Exhibit – November 2 to December 2, 2023

Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Saturday Noon to 5:00 pm

Chilliwack Visual Arts Association at the O’Connor Group Gallery is excited to present a selection of works from the 2023 Fraser Valley Biennial, organized and circulated by The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford. Now in its seventh edition, the Biennial showcases exceptional artwork produced by artists in the Fraser Valley region over the past two years.

The overarching theme of the 2023 Fraser Valley Biennial is the body and its relationship to countless aspects of the corporeal, sensorial, psychological, and intellectual human experience.

Featured in the are works by Sarah Louise Brammer, Olivia de Fleuriot Perry, Amy Dyck, Michael Doerksen, Kat Grabowski, Paula Funk, Davida Kidd, Lorena Krause, Russell Leng, Luke Pardy, Amberlie Perkin, Cobi Timmermans, Devon Riley, Laura Rosengren, Jennifer Shepit, Tracie Stewart, Erica Grimm, Ellen Scobie, Shel Stefan, and Qahraman Yousif. In these works, the twelve artists work with, and through, notions of the body as a vessel of experience; the sexualized body as a form of either oppression or liberation; gestures and traces of the labouring body; pain, disease, and disability, as well as strength, resilience, and power; bodily metaphors in the language of technology; humans’ relationship with imagined microbial communities; and more.

This year’s edition of the Fraser Valley Biennial is guest-curated by Candace Couse. An assistant professor of visual art at the University of the Fraser Valley’s School of Creative Arts, Couse is a grateful guest on the traditional and unceded territory of the Stó:lō People. Couse earned an MFA from The University of Calgary (2010) and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Brock University (2020). Couse’s work has been exhibited across Canada, as well as in the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, Trinidad, Pakistan, Nepal, Iceland, and India.