Wednesday, January 12, 2011 Tri-City News 27
TRI-CITYY ARTS
CONTACT Janis Warren email: jwarren@tricitynews.com phone: 604-472-3034 • fax: 604-944-0703
JENNIFER GAUTHIER/THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Vancouver artist Robi Smith — pictured here with Herring (2010) — will show 30 works from her series, called The Voice of the Sea: Paintings of a Threatened Ocean, in a new exhibit that starts tomorrow at Place des Arts. Smith will be at the opening reception Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. as will artists Suzy Stroet and husband and wife team Rick Glumac and Nathania Vishnevshy, who are also displaying their pieces this month at the Coquitlam facility. It is Smith’s first major solo exhibition.
Fish, libraries and Venice By Janis Warren
context and to romanticize them,” she said. “Oil is something that can be preserved and last forever,” unlike bookstacks. Had she interpreted the automated retrieval system instead, she would have used a digital format, she said. The second part of Library focuses on referencing, a topic she is familiar with at the library. Her drawings show the creative process of retrieval, like peeling back “the layers it takes for the information to come out,” she said.
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bout eight years ago, Robi Smith found a copy of a 1940s book written by the department of Fisheries and Oceans about B.C. fish. The black-and-white etchings and the stories behind the fish fascinated her. “There are so many varieties of fish in our waters that I never knew about,” the Vancouver artist said. “We talk about salmon and cod and rockfish all the time, but never about these fish. I felt like I was discovering a whole new world and I wanted to learn more.” Smith’s connection with the ocean over the years has been profound. As a child, she played on the beach in Vancouver and, as an adult, she has studied and written papers on environmental health topics for government clients. But the DFO reference book sparked her passion to translate what she saw and read on to canvas. Her series, called The Voice of the Sea: Paintings of a Threatened Ocean, will be part of a month-long show opening tomorrow (Thursday) at Place des Arts in Coquitlam. It is her first major solo exhibit. A self-taught artist, Smith will display 30 acrylic works, which she describes as “realistic abstract symbolism.” Realistic, as the fish are true interpretations; abstract, as the backgrounds are a rich wash of blues and greens, like the sea, and oranges and reds, to represent acidity; and symbolism, as the images surrounding the fish contrast with their pristine surroundings. For example, the outlines of the plastic bottles are the ocean’s garbage and the falling dinosaurs are the carbon from the fossil fuels; the outlines of fish mean their stock has collapsed or is near extinct. With her artwork, Smith’s intent is to raise the level of awareness about the impact of overfishing, pollution and climate change. But they’re also supposed to educate the au-
VENICE, UP CLOSE
COURTESY OF PLACE DES ARTS
Suzy Stroet’s Book Stacks 1, part of her Library exhibit, and Nathania Vishnevsky’s Reflections of the Past from the Remembering Venice series. dience about B.C. fish and she has comments to accompany each painting. Of herring, she writes: “Once abundant on the B.C. coast, herring feed almost the entire range of marine animals. The eggs are eaten by fish and seabirds, the larvae by jellyfish and crustaceans, the larger fish by sharks, other fish, seabirds, seals and sea lions. But who will eat the plastic bottles?” Said Smith: “There’s so much under the water that we don’t know about and I want to bring that to people’s attention. The oceans are in trouble and I feel that we could lose so much without even knowing it.”
UBC BOOKSTACKS Suzy Stroet instinctively knows who went to UBC when she shows them her paintings
of the Main Library. “There are usually very strong connotations,” she said. “There are some UBC grads who say, ‘Oh, I spent too much time there!’ but there are others who remember the bookstacks fondly.” The Vancouver artist, whose series called Library is being exhibited in the Leonore Peyton Salon this month, would place herself in the latter half. In 2005, as the bookstacks were being replaced by an automated retrieval system, Stroet snapped photos of them to re-create on canvas in between her full-time job as a children’s librarian at the Collingwood branch of the Vancouver Public Library (she has a master’s degree in library science from UBC). She painted the images in oil “to give them
It was a week-long trip to the Queen of the Adriatic in 2009 that inspired Rick Glumac and Nathania Vishnevshy to photograph and paint a series called Remembering Venice. The joint exhibition by the husband and wife team, to be shown in the Mezzanine Gallery, yields familiar sights from the Italian city such as the bridges, gondolas and masks. But the Port Moody couple also doesn’t shy away from capturing the squalor of the tourist destination: garbage from the sea washing on to the streets next to cathedrals and pigeon poop on statues. “During this trip we rented our own apartment, bought our food from the local markets and tried to live as the Venetians do,” Vishnevshy said. “We even evacuated to higher ground in the middle of the night due to the all-too-common flooding that the Venetians seem to take in stride.” Vishnevshy, a watercolour and acrylic artist who has two master’s degrees from Ohio State University, has taken part in a number of Tri-City art shows while Glumac, a computer graphics expert, was on last year’s organizing committee for the Wearable Art exhibition. • The three Place des Arts exhibits run from Jan. 13 to Feb. 5 at 1120 Brunette Ave. The opening reception will be held Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m., with the artists in attendance. jwarren@tricitynews.com