concerns, as bodies situated inside material problems and the mutability of human existence. There is disquietude over resources and their extraction and hope for regeneration in the stories of our separate and recombined histories. Forever & For Never is a transitory record of things coming together, breaking apart and recombining somewhere between past and future.
Omid Afarinzad is an Iranian visual artist focused on sculpture and installation. His work embodies abstract concepts to challenge consciousness. His previous works have investigated the non-linear perception of time through the revival of objects. Omid’s current work is a public art project that introduces an old ritual into an environment where there are not any preconceptions of the ritual and aims to collect the responding human behaviour.
Lauren Brinson is an interdisciplinary artist from Newfoundland and Labrador working in Victoria BC. Her work explores value structures in cultural textile practices and the relationship between utility and aesthetics, while considering traditional and contemporary notions of the domestic and everyday through rug hooking, knitting and making fishing nets.
Rande Cook is a multidisciplinary artist of Indigenous descent. Rande is focusing on environmental studies in his art practice, specifically how mythology and the historical narrative of Indigenous art making can preserve land from the old growth forests to the sea. Rande uses various media within narratives to explore contemporary methods in storytelling.
Mona Hedayati is an Iranian-Canadian artist and researcher with a particular interest in investigating the use of language as a visual and verbal hybrid. Mona has exhibited and presented her work internationally as well as across Canada. Her current project deals with digital textualities as a generative system, drawing parallels between linguistic cognition and abstraction to highlight the conceptual and formal properties of language.
Jordan Hill is a multimedia artist interested in the innate qualities we possess to understand the world as we navigate what is presented to us. His work aims to intervene in the normalized spatial and social assumptions we make upon getting introduced to environments and structures that put our body and mind at odds with one another.
Clare Lannan is a Victoria-based artist concerned with arenas of the forced spectacle. A self-proclaimed flesh tourist, Lannan works to reclaim space from oppressive systems for bodies that have been left behind. Working with a variety of mediums, she seeks to fill a void and to create new paths in the collective landscape shared by marginalized people.
Leanne Olson’s art practice persists as a way to understand the deceptive depths of the human mind. Olson has been exhibiting for a decade, cycling through themes of entropy, uncertainty and impending decay. She focuses on land and water bodies that are tasked with jobs and entangled in massive change, such as landfills, sulphurous springs and recreational lakes. Her practice is repeat visitation and documentation of these sites for glimpses into ecological perseverance.
Liam O’Sullivan is a Canadian painter working with illusion as a psychological phenomenon to promote self-recognition and neurological humility. Personification, mythologizing, parody, image swapping, cognitive biases and the grotesque are adapted in his work to represent the cultural and psychic momentum that we all create and are swept through unceasingly together.
Dani Proteau is an artist currently residing in Victoria BC. Through sculpture and other mediums, her practice aims to distill and bring forth ephemeral elements—light, sound, wind and natural phenomena—to prompt contemplation, wonder and to interrupt otherwise ossified ways of knowing. At times mesmerizing, whimsical and delicate, her work endeavours to unfasten passive modes of perception by expanding upon our sensorial awareness of everyday surroundings.
Graham Wiebe is a visual artist working in Victoria BC. Employing the snapshot as material toward a visual memoir, Wiebe's photographs are a record of impulse and engagement. These fragmentary and still documents weave together to highlight the intersection of the urban and suburban landscapes, creating an intimate portrait rooted in time, place and personal experience.