Traces of War Works at The Penticton Art Gallery

It’s a little weird being in a rural gallery that is so open to showcase such different genres together, however that is the case with this Rememberance Day show at the Penticton Art Gallery this fall. I’m not quite sure exactly where it begins and ends, but that it is dark -- I can’t even see the dust although can readily imagine it upon the ornate frames of a series of paintings from the original collection. This paired with a new-media installation is an exhibition made by a Michael Sandle, Jack Shadbolt, and Bettina Somers a group of people who apltly captured imagery from war times throughout classic and contemporary times. In the painting showcase, we see soldiers, nurses, and other officials and lay people in their according garbs, and they look quite more modern that you’d expect. Well of course they are because they were made in a time when mechanic technologies already existed, portrait paininting is on the way out, and so it contain this type of earier transcnedance if you will: those looks contained on the faces, bodies, and gestures of the people. There is also this gaze of course in that we would not be able to see in these images if it os not for people like her, the artist in question to capture them either. Not only do they contain an effection for the people as well for the landscape in that there is perhaps a warm richness to their colours and scales it seems. Can I hear a soundtrack in the background? I don’t know. That’s how the sound moves around the exhibition at the Penticton Art Gallery anyway. There is also this notion of activity in the imagery as well. Set in villages, communities, outsides, in entrances, these thresholds gives them all a sense of transiens of war as well as the longing for home perhaps. The art gallery itself is situatied in a relatively old city, with people who undoubtedly have connections with history so it’s nice that there is a creative place like this to give reverence to issues regarding war and remembers like this. Yet I am also drawn to the actual present reality of war and peacekeeping in the videos and soundtracks that seems to give a ground to the contemporary issues regarding the gathering of such subject matter as in the old oil paintings. A video from the internet portrays a group of people driving in a tank and flying in a helicopter. I’m actually viewing a screen and on either side there are other screens as if I’m driving in a giant vehicle, targeting various elements on the landscape. One wonders exactly where the footage is from. Regardless, it seems satisfying. As I listen to the headphones that showcase various tracks from radio recordings made by officials during their various excursions over the landscape, a night vision lense illumines an exterior landscape and then enters a civilians home. The people are on their couches, and I am under the trees that were in the actual paintings perhaps. Their looks are a little different, however, than the voices that I can’t here in the paintings of course. Being that they aren’t necessarily the same perspective as in the old oil paintings. Could they ever be? Although there is a sense of relief for the melancholic stance of many people in the older images, the sort of new threshold, the new negotiation of these spaces, and also a new type of longing perhaps, that of where is the home in all of this? The aspect of the womanly gaze is juxtaposed clearly against time it seems. The imagery staggers, or soundtracks stop, change, and somehow become impressionistic as oil paintings. Perhaps that gives inkling of how the scale of details that I don’t necessarily notice in the paintings refers to that which then is too quick to capture. The Exhibition runs at the Penticton Art Gallery from Sept 20 2019-Nov 11 2019.