June 24 – August 14, 2022

Transformation

Scott Evans, Naoko Fukumaru + Conrad Sarzynick

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, June 24th 5-7PM at the Arts Centre

Fukumaru, Evans, and Sarzynick are close friends who have made art together, have exhibited art together, and have shared life together. Each of their work is captivated by transformation – from the physical materials employed, to the artistic and aesthetic sensibilities they are drawn to, to ideas and experiences, to details of change, to emotional metamorphosis, to mysteries of life, to social and environmental shifts, and to spiritual transformation. Although materially distinct, their practices interact in interesting and synergistic ways, creating an interplay of aesthetics and meaning that shares common ideas and concerns. 

Through their work they explore how transformation can be a potent force dancing between destruction and rejuvenation. Transformation as the end of something and the beginning of something else. 

Scott Evans’ installation, sculpture, and drawing strive to awaken wonder and imagination by presenting surreal environments and abstract landscapes made from contradictory materials. Using these objects as building blocks to create magical alien worlds, crumbling utopias, and otherworldly sci-fi scenarios where new possibilities are presented. 

Naoko Fukumaru’s Kintsugi installation uses thousands of Slug Pottery fragments excavated from the important Sunshine Coast kiln site in Roberts Creek. Kintsugi, the Japanese art of golden joinery, is a five-hundred-year-old method of restoring damaged ceramics. Kintsugi celebrates imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness by creating the beautifully broken. Fukumaru’s work respects the traditional materials and aesthetics of Kintsugi but also uses creative innovations to expand conventional Kintsugi ideas, pushing the boundaries of techniques and materials with an approach uninhibited, instinctive, and inspirational.

Conrad Sarzynick sees transforming wood into sculpture as an intuitive act of discovery. At the beginning there is only the wood, no fully conceived idea of what the final form will become. The work is improvised. Finding and uncovering the hidden yet clear vision beneath the surface, something sensed felt and pulled towards but unknown until it is fully revealed.

Scott Evans’ art is primarily the processed based investigation of the many qualities of materials. To play with the shapes and textures, as well as their meanings and interrelationship is endlessly fascinating to him. Being born and raised in a small west coast village of BC, surrounded by forest and sea, was very influential in his artistic and aesthetic development. He went on to study sculpture at Emily Carr Institute and presently resides in Powell River BC.

Naoko Fukumaru was born in Kyoto, Japan to a third-generation antique auction house family, the business beginning with her great-grandfather collecting unwanted broken objects by wheelbarrow and repairing them at home. Growing up surrounded by fine arts and antiques, She began to experiment with broken objects at an early age, a passion she built into a career. She graduated from West Dean College, Chichester, England in 2000, with a post-graduate diploma in Ceramics, Glass and Related Materials Conservation and Restoration which led her to more than two decades of working as a professional ceramic and glass conservator at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other institutions in the USA, Europe, Egypt, and Japan. 

Conrad Sarzynick is a self-taught artist who began wood sculpting 1995 in Ontario. Since 1999 he has lived permanently in British Columbia, first in Vancouver, then in 2011 to Powell River on British Columbia’s upper Sunshine Coast. He has exhibited in galleries and group shows in Vancouver, North Vancouver, Richmond, Powell River and along the Sunshine Coast and has had outdoor public sculptures in Castlegar, Penticton and Nelson. Conrad is also a poet, collage artist and painter who enjoys experimental vocal work and collaborating with improvisational musicians