Wanda Lock: The Year We Disappeared

Wanda lock | the year we disappeared

vernon public art gallery vernon, british columbia canada www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

Wanda lock ¡ the year we disappeared

wanda lock The Year We Disappeared

Vernon Public Art Gallery January 9 - March 4, 2020

Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3 www.vernonpublicartgallery.com 250.545.3173

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T 2H3, Canada January 9 - March 4, 2020 Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery Editor: Lubos Culen Layout and graphic design: Vernon Public Art Gallery Copy editing: Kelsie Balehowsky Cover image: The Day You Went Away (it was summer), (detail), 2019, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in Printing: Get Colour Copies, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada ISBN 978-1-927407-54-7 Copyright Š 2020 Vernon Public Art Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Requests for permission to use these images should be addressed in writing to the Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3, Canada.

Telephone: 250.545.3173 Facsimile: 250.545.9096 Website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, the Government of Canada, corporate donors, sponsors, general donations and memberships. Charitable Organization # 108113358RR.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by:

table of CONTENTS

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Executive Director’s Foreword · Dauna Kennedy

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Introduction · Lubos Culen

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Unless. Wanda Lock and The year We Disappeared · Carolyn MacHardy

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Artist Statement · Wanda Lock

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Images of Works in the Exhibition

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Selected Biography · Wanda Lock

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Executive Director’s Foreword

The Year We Disappeared is a culmination of three different bodies of work by Wanda Lock which in their own way, ponder female issues through a feminist lens. Turning 50 was a pivotal time for Lock and was the impetus for creating these works included in this exhibition.

The Vernon Public Art Gallery is pleased to provide this accompanying catalogue with an introduction from VPAG’s Curator, Lubos Culen and essay by Carolyn MacHardy, Professor Emerita (Art History), University of British Columbia.

The Vernon Public Art Gallery would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia, the Regional District of the North Okanagan, and the BC Arts Council, whose funding enables us to produce exhibitions such as this for the North Okanagan region.

We hope you enjoy this work by Wanda Lock.

Dauna Kennedy Executive Director Vernon Public Art Gallery

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Introduction - Wanda Lock: The Year We Disappeared

Wanda Lock, a mid-career artist based in Lake Country, moves with confidence between painting and drawing, often combining both mediums. Her vocabulary of mark-making in her drawing and painting draws on years of her studio practice and incorporates drawn expressive lines in a variety of media, often combined with full colour backgrounds. In later works, Lock incorporated store bought stencils of small animals and foliage which, once applied, produce hard edges in contrast to Lock’s hand-applied layers of paint. Her exhibition The Year We Disappeared at the Vernon Public Art Gallery contains several streams of ideas and their visual execution. Despite the difference between the works’ sizes and modes of paint delivery, the exhibition offers glimpses of Lock’s ideas based on her personal experiences without being overtly self-referential; on the contrary, her ideas and observations give the viewer a wide array of possible narratives as seen through the eyes of a contemporary art creator. While generating ideas for more complex and larger works, Lock prefers to work on a large number of smaller and mid-size drawings until glimpses of some cohesive narratives start to emerge. In her statement reproduced in this catalogue, she points out that she still relies on the basic principles of art making which also influence how she approaches her subject matter.

Lock’s works are inspired by mundane things ‘around the house’, everyday objects, interiors, landscapes, and small animals and insects. Despite the fact that she is often observing objects and spaces, her work is far from being realistic in appearance; her artwork is a symbolic rendering of observed surroundings and objects. In addition to her immediate environment, she is also drawing inspiration from Pop culture references such as titles of movies or literature, or the sentences spoken by protagonists who inhabit them.

Besides the conceptual and aesthetic considerations – the formal aspects of Lock’s work - Lock’s work is loaded with existential references which are ambiguous on purpose. When observing some of Lock’s works containing insects, mice, or rabbits, one can conclude that the images capture the idea of biological multiplying while not being specific about the consequences; is the multiplying detrimental, or is it a celebration of fertility?

The work titled Benevolent – Malevolent (lost in the woods) is equally ambiguous (even its composition) and consist of two areas, one a modelled 3D view of a forest created by using floral

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stencils. Superimposed over this ‘forest’ is a fairly flat rectangle with numerous spiders streaming to the top. The questions still arise: ‘lost in the woods’ might be a fact, but inconclusive: benevolent?

Malevolent?

