ARTiculate Spring/Summer 2022

COVID-19: The status of public events and activities listed is current as of publication, but COVID-19 protocols may change at any time. Please check government and event websites for the latest updates.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

W K R A C / C K C A a r e g r a t e f u l t o c a r r y o u t o u r w o r k u p o n t h e t r a d i t i o n a l a n d u n c e d e d t e r r i t o r i e s o f t h e S i n i x t , K t u n a x a , S y i l x , L h e i d l i T ’e n n e h , a n d S e c w e p e m c p e o p l e .

ART & NATURE: ART GALLERY OF GOLDEN LANDSCAPE & HISTORY: CAROL WALLACE MONSTERS & MAGIC: JIM HOLYOAK BIRTH STORIES: ELLIE REYNOLDS RADIO DAYS: BOB KEATING

Arts & Heritage News New & Noteworthy: Book reviews Last Word: Nicole Friedl

SnapS hot S:

A glimpse into the remarkable stories of people and places in the Columbia Basin.

A Visual Love Letter to the Village of Salmo The natural surroundings of Salmo have long been an inspiration for local artists, including Tia Reyden.

With support from the Trust, Reyden was chosen by the Village to paint two colourful murals depicting Salmo River and local trails.

“One of my friends lives right past the murals, and she told me that she just loves seeing them every day,” she adds. “When the light is changing, it’s almost like the murals change with the light.”

Find more on

ourtrust.org/stories

THE GIVE AND TAKE OF

CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS One of the themes that emerged as we started work on this issue of ARTiculate is how collaboration can be a necessary and rewarding tool for artists of all stripes.

We often picture the solitary artist toiling in their studio as the norm. Particularly in these times we’re living in, though, personal isolation can be limiting and even debilitating to those souls who feed on inspiration outside themselves.

Of course, each person has a different coping style: some artists have broken through their isolation by seeking out and developing creative partnerships; some have put in-person shows on hold until the dust settles a bit more; some have continued to thrive through all the challenges and discomfort of the past two-plus years. As audiences, we’ve encountered a kind of fourth wall when we’ve decided to stay home to take in a piece of theatre, a musical performance or a gallery show on our favourite streaming service: we have no way to respond except by bouncing in our chairs, and all those good feelings engendered by what we’ve seen have nowhere to land, except in our bowl of snacks.

But, as Trail & District Arts Council director Nadine Tremblay points out, “Artists are resilient people. We’re flexible and risk takers.”

“Pivoting” and “resilience” are words often used to describe our cultural communities’ strength of character and determination to carry on. Here at ARTiculate, we’re always elated by the variety of those amazing stories and pleased to be able to share them with you.

But back to that collaboration thing. Mentorship is one form of collaboration that benefits both the teacher and the student.

What better way to learn than by shadowing or assisting a professional who has years of experience to offer? Those medieval guilds really had the right idea, apart from the indentured servitude part. And what a great way to inspire young artists to carry on a craft, venture into publishing their work or further their education in an area that they love.

Mentorships can be formal or spontaneous, offered by institutions or entered into by individuals as a way to lend a hand. Collaborative relationships between peers and among like-minded groups make so much sense: everyone brings a different skill to the mix, and everyone gains from it. In a way, public art also has become a form of collaboration: as a teaching tool; a means of engaging with the public; and as fodder for important conversations. I hope you will enjoy reading more.

Columbia Basin Trust operates in the unceded traditional territories of the Ktunaxa, Lheidi T’enneh, Secwepemc, Sinixt and Syilx Nations.

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Margaret Tessman, editor

Arts & Heritage News

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Cover Story: Art Gallery of Golden

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School Days: Legacy of Learning

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Collective Spaces: Artist-run Centres

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Landscape & History: Carol Wallace

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ARTiculate Events Calendar

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Chasing Monsters: Jim Holyoak

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Joyful Noise: Acoustic Correspondence

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Broadcast News: The Next Episode

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Birth Stories: The Way They Came

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First Peoples: Ric Gendron

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New & Noteworthy: Book Reviews

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Last Word: Editorial

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On the Cover: Michael Hepher, Home/Place, oil on canvas, 36x36 inches, 2021.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 ISSUE #41 Editor: Margaret Tessman Contributors: Luanne Armstrong, Sarah Beauchamp, Lisa Benschop, Shelly Boyd, Anne DeGrace, Nicole Friedl, Susan Andrews Grace, Barbara D. Janusz, Sean Arthur Joyce, Erin Knutson, Maggie Shirley, Margaret Tessman.

Design: Guy Hobbs Proofreader: Anne Champagne Project Management: Laura White Sales: Natasha Smith ISSN #1709-2116

ARTiculate is produced in Nelson as a project of the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council: ph: 250-352-2421 or 1-800-850-2787 email: articmag@telus.net

The West Kootenay Regional Arts Council acknowledges the generous support of the following funders and corporate sponsors:

Reasonable care is taken to ensure that ARTiculate content is current and as accurate as possible at the time of publication, but no responsibility can be taken by ARTiculate or the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council for any errors or omissions contained herein, nor for any losses, damages or distress resulting from adherence to any information provided. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARTiculate, the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council or funders and supporters.

Copyright: The contents of ARTiculate magazine are protected by copyright and may be used only for personal, non-commercial purposes. All other rights are reserved and commercial uses, including publication, broadcast or redistribution in any medium, are prohibited. Permission to copy must be sought from the copyright owner. Contributors retain the copyright of their original work. By submitting work to ARTiculate for publication, contributors are granting permission to ARTiculate for one-time use in the print and digital/online versions.

ARTICULATE 3

NEWS

COVID-19: The status of public events and activities listed is current as of publication, but COVID-19 protocols may change at any time. Please check government and event websites for the latest updates.

NEWS

KEY CITY THEATRE CARRIES ON

by Margaret Tessman Key City Theatre in Cranbrook is in the process of elevating local, raw talent through education and opportunities to create a semi-professional and professional production team of directors, artists, technicians and production support. The theatre does this with its January Production, a full Broadway-style musical that has been presented each year since 2017.

This season the theatre’s staging of 9 to 5: The Musical hit right at the peak of Omicron. After the opening night gala on New Year’s Eve, the rest of the run was cancelled, everything was stored away and July has been pencilled in as the tentative date for restaging the show.

“We run the show once a month at the theatre, just to keep things fresh,” says Brenda Burley, Manager of Events and Development at Key City Theatre.

Alice discovers wonderland at Frog Peak Café in downtown Crescent Valley.

Photo: Matty Kakes

MATTY KAKES

fence and one side of the building.

“I see public art as a great opportunity for community building,” says the muralist known as Matty Kakes. Kakes brings his experience in youth work and social work into his art, sharing his personal values in the imagery he creates, the partnerships he seeks out and the tools he uses.

One of Kakes’ earlier collaborations, Colours of Nelson, sits under the Big Orange Bridge and was designed and painted in part by Nelson Youth Centre participants. Kakes now teaches in the Human Services program at Selkirk College in Castlegar, where two of his murals grace walls in the city’s downtown area. “The intersection of youth work, social work and public art is a great relationship. I find it therapeutic to express myself this way,” he says. He gives a shout out to Willow Enewold at Pinnacle Accountants and Advisors in Castlegar, who helped fund the murals, and to ARC Programs, who offered their wall space for one of the works.

Some of Kakes’ more unconventional murals are on display along Pass Creek Road, between Crescent Valley and Castlegar, on a high-visibility panel mounted on the side of the road. Commuters and locals have been greeted over the years with themes ranging from Black Lives Matter, anticapitalism, climate change, feminism and the Palestine/Israeli conflict. Kakes hopes that he can encourage public discussion on these topics, which reflect his socio-political views with an artistic punch. He says that the initial public reaction was mixed, but now the feedback he receives is “ninety-nine percent positive.”

The ARC wall image, “a Kootenay-esque sunset scene,” was painted using Airlite, an Italian-made product with a much lower environmental impact than conventional paint.

In fact, as the paint is applied and dries, it absorbs carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide through a process of carbonation.

The pigment is shipped in powder form and once the colours are mixed, the application time is limited, so assistance from the community was essential. “Things need to be well planned,” says Kakes. “It was an arduous process.” Kakes says he’s “pretty proud” that this project is the first in Canada to use Airlite technology.

“They bring public art to an area that doesn’t see it.”

Kakes is currently lining up pieces for the spring, including seeking out mural festivals. He also plans on continuing to work on group pieces, mentoring and giving lessons to willing participants.

Uniting public art with political dialogue

by Margaret Tessman

A second panel is in the works, thanks to a grant from the Slocan Valley Arts Council. Kakes’ rural murals can also be seen at Frog Peak Café in Crescent Valley, covering a board

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Burley started as an employee of the theatre in 2016 after volunteering for years at Mount Baker high school in Cranbrook and participating in staged readings with a small community theatre group. “The high school has an incredible theatre program,” she says. Conveniently, Key City is attached to the high school, encouraging student participation in productions.

Several grads have gone on to further arts training and one, Drew Lyall, returned from his final year of studies at the National Theatre School in Montreal to work on 9 to 5. Lyall designed the lighting and sound for the show, and mentored a Grade 11 student, Pepijn Heij. “Mixing sound for a musical production gives Pepijn material experience on his resume when he decides to apply to schools,” says Burley.

With the support of funding from the Trust through the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, Key City is in the enviable position of being able to pay people for their talent.

“The ability to offer a salary values professional-level work,” says Burley. For 9 to 5, the theatre hired William Corcoran, a Toronto-based freelance set designer, who worked with locals to bring the vision for the play to the stage. The January Production also gives volunteers and amateurs the opportunity

Violet (Sarah Turk) and Joe (Matt Van Boeyen) find working nine to five so much better when they are together . . . plotting the overthrow of management.

Photo: Barry Coulter/Cranbrook Townsman

to find their stage feet. Burley cites the example of the musical director of 9 to 5, Amanda Casey, who auditioned four years ago for a production, having had no previous theatre experience.

“Now she’s leading the show,” says Burley.

Key City Theatre relies on grants, ticket sales and its gala fundraiser to support operations. “We get amazing feedback from the community,” says Burley. “The theatre is part of what Cranbrook is. Cranbrook is a hockey town, so the strong theatre program is a great alternative for kids who are not into sports.

Creating a cool product is fun, but it’s a community that is built during the process.

“We’re a big, raucous family of cast, crew and audience.” keycitytheatre.com

In August 2021, Slocan Valley ceramic artist Robin DuPont embarked on a collaboration with chef Matt Brandt to host an intimate meal that would combine Brandt’s wizardry in the kitchen and DuPont’s functional work. The result was the transformation of DuPont’s driveway into a five-star gourmet dining experience. Food was served on handmade functional pottery, with ceramic furniture used in the seating arrangement. The sawhorse and table slab were designed and assembled by Brandt. The collaboration fulfilled part of a CKCA Community Arts grant that DuPont was awarded to create a series of functional ceramic furniture for display in an unconventional setting.

Photo: Louis Bockner

News continued on page 30

ARTICULATE 5

COVER STORY

COVER STORY

Right: Sabrina Curtis, Guarded, 24x36 inches, acrylic on canvas, 2021.

Photo: Remi Goguen

Left: Aine Falter, Moody Sir D, photograph, 2019.

Photo courtesy Aine Falter

ART GALLERY

OF GOLDEN

Collective vision, collective responsibility

by Barbara D. Janusz Michael Hepher, Saint Griztopher print. Photo courtesy Michael Hepher

Nestled within the Rockies and Columbia mountains, the town of Golden is also, notoriously, on the crossroads of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 95, which runs south to Radium Hot Springs. The treacherous stretch of the TransCanada east of Golden is often subject to closures, forcing travellers and truckers to divert along Highways 93 and 95.

Despite not having encountered any road closures on my latest road trip through Golden in January, I decided to interrupt my journey west and to poke my head into the Art Gallery of Golden (AGOG) to take in the “Vanishing Bighorn” exhibition.

The Trans-Canada, as I learned, is also treacherous for the herd of bighorn sheep of the Kicking Horse Canyon and the main cause of their decline. Road construction on the section of highway east of Golden has recently bettered the odds for the herd’s survival, but once the highway upgrade is completed the fate of the bighorn will, once again, hang in the balance.

Fernie painter and printmaker Michael Hepher, whose solo travelling exhibition, “In This Together,” is scheduled to be shown at AGOG from June until September, believes that the fate of the bighorn and the flora and fauna of the Columbia River Basin is inextricably woven into the consciousness of its people. “We can’t disconnect ourselves from nature,” Hepher says. “As residents, we bear an extra weight of responsibility.”

Launched in Kimberley in September, “In This Together” has also been hosted in Cranbrook and will travel to Rossland and

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Fernie. Owing to the modest size of the AGOG gallery, the exhibition, which comprises 28 oil paintings and 9 prints, will be pared down. But Hepher is confident that this latest body of work, even when condensed, will dramatize his intended message: Why we live in this place.

Hepher’s painting Home/Place is a whimsical portrayal of the Columbia River Basin, replete with a kayaker on a lake teeming with fish, a wolf, a bird perched on a tree and clusters of houses, all interspersed with forests and crowned with mountains and roiling clouds overhead. Composed of boldly coloured geometric figures, the painting is emblematic of the integration of the people of the Columbia Basin with their natural environment.

The genesis for “In This Together” was a commissioned mural on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 7th Street in Fernie called All Kinds of Beauty, completed in October 2019. For Hepher, the painting of the mural metamorphosed into both a personal emotional journey and a community project, with residents attracted to the work in progress, stopping to share their own unique experiences and reflections on life in the East Kootenay.

Eager to unearth commonalities and differences of Kootenay residents on a broader stage geographically, Hepher applied for funding to the Columbia Basin Trust for his next project, his objective “to visit other communities, to paint, to listen, to learn about what makes us unique and what binds us together.”

ARTICULATE 7

COVER STORY

SCHOOL DAYS

On the heels of the pandemic, Hepher’s emotional journey only intensified. While the form, colour and composition of the paintings of “In This Together” are a stark departure from Hepher’s signature impressionistic style of painting, the exhibition presciently embraces a new and ever more urgent meaning. With the mandating of health restrictions precipitating so much polarization, Hepher’s objective to create a body of work that encourages “a constructive way to dialogue” resonates powerfully. So many of us have used nature to seek solace and escape the isolating pathos of the pandemic.

From April 8 to May 14, AGOG will be hosting “Reality Check,” a collaborative exhibition of 12 pieces combining realistic acrylic paintings by Sabrina Curtis, mirrored with standalone photographs by Aine Falter. Three of the works are mixed media, realistic paintings on raw canvas interwoven into photographs. Falter credits the exhibit with “throwing people off. Is it a painting or is it a photograph?”

Both Falter and Curtis are Golden residents and attribute the surrounding alpine environment as “a platform for spurring insight and a perspective into our current realities and future possibilities.” Curtis says that the exhibit’s title was chosen to reflect that “while as individuals we may see things differently, we can still focus on what we have in common and move forward with a collective vision.”

Falter grew up in Colorado and has called Golden home for the past six years. Having earlier devoted his time to drawing and airbrushing, once Falter started a family he transitioned

to photography and particularly astrophotography— photographing the deep sky—after the sun set and his kids were tucked into bed.

An engineer by profession, Curtis has only been painting since 2020 and attributes her passion for the medium to “a drastic life pivot.” Suffering a concussion following a mountain bike accident, a friend suggested art as a therapeutic outlet. Curtis was surprised with how her artistic expression “came out so fluidly.” Enticed by the unknown, Curtis treats each painting as an adventure. On the 2021 Summit Bid website of the Alpine Club of Canada, Curtis describes the creative process as follows: “The awe of how things transpire on canvas, is almost as inspiring … as the wonder of the natural landscapes themselves.” Curtis has travelled all over the world but 20 years ago she unequivocally decided to settle in the Kootenays.

And Curtis is not alone. According to Tammy Prather, curator of AGOG, the demographics of Golden are shifting. The local art scene is growing and Golden, like many communities in the Kootenays, is at a crossroads. “Local artists are seeking more exposure of their work,” says Prather. And while AGOG is pivoting to oblige, the next time I’m driving west on the TransCanada, I’ll be stopping for more than gas at the crossroads with Highway 95 and looking forward to checking out what’s happening at AGOG. kickinghorseculture.ca/art-gallery-of-golden Barbara D. Janusz lives and writes in Crowsnest country.

EMPIRE OF DIRT RESIDENCY EoD is offering a residency this fall for THREE professional and emerging Columbia Basin artists in support of research, reflection and experimentation in three live/work studios.

September 2022 Residency applications will be evaluated by a review panel of established artists and curators.

EoD is a place where 'chance' is a process of creation.

For application process and more details about the emerging artist residency program, email empireofdirtresidency@gmail.com.

EoD is on the unceded traditional territory of the Yaqan Nukiy within the Ktunaxa Nations (otherwise known as Creston, BC).

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LEGACY OF LEARNING CONNECTS THE BASIN

by Erin Knutson Since its inception in 2013, the Legacy of Learning Project has built bridges in the community. The Columbia Basin Institute of Regional History (CBIRH) has partnered successfully with School Districts #5 and #6 to preserve the unique educational history of the communities in those areas.

Through the partnerships, the CBIRH has brought childhood roots back to life. Its mission is to preserve and save precious school memorabilia through multimedia presentations, yearbook displays and the archiving and exhibition of artifacts.

As the project expands, the delivery methods continue to grow as the CBIRH team embarks on a journey to tell the story of the Columbia Basin’s history through its schools.

“Our community needs to know from whence it came, what the training ground was where we learned to proceed civilly,” says CBIRH historian and founder, Derryll White.

White recognized a need to prevent further losses when he saw the disposal of school items with the change of an administration or the closing of a school. People’s lives and childhood memories forever lost to the abyss of a landfill or a basement sparked the movement by the CBIRH to ensure that institutional memory remained a vital part of local history.

“Right now, we are working on growing the network and letting communities in these districts know that we are collecting the educational legacy of the region,” says White.

According to White, unearthing the foundations on which society is built through the education of young people while preserving and presenting these collective educational memories through different mediums is paramount to the area’s identity. “School memories are things that build as one grows older, fostering a pleasing sense of community.”

The impetus for the project resulted from a combination of elements, including the work of SD#5 trustee and CBIRH board chair Chris Johns. Johns was instrumental in developing and constructing a relationship with the school districts. A lifelong educator, Johns’ interest in preserving the legacy of his students was part of the vision to create multimedia exhibits for several locations, including the SD#5 and #6 board offices, the Kootenay Learning Campus and First Perk Coffee House in Jaffray. “It’s part of the mission to protect school legacy through the storage and preservation of it,” he says.

CBIRH board chair and SD#5 Trustee Chris Johns (left) and CBIRH founder Derryll White celebrate the installation of a Jaffray history digital display at the First Perk Coffee House.

Photo: Erin Knutson

Johns believes that learning about school history is vital to progress.

However, without an attempt to retain and showcase school history, the story at the foundational level has missing pieces. “Learnings about the past are lessons going forward,” he says.

With the help of SD#5 board chair Frank Lento, Johns transformed the CBIRH office in Cranbrook to include an archives room for artifact storage and to house a school trophy exhibit. The room itself is a mark of progress for the project and the CBIRH. It continues to evolve, representing a change for the Institute, which has grown despite the pandemic and ever-changing funding streams in the heritage, arts and culture sector.

Along with former CBIRH executive director and current business manager Anna Majkowski, volunteers, donations and the help of board members, the Legacy of Learning Project is beginning to find traction with the goal to encompass the entire Columbia Basin.

“We want to look at how different the Kootenays are compared with larger areas. Working on this project has helped us define Basin culture, which is different from the Lower Mainland and rooted in schools,” says Majkowski.

Majkowski emphasizes that grad boards (thumbnails of individual grad class photos) and yearbooks are being siphoned off and discarded, erasing valuable school landmarks. “If we don’t have access to these visuals, childhood memories are lost, people’s roots to their communities are lost.”

As the project proceeds, representing all the schools within the region and showcasing their history is at the forefront of the CBIRH’s agenda. “Legacy of Learning will help foster ideas for the communities about where they’ve grown up and where they’ve come from while documenting and providing an opportunity to learn from the past. Community starts with the schools,” says Majkowski.

As the CBIRH moves forward with this project and others, school history is one way the Institute will continue with its mandate to protect and showcase local history.

