a quick note to say that two of my video installations have opened at the Penticton Art Gallery’s war artist show. I’m thrilled to know that I’m sharing the billing with Mary Riter Hamilton (1873-1954), my hero actually. Riter Hamilton spent three years painting the still-smouldering battlefields of the Western Front from 1919-1922, losing her health and partial eye-sight doing so and suffered greatly afterwards, financially and physically. Her work has been neglected for a century. I wish she could see it exhibited so beautifully by curator Paul Crawford. More photos from the exhibit coming soon!

I am pleased to announce that two of my video installations will be on exhibition at the Penticton Art Gallery this autumn, and that I will be giving an artist talk on Saturday, September 21 at 1 pm. Curator Paul Crawford has assembled a fantastic exibition featuring the much neglected, but fantastic war artist, Mary Riter Hamilton’s (1867-1954) work. I have long admired Riter Hamilton and have lectured on her work, and I am so grateful to Paul Crawford for bringing her work back to us. I am humbled to be part of this show.

The work of mine that will be on display includes Road to War (2014), a video triptych shot over the two years I was embedded as a war artist with the 1st Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. The footage, shoot using a handheld digital camera, intends to provoke thoughts on the paradox of the war narrative—a narrative at once private, and yet so very public. The work is intended to be viewed selectively, that is, one chooses how to experience the triptych, e.g., as a single screen, a double screen, a triple, with or without ambient sound, or my poetry as voice-overs. First seen at Scotland’s wondrous StAnza International Poetry Festival, the work has been exhibited in Canada and Britain.

The other video installation I will be exhibiting is one I shot on the battlefields, in the woods, and the graveyards of the Western Front in 2014, the centenary of the start of the Great War. Champs de Visions/Fields of Visions/Blickfelder is a meditation on the consequences of landscape—all footage was shot from the ground up, so flat and dangerous was the Western Front. I hope you can join us for this innovative exhibition that includes women war artists from almost a century apart.