Additional images featuring spiders and rabbits are in One of Many. This time an image of a solitary rabbit with perhaps an implication that there are many; as if in “when there is one, it’s given there are many.” The upper right-hand corner contains perfectly spaced horizontal lines; are they there to suggest that they are a means of human communication? If so, then with whom? The work titled It Happened While You Were Looking the Other Way includes the images of mice, but also a sequence of numbers perhaps implying a growing sequence of mice multiplying. Finally, the painting titled Accidental Drowning in the Bathtub (a fool for you) is a direct Pop culture reference to the disputed accident that took place and resulted in a death of a singer.

The largest three works collectively titled Heavy Lies the Crown, a heavy reference to Shakespearian drama, exemplify the existential angst and assumed responsibility, yet Lock is avoiding a commentary. All three works have similar compositions and feature a single figure in varied backgrounds. The Heavy Lies the Crown (pass) features a figure with a face/head covered heavily in black paint in a crisscrossing pattern. My associations take me to the photographs of people who scratched out their faces from family photos; is it to sever ties with the rest of the family? In the case of Lock’s image, is it the erasure of identity? If so, then whose? Equally ambiguous is the time frame; is it in the present or in the past? The second figurative work (with subtitle 3) features an anthropomorphic shape, a figure/person, but this time obviously translucent before the plant forms. Again, the question arises: is it an absence of a person, or perhaps only a memory? Is it fixed in time, or just passing through? Sliding out of existence? The three stenciled images of a royal crown are prominently placed in the left hand side and appear to be floating in flux and not falling. Is this the ‘image’ of a king, now absent?

A suit of modestly sized paintings based on landscape observations are painterly and created in muted colours. The brush marks are evident, unpretentious, fast, and unapologetic for their alla prima delivery. These paintings are atmospheric despite the opacity of colours, and attractive to look at. All these paintings have common titles, The Day You Went Away, and the second part of each title consists of factual information that help us to understand that there might be some narrative structure. The umbrella title suggests that an event happened in the past as are the sub-titles all referenced in past tense. If arranged in a narrative structure, the sub-titles might inform the viewer about the factual circumstances that might have happened on “the day you went away”: it was summer / the weather had turned / a storm was brewing / I was waiting. Less

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obvious facts pertain to who was “you” that went away, or a sub-title of one work titled pond. The narrative(s) are fairly open-ended, yet they carry a sense of witnessing an event either possibly real, or imaginary.

In the suite of mixed media drawings/paintings, Lock’s works reference figure(s), often in dynamic and turbulent circumstances. The work titled The Winner is also a Loser, in itself quite a loaded signifier, we are confronted with a minimally modelled anthropomorphic shape indicating an androgynous figure. The ‘head’ is obscured by a dense rich cloud of swirling black marks which preclude the viewer to form a possible narrative other than trying to piece together a narrative from visual hints that Lock presents us with; obscured identity, a heavy cloud of dense dark and weighty mass bearing on the figure, and a dynamic gestural background filled with numerous images of mice that appear to be in positions not conforming to gravity, but swirling in flux. In another work Lock references Carol Shields’ novel Unless under the same title. The image features two figures, perhaps a couple, with the same heavy cloud of black marks above them. The image also features lines of what can be read as an unarticulated text; a means of communication, but the meaning is inaccessible in the visual approximation of writing. The title Unless implies that there is something, an event or condition, which is unarticulated, and perhaps suggesting a port of departure for the future. The work titled Yellow Wallpaper combines elements of a landscape approximated in dark black marks with a pattern of horizontal lines. In contrast to gestural modelling of a possible landscape, the lines are perfectly geometric and evenly spaced. Is this perhaps a suggestion of an invitation to communicate through text, or perhaps an expression that there is nothing to communicate? This work also references a literary story about a woman closed in an empty room, possibly with post-partum depression, and her existential quest for her identity.

The works in Lock’s exhibition are loaded with interpretable meanings, yet Lock does not offer an interpretation. She keeps the visual clues minimal and her conceptual strategy is to offer a viewer a few hints, some based on knowable forms and others interpretable through personal associations.

Lock offers us, the viewers, an arena in which we can construct various narratives based on the glimpses which we can gather from Lock’s compositions. While the images she creates are often ambiguous, there is a conceptual unity in her approach to art making and producing works which reveal their meaning once the viewers are willing to immerse in her visual language.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery

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Unless. Wanda Lock and The year We Disappeared

by Carolyn MacHardy …suddenly, it’s like I just vanished from the room. And I have to yell so much louder to be seen, and I feel like, Oh my God, this is what they mean when they say about women all the time, ‘Oh, she’s crazy.’ She’s not crazy, she’s just yelling so that you can see her! Because you didn’t notice that she’s sitting at the conference table! 1 Wanda Lock turned 50 in 2019. The works in this exhibition, and the many that remain behind in her studio, were all done in what she wryly calls “the year we disappeared”. It is a pointed challenge to the viewer to confront western society’s facile embrace of the idea that at a certain age women begin to disappear - they become invisible - as novelist and screenwriter Ayelete Waldman points out above. The past century or two has offered many examples in the fields of magic, film and photography of women who quite literally disappear, ranging from magicians (almost always men) making women vanish under “sheets, blankets . . . in trunks, boxes, closets, beneath trapdoors” to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) to contemporary American photographer Patty Carroll’s ongoing series entitled Anonymous women, as essayist Akiko Busch points out2. However, the well-read Lock’s negotiations with disappearance seem less aligned with visual examples than with literary ones as in, for example, novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, and Carol Shields’ Unless, published in 2002. Though not explicitly addressing the phenomenon of the vanishing older woman, a mainstay of social media infatuation, Lock uses disappearance as a semi-transparent screen to reflect on the many choices she has made and the transient nature of some of the stages in her own life. She is simultaneously an artist, a painter, a mother, a partner, a daughter, a curator, a friend, and that is just a start.

Lock graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design with her four-year diploma in 1992, and returned to the Okanagan to establish her career as a painter. During her time at art school, she was well aware of the controversies surrounding painting’s patriarchal history, its centurieslong subjugation and objectification of both woman and her body for the delectation of the male gaze, and the paternalism of some male artists who thought women’s art practice was somehow outside the scope of current theoretical debates. As curator Judith Mastai, writing for the important Women and Paint exhibition held at the Mendel Art Gallery in 1995, notes in response to the debate about whether women should even paint or whether they should use less historically-

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loaded media, “To paint or not to paint is clearly not the question. However, as painting will always hold a privileged place in the histories of art, a feminist practice in the visual arts must deal with it, one way or another.”3 Lock’s feminist practice circles around and weaves into the many ways of dealing with being a 21st century painter in a field dominated by the weight of historical baggage. Negotiation is always at the core of major issues such as balancing motherhood and domesticity with the demands of a painting practice and rebutting still-prevalent cultural stereotypes (you can’t be both a mother and a painter!); the need for solitude in which to work, easily available in the Okanagan, versus the loneliness of working far from larger centres with their many artists, galleries, and the supporting apparatus of the art world; and the many myths pertaining to male artists, their behavior in the studio, the reality of working in a studio versus the bad-boy misogynist “heroics” perpetrated in films on artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Lucien Freud, each artist as guilty of making women vanish as any 19th century magician.

All the works in the exhibition were done in Lock’s studio overlooking Lake Okanagan. The studio is her place to figure it all out; to absorb everything that she’s reading/listening to/ thinking about. It is also the place where what I think of as Lock’s contemporary Greek chorus drops by to comment on the actions and events taking place in her studio: It is late Saturday afternoon, and Rosanne and Rose are here with me in the studio. I’m wanting their advice, although to be honest, their confirmation that I have selected the correct work for the exhibition. We discuss composition, colour, texture, paint application, Ozzy Osborne, and Gene Simmons.4 The series of five landscape paintings in the series The Day You Went Away are quiet meditations on place and space and time; they are views of what one might think of as quintessentially early modernist Canadian-type of painting: the view out, down, across and back up, the flagpoles, ladder and in one (Pond), the energetic tree-spirits preventing it all from skidding out of sight in the wind. Painting these works in her studio in the early months of last winter gave Lock the time to immerse herself in the seductive medium of paint while her mind roamed over things seen, things imagined, things remembered, and things that may or may not have been.

The three large works on paper that comprise the series Heavy Lies the Crown tangle with how Lock navigates the many identities carried by women. They do so through multiple and openended visual and literary allusions that are at first puzzling: the title of the series is a misquote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”. In each panel a solitary female figure, loosely outlined, stands tall with her arms at her sides. Two of the figures 12

are accompanied by crowns tossed to the side (three in one, one in the other), a nod to street art and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy, and symbolic of matriarchy and domesticity and all the roles and expectations placed on the female. Curiously, the third figure has no crowns on either side of her but there are three stencilled numbers scattered to her left, as if a piece of 1960s Pop art had strayed into her work. Their very presence seems like a random gesture, an alternative to the symbolic realm of the crown in the other two works – but these are the first three prime numbers, numbers that are only divisible by themselves and by 1. Their machine-produced hard edges and mathematical certainty are in sharp contrast to the woman who appears to have tossed them aside: she is a complex amalgam of contour lines, gestural drawing and patterning, and her face, covered with repeated strokes of vertical and horizontal hatching, is inscrutable. They seem to have no connection to the woman and perhaps that is the point.