For more information on the CBIRH, visit basininstitute.org.

To view the organization’s work in the South Country visit trianglewomensinstitute.ca.

Erin Knutson is the executive director of the Columbia Basin Institute of Regional History.

ARTICULATE 9

COLLECTIVE SPACES

COLLECTIVE SPACES Creston. From the very beginning, they envisioned Tilted Brick as an artist-run endeavour so that it could be responsive to the creative community in our valley and be a place where local artists could engage with one another to share art and ideas.

This Z’otz* Collective vinyl mural was installed as part of a remote residency at Oxygen Art Centre in 2020.

Photos courtesy Oxygen Art Centre

ARTIST-RUN CENTRES Accessibility and community engagement

by Lisa Benschop In Canada, the contemporary art world is primarily made up of commercial and institutional galleries, as one might reasonably expect, but we’re also fortunate to have a vast network of artist-run centre galleries and collectives across the country. Artist-run centres (ARCs) are a uniquely Canadian format of gallery where the space is operated by practising artists with the express intent of providing opportunities for art forms that don’t fit particularly well into typical public art spaces.

Artist-run centres arose in Canada in the 1960s, as many artists began to explore artforms that challenged traditional norms or that blended creative forms (such as performance, public intervention or highly political art) and found there was nowhere for them to show their work. For an artist, the process of making work really culminates in its being viewed and discussed by an interested audience.

To fill the void in representation and participation in the art world, artists began organizing their own gallery shows by finding accessible, if unusual, spaces and volunteering their time and resources to make them work. Over time, the artist-run centre model gained traction and groups of artists in different cities learned from each other. There are now hundreds of galleries and community art spaces operating in this way across Canada. The Kootenays are home to two artist-run centres: Tilted Brick Gallery in Creston and Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson.

What sets ARCs apart from other kinds of galleries is that they (almost always) operate as registered non-profit organizations, and they operate with a board of directors that is (usually) made up almost entirely of practising artists or creative practitioners of some sort. The board oversees both the day-to-day operations and the

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Now in its third year of exhibition programming, Tilted Brick Gallery invites local and visiting artists to present personal or experimental projects or to make new works specifically for their exhibitions—the work they’d make if they were not concerned about selling it, and work that wasn’t being shared in Creston because there just wasn’t really a place for it. Exhibitions featuring artists from Calgary, Vancouver and elsewhere in Western Canada have introduced new people and modes of artmaking to the local community. A second location on Canyon Street, Tilted Brick ArtSpace, has become a place to offer workshops and classes, build a shared studio community, and host screenings, talks and performances in partnership with arts groups in other disciplines.

StudioGift Sho p

Oxygen Art Centre painting class.

programming of exhibitions and other activities. With a budget made up from grants, donations and revenue-generating activities, ARCs pay exhibition fees to the artists who show work. Across Canada many ARCs are well established enough to have permanent paid staff positions and to undertake other activities such as print publication, collaborating to create festivals and maintaining connections among ARCs in provincial and national associations.

Every ARC has a different “personality” or specific focus, depending on who its founders were, what need in the creative community they set out to address and how they situate themselves within the broader contemporary art scene and their city or town. In the case of Nelson’s Oxygen Art Centre, the group of artists who instigated its creation had all previously been co-workers at the Kootenay School of Art until changes in government funding prompted KSA to dissolve the visual art and writing programs and abruptly dismiss the entire teaching staff from both departments. So, when they were discussing and organizing what was at first the Nelson Fine Art Society and later become Oxygen, their priority was to build a learning environment and a place for artists and writers to gather, share work and talk to one another.

Throughout its now-20-year history, Oxygen has maintained a focus on education, dedicating nearly a third of its annual programming to courses, workshops and community engagement.

The residencies and exhibitions uphold this focus on career development and support for learning, in that all of the projects and activities they present emphasize the process of making art, providing the time and space for artists to build new bodies of work on-site and welcoming the public to engage in that process along the way.

Jim Wallis and Marnie Temple, who spearheaded the Tilted Brick Gallery, had learned from their experience with artist-run culture in Calgary about the tremendous value and potential of grassroots organizing in the art scene, and they brought that enthusiasm to

One nearly universal feature of ARCs is that they don’t charge entry fees to view the work in their spaces, and they prioritize accessibility for things that do come with a ticket price or registration fee. Gallery staff are happy to answer questions and often there will be an explanatory essay or catalogue to help viewers connect to the work. In the context of the Kootenays, artist-run centres open a door, helping locally based artists reach out into the broader art scene across Canada, while also bringing artists from elsewhere to share their work here, with us. Artist-run centres expand possibilities for artists and audiences alike and feed our communities in so many subtle and profound ways.

Oxygen Art Centre, #3-320 Vernon St. (alley entrance), Nelson. oxygenartcentre.org Tilted Brick Gallery, 101 Canyon Street and ArtSpace 112 Northwest Blvd., Creston. tiltedbrickgallery.ca Lisa Benschop is a Creston-based interdisciplinary artist who makes mixed media works, photography, text-based or performative interventions and found object installations.

ARTICULATE 11

LANDSCAPE & HISTORY

LANDSCAPE & HISTORY In a studio visit before the exhibition, Wallace mentioned that ink and machine-stitched drawings on the panels represent patterns that occur in the geological fabric of rock. Imagine my surprise to learn this scientific term, geological fabric, for the arrangement of elements (minerals, textures, fossils, layers) that make up rock.

The fabric of a rock shows the pattern of its route to existence in solid form. This fact makes even more sense of the central works in the exhibition, even though you don’t need to be a geologist to be enthralled by them. They strongly suggest the feminine that characterizes Wallace’s confident visual thinking.

CAROL

WALLACE

The feminization of geology

The panels have names that indicate their formation: pillow lava, wave ripples, mud cracks, granitic texture, conglomerate, coral and ductile textures. There’s a panel with needle-shaped crystals and one with basalt shards of glass. Some have wax paper shapes appliqued onto the organza that lend areas of opacity. One panel has all the chemical formulas for minerals in granitic rock, such as SiO2 for quartz. Biotite has the longest formula, over a metre. There’s a lot to see.

The exhibition includes a slide show of optical minerology in a separate room of the gallery. Digital images were taken through a petrographic microscope of thin section slides. The slides, as the name suggests, are thin slices of rock, mounted on a glass plate.

Because of the polarization of light, each mineral has its own specific colours, such as biotite’s bright yellow, green and blue.

This results in vibrantly coloured images of sensorial information big as a room, locked in a tiny slice of rock.

The slides are part of a love story; they are the property of Wallace’s partner, also a geologist. He’d asked her to be his assistant for the post-doctoral work he did in Nelson (1988) which resulted in the collection of the rocks the slides were made from. She turned down the offer and instead went to Atlin, B.C. They didn’t get together

by Susan Andrews Grace The title of Carol Wallace’s exhibition, “Give or Take a Few Million Years,” gives a first clue as to the vast concept of time that informs her artmaking. The exhibition includes drawings, three-dimensional works, video projection and sound. The works immerse you in an embodied understanding of planet Earth that mesmerizes as it informs. Wallace, also a geologist and an artist known for painting and drawing, has stepped into new territory. A geologist lives with a different perspective: she wants to know the geology underneath her feet as well as its history before it became the landscape in front of her.

For this exhibition Wallace left behind an anthropocentric and extraction point of view to present a feminization of geology.

An Instagram post by Wallace in January 2020 signalled a new beginning with the comment, “In the studio these days.” The accompanying image of a white sewing machine and a cloud of silk organza with a delicate white line of stitching through it announced a sharp turn in her practice.

Silk organza panels, the largest works in “Give or Take,” hang from the ceiling in vertical, staggered rows that invite you to come closer.

They take up the most space in the gallery and give a delicate, ethereal mood; they flutter as you displace air, walking around them to look more closely. The silk plays with light and makes shadows on the nearest wall.

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Carol Wallace at work.

Photo: Meghan Krause

used knowledge of earth to imagine sounds never heard, a sort of synaesthesia of hearing what you’re seeing.

the granite foundation of many of the buildings in Nelson and surrounding area, fascinates. No one tells you this in school!

In another turn of imagination, Wallace made small, exquisite stone sculptures that appear to burst with secrets. She split rocks that have been water-smoothed for centuries. Then she attached intricate, handmade clay epoxy forms on the split sides. The placement of the two halves, side by side, make a sort of fantastical cross-section.

Wallace collaborates with stone, showing us what hides in plain sight inside the vein of a rock. Her choice of silk organza made by worms leaps to a gentle aesthetic involving the human body as well as the earth from which we are made and to which we will return.

“Give or Take a Few Million Years” enchants as it makes beautiful sense and sense of beauty.

“Give or Take” portrays geology with tenderness, intimacy and concern. Wallace makes straightforward connections between rock and life. Many elements in granitic rock, listed on the panel of mineral formulas, also make up the chemistry of human flesh and bone. The fact that my body is made of the same material as

Left: “Give or Take a Few Million Years” installation. Ink and thread on silk organza, 2022.

Panels measure 42 inches by 8 feet.

Photos: Carol Wallace

Via headset, a soundscape of rock formation accompanies the video projection. No one knows what it sounds like when liquid turns to crystal, tens of kilometres below the surface. Wallace

Susan Andrews Grace is a poet, essayist and visual artist who lives in Nelson.

wkartscouncil.com

Above: Rock sculpture, epoxy clay on rock.

until 16 years later, but the slides remain a treasured aesthetic symbol of their relationship. The slides made their way into the show, sit on top of a clear mylar map of the Nelson Batholith, laid on a bed of satin.

“Give or Take a Few Million Years” will be on display at the Tilted Brick Gallery in Creston from July 22 to September 3. tiltedbrickgallery.ca, carolwallaceart.com

Supporting arts development since 1980!

ARTiculate magazine back issues �ootena� �rts ���ulle�n  �orks�o�s � �esources � ��uca�on � ���ocac� �ootena� �es��als � ��ents � �usiness ��� ARTICULATE 13

EVENTS

COVID-19: The status of public events and activities listed is current as of publication, but COVID-19 protocols may change at any time. Please check government and event websites for the latest updates.

