Stellerine

Karina Kalvaitis

October 21 to November 26, 2005

Taking manatees as its subject, Stellerine is an exhibition of graphite drawings and mixed-media sculpture. Steller’s sea cows were first documented off the Pacific West Coast in 1743—only to be hunted to extinction 30 years later. In Kalvaitis’ stark and elegant drawings, Stellerine float, hesitate and react to events and objects—bizarre self-embellishments, encampments of tiny circus tents, mysterious black holes in the sea and other creatures which inexplicably materialize, out of context, in their realm.

Kalvaitis has also created small, free-standing sculptural habitats contained within glass bell jars which echo the airless underwater world of the drawings; their existence perhaps to be found in another dimension beyond the dark and enigmatic portals these animals encounter.

Taken together, this work captures a stillness before some small, strange but inevitable emotional drama is played out—conjuring a world stripped of artifice and culture but equally as impenetrable as our own, underscoring our all too human vulnerability in the midst of ongoing isolation, a frustrated desire for contact and increasing alienation from nature.

Karina Kalvaitis lives and works in Victoria, BC. Kalvaitis graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1996 and her work has been shown in galleries and artist-run centres in Alberta and British Columbia, most recently in Shapeshifter Hotspot Now at Open Space.