The third group of works in this exhibition, a suite of eight mixed media on paper, is packed with symbols and references to the worlds of music, books and popular culture; crowns reappear, as do numbers (including non-prime numbers), and they are joined by spiders, rabbits, and mice.

It is an iconographic free-for-all. The viewer is faced with associations through time and across cultures which each of the animals presents: the rabbit, for example, is a key character in Beatrix Potter, Richard Adam and Lewis Carroll, and was the subject of Jeff Koons’s large 1986 stainless steel sculpture simply called Rabbit; the spider is the beloved subject of Charlotte’s Web and Louise Bourgeois’ magisterial Maman sculptures, but it is also an insect steeped in mythology (the Greeks’ Arachne from whom its name comes). The mice too recall Aesop, Cinderella, running up the clock, or, more ominously, Art Spiegelman’s Maus in which the Nazis are depicted as mice.

Many of these animals are brought together in Accidental Drowning in a Bathtub (fool for you), a work based on the death of Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of the Cranberries, who died in her bathtub in 2018. Accidental death or suicide (no one is sure which it was) is a disappearance, and in Lock’s eyes O’Riordan was, like her, negotiating multiple identities and expectations. The text scrawled across the top is from one of the group’s songs, adding (if one wishes) an audio track to the work, but despite the presence of mice, spiders and geese surrounding the recumbent torso and head of O’Riordan, the work resists a simple or single reading. The layer upon layer of stencils, paint and drawing is a metaphor for the multi-layering of identities that women like O’Riordan and Lock navigate through their lives, and depending on how one wishes to read each element, various and multiple meanings become possible.

The work which, to me, most brings Lock’s concerns over the past year into sharp focus is simply titled Unless. In it, two figures stand in the centre of the panel, a large black mesh of black curling lines suspended over their heads; to the left is an intense scroll, almost like a section from a

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handwritten diary, but the letters are unintelligible and the script undecipherable. It is further obscured by the wash of mauve paint that covers most of it. There are no supporting players here, no insects, rodents or rabbits, and no text to link it to popular culture. The only thing the viewer has to work with, apart from the images in the work itself, is the title – a reference to Carol Shields’ novel Unless. Shields’ novel centres around the disappearance of the central female character’s eldest daughter and draws loosely on the Greek myth of Demeter and her missing daughter Persephone. However, I think the disappearance theme of Shields’ work is possibly less important to Lock than the observation Shields makes towards the end of the novel: she writes that A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd pieces of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.5 I suggest that Lock’s work, including both the works in this show and the many others she has done before, can be thought of as those odd bits of painterly language that cement together one example of a feminist practice in the visual arts: one in which signifiers such as painter, mother, partner, daughter, curator and so on co-exist, and that these shards of painterly grammar, when brought together, form the type of coherent narrative that Shields writes about. I am very curious to see where Lock goes with her next works.

Endnotes 1 2 3 4 5

Ayelete Waldman, The Case of the Vanishing Woman, nextavenue.org/case-vanishing-woman/.

Akiko Busch, How to Disappear. Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 140-1.

Judith Mastai, “Thou Shalt Not . . . The Law of the Mother” in Women and Paint (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 1995), 14.

Wanda Lock, Artist Statement, 2019 Carol shields, Unless (Toronto: Vintage Canada Edition, 2003, ©2002), 313.

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Carolyn MacHardy is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, where she taught courses in contemporary, Canadian and Outsider art history. She has written numerous articles and exhibition catalogues essays on local artists, including Mary Smith McCulloch, Ruth MacLaurin, Percival Ritchie, Lori Mairs and Briar Craig.

Her paper on Lady Aberdeen’s Guisachan Album was published in the Journal of Canadian Art History in 2015. She is currently researching women artists who were working in the Okanagan between 1900 and 1970.

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This exhibition is about books read, movies seen and stories told. It is about conversations had over morning coffee, late-night studio visits, and brief encounters with those who slip in and out of our lives. The Year We Disappeared is about the summer I turned 50.