ONGOING/ RECURRING Art Event Monthly Gallery Exhibitions Tues.–Sat. 1–5 pm Kimberley Arts at Centre 64, 64 Deer Park Ave., Kimberley 250-427-4919 info@kimberleyarts.com kimberleyarts.com Theatre “Newsies” Summer Youth Production See website for details Capitol Theatre, 421 Victoria St., Nelson 250-352-6363 capitolnelsonbc@gmail.com capitoltheatre.ca Exhibition Young Visions - School District 20 April 22–May 28 Kootenay Gallery of Art, 120 Heritage Way, Castlegar 250-365-3337 kootenaygallery@telus.net kootenaygallery.com

Live Music Music in the Park Thursdays June 16–Aug. 25, 7–8 pm Gyro Park, Trail 250-368-9669 info@trail-arts.com trail-arts.com

Art Event dig a hole in the garden June 11–July 17 Oxygen Art Centre, #3-320 Vernon St., Nelson 250-352-6322 info@oxygenartcentre.org oxygenartcentre.org

Exhibition Vestigial Trails - Jim Holyoak June 18–Aug. 20 Kootenay Gallery of Art, 120 Heritage Way, Castlegar 250-365-3337 kootenaygallery@telus.net kootenaygallery.com

Arts & Culture Event Art by Brian Buckrell & Art by Lori Korkola June 21–July 9 & July 12–30, Tues.–Sat. 11 am–4 pm Studio Connexion Art Gallery, 203 Fifth Ave. NW, Nakusp 250-265-8888 studioconnexion@telus.net studioconnexiongallery.com

Festival Kimberley First Saturdays July 2, Aug. 6, Sept. 3, Oct. 1 Kimberley Arts at Centre 64, 64 Deer Park Ave., & Downtown Kimberley 250-427-4919 info@kimberleyarts.com kimberleyarts.com

Arts & Culture Event The Night Market at Music in the Park Thursdays July 7 & Aug. 4, 5–8 pm Gyro Park, Trail 250-368-9669 info@trail-arts.com trail-arts.com

Art Event Authentic Food Battle: Angela Glanzmann + Stephanie Yee April 27–May 28 Oxygen Art Centre, #3-320 Vernon St., Nelson 250-352-6322 info@oxygenartcentre.org oxygenartcentre.org Art Event Art by Lorna Guild May & Art by Louise Ducharme May 13–28 & May 31–June 18, Tues.–Sat. 11 am–4 pm Studio Connexion Art Gallery, 203 Fifth Ave. NW, Nakusp 250-265-8888 studioconnexion@telus.net studioconnexiongallery.com MUSIC

Theatre Capitol Theatre Season 2022–2023 May 2022–July 2023 Capitol Theatre, 421 Victoria St., Nelson 250-352-6363 capitolnelsonbc@gmail.com capitoltheatre.ca

IN

Live Music REVY. Live Outside July 1–Aug. 27, 6–9 pm Grizzly Plaza, Revelstoke 250-814-9325 info@artsrevelstoke.com artsrevelstoke.com Concert Series Summer Kicks June 15–Aug. 10 Keith King Memorial Sports Field - 1501 Maple Dr., Golden 250-344-6186 info@kickinghorseculture.ca kickinghorseculture.ca

THE

PARK

THURSDAYS JUNE 16 TO AUGUST 25

NIGHT MARKETS

JULY 7 & AUGUST 4

FOOD BEER GARDEN MARKET TRAIL-ARTS.COM GYRO PARK, TRAIL 14 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Exhibition Transcience - Jan Kabatoff Aug. 27–Oct. 29 Kootenay Gallery of Art, 120 Heritage Way, Castlegar 250-365-3337 kootenaygallery@telus.net kootenaygallery.com Arts & Culture Event Art by Delree Dumont & Art by Ann Eynon Aug. 3–20 & Aug. 24–Sept. 10, Tues.–Sat. 11 am–4 pm Studio Connexion Art Gallery, 203 Fifth Ave. NW, Nakusp 250-265-8888 studioconnexion@telus.net studioconnexiongallery.com

EVENTS

Exhibitions at Gallery 2

JUNE Theatre Homecoming 2020 June 11, 7:30 pm Capitol Theatre, 421 Victoria St., Nelson 250-352-6363 capitolnelsonbc@gmail.com capitoltheatre.ca

May 7 – August 6

Context is Everything Monique Martin

JULY

Illuminated Collapse Jude Griebel

Theatre Triple Threat Experience THE LITTLE MERMAID JR. July 23, 3 pm & 7 pm & July 24, 3 pm The Bailey Theatre, 1501 Cedar Ave., Trail 250-368-9669 info@trail-arts.com thebailey.ca

August 20 – November 12

Monument 83 Keith Langergraber

AUGUST Arts & Culture Event Columbia Basin Culture Tour Aug. 6–7, 10 am–5 pm Various locations in the Columbia Basin 250-505-5505 admin@wkartscouncil.com cbculturetour.com Art Event Artist-in-Residence: Lucie Chan Aug. 3–27 Oxygen Art Centre, #3-320 Vernon St., Nelson 250-352-6322 info@oxygenartcentre.org oxygenartcentre.org

Art Event Exhibition: Lucie Chan Sept. 3–Oct. 1 Oxygen Art Centre, #3-320 Vernon St., Nelson 250-352-6322 info@oxygenartcentre.org oxygenartcentre.org

Festival Kimberley Kaleidoscope Arts Festival Aug. 20–27 Kimberley Arts at Centre 64 & downtown Kimberley 250-427-4919 info@kimberleyarts.com kimberleyarts.com

MAY

SEPTEMBER

Art Event Art of Adornment Wearable Art Show and Gala May 28 Rossland Miners’ Hall, 1765 Columbia Ave., Rossland 613-203-1494 rosslandarts@gmail.com rosslandartscouncil.com

Performance Dakhká Khwáan Dancers with DJ Dash Sept. 25, 7:30 pm Capitol Theatre, 421 Victoria St., Nelson 250-352-6363 capitolnelsonbc@gmail.com capitoltheatre.ca

524 Central Avenue | Grand Forks 250.442.2211 info@g2gf.ca | gallery2grandforks.ca Articulate-ad-ice cap.indd 1

In Their Hands Rocio Graham Image: Jude Griebel, Ice Cap, 2017

embracelocal 2/28/2022 1:03:32 PM

Did you know that by banking locally with our Credit Union you ensure a vibrant arts community and a dynamic cultural economy since decisions are kept close to home?

here to help

877.352.7207 nelsoncu.com Lucas Jmieff I Baldface

ARTICULATE 15

EVENTS

EVENTS “One of the best buildings in BC” Architecture Foundation of BC, 2014

March 11 – May 8

Rachel Yoder “By This Means: Ladders” Kootenay Lake Historical Society “Records of Lives”

May 13 - July 17

Bettina Matzkuhn “On Foot” Branda Avis TBA

July 22 - October 16

Tsuneko Kokubo retrospective “Of Light Itself ” Nikkei National Museum “Broken Promises”

Art Gallery • Theatre • Japanese Canadian Museum

447 A Avenue, Kaslo, B.C. www.thelangham.ca February 1 – 26 We-Paint! Group Art Exhibition March 1 – 26 Art Exhibition by Judy Winter “Between Two Worlds” March 16 New! Ceramics Studio Tour March 23 La Cafamore: Tango King Live Music March 25 Jeremy Furlong Standup Comedy Show March 29 – April 23 Victoria Page “My Friends & I” Group Art Exhibition April 1st Da-VIN-Ca Paint Night with Julie-Liu April 16 Live @ Studio 64: Melody Diachun Quartet: The Music of Sting April 26 – May 21 Adjudicated Young Artists – Open Art Exhibition

May 13 Live @ Studio 64: Red Dirt Skinners May 24 – June 5 Quilt Show June 7 – July 2 Artrageous -Open Art Exhibition June 25 Live @ Studio 64: Performer TBA July 2nd First Saturdays live music, vendors + more July 5 – 30 Art Exhibition by Barbara Maye – “Tectonic Perspectives” August 2-27 Kimberley Kaleidoscope Juried Art Show Open Art Exhibition August 6 First Saturdays live music, vendors + more August 20 – 27 Kimberley Kaleidoscope Festival Sep 3 First Saturdays live music, vendors + more

All art exhibitions are subject to future Covid-19 requirements.

MONTHLY CHANGING GALLERY EXHIBITIONS, LIVE MUSIC AND EVENTS

Columbia Basin Culture Tour Aug 6 & 7, 2022 10:00am - 5:00pm

Aug 15,the artists, shop for fine art and craft, view Meet

Explore artists’ studios, museums, art galleries and heritage sites through this free, self-guided tour within the Columbia Basin. demonstrations, special exhibitions, interpretive displays or chat with local historians during this two day long cultural celebration!

For further information visit our website or call.

A project of

Funded by

Fernie Forge - Eye of the Needle Studio

Visit www.kimberleyarts.com/calendar for details and to buy tickets!

Gallery and office hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 1 - 5 pm 64 Deer Park Avenue, Kimberley, BC

16 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

ARTICULATE 17

CHASING MONSTERS

CHASING MONSTERS and now settlers have shared this place with grizzlies and cougars, with whispers of Sasquatch stalking the forests and giant serpents swimming in the depths of lakes. Forest fires have always existed but recently they have taken on a new bestial life, swallowing whole villages and mountainsides. People retreat indoors from the fire to find the invisible monster known as COVID sneaking upon us in our workplaces, our schools and our homes.

JIM

HOLYOAK Following the vestigial trail

by Maggie Shirley Since childhood, Jim Holyoak has been fascinated by animals and monsters, mythology and biology, metamorphosis and hidden worlds. Throughout his life, drawing has been a way for him to contemplate the tension between the imagined and observed, the real and the unreal.

Holyoak’s art practice consists of drawing and writing, artists’ books and room-sized drawing installations. In parallel to his solo practice, Holyoak has orchestrated numerous collaborative drawing projects, often with Montreal-based artist Matt Shane, and sometimes involving hundreds of people drawing together. He graduated with a Master of Fine Art from Concordia University in Montreal and apprenticed with master ink-painter Shen Ling Xiang, in Yangshuo, China. Holyoak also holds a diploma in Elfs and Hidden People from the Icelandic Elfschool in Reykjavik.

