The Kelowna Art Gallery is pleased to host the traveling exhibition Alison Norlen: Float.

Float is an exhibition of five large-scale, ink and charcoal drawings depicting harvest festivals and carnival iconography interspersed with the artist's personal history.  Float portrays a theatrical world of impossible architecture and spinning sensational space.  Norlen's drawings represent a claustrophobic and catastrophic dream world - a warehouse full of forgotten movie sets and leftover parade paraphernalia. 

Norlen exposes her ability to mix the familiar and the exotic and have us feel the rich potential of drawing.  Her exhibition takes the form of mixed-media drawings in charcoal, graphite, gouache, and Xeroxed matter on large sections of paper which, when composited, have an overwhelmingly expansive presence, with palpable links to sculpture and performative action. Norlen's baroque drawings tend to overwhelm viewers with a bravura of detail and their massive scale (one untitled work is three by seven metres).  Her montage of jet airliners, livestock, roller coasters, houseboats, and jumping fish suggest a wild, perverse social spectacles that pay homage to the act of collecting, inspecting and analyzing our built environment, producing subtle critiques of a material culture.  Inspiration for the drawings derives from the common public spectacles of small town cultural events, parades, floats, roadside attractions, and mascots. 

Wayne Baerwaldt, 2002

In addition to the drawings and several smaller scaled companion wire sculptures in Float, Alison Norlen's exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery will include new research related work produced by the artist in response to her recent two-month artist residency in Trinidad.

Alison Norlen graduated from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in 1987 and completed her MFA at Yale in 1989. For the past ten years she has participated in residencies and visiting artist and mentoring programs internationally. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions since the late 1980s and currently teaches at the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of Art and History.

An illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition with an introduction by Wayne Baerwaldt (Adjunct Curator, Mendel Art Gallery, Director, Plug In Inc. and Power Plant) and an essay by Trevor Boddy (Vancouver-based Cultural Critic and Historian). 

Float is organized and circulated by the Mendel Art Gallery and Curated by the Mendel's Head of Public Programs, Alex Stratulat.