The Year We Disappeared (2019) My artist’s statement is long overdue. I told Lubos I would have something on paper by September, and here it is November 5th. It’s not like I haven’t started, this document already contains over 2000 words. Unfortunately, it is mostly mumbling and meanderings of fleeting thoughts and ideas with no concrete conclusions.

So tonight, I’m sitting at my dining room table eating fudgesicles and drinking red wine and determined to put down some meaningful statements about what I have been working on over the past 10 months.

I told Rose that I need to write an artist statement for this new series of work, and I’m lost… start with a limerick, she says, that’s always a good place to start.

So I Google… how to write a limerick.

To write a limerick, come up with a 5-line poem where the first, second, and fifth line rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth line rhyme with each other. Also, make sure the first, second, and fifth line have 8-9 syllables, and the third and fourth lines have 5-6 syllables.

There once was a woman living in spheres She walked blindly through open doors for years And then during a storm of whispers She became covered entirely in blisters And up until now never stepped away from the tears This does not help. So let’s start at the beginning…

The early days of 2019 were all about painting. I have worked in this studio space now for over 20 years. The studio is free standing with views of the landscape from windows on all four walls. I know this space, and its surroundings intimately. Rarely, I do not set foot in my studio daily.

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January in the Okanagan, as always, is grey, dark, flat, and quiet. It is in the winter months that I am most productive. And this year, I wanted to spend the first few months painting. As for what I was going to paint, well, as I sat for a few days researching various items on my ‘things I need to contemplate’ list, in the end it was the pine trees that I have watched over the years come to their demise through the pine beetle, the distant mountains that, depending on the time of the year, are clear and crisp or become ambiguous forms in the January grey, the cornflower blue plunge pool on my lawn that my son used to float in a who has now grown too big and no longer uses, the pool, left ignored, becomes a reminder of time passing and the ratty Canadian flag and flagpole below my studio view that leaves me uncomfortable in these days of bizarre political antics.

The fundamentals of art are the foundation of my art practice.

They are colour, form, line, shape, space, texture, and value. The ten common principles of art are balance, emphasis, harmony, movement, pattern, proportion, repetition, rhythm, unity, and variety.

Many of these concepts are not only related to one another but also overlap to create an artistic vision.

Over the next few weeks I complete a series of small oil paintings on canvas. I bring into the compositions the smoke-filled skies of the previous summer as well as a UFO. UFOs have been featured in my work before (2009-2013) and add a narrative of being taken away (disappearance).

Disappearance is a theme in this work. It stems from an interview I heard years ago about Carol Shields’ new book, Unless. Although I cannot confirm this, I remember part of the conversation talked about how women ‘disappear’ after a certain age, was it 44 or 50? I cannot recall. At the time of this interview, I just had read A. S. Byatt’s short story, A Stone Woman. At the time, these two events did not weigh on me, but in 2019, the year I turned 50, they are revisited.

Originally this exhibition was titled, The Year I Disappeared, and for a brief moment, this body of new work was about me, but, as always in the end, my work is not only about me, it’s about you.

I started using spiders and mice a few years ago. They stood in as background dialogue…the idea that you may only see one (spider, mouse) but know where you see one, there are many. And you could say, now there is an infestation in my work (including the rabbits).

Infestation: the presence of an unusually large number of insects or animals in a place, typically so as to cause damage or disease.

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Rose tells me to read, Leinigen Versus the Ants (Carl Stephenson 1893-1954). And yes, this short story does relate to the drawings of spiders, mice, and rabbits. Although I must admit, while reading this story, I couldn’t help but recall an episode of Swiss Family Robinson, Terror on South Island (1976), about a skeleton found in a cave and soldier ants marching towards the injured Ernest. One of those childhood memories that are both curious and terrifying at the same time… a memory that finds a way to us in the most unexpected ways in our adult lives.

Because of the ambiguity in the work, I have become a bit smitten with the word, ‘Unless’. The rabbit hole I have fallen into has me reading about logical symbols, compound statements, material implication (rule of inference)…

The “Ͻ” symbol is used to symbolize a relationship called material implication; a compound statement formed with this connective is true unless the component on the left (the antecedent) is true and the component on the right (the consequent) is false.

If you had stopped by the studio this summer, you would have noticed that I work in threes, two 38 x 50 inches sheets of Stonehenge paper side by side on one wall, and a single sheet on the adjacent wall. 27 drawings were completed this summer, with each drawing having a continuing narrative or subject from the previous work while keeping an individual identity. When I stumbled upon the above statement about material implication, I thought about how I view my work, truths, falsehoods, and contradictions.