Artwork has carried Holyoak throughout the world for projects, exhibitions and artist residencies, including in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iceland, England and the Nepalese Himalayas. At the dawn of 2018, Holyoak landed in one of his favourite corners of the planet, Nelson, B.C., where he met his partner, fellow artist and curator Genevieve Robertson.

From their shared backyard studio in Nelson, Holyoak remotely teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Some may consider monsters as a subject better left behind in youth, but monsters have been a part of culture as long as there has been culture, beginning with myths and legends and now heavily imbued in pop culture in the form of zombies, vampires and aliens.

Ideas of the monstrous are slippery because of their multitudinous meanings, and because monsters, by definition, transgress categories and boundaries. Stories of monsters appeal to all ages. In fact, Monster Theory, the scholarly study of monsters, is now an academic field of research.

18 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Holyoak will also create a large-scale, location-specific drawing during a 15-day residency between June 21 and July 8. There will be specified hours when the public will be invited to watch the work in progress. Within the exhibition space will hang collections of large and smaller-scale drawings depicting monstrous places and beings. To exhibit his book works, tables will be arranged for visitors to touch and read handmade zines, comics and sketchbooks.

The “Vestigial Trails” exhibition will also include a reading room with books about monsters, and a workshop area where visitors will be invited to draw and write on chalkboard walls and postcards to reflect and respond to questions such as: What is a monster? Where do monsters come from? Who is the monster? What do monsters tell us about ourselves?

The Thicket, 2016, charcoal and ink on paper. Photo: Paul Litherland

The monstrous offers a rich body of thought for philosophical contemplation and discussion. As Holyoak writes, “A ‘monster’ can be perceived as wonderful or terrible, wrathful or protective, human or non-human. Monsters are speculative beings that simultaneously don’t, did or might exist. They are the unknown, the misunderstood and the profoundly different. There are monstrous situations, behaviours and attitudes, monstrous feelings, places and times.” Monsters can represent the “other” in society and can stimulate feelings of empathy, cruelty and indifference. We can make strange with them or make kin. Rather than explaining away the monstrous, within his work, Holyoak seeks to expand, deepen, and complicate ideas around othering, with hopes of being a voice of tolerance.

More detailed information about programming will be available on the Kootenay Gallery website, kootenaygallery.com, closer to the date. Subscriptions to the gallery’s monthly e-newsletter can be had by emailing kootenaygallery@telus.net. Jim Holyoak’s work can be found at monstersforreal.com.

Maggie Shirley is the curator of the Kootenay Gallery in Castlegar.

She may or may not believe in monsters.

Jim Holyoak sketching Gimli Peak in Valhalla Provincial Park.

Photo courtesy Jim Holyoak

Holyoak’s drawings often take the form of arboreal wilderness and bodily mountains, as well as fossil, planktonic and other unlikely lifeforms, sketched from a melding of imagination, dream, memory and observation, from the field, in the studio and from sketchbooks kept while riding trains, ferries and buses. He has been working on a series of comics that tell strange tales of daydreaming creatures who wander from mountain paths, down into subway systems and forest holloways. Like the subjects Holyoak examines, he works on both micro and macro scales, from physically immersive wall drawings and constellations of smaller, discrete drawings, to psychologically immersive artists’ books, zines, comics and scrolls.

His interest in pairing drawing with written word has resulted in the Book of 19 Nocturnes, a 500-page, 19-chapter artist book that resembles an illustrated manuscript or a grimoire.

The Kootenay Gallery of Art in Castlegar has invited Holyoak to create an exhibition that will run from June 18 until August 20 called “Vestigial Trails”. This exhibition will feature works collected during Holyoak’s travels, as well as new works reflecting the shapes of the monstrous today as it relates to our lives in the Kootenays. The mountains, when blanketed in cloud or snow, in darkness or in smoke, can transform into unknown beings looming over the valleys at their feet. For millennia, Indigenous people !

FEATURING OVER 250 LOCAL AND CANADIAN ARTISTS & DESIGNERS OPEN MON-SAT( all year) and SUNDAYS (July, August & Sept)- 378 BAKER ST,

NELSON B.C 250-352-3006 -

WWW.CRAFTCONNECTION.ORG

ARTICULATE 19

JOYFUL NOISE

BROADCAST NEWS

THE NEXT EPISODE Podcasting the Kootenays

by Anne DeGrace

ACOUSTIC CORRESPONDENCE CREATES A SOUND PARTNERSHIP

by Margaret Tessman In a rather typical sign of the times we’re living in, Véronique Trudel and Émilie Leblanc Kromberg first met virtually before developing their artistic and personal relationship.

“We both have children who go to the same francophone school in Nelson, but we didn’t really know each other until we began collaborating,” says Leblanc Kromberg. “Our friendship evolved from the collaboration.”

It’s clear from the way Trudel and Leblanc Kromberg finish each other’s thoughts and spark off each other’s energy that they have found common ground for artistic expression and an appreciation for what each can offer the other.

Both women attended a November 2020 Oxygen Art Centre workshop with Nelson-based multimedia artist prOphecy sun. “Sonic Imaginaries” explored voice, frequencies and installation practices, as participants worked independently and collectively to build and produce a series of experimental sound compositions.

Trudel is a musician whose work up to then had been mostly intimate folk. “I’m an intuitive musician but I felt that I had reached a creative limit,” she says. “I’ve always liked electronic music, for example. I just didn’t know how to embrace it in my work.” Leblanc Kromberg is a multidisciplinary artist who trained as a goldsmith. Her work has evolved to incorporate photography, video and sound.

As part of the prOphecy sun workshop, students were asked to collaborate on free sound assignments using Audacity, a digital audio editor and recording application software. “We would find a soundscape that interested us and take turns sending it and adding to it,” says Trudel. “The experience was a little gift.”

The women agreed to continue sending each other audio files of sounds that intrigued them: footsteps, water, the whirring of a chairlift at the ski hill. Trudel would then add instrumentation and layer in a piece of text or a poem. The process became

20 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Émilie Leblanc Kromberg, “Moi j’connais.” “I have been using negatives and exploring double exposure lately. To me, it gives a reminiscence of another way of being or thinking.

That alternative states are possible and can be true.”

the thing. “We decided not to focus only on the product,” says Leblanc Kromberg. “Keeping a sense of playfulness was important to us.”

“We were in recess mode,” says Trudel. “It fed us as humans and mothers and gave us a creative medium. The collaboration became more than just us. We met somewhere in the middle.

“It’s the process and growth that inspire us.”

“When Véronique and I brainstorm we practise saying ‘Yes and’ instead of ‘Yes but.’ All ideas are good no matter how absurd, and these thoughts bring us to other thoughts,” says Leblanc Kromberg.

In partnership with AFKO, the West Kootenay francophone association, Trudel and Leblanc Kromberg expanded their artistic partnership into the community by starting a creative book club. Not your typical reading and discussing and wine drinking book club, though. Instead, each member has a month to create something on a specific theme and then post it to Padlet, a real-time collaborative web platform.

Each morning Bob Keating irons a fresh shirt and dresses for the office—across the hall in his home. He’s at his desk by 7 a.m.

“It’s a trick I play on myself,” says the former CBC reporter, recently retired and with a mittful of awards to show for his long career. “Often I don’t see anyone all day, but I wear a pressed shirt.

No jeans.”

This strategy may have helped Keating avoid retirement-related productivity pitfalls, but getting down to work is easy when you’re tackling projects you’re passionate about. In a sidestep from live radio, Keating has jumped headfirst into podcasting. And he loves it.

A recent passion of Keating’s is an eight-episode series called The Headwaters, a project of Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine (KMC) in partnership with the Columbia Basin Trust. Keating loves its scope of stories and voices, and that it’s rooted in the region he knows best. “Not a single person from outside the Kootenays is involved,” he says. This includes reporters, subjects and even the soundtrack by Nelson musician Jesse Lee. “Headwaters has been a blast.”

Topics range from tech and innovation to women adventurers, saving species and reducing our carbon footprint. Each episode features different reporters: Castlegar journalist and historian Greg Nesteroff covers the Doukhobor story, for example, while travel writer Jayme Moye interviews record-setting highliner Mia Noblet.

“We don’t want it to be what you expect,” Keating says.

KMC co-publisher and editor-in-chief Mitchell Scott intros most of the episodes. The project, he explains, came about through a conversation with CBT about ways they could work together to do something creative, tell compelling stories and reach a younger demographic—one that may not be familiar with the work of the Trust, but that is KMC’s readership.

“All of our episode themes align with CBT’s core communication pillars: environment, technology, climate and culture,” explains Scott. In keeping with the storytelling heart of the magazine,

“We’re just telling stories we think our readers will find interesting.”

Scott is enthusiastic about the project—poised to roll out in May— and about Keating’s involvement. “Through his experience he is a great producer, great writer, good in the field, good interviewer and he had podcasts under his belt already. He loves KMC and he gets the Trust.”

Indeed, Keating has produced more than 60 podcasts. His training ground was a series he created called The Writer’s Block, which includes such disparate subjects as a eulogy writer, an A-list romance novelist and a wonderful, gravelly interview with singersongwriter James McMurtry, undersung brother of the celebrated author of Lonesome Dove. These he created while still at the CBC “to see if I had the chops to do it.”

He did. Next came Kootenay Time, a 10-episode series that traces Keating’s career as a reporter through stories he covered, and which first aired on CBC’s North by Northwest. Among these are “Rumours of Extinction,” about the Sinixt nation; “Winning the Punk Rock Lottery,” the story of BCDC; and “The Bear Dude,” the Kootenay cannabis grower who enlisted local bears as security.

Keating also created 41 podcast episodes for the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation.

Recently, he’s been working on The Ocean Project (theoceanproject. ca). This podcast, created for the conservation organization Oceans North, has taken him from the southern tip of Vancouver Island to the northern tip of Baffin Island. Keating and co-host Colleen Turlo offer a casual-smart, engaging exploration into aspects of, and human impact on, Canada’s oceans.

Keating loves what podcasting offers creatively. “With longer form stories I get to dig in, really tell a story,” he says. Yet however well you might tell that story, with a million-odd podcasts created each year in North America, Keating knows that to be heard, “you have to rise above the noise” with good marketing and engaging content.

That’s echoed by Anthony Sanna, a digital media content producer and marketer who bills himself as a “social media smarty-pants.”

