Susan Point: Spindle Whorl
to
Kelowna Art Gallery 1315 Water St, Kelowna, British Columbia V1Y 9R3
Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gal
Susan Point, Behind Four Winds, 2012
screenprint, 80.0 x 80.0 cm, Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Artist, Photo: Rachel Topham, Vancouver Art Gallery
Susan Point will be in Kelowna for one evening to host a free tour and walk through her exhibition entitled Susan Point: Spindle Whorl on Thursday, June 13, 2019, at 6 pm.
A new exhibition by Musqueam artist Susan Point opens at the Kelowna Art Gallery this weekend. This marks the first solo exhibition of her work in the Okanagan.
Over the past three and a half decades, Point has received wide acclaim for her accomplished and remarkably wide-ranging compositions that forcefully assert the vitality of Coast Salish culture, both past and present.
During this time, she has produced an extensive body of prints and an expansive amount of sculptural work in a wide variety of materials that includes glass, resin, polymer, stone, bronze, concrete, steel, wood, acrylic paint, and paper. The scale of her work is also wide in scope, ranging from the intimacy of the jewelry she produced in the early 1980s to the monumental character of the public sculptures she continues to make today.
Susan Point: Spindle Whorl is a touring exhibition from the Vancouver Art Gallery that showcases 40 works, which are accompanied by a special selection of 14 works borrowed directly from the artists’ studio for the Kelowna Art Gallery.
The spindle whorl has been a persistent motif in Point’s work since the beginning of her career. Comprised of a small wooden disk with a rod inserted through its centre, this tool was traditionally used by Coast Salish women to prepare wool that would be woven into garments and ceremonial blankets. Point has drawn upon the spindle whorl to provide a formal structure for her art while combining this motif with a uniquely Salish vocabulary of circles, crescents and curved triangles, elements that distinguish the art of her people from the form line-based art of more northern peoples.
The exhibition is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art and Ian M. Thom, former Senior Curator–Historical.