ARTISTS-IN-CONVERSATION
Saturday 12 February, beginning at 3PM
Victoria Arts Council
1800 Store Street | Victoria, BC
Parallel Art Show artists Susan Benson, Connie Kuhns, and Peter McFarlane will be in discussion at the Victoria Arts Council as a closing event for the Salt Spring Island National Art Prize Award Winners exhibition. This informal discussion will be moderated by SSNAP founding director, Ronald T. Crawford. This is a rare opportunity to hear from these artists set amongst their work in our main gallery.
About the Artists-in-Conversation:
Susan Benson finished her training in painting in the UK before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Television. In 1966 she emigrated to Canada, where she began designing sets and costumes across the country and designing internationally—in the US, Finland, China, and Australia. Since moving to Salt Spring 10 years ago, she has concentrated on painting and participating in many juried shows and exhibitions in Ontario and BC. Awards include the Banff Centre Medal for her contributions to the Arts in Canada and membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. She is a member of the Order of Canada.
Connie Kuhns has a forty-year history as an essayist, journalist, photographer, and broadcaster. Her essays have been finalists for a National Magazine Award, a Western Magazine Award, Best American Essay Series, Prism International, LA Review Literary Awards, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. Her photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, Globe and Mail, Geist, the Georgia Straight, Herizons, and other periodicals. Exhibitions include “True Nature’s Child” at Chernoff Fine Art and “Salton Sea” at POD Contemporary–part of Salt Spring Island’s 2019 Photofest. She was a regular presenter at David Wisdom’s Summer Slide Shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Peter McFarlane is a conceptually based sculptor, mixed media, and installation artist. “I take some pride in the wide and varied materials that I work in and refuse to be hemmed into any one particular element, though the recycled object or image has been a steady, first string regular! To me, waste is just a lack of imagination! I want all my work to challenge the viewer’s expectations and perceptions. I hope to unsettle the obvious relationship of the viewer with their understanding of the everyday mundane object! I hope it makes the audience look closer, think harder and reconsider the parts of our lives that are often overlooked and create a more comprehensive understanding of the world around us. I rely on long hours, landfills, serendipity, and luck to create something vivid, memorable, in amber! Still, the theme remains: something new is once again recycled from the old meanings that consciousness has left behind but not forgotten.”