Sanna produces the community news show Kootenay Morning for Kootenay Co-op Radio, and he mentors new programmers at the station. He teaches the online course “Podcasting 101” for Selkirk College, sharing the knowledge he’s gained mostly by doing: for five

Also in the works is a public installation of their sound collaborations, “Acoustic Correspondence,” which they plan to launch in Nelson this summer. “At some point you want a way to share your work when you’re feeling good about it,” says Trudel. The installations will include imagery and/or words and a QR code that listeners can scan to download the soundscapes.

The idea stretches the boundaries of public art and might just become its own version of Nelson’s ArtWalk.

You can listen to excerpts from a couple of “Acoustic Correspondence” works here: instagram.com/correspondance_ acoustique; facebook.com/Correspondanceacoustique. And you can find Trudel and Leblanc Kromberg’s websites here: emilieleblanckromberg.com/correspondance-acoustique; vtrudel.com/correspondance-acoustique

ARTICULATE 21

BROADCAST NEWS years he’s produced Fusion Health Radio with traditional Chinese medicine practitioner Michael Smith. He’s noticed tremendous growth in both podcast production and consumption.

“Social media has introduced new ways of obtaining information that wasn’t possible before. We also have social media overload and information fatigue,” he explains. “Podcasting has grown in popularity because it is storytelling. It’s a delicious thing. Since we sat around the fire, we’ve been telling stories to one another. People have rediscovered long-form audio content. It’s something you can enjoy when you’re walking, doing the dishes, driving the car.”

Sanna thinks that appreciation for podcasting has picked up during COVID because people have time on their hands. In a silver lining to pandemic fallout, we are ready to slow down and engage. “Social media is reactionary; podcasting is a dialogue. There’s a real honesty to learning things through the audio form that’s missed in other forms. I always feel good about whatever it is I’ve heard through a podcast,” he says. “I feel I’m a better person for having learned something through listening.”

Statistics suggest that Sanna is not alone. The American digital marketing firm Neal Schaffer reports “explosive growth” in podcast

production of more than 20 percent between 2020 and 2021, and—in part due to increased smartphone use—a continuous rise in listenership, with 67 percent of audiences being between 18 and 44. There’s that younger demographic that CBT hopes to reach with the help of Bob Keating, Mitchell Scott and that all-star Kootenay cast.

For Keating, a great podcast is one that is fully captivating.

“Engage. Enlighten if you can. Draw the listener in and hold them with the sound, the voice, the writing,” he says. “The key is telling stories that the listener cannot pull themselves away from.”

He’s pressed and ready for the next one.

To learn about creating your own podcast, check selkirk.ca for the next offering of “Podcasting 101” with Anthony Sanna, and emlfestival. com for Bob Keating’s podcast workshop during the Elephant Mountain Literary Festival, June 23–27 in Nelson.

The Show always goes on

The Capitol Theatre in nelson presents...

Our 34th annual summer youth Program

Anne DeGrace is a writer, editor, podcast-consumer, story-lover, and incorrigible volunteer. She lives in Bonnington, B.C. Mitchell Scott, Bob Keating and Jayme Moye gather in Keating’s studio to work on a new episode of The Headwaters.

Photo: Mitchell Scott

Based on the real-life Newsboy Strike of 1899, this Disney musical tells the story of Jack Kelly, a rebellious newsboy who dreams of a life as an artist away from the big city. After publishing giant Joseph Pulitzer raises newspaper prices at the newsboys' expense, Kelly and his fellow newsies take action.

your community-owned grocery store

2022-2023 Season launch September 6, 2022

eat well. be well.

Pick from a variety of choices of season subscriptions and SAVE on shows!

777 Baker Street, Nelson

The Capitol Theatre Presents

Open Daily 8am-8pm

local, national and international artists in live theatre, music, dance, comedy & more

www.kootenay.coop

July 28th, 29th, 30th & 31st

A SAMPLING OF KOOTENAY PODCASTS The Headwaters offers all-Kootenay stories, available wherever you get your podcasts and through ourtrust.org/ or mountainculturegroup.com/magazines/kootenay/ Kootenay Time highlights some of Bob Keating’s stories while he was a broadcast journalist for the CBC. kootenaytimepodcast.com/ Fusion Health Radio features conversations with Dr. Michael Smith, Anthony Sanna and guest health professionals about your health journey. fusionhealthradio.com/ Homeschool Mama Self-Care offers support and advice for homeschooling parents with educator and advocate Teresa

22 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Wiedrick. Available on Apple Podcasts.

Peach Pear Plum Parenting Podcast is a project of the Kootenay Kids Society with hosts Nicole Purvis and Jen Gawne, supporting parents to raise healthy kids. Available on PodBean.

Sound of the Kootenays with Al Woodman interviews Kootenay musicians including Adham Shaikh, Craig Korth, The Hillties and others. Available on Apple Podcasts.

This Black Bear Has 28 Minutes by students at Selkirk College, featuring author readings, radio plays, interviews, panel discussions and more. Available on Apple Podcasts.

photo credit: GBCreative

2022/2023 Season sneak peek:

Dakhka Khwaan Dancers & DJ Dash September 25th at 7:30PM Learn more or buy tickets on our website:

www.capitoltheatre.ca

Phone: 250.352.6363 421 Victoria street, Nelson, BC box office tuesday-friday ARTICULATE 23

BIRTH STORIES

BIRTH STORIES

THE WAY

THEY CAME

Beautiful & horrific & ugly & magnificent

by Margaret Tessman Ellie Reynolds’ one-woman show, The Way They Came, had its genesis in her pregnancy and birthing experience with her third child. The night the baby was born, Reynolds (nine months pregnant) and her husband Charles decided that laying a new floor in their living room would be a good idea. That was the biggest “oops!” moment possible, to put it mildly.

Reynolds started haemorrhaging and after a crazy drive to the hospital with her midwife (there were no ferries running at that time of night, and they hit a deer on the dark Kootenay road) the baby was delivered by emergency caesarean. The doctor later told Reynolds that if they had arrived 10 minutes later, both she and the baby would have died. “Everything that could go wrong did,” she says.

Fast-forward five years. Reynolds already had one successful onewoman show under her belt, Matchmaker on the Roof, a joyful musical romp through her decision to leave England for Canada and to secretly marry Charles, a much older man. Reynolds worked with local musician and actor Bessie Wapp to develop and stage Matchmaker and the two picked up where they left off to get The Way They Came ready for the stage. “It was magical working with Bessie a second time.”

This time, though, the material was fraught with emotional hurdles, not least of which were feelings of shame and blame that this birth experience had not been perfect. “I had two lovely home births,” says Reynolds. “I had read all the books. I didn’t want to know anything about caesareans.” Reynolds put out a call on Facebook for women who had experienced caesarean births and who were willing to talk to her about it. “I connected with twenty-five or thirty women. There was a lot of crying involved and huge feelings of loss, of having missed out, especially if they had immersed themselves in the culture of natural childbirth.”

Many of the women Reynolds heard from felt that because they had not actually lost their babies, they were not allowed to express their feelings of inadequacy and disappointment. As one woman pointed out, “Nobody ever asked us.” As well, new mothers are just not given the space to talk about and process birth. “There’s a baby to deal with, twenty-four/seven,” says Reynolds. “I felt I had to tell my story and start a conversation. We were all born, right? We all had our own birth experiences. We all have a creation story. How does our passage into the world shape us and our way through life?”

With the support of Wapp and a grant from the Trust through the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance, Reynolds found a way to stage the work, debuting five performances in a yoga studio on the East Shore in the fall of 2021. “It was a very feminine space for a very womblike play,” she says. “And the audience response was exactly what I hoped I would get.” Reynolds found that the play started some long, emotional conversations: a 60-year-old woman who hadn’t grieved her caesarean; men who realized that they had “never thought about it”; women whose experiences were still too fresh and were going to go home and cry more; doulas and other birth professionals who appreciated the show’s honesty. “Birth can be beautiful and horrific and ugly and magnificent,” says Reynolds.

“It’s a lonely time being pregnant. We’re away from our village.

There isn’t any good language to talk about the dark places we can go during pregnancy, birth and death.”

Wapp helped to simplify the stage props that all serve multiple purposes: a curtain becomes part of a hospital room scene; a scrim is transformed into a shadow puppetry screen; tapestries embroidered by Reynolds’ mother evoke family and shared history.

Some characters speak in voice-overs, such as the Divine Mother and the Voice of Contempt, that horrible inner voice we try to suppress. “Even my uterus talks, kind of like a cheering section: ‘C’mon, let’s make a baby!’” says Reynolds. The show is 70 minutes long, but Reynolds assures me that for all the intensity, “there is also lots of comic relief.”

Wapp describes Reynolds as “such a willing actor with great physicality. She did multiple birthing scenes with lots of writhing around.” The staging came together at warp speed over the course of three Monday and Tuesday sessions. “Our symbiotic working relationship enabled us to move quickly,” says Wapp. Reynolds’ husband Charles created the lighting effects and was soldering wires together right up to the last minute before the first performance. “It gave me fits,” says Wapp. “I kept saying, ‘What is plan B? What is plan B?’” Reynolds says that she is looking forward to dusting the cobwebs off and sharing the play again. “I’d like to keep performing it as long as possible,” she says. “I felt more changed by my third birth experience and that’s why I wanted to write the play. The best solo shows are transformative in some way.”

To connect with Ellie, find out about future shows in the Basin area, or if you’re interested in bringing The Way They Came to your community, please follow or send a message to facebook.com/elliesolotheatre.

Reynolds really knuckled down to writing during a “COVID treat” for herself: a Zoom group for solo performers that met once a week with a facilitator in Los Angeles. The participants were asked to each present 10 minutes of material a week. “Everyone else in the group was able to put on a public performance in some way,” says Reynolds. “I thought I’d never be able to perform it.”

Sharing her experiences around the birth of her third child was at the root of Ellie Reynolds’ one-woman show, The Way They Came.

Photo courtesy Ellie Reynolds

24 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Reynolds did an early reading of the play for Wapp and Luanne Armstrong. “They both have fantastic eyes and ears for language and staging,” says Reynolds. Nonetheless, Reynolds says that the changes the play went through felt like torture. “I couldn’t find a way to tell it, and you never can tell how it’s going to go until you’re in front of an audience. It’s important being together in some room to feel something as a group.”