Exhibition titles act as starting points and they set the stage for viewing the work…

Heavy Lies the Crown, (from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, ‘uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’), meaning those who wear a crown have many responsibilities…Accidental Drowning in a Bathtub, with text from the Cranberries’ song Linger…The Day You Went Away, whether forced or on ones’ own will, denotes abandonment and loss…Weather Patterns, we always remember what the weather was like on days of importance…The Winner is also The Loser, a line from Peter Greenaway’s 1988 film Drowning by Numbers…Nobody Waved Goodbye…1+1=3, a nod to Guido Molinari…Yellow Wallpaper, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story…Unless, material implication meets Carol Shields.

It is late Saturday afternoon, and Rosanne and Rose are here with me in the studio. I’m wanting their advice, although to be honest, I’m wanting approval that I have selected the correct work for the exhibition. We discuss composition, colour, texture, paint application, Ozzy Osborne, and Gene

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Simmons. Greg makes a brief appearance in the studio but finds our chatter overwhelming and has to leave. You have strong opinions about everything, he says to me the next morning… and I reply, yes we do.

Wednesday morning and Stew arrives to photograph the artwork in the studio. The day is gray and dull, but the light should work well for photographing paintings and drawings. As we hang work, take pictures, and repeat this process for the duration of the morning, the conversation takes on many topics. Stew and I chat about travel, art history, politics, the weather and contemplate Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Dolores O’Riordon, and Kate Spade.

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas - all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.” John Cage Friday evening, Rosanne, Rena and I have gathered for food, wine, and updates on our own lives at Rosanne’s place. I bring up the matter of loneliness (sadness because one has no friends or company), being alone (having no one else present), and solitude (the state or situation of being alone). I soon realized that this subject is too heavy for this occasion and better saved for another time. Tonight is about cheese, funny stories about Danish furniture, antique area rugs and a three legged cat, a much needed distraction as the past few days have been somewhat bothersome.

Being ambiguous and non-committal is how I roam through time, place, and subject. At times actively participating and other times as observer. The thing about disappearing is that it does not necessarily need to be forever or fatal. One can also be found and re-appear.

Wanda Lock November 2019

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the year we disappeared works in the exhibition

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Accidental Drowning in a Bathtub (a fool for you), 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Benevolent - Malevolent (lost in the woods), 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Heavy Lies the Crown (3), 2019, spray and oil paint on paper, 75 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Heavy Lies the Crown, 2019, spray and oil paint on paper, 75 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

It happened while you were looking the other way, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Nobody Waved Goodby, 2019, mixed media on paper, 38 x 50 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

One of Many, 2019, mixed media on paper, 38 x 50 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Day You Went Away (a storm was brewing), 2019, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Day You Went Away (I was waiting), 2019, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Day You Went Away (it was summer), 2019, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Day You Went Away (pond), 2019, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Day You Went Away (the weather had turned), 2019, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

The Winner is Also the Loser, 2019, mixed media on paper, 38 x 50 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Unless, 2019, mixed media on paper, 38 x 50 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Weather Patterns, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Yellow Wallpaper, 2019, mixed media on paper, 50 x 38 in, photo: Stew Turner Photography

Wanda Lock

CURRICULUM VITAE

email: wandalock@shaw.ca website: www.wandalockart.com Education 1992 Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver BC, Four year diploma – Studio Major

(painting and drawing) 1989 Okanagan College, Kelowna BC, Studio Major (art history, painting, drawing and print

making) Solo Exhibitions 2018 A Studio of One’s Own, HeadBones Gallery, Vernon, BC 2013 Flying Machines and Poems Sung by Strangers, Kelowna Art Gallery’s satellite space at the Kelowna International Airport, Kelowna, BC 2009 Pitching Tents, Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, BC 2008 Stacks & Piles: Recent Work by Wanda Lock, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC 2006 Place Explained…, Art Ark Gallery, Kelowna BC 2005 You told me once, but I forgot, Gallery Vertigo, Vernon, BC 2004 Crush, Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, Penticton, BC 1997 New Work, Alternator Gallery, Kelowna, BC 1995 New Work, Vancouver Community Arts Council Gallery, Vancouver, BC Group Exhibitions 2019 Slow Reflections, Mortar & Brick Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta 2018 CORrE: Okanagan Group Exhibition, HeadBones Gallery, Vernon, BC eRacism, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC 2017 The Games We Play, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC 2016 Escape Artists, Kelowna Art Gallery Courtyard, Kelowna, BC Drawing from Life, Kelowna Art Galley, Kelowna, BC 2015 OAR Exhibition, fina Gallery UBCO, Kelowna, BC Elementary BASIC: A Steampunk Primer, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC Steamrolled: How Steam Colonized the West, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC Superheroes & Supervillians, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC 2014 Sotto Voce, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country, BC (two person exhibition) Styx n Stones, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC

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Group Exhibitions continued 2014 Welcome Home, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC

Day Job, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC 2013 Salonus Paptrus, Headbones Gallery, Vernon, BC Saturday Morning Cartoons, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC

Tall Tales, The Art Gallery of St Albert, St Albert, Alberta (two person exhibition)

Terroir: Physically Speaking, Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC 2012 Group Show, Warehouse Gallery, Kelowna, BC

Revision: Member’s Show, Alternator Gallery, Kelowna, BC

Exploratorium: Member’s Show, Gallery Vertigo, Vernon, BC Personal Topographies, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC

Member’s Wall, Gallery Vertigo, Vernon, BC 2012 Member’s Juried Exhibition, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country, BC 2011 Leon Avenue Banner Project, Communities in Bloom, Kelowna, BC

Diversity in Drawing, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country, BC 2011 Starting Point, Lake Country Gallery, Lake Country, BC

Migration/Hibernation Show, Victoria Park Gallery, Kincardine, Ontario 2010 It came from the sky, Elevation Gallery, Canmore, Alberta

Constructions of Identity, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC 2009 Untitled six-month installation at the Kelowna Art Gallery’s satellite space at the Kelowna International Airport

Strength and Vitality, Elevation Gallery, Canmore, Alberta 2008 Whimsy, Front Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta 2007 Green, Gallery Vertigo, Vernon, BC 2006 Narrative?, The Drawers/Headbones Gallery, Toronto 2005 By the Book, Gallery Vertigo, Vernon, BC 2003 Fresh, Art Ark, Kelowna, BC 2002 Fresh, Art Ark, Kelowna, BC 2001 The Creative Voice: Life and Art in the Okanagan, Gallery 284, Penticton, BC Celebrating Contemporary BC Visual Art, Artropolis 2001, CBC Broadcast Centre, Vancouver 2000 No Particular Order, Okanagan University College Gallery, Kelowna, BC 1997 Strange Patterns, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC 1996 Rosanne Bennett & Wanda Lock: New Work, Gallery XX, Kelowna, BC 1993 New Work, Gallery XX, Kelowna, BC 1993 Wanda Lock: New Work, Vancouver Community Arts Council Gallery, Vancouver, BC

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Public Collections Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC Public Art Projects 2016 ‘Us, Together’: Glenmore Elementary Mural Project, Glenmore Elementary, Kelowna, BC ‘2016 Ultimate Summer Festival Guide Cover’, BC Musician Magazine, Peachland, BC 2015 ‘Gaudi in the Garden’ Part Two, Cool Arts and Community Gardens Public Art Project,

Kelowna, BC 2014 ‘Gaudi in the Garden’, Cool Arts and Community Gardens Public Art Project, Kelowna, BC 2011 Leon Avenue Banner Project, Communities in Bloom, Kelowna, BC Bibliography Artropolis: Celebrating Contemporary BC Visual Art. Vancouver: A. T. Eight Artropolis Society, 2001.

Best, Theresa. “In the Gallery,” Arts Vancouver, Volume XII, No.1, Winter, 1995, p. 5.

Brennan, Maev. “Arts and Entertainment,” Capital News (Kelowna, BC), September 22, 1993, p. A18. _____. “Arts and Entertainment,” Capital News (Kelowna, BC), September 19, 1993, p. A18. _____. “The Year’s Best,” Capital News (Kelowna, BC), December 30, 1993, p. B4.

Clark, Glenn. “Arts Letter,” Art Gallery of the South Okanagan, Vol. XXIV, no. 2, March/April, 2004.

Cook, Glenn. ‘Getting Happy at AGSA’, St Albert Leader, September 4, 2013.

Culen, Lubos. “North Okanagan Open Juried Exhibition: Here and Now,” Vernon Public Art Gallery Newsletter, Volume 15, No. 5, Sept/Oct, 2006, p. 4.

