The Summerland Community Arts Council features six unique art shows throughout the year.
Once every year, one of the shows is a community based show which means a call goes out for local artists to create works based around a special theme.
This year that theme celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the Kettle Valley Railroad.
For the past six weeks, works by 10 local artists featuring KVR scenes have been displayed on our walls.
If you haven’t been in to see it you are in luck, the show is on for a few more days until June 20.
The next show is titled The Rip Off Artists, featuring a group of 10 artists from Oliver. Each summer members of this group pick a work by a well-known, deceased artist to copy. After learning about the artist and brainstorming their designs they spend one week creating their works and invite the public to watch their process.
The show at the Summerland Art Centre will feature interpretations of their 2014 pick: Canadian artist Mimi Parent and her 1963 embroidery titled Queen of the Fish.
When Parent moved to Paris in the 1920s she was influenced by the surrealist movement.
This was a cultural movement with aims at resolving the contradictory conditions of dream and reality.
Artists during this time painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.
Each member of the Rip Off Artists have created their own interpretation of the famous work using their medium of choice. In the past they have had works done in collage, acrylics, needle felting, painted on furniture and other found objects, encaustics, quilting, and even woodworking. Selections from previous years will also be in the exhibit.
The opening of this show will be June 25 from 7 to 9 p.m. with an artist talk on June 26 at 2 p.m. at the Summerland Arts Centre, 9908 Main St.
For more information about the Rip Off Artists please see their website www.ripoffartists.ca or stop by their home base at the Quails Nest Art Centre 5840 Airport Road, Oliver during the week of July 20 to 25 to see them in action on this year’s rip off challenge.
Carmen McDowell is the Summer Arts Program coordinator with the Summerland Community Arts Council, P.O. Box 1217, 9908 Main St., Summerland, B.C. V0H 1Z0.