Seeking Peace, Illuminating Peace art exhibition

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Friday, January 13th, 2012
10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

The Nanaimo Art Gallery is excited to be presenting two talented artists with the theme of peace prevalent.

The gallery at 900 Fifth Street will be transformed into a sanctuary for contemplation, and hope from January 13th to April 16th 2012.

FREE docent led tours of the exhibitions on Saturday March 24, April 14 from 2:00-3:00pm!

Illuminating Peace: Amy Loewan’s exhibition and artist practices center on “creating work as a vehicle for personal transformation and promoting human understanding. I am dedicated to peace building and my career as a visual artist provides me with the avenue to carry out this task.”
Loewan was born at the end of Second World War. During a time when peace was finally declared in Hong Kong, she was named Wai-Ping – Wai, in Chinese, meaning gift, and Ping, meaning peace. While growing up her memories “include my parents caring for orphan cousins and relatives fleeing from war-torn China to British Hong Kong.
After living in Hong King, the U.S. and Australia she immigrated to Canada. In the last decade Loewan has been focused on integrating her multicultural learnings and reaching into the roots of her Chinese heritage by studying ancient symbols and eastern philosophies. By experimenting with the Chinese traditional art materials such and rice paper and ink, the large scale rice paper weaving installation of Illuminating Peace was created.
She states “When viewers are close enough to read this work, they are presented with eight values vital in human relationships: compassion, kindness, respect, understanding, patience, tolerance, gentleness and forgiveness. More than 35 world languages are interwoven into this work.”

Loewan encourages the public’s participation as viewers are invited to write/draw their visions of peace onto strips of rice papers and then weave them onto a separate panel.
She states “In our contemporary society when we are constantly tempted to fear and to despair because of terrorism, global warming, nuclear weapons, depletion of natural resources, rending of social fabric and so on, I strongly believe a message of hope is crucial for our well being.”

Much of Deryk Houston’s work over the past fifteen or so years has been in support of children's rights and peace.
His installation “Seeking Peace” is inspired by a life altering event. Houston elaborates.
“It started with a journey to Iraq and a tour of the Ameriyha bomb shelter in Baghdad, where several hundred men, women and children died in a blinding flash of agony. The simple, concrete and reinforced steel, box like structure, with four foot thick walls and ceiling, was considered to be a safe place to find shelter from the constant air attacks during the first Gulf war.
I was accompanied by an elderly woman who had lost her entire family in the blast. Since her loss, she has spent her time taking people through the shelter, explaining how the two massive, guided missiles burst through the roof and found her family inside.
She had just left the shelter, thinking that everything was safe for a while between attacks to go back to her nearby home and hang up her laundry. (Life had to go on despite the daily bombing runs and so it was normal to come and go from the shelter.) The first missile sliced a hole in the roof and exploded inside where her family and several hundred people huddled. A second missile entered the same hole in the roof and burst through the main floor to the next level below the first, where it exploded and created even more horrific carnage and incinerating heat.
Anyone who has entered through the large, five ton doors of that shelter and witnessed the remains inside, leaves in shock.
But what does one do about it? How does one find any hope?
I found it in the Iraqi people themselves. They demonstrated to me a deep eternal hope that always survives despite the darkness and it altered my ways of thinking in a profound manner over the years. Their strength helped me retain my sanity when world events might test us to our limits.”
Houston has chosen in his installation to not focus on the grim physical tragedy of this event but to rather turn the focus on life over the destruction of war because it is the only way forward. In Seeking Peace Houston would like visitors to contemplate the crisp white sheets that are a part of it as fresh ideas, including new beginnings, surrender, nationalism, as well as an international signal of peace to strangers entering foreign lands.
Houston’s wish is that the viewer “will find some kind of hope after viewing this installation.”

The opening reception takes place on Friday, January 13th from 5:00 – 7:00pm. An artist’s talk by Amy Loewan will be given from 4:30-5:30pm.

Gallery hours are Monday - Friday, 10:00 - 5:00pm, Saturday 12:00 - 4:00pm