Crawford, Paul. “Arts Letter”, Penticton Art Gallery, Vol. XXXlll, no.2, March/April, 2013 Hawkshaw, Heather. You told me once, but I forgot. Vernon: Vertigo Gallery, 2005.

Hayes, Scott. ‘Making Noise (Two artists combine talents to show off offbeat fantasy worlds)’,

St Albert Gazette, September 4, 2013.

Images & Objects X: Contemporary BC Artists: An Exhibition. Vernon, BC: Assembly of BC Arts

Councils, 1992.

Johnson, Mia. “Wanda Lock: Stacks and Piles,” Preview magazine (Vancouver), Nov/Dec/Jan,

2008-9, p. 16.

Moore, Linda. “Artscene,” The Review (Richmond, BC) September 24, 1997.

Oakes, Julie. Headbones Anthology 2006, Toronto: Rich Fog Micro Publishing, 2006.

Oakes, Julie. Wanda Lock – Headbones Gallery, The Drawers. Toronto: Rich Fog Micro Publishing,

2006.

Parnell, Kevin. “Acceptance for all takes broad strokes in Lake Country”, Lake Country Calendar

(Lake Country, BC), October 14, 2015, p. A8.

Pearson, Gary. The Creative Voice Life and Art in the Okanagan. Prince George, BC: Caitlin Press 1998.

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Bibliography continued _____. “Drawing the perfect circle,” Off-Centre Magazine (Kelowna, BC), Volume 6, Issue 8,

August, 2006, p. 12.

Priegert, Portia. “Artropolis,” Event magazine, The Daily Courier (Kelowna, BC), February 21,

2001, p. 8. _____. “A breath of fresh art,” Event magazine, The Daily Courier (Kelowna, BC), November 28,

2002, p. 8. _____. “Crushed,” Event magazine, The Daily Courier (Kelowna, BC), March 17, 2004, p. 11 _____. “Fabrics and patterns explored,” Event magazine, The Daily Courier (Kelowna, BC),

June 29, 2005, p. 12. _____. “Dick and Jane images inspire visiting artist,” Event Magazine, The Daily Courier

(Kelowna, BC), Nov 14, 2008. p. 7.

Turnbull, Glenna. “Lock finds voices through the ages …” Capital News (Kelowna, BC), Oct 30,

2008. _____. “Art combines flying machines and songs of strangers” The Daily Courier (Kelowna, BC),

Sunday Edition, June 9, 2013 Vanyork, Stephanie. “Artropolis 2001 …,” The Calendar. (Winfield, BC) April 4, 2001, p. 17.

Wylie, Liz. “Something I have been meaning to tell you,” in Stacks and Piles: Recent Work by

Wanda Lock. Kelowna: Kelowna Art Gallery, 2008. _____. “Stacks and Piles: Recent work by Wanda Lock,” Capital News (Kelowna, BC), Oct 29,

2008, p. B15. _____. “Piecing it Together,” in Constructions of Identity: Recent Acquisitions from the Permanent

Collection of the Kelowna Art Gallery. Kelowna: Kelowna Art Gallery, 2010. _____. “Lake Country’s Lock installs art at YLW”, Lake Country Calendar (Lake Country, BC),

May 22, 2013, p. A8 Young, James. “Two-by-two in the Ark,” SNAP Okanagan, Volume 1, No. 3, October, 2006, p. 17.

Committees/Volunteer Experience 2014-15 Okanagan Art Review, Kelowna, BC 2015-Present CentrePiece Committee, Lake Country, BC 2015 Lake Country Rail Trail Action Committee, Lake Country, BC 2013-August 2014 Lake Country Art Gallery board member, Lake Country, BC 2007-Present Lake Country Public Art Advisory Commission, Lake Country, BC 2003 Art for Kid’s Sake’ Fundraising Committee for Big Brothers & Big Sisters,

Kelowna, BC 2001-2007 Kelowna Art Gallery Acquisition Committee, Kelowna, BC

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Work Experience 2016 Keep it Real: LC Youth Festival, Lake Country, BC 2015-present Curator, Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake Country, BC 2009-2014 Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, BC Art Instructor (painting, mixed media, collage) 1994-2006 Opus Framing and Art Supplies, Kelowna, BC Manager of the Kelowna store from 1995-2006 1992-1994 Kelowna and District Boys & Girls Club

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Wanda lock | the year we disappeared

vernon public art gallery vernon, british columbia canada www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

Wanda lock ¡ the year we disappeared