AUGUST 12-14, 2022

JUNE 24/JULY 29/SEPT 4/2022

ARTICULATE 25

FIRST PEOPLES

FIRST PEOPLES

RIC GENDRON

In Gendron’s work you can see the impact of the Sn̓ ʕay̓ ckstx diaspora. In the Sinixt language there is not a term that appropriately describes either the declared extinction of the Sinixt people or the coming home after the landmark Desautel decision in May of 2021. The artwork displayed in Revelstoke was important to Gendron in representing the return of the First People of the area, a theme that is unique in his work. Much of Gendron’s art reflects cultural and spiritual influences and the impact that music has had in his life. Gendron is an accomplished guitar musician as well as visual artist.

The Revelstoke mural’s special beauty is the reflection of all Sinixt ancestors; even Gendron as a child is portrayed in the images.

During the dedication of the piece during the 2021 LUNA Fest, Gendron spoke about the image of Crow that often shows up in his work regardless of what its original focus might have been. During his visit to Revelstoke, he was amazed at the size of the mountains and beauty of the water. This was his first time travelling so far north and it was indeed a coming home.

A Revelstoke school class answers questions about Sinixt history, with Ric Gendron’s diptychs in the background.

Photo: Rob Buchanan

Coming Home

by Shelly Boyd Ric Gendron is a Sinixt visual artist who has created two giant diptychs for Revelstoke’s Art Alleries, downtown alleyways that are being transformed into outdoor art galleries. Both pieces, entitled Coming Home, are densely populated by Sn̓ ʕay̓ ckstx (Sinixt/Arrow Lakes) faces past and present, alongside many Indigenous symbols. These vibrant and figurative works boldly confirm the deep connection to Revelstoke that Gendron’s people share with the land. Sn̓ ʕay̓ ckstx, which translates to “place of the bull trout people,” are the people of the Upper Columbia Basin.

This is their homeland.

Gendron is a prominent Native artist of the Pacific Northwest.

He has held exhibitions throughout the region and his work is featured in the Marmot Art Space in Spokane, the Missoula Art Museum, the Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, to name a few.

The images that make up the mural are a good place to begin to learn about the First People of Revelstoke, the story that took them away and, more importantly, the journey that has been paved with determination, spiritual guidance and strength of a people. Coming Home is being integrated into the SD#19 K–12 curriculum using educational tools and resources designed for Revelstoke students to learn about the Sinixt culture, its rich history and its peoples. Utilizing their resources, elementary and secondary Aboriginal Education assistants Marlene Krug and Lisa Moore encourage students to identify the symbolism and historical figures that come alive through Gendron’s work.

Gendron also began work on a mural on the exterior of the Capitol Theatre in Nelson in 2019, but that project was put on hold because of COVID restrictions. Nelson & District Arts Council director Sydney Black says that the location for the mural could potentially change, but she projects an early June completion date. “We are honoured to have the chance to support Ric as he creates a new mural in Nelson,” says Black.

“This mural project has been in the works since the fall of 2019, and we are delighted that it is becoming a reality. Ric is a prolific artist with a deep, ancestral connection to this place, and our community will be richer because we will have the opportunity to experience his work.”

101 Canyon 101 Canyon StreetStreet Creston, Creston, BC BC

www.tiltedbrickgallery.ca www.tiltedbrickgallery.ca

EXHIBITION EXHIBITION SCHEDULE SCHEDULE Tranquility Tranquility April 15April to May 15 to 28,May 2022 28, 2022 Barb Fyvie Barbcreated Fyvie created over a over hundred a hundred small studies small studies during during the the early months early months of the pandemic of the pandemic to support to support this collection this collection of of paintings paintings that offer thatquiet, offercontemplative quiet, contemplative solitude solitude for thefor the viewer.viewer.

Blossom Blossom June 3 June to July 3 16, to July 2022 16, 2022 Creston Creston artist Alison artist Masters’ Alison Masters’ new work newinvestigates work investigates the the symbolic symbolic meaning meaning of the blossom of the blossom resulting resulting in delicate in delicate and and colourful colourful experimentations experimentations of paintings, of paintings, sculpture, sculpture, and stilland still projections. projections.

Give orGive Take orATake Few A Million Few Million Years Years July 22 July to September 22 to September 3, 20223, 2022 Carol Wallace Carol Wallace offers aoffers sensorial a sensorial and ethereal and ethereal exploration exploration of of magnified magnified crystal crystal and layers and of layers earth, of an earth, installation an installation that offers that offers an immersive an immersive experience experience of geologic of geologic phenomena. phenomena.

The Whisperer The Whisperer in Darkness in Darkness September September 9 to October 9 to October 29, 2022 29, 2022 Creston-based Creston-based artist Larry artistMcDowell Larry McDowell uses hand-built uses hand-built electronic electronic devicesdevices and instruments and instruments to produce to produce complex complex atonal atonal sound sound performances performances and droning and droning noise installations. noise installations.

ARTSPACE ARTSPACE

112 Northwest 112 Northwest Blvd,Blvd, Creston Creston BC BC

‘Artists, Musicians, Writers... At Work’ showcases the talent of artists of all disciplines throughout the West Kootenay. Do you have a new piece of art to share, a book to launch or a CD release? Contact the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council at 250-352-2421, 1-800-850-2787 or email wkrac@telus.net for more information on how to be featured on this page!

26 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

For bird lovers a Field Guide of sorts Don Konrad 778.463.2020 www.thenarrowsbc.com

Artspace Artspace provides provides a community a community environment environment that brings that brings together together practising practising and aspiring and aspiring artistsartists from across from across the Creston the Creston Valley,Valley, providing providing opportunities opportunities to share to share learnings, learnings, exhibitexhibit work, work, collaborate collaborate on projects on projects and invite and the invite public the public into meaningful into meaningful conversations conversations about about art. art.

SUMMER SUMMER WORKSHOP WORKSHOP SERIES SERIES with visiting with visiting artists:artists: Barb Fyvie Barb -Fyvie Abstract - Abstract Painting Painting with Oil with & Cold Oil & Wax Cold Wax Mark Mark Holliday Holliday - Encaustic - Encaustic Painting Painting | Mark | Mark Johnsen Johnsen - Printmaking - Printmaking | Esteban | Esteban PerezPerez - Soundwalk - Soundwalk For more Forinformation, more information, please please visit artspacecreston.com visit artspacecreston.com or email ortiltedbrickgallery@gmail.com. email tiltedbrickgallery@gmail.com.

ARTICULATE 27

NEW & NOTEWORTHY

NEW & NOTEWORTHY

LUANNE ARMSTRONG

GOING TO GROUND: ESSAYS ON AGING, CHRONIC PAIN AND THE HEALING POWER OF NATURE Caitlin Press, 2022 Luanne Armstrong is intimately tied to the landscapes of the East Shore of Kootenay Lake, having lived on her family’s farm there all her life. The sky, the water and the mountains are her bellwethers, and she observes and shares them with love and frankness. On her daily strolls down to the water with her cat, Armstrong can measure the passage of time through shifting cloud formations and the aches and pains of getting older.

In this warm and tender new collection of essays, Armstrong delivers a blend of self-reflection, nature-inspired philosophy and social critique. Filled with a lifetime’s worth of wisdom and astonishing prose, Armstrong’s vignettes get deeply personal about what it means to recover from traumatic brain injury, grow older when you’ve fallen in love with being needed, and slow down enough to listen to nature, even when the message isn’t what you were expecting to hear.

Governor General’s Literary Award finalist Donna Kane writes, “With honesty and unsentimental acuity, Going to Ground charts the losses that come with the passing of time and the beauty that remains. ‘So much to know, still. So happy to learn it, out here, on the edge of knowledge and understanding.’ This is a book filled with grief and joy but most of all wonder. This is a book to love.” caitlin-press.com/our-books/going-to-ground/

DON AND ERICA KONRAD

MICHAEL CONE

MARILYN JAMES AND TARESS ALEXIS

A PLAY ON BIRDS

CONNECTING THE KOOTENAYS: THE KOOTENAY LAKE FERRIES; A HUNDRED YEARS OF SERVICE, 1921–2020

NOT EXTINCT: KEEPING THE SINIXT WAY

Self-published, 2022 A Play on Birds is a collaboration between two artists—father and daughter—in which the traditional writer/illustrator roles were reversed.

The father, Don Konrad, a retired journalist, writer and editor, created the birds in watercolour and casein. Erica Konrad is a well-known Nelson abstract painter, amateur birder and environmentalist interested in all things natural. When she first saw different bird characters Don had completed, Erica was inspired to start the research and writing: a field guide of sorts. Not a birder himself, Don nevertheless was motivated to create more birds as a result of travels to exotic locales, conducting watercolour workshops aboard cruise ships.

The birds are quirky, imaginary characters from the mind and the hand of an artist. The text is part fiction, part fact, harbouring secrets that connect to real places and birds on the planet. The authors hope to engage everyone, whether layperson, amateur birder or accomplished birdwatcher, and make them smile. A treasure hunt of sorts, entertaining the eye and informing the mind.

Funding for the project was provided by the Trust through the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. A Play on Birds is available in Nelson at the Kootenay Crate Co., Touchstones Museum, or online at thenarrowsartistretreat@gmail.com.

SEAN ARTHUR JOYCE

WORDS FROM THE DEAD: RELEVANT READINGS IN THE COVID AGE Ekstasis Editions, 2022 In a world dominated by social media sound bites and the indiscriminate dissemination of information, the lessons of history can take a back seat to swallowing piecemeal what is being fed to us. It seems that even a basic working knowledge of classic literature and philosophy is no longer deemed necessary or useful in order to understand and interpret the present.

In addition to the daily hype on offer, we struggle with COVID brain to make sense of a world that continues to shift under our feet.

In Words from the Dead, New Denver-based Sean Arthur Joyce hopes to fill that gap, using great works of literature, poetry and history as a lens through which to look at the COVID Age and focus critical thinking.

