STILL

I remember the ritual of family film nights on Sundays in the suburbs of Toronto: the whir and clatter of the projector, the bonds of kinship, the viewing of those silent and awkward images that documented our family life. This exhibition begins with those memories and plays at the intersection of technology, family histories, memory, and re-imagining.

I recently recovered over twenty 16MM film reels containing footage of my family in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s, following my parents’ emmigration from Holland to Southern Ontario. Over the many hours I spent digitizing each reel, I meditated on the differences between moving images, stills, and painted canvases. Translating between mediums revealed spaces or gaps in representation, mirroring the gaps in recorded and cognitive memory, and presented opportunities for creative interventions and reimaginings. This was a new approach to painting for me, one in which “the subject of the pictures was not the images per se but the change from one to another, the change that represented time and motion more vividly…”*

A smaller sized series of paintings dwell on the near-imperceptible shifts between frames, slowing down both the passage of time and the movement of figures through space. The film stills are moments that never would have been intentionally captured by a still camera. People blinking, moving out of frame, tilted horizon lines - these moments between the ‘main events’ catch my attention perhaps because they are just as much a part of our existence as more carefully composed photos. The larger paintings highlight individual stills and become portals through time, spaces to imagine and experiment around objects, people and places of the past.

By slowing down the films to dwell on their details, my work runs against the grain of contemporary visual culture, which produces an excess of images to be consumed at incredible speeds, discouraging contemplation. I want to recover the kinds of rituals in which communities can gather, document, share and celebrate their stories.

* Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Viking, 2003.

YVONNE VANDER KOOI

Yvonne Vander Kooi's art practice has embraced community, collaboration, education, public art and studio work. In the studio her painting practice moves between figuration and abstraction primarily using acrylic and oil on various sized canvas or wooden panels. These semi-abstract figurative works have focused on experimentation, the materiality of the paint and evocative imagery. Her subjects have included the figure, portraiture, flora and fauna and the landscape.

Her work has expanded into larger scale, narrative works that place the figure in resonant environments and are based on memory and family history, connecting to larger themes of immigration and war. Her current work takes place at the intersection of technological and family histories, personal and collective memory. She is interested in foregrounding the dynamic, interactive qualities of these narratives, unsettling the kind of nostalgia that relies on fixed truths or static storylines. Yvonne's work invites us to consider stories about people, places, and movement that are both personal and universal.

Born and raised in Ontario, she acquired her BFA in Michigan, and lived in Toronto and Vancouver. She currently lives in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island with her family and two dogs. She has participated in numerous group shows and has work in private and corporate collections. Recent notable achievements include being shortlisted for exhibition for the 2024 Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award at the National Gallery in London, UK. She received the 2023 Award of Excellence in the 10th Biennial juried Exhibition in the Ladysmith Fine Art Show and was also selected for a curated group exhibition at the Two Rivers Public Art gallery titled Immigration: A Conversation in Two Rivers in British Columbia in 2022. She is currently a member of the Art in Public Spaces Working Group for the City of Nanaimo for the past 4 years.

YVONNE'S WEBSITE