Treading Softly: A Site Specific Installation by Jennifer Macklem

July 10 to October 14, 2001

The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased to present Treading Softly, a site-specific installation by local artist Jennifer Macklem.

The installation is a body of work that the artist has created in response to the local environment.  Macklem is interested in the plant life that grows in the hillsides, fields, empty lots and undeveloped tracts where she takes her walks, she celebrates the diversity found in the neglected and undeveloped areas she encounters.

The bowls are cast from coloured resin and embedded with collected organic materials.  The bowls collect only water and light and work with the other elements in the installation to reflect and transmit light in a way that suggests a story about suns, stars, patterns and nature.  

Vessels: kind of blue, recent paintings by Jennifer Macklem

September 7 to October 14, 2001

The Kelowna Art Gallery is showing a selection of recent paintings by Jennifer Macklem in our Reynolds Gallery that compliment the courtyard installation.  That exhibition features a recent body of work that focuses on vessels.

Jennifer Macklem was born in Montreal and has studied in Paris and Quebec.  She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Europe and the United States since 1980.  Macklem has been based in Kelowna since 1992 and teaches at Okanagan University College.  She is active in the local arts community, and has been involved with the Alternator Gallery as Gallery Coordinator, President of the Board (1993-96) and Curator/Director (1998).  

Artist’s Statement

These paintings represent a cycle of work where I investigate colour, surface, materiality and especially process. The recurrent vessel imagery resonates with historic antecedents and evokes a sense of ritual, suggesting at once enclosure, containment, offering and sustenance. I imagine these vessels as soulful objects, which somehow hold an immaterial energy. I am interested in the dynamics of materiality and spirit, as can be embodied in painting and revealed through a myriad of configurations in our world.

Within these works I have contained and channeled my own creative process as well, by limiting them to a specific theme. The sense of risk in the process of making a painting is crucial, a sense of not knowing the outcome, of persevering through uncertainty. Within specific formal limitations I experiment with combinations, compositions, substances and textures, as though my studio is a makeshift laboratory where the unexpected result generates further sequences.  

 Jennifer Macklem

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