“My hope for this book is to bring consolation, critical thinking and clarity to readers devastated in their various ways by the COVID Age,” says Joyce. The book draws on a wide reading list of nearly 50 books, from Taoist sages Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, through classic literature, to more recent critical commentators such as Karl Popper, Arnold Toynbee, John Ralston Saul and Michael Rectenwald. Joyce’s 30-year career as a freelance journalist and author provide a solid research foundation for the book. ekstasiseditions.com

28 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

Self-published, 2022 Review by Luanne Armstrong The big book of Kootenay history has arrived. Now we can all stop wondering when the roads were built, when the railways were built, which sternwheelers ran where and when and how the Anscomb, the Balfour and the Osprey ferries were built. Historian Michael Cone has spent years hunting through archives, interviewing people, finding old photos and documents and putting them all together in this volume.

Boswell book designer Warren Clark designed the cover and did the layout. The book is fully indexed. For me, as an author and a researcher with a long-time interest in all kinds of history and with a growing interest in community and personal history, the detailed chapter notes and references at the back of the book are one of the most valuable features.

The chapters range from “Building the Great Trunk Road,” in 1908, to “Building the Osprey 2000.”

As he did the research and interviews for this book, Cone also collected never-before-seen photos, plus anecdotal snippets of all the odd happenings of the past 100 years on a lake as massive and unpredictable as Kootenay Lake, where often at night, sternwheeler captains strained to see through the rain and fog, or when sternwheelers raced from Kaslo to Nelson.

You can purchase the book from Cone, klfbook@shaw.ca, or at many fine bookstores and museums around the Kootenays. There will also be ongoing readings and book launches as spaces to hold these events open again.

(SECOND EDITION)

Maa Press, 2021 Review by Sarah Beauchamp When Augustus Oicle, creative director of the innovative new reading and publishing platform Legible, saw the second edition of Not Extinct: Keeping the Sinixt Way, he was impressed by its ingenuity and creative foresight.

“The traditional form of storytelling is spoken, and what an incredible opportunity to package these beautiful stories with vast imagery,” he says.

Oicle loves reading and fusing different types of media to tell a story. So, he was excited to see the interactive component accompanying Not Extinct. Every purchase of the second edition includes a free audio download of the 21 Sinixt stories for readers to enjoy alongside the book. “There are some stories that need to be heard and not just read,” Oicle says.

This year, Legible teamed up with Maa Press and the authors to create a visually diverse, media-rich electronic book that offers readers the opportunity to flip between reading, watching and listening. Media including video clips, interviews, language links and audio of the stories told by Marilyn and Taress are all part of the experience.

The second edition includes three new stories, many new pieces of art and material, including Snslxcin (Sinixt language) updates.

Further discussion and settler reflections written by multiple voices still follow each chapter to engage the reader on yet another level.

Digitizing Not Extinct makes these incredible stories accessible to a larger audience. As we push further into a digital era, people consume media in different ways, so this is an exciting opportunity.

SINIXT IN THE SLOCAN: THE LAST 3,000 YEARS

SLOCAN HISTORY SERIES BOOKLET 8 Chameleonfire Editions, 2022

Although unknown until recently by the settler society that displaced them in the 19th century, the Sinixt have lived in the Slocan Valley for the last 3,000 years, perhaps much longer.

Drawing on recent archaeological investigations and up-to-date historical knowledge, the Slocan History Series has released its eighth booklet, Sinixt in the Slocan: The Last 3,000 Years.

The booklet is divided into three sections written by four authors.

Archaeologists Nathan Goodale and Alissa Nauman of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, report on the results of their on-site investigations at Slocan Narrows since 2000. Cole Harris, UBC Professor Emeritus of Historical Geography, describes Sinixt life in the valley in the period just before the devastating smallpox epidemic of the early 1780s, then follows their movements until about 1900. Anthropologist Lori Barkley takes the reader from 1900 to the present, writing of the return of the Sinixt to the valley.

The booklet was designed and produced

by Sean Arthur Joyce of Chameleonfire Editions, with colour illustrations throughout. Slocan History Series booklets are available at Otter Books and Touchstones Museum in Nelson, Raven’s Nest Gifts in New Denver, Kaslo and New Denver pharmacies, Silverton Building Supplies and local Chambers of Commerce. For online orders visit slocanhistoryseries.ca

ARTICULATE 29

NEWS News continued from page 5

BAILEY THEATRE

UPGRADES COMPLETED

by Margaret Tessman The Bailey Theatre in Trail recently completed a $1.2 million renovation and upgrade project after years of planning.

Supported by the Columbia Basin Trust, the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, the BC Arts Council and the Trail & District Arts Council (TDAC), the project overhauled infrastructure and added features to the theatre that will expand its capabilities.

Bailey Theatre marketing manager Vicky Jones and TDAC executive director Nadine Tremblay call the renos “sexy in theatre terms.” They include: • An electrical upgrade and overhaul; • A rigging upgrade, including new steel beams over the stage and in the catwalk area; • New fireproof curtains; • A cyclorama screen at the back of the stage for projection and lighting effects; • Circus hang points that can support more aerial components.

LAST WORD “Renters will be stoked!” says Jones.

The Bailey was closed for five months while the renovations were taking place. “Resiliency funding has been keeping us alive,” says Tremblay. She can’t wait for the two-sided isolation of performing/listening to music or a play online to be a thing of the past. Those of us who are Zoomed out can certainly relate. “Audiences have been seriously missed. I think we took them for granted. Live performances are a high for me and performers need immediate feedback.”

The Bailey hosts up to 50 events annually, including the Performing Arts Trail series, Jazz at the Griff (in the intimate Muriel Griffiths recital room) and Monday Cinema at the nearby Royal Theatre. Tremblay and Jones intend to maintain The Bailey’s capacity at 50 percent for the time being. They are optimistic that their core audience and volunteers are excited but perhaps cautious to return to live music and theatre.

Having apparently weathered the COVID storm, Tremblay and Jones are hoping that younger audiences will help bring new life to the new Bailey. “It may take a couple of years, but we know we can bring in a younger demographic,” says Jones. “The Bailey is an integral part of a healthy community.”

“We’re flexible and risk takers,” adds Tremblay. “Artists are resilient people.”

For more information or to purchase tickets for upcoming shows, visit thebailey.ca.

June 23-26, 2022

Join us live, in person, For a weekend of reading, writing & celebrating authors from at home and away

www.emlfestival.com 30 SPRING/SUMMER 2022

STEPPING OFF

THE LONELY ROCK

by Nicole Friedl

As a writer, I have grown to be abnormally comfortable staring at people for far longer than is socially acceptable. This means watching them do ordinary things that actually become less and less ordinary the more you examine them. You can understand a lot about a person based on their choice of Subway sandwich, and it wasn’t until I began translating the nature of sandwich building into words that I was able to see the underlying intricacy of the people behind the act. However, without contemplation these seemingly insignificant details of life are so easily overlooked and normalized as everyday behaviour that they almost disappear entirely.

Consider the paramount existence of air. Something invisible is what brings the world to life, allows us to experience the joy of cats, puppies and birds and gives us room to bring words, love and meaning into our lives.

Ethereal really, and yet, invisible. What it serves as is an accurate metaphor for who exactly the writer—or any artist—is. They ponder these details; they are the people transforming the invisible qualities of air into the perceivable rising and falling of the chest with each inhale and exhale of the lungs. They reach into the beyond, the unseeable spaces and bring back artistry. So, in the same way that every breath has a breather, every painting has a painter, every story has a writer and every work of art has an artist.

This is why creating a story largely revolves around our interpretation of the world. It is quite literally the merging of what we do and do not see, what we do and do not feel. For instance, when I was nine, I wrote a western dedicated to my father titled Ricky L’Amour. It was a rather explicit plagiarism of one of Louis L’Amour’s hundreds of western novels and less apparently an adventure story with characters that were really just my family members dressed up as cowboys, wrangling bandits and riding off into sunsets. Copyright or not, to this day I consider it my most novel piece with an underlying theme I will never be able to capture again with the same purity. Though it was clear that the mechanics of both a gun fight and proper sentence structure escaped me at the time, it was obvious that the three-part story had vividly expressed a theme encapsulating the unmatchable value of companionship. Fifteen years later, I understood this more as the world doesn’t always have to make sense as long as there are people riding horses alongside you—and you riding alongside them.

However, my life did not unfold gracefully before me just because I unintentionally hacked into this deep philosophical knowledge at the age of nine, and since the writing of Ricky L’Amour I had experienced the shudder of life. The writing of my early 20s was really an outpouring of rather dark and confusing pieces consisting mainly of demented creatures, harsh dialogues and solitude—aspects of life we are all acquainted with. I wasn’t overly eager to share these pieces with others; however, going into my first semester in the creative writing program at Selkirk College, I really didn’t have much choice in the matter. Thankfully, I managed to survive the cheek squeezing of my first writing exposure and in doing so, I realized that sharing my work and really my life, was like stepping off that lonely rock in the roaring ocean to discover that the water was only two inches deep, that the sand beneath its surface was soft and that the water I stood

within connects everything and everyone. I have unexpectedly uncovered that we all have a toe in the same water whether we have written about it or not and that others understand your story more than you might think.

So, my growth as a writer really comes down to my growth as a person, the pages I am constantly turning in life and an ongoing striving to articulate this invisible world into a pattern of letters and words understandable to another. From my writing career as a child up until now, one thing has become ever more apparent and that is that everyone is a writer at every point in their life. It doesn’t matter whether you have the greatest vocabulary or whether you know where to put all the appropriate punctuation, what matters is that you are you and that the formation of your words, what you chose to write about, what you chose to see, is a silhouette of who you are. All of my writing, all of our writing, is like a sneak peek into the mind of the everlasting when everything else around us is decaying.

Nicole is a 25-year-old woman living out in the boonies wandering about the bushes. She has been writing since before she could spell the word “the” and still forgets to put the “e” at the end more often than she’s willing to admit.

The West Kootenay Regional Arts Council gratefully acknowledges support for ARTiculate from its generous donors.

Anne Helps Carol Palladino

Laura White J. Hamilton

Anonymous: In Honour of: Valerie Volpatti If you enjoy ARTiculate and feel it provides a valuable contribution to local culture, consider showing your support through a donation or the purchase of an ad.

Donations of $20.00 and over will receive a charitable tax receipt for their donation. Donations may be made through Canadahelps.org or by cheque to the West Kootenay Regional Arts Council. www.wkartscouncil.com Registered charity # 119294114 RR0001

ARTICULATE 31

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