Gathie Falk: Visions pays tribute to one of British Columbia's and Canada's most respected senior artists.
Born in Manitoba in 1928 Falk eventually settled in Vancouver in 1947 and had a twelve-year career as an elementary school teacher before turning her attention and energy to art. For over 30 years she has been an important and celebrated painter, sculptor and performance artist. Throughout the 1960s and 70s she played a major role in Vancouver in challenging traditional categories of art production and questioning the boundaries between art and everyday life. In 1997 she received the Order of Canada for her contribution and commitment to Canadian art and her work has been the subject of three retrospective exhibitions. Today, Gathie Falk continues to develop her artistic practice from her Vancouver studio.
Gathie Falk's work is often described as a kind of adoration and elevation of the ordinary everyday object such as shoes, dresses, shirts, chairs, tables, sinks, fruit, vegetables and flowers. Over the years Falk has created works that draw our attention to the beauty and uniqueness of things we usually take for granted.
But in addition to Falk's work being about the extraordinary in the ordinary, there is also an out of the ordinary quality in the artist's practice that surfaces from an unknown and perhaps unknowable source. This is the place of visions.
Gathie Falk: Visions includes ceramics, paintings, photographs and sculptures produced between 1969 and 2001. This wide range of works provides viewers in the Okanagan with an opportunity to see many works by Falk for the first time. The works have been selected with the intention of exploring a relationship between images that appear over time in both the artist's two-and three-dimensional works. The title of the exhibition refers to a conversation with the artist regarding the source for ideas for some of her paintings and sculptures. Gathie Falk describes one of her sources as “visions” which often come “out of the blue” and which frequently require a long period of gestation before they, with the artist's guidance, materialize into a painting, or a sculpture, or both. For Falk, sometimes a vision requires a single object to work it out, sometimes it demands several. Gathie Falk: Visions provides a glimpse of how one artist stops, takes notice and pays homage to her visions.
The Kelowna Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Vancouver Foundation.
Images from the exhibition:
