May 4 – 28, 2023

MEET THE ARTISTS: Saturday, May 6, 12 pm – 2 pm. Please join us for conversation & refreshments.

In the Main Gallery

NEIL MCCLELLAND | Bright Black Starry Sunny Night (painting)

The paintings in Bright Black Starry Sunny Night take as their starting point McClelland’s childhood home in Quebec’s Gatineau Hills. This place becomes an imagined world in his paintings, acting as a metaphor for the sense of belonging we seek within nature and the cosmos. In this fictional world, time bends and blurs, land shifts and moves, the uncanny and the everyday collide, and anything might happen. The places pictured in the paintings become spaces filled with possibilities, defamiliarized but somewhere where we might find something of ourselves and our world.

Originally from Quebec, Neil McClelland splits his time between Victoria BC and Edmonton AB. He received his MFA from the University of Victoria in 2014 and has exhibited in Alberta, BC, Ontario and Quebec. McClelland is a 2016 and 2020 grantee of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and his paintings are in collections that include the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Colart Collection. He teaches visual arts part-time at the University of Victoria and the Vancouver Island School of Art.

Neil McClelland wishes to acknowledge The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for their grant which supported the making of this body of work.

To watch a video of this exhibition, please see our YouTube channel.

NATALIE ROBINSON | Room in Frame (painting)

Natalie Robinson explores the overfamiliar and mundane aspects of day to day life in Room in Frame creating something new and worthwhile from the unremarkable. Her painting practice is a continuous exploration of perspective, form, colour, and her relationship to the intimate, domestic places depicted and recreated as a ‘familiar-nowhere.’ Each painting is a puzzle of space and form interacting with each other, playing in a liminal space between the tangible and the imaginary.

Natalie Robinson is a Chinese-Canadian artist from Burnaby, BC. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and has shown her work in both solo and group exhibitions in Vancouver, BC. Working primarily in oil paint, her artwork emphasizes the abstraction of day to day life and the overfamiliar.

To watch a video of this exhibition, please see our YouTube channel.

In the Eve Smart Gallery

DONNA GOULETTE | Embroidery on Paper (textiles)

In the exhibition Embroidery on Paper, Donna Goulette uses the traditionally feminine endeavour of embroidery to make contemporary art using thread and intractable paper instead of cloth. Motifs include ubiquitous geometric patterns, lines or nature inspired shapes to produce stitched drawings for the viewer’s eyes to rest upon for a few calming moments.

Donna Goulette is a local fibre artist who has worked in a variety of mediums. She holds Bachelors of Arts in Family Studies and in Education from the University of Windsor and the University of Toronto. She has exhibited in California, Richmond, and on the Sunshine Coast.

To watch a video of this exhibition, please see our YouTube channel.