Key City Theatre is grateful to live, work, play and create on the traditional and unceded territories of the Ktunaxa peoples.

In the spirit of reconciliation, we are extending an invitation to local First Nations, Inuit, and Metis artists to utilize our art gallery space for the month of October into November 12th.

This will be a group exhibition, and number of works will be determined by available space. We welcome all levels of expertise, from beginners to professional. Artistic mediums that work best in the space include photography, paintings, textile, wall hangings, etc. Works can be offered for sale or for display only. As a show of support to emerging artist, we will waive our commission on any sales.

About the Artists:

Sarah Brannigan

Sarah Lynn Brannigan is a Metis artist born and raised in the East Kootenays.

Her colourful images celebrate humanity while examining the struggle of women in today’s world.

Her work is informed by a strong intersectional feminist outlook and fascination with the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Donna Krane

I am a Metis artist living in Creston B.C with my husband.

I have painted for a long time in Acrylics and oils. I have taught painting when I lived in Fort St. John BC., And I am textile Artist this is my passion, I love the way you can make beautiful art piece out of fabric.

Alex Ibbotson

Alex is a Métis artist who began loom beaded at the age of ten.

In 2019 she apprenticed with Lynette La Fontaine (Otipemisiwak Artist) to learn the art of moccasins and the one needle embroidery style beadwork technique. In 2020 Alex continued to be an apprentice learning medicine bag teachings from Lynette La Fontaine. In 2020 Alex learned loom sash making from Kalyn Kodiak and in 2023 learned Northern-style mitten gauntlet making from Kaija Heitland.

Alex’s artwork is inspired by her connection to the land. She is a guide, land-based species knowledge sharer and a business advisor for values-based strategic culture. She has always called ?amak?is Ktunaxa her home and is grateful for the opportunity to inspire others to respect this land as we co-exist with it.

Alex’s family, Louis (dit Assiniboine) Patenaude (Bottineau) and Catherine Moiynon/Patenaude(Bottineau)/Simpson were Rocky Mountain Métis Guides in the mid 1800’s. Louis’s Uncle Pierre Bottineau was a guide. His Father Charles a French Canadian Voyager and Mother Marguerite Macheyquayzaince Ahdichsongab (Clear Sky Woman), was half Ojibwe and half Dakota of the Lake of the Woods First Nation. Catherine Moiynon’s family was Woods-Cree and Ojibwe Métis.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Brass-Donald, an Orkney Métis ancestor’s life was depicted by poet Marilyn Dumont in “The Land She Came From”, the story of Betsy and her husband’s disposition from their Edmonton home by Canada in 1887.

Alex wears her art proudly to bring Métis visibility to spaces where Métis are underrepresented such as the outdoor, adventure tourism industry and Indigenous government advising.

Student Artists:

• Puc Lamb

• Michelle Palmer

• Alizae George

• Rebecca Mahseelah

• Kayden Penyes

Anton is born and raised in the Austrian Alps. He has been painting since he is a little Boy 

He moved to Canada in 1983 and calls Kimberley his Home " I love those Purcell's ! "

His Paintings in Acrylic or Oils are a Reflection of the Solitude he finds on a Mountaintop or in a Rainforest when he is not skiing , hiking or biking , he is painting .

Many Art Lovers and Collectors around the World have Anton's painting decorating their Home.

" it brings me so much Joy to to know that my Paintings bring Joy to so many Homes.

Faces of Pride

Faces of Pride, an art exhibition that opens in June, will feature portraits of local LGBTQ2IA+ community members. Under the creative hand of local hero, Joel Robison, the portraits will provide a unique way for all of the people in our area to get to know each other a bit better.

Robison grew up in Cranbrook and has become an award winning artist, working with organizations such as Coca-Cola, FIFA, Yahoo, Adobe, Oprah Magazine, Mariott, ArcAngel, Trevillion, PhotoNews Canada, and many more. Despite the fame, Joel continues to keep his home town close to his heart and is excited to be the 2023 Faces of Pride artist. 

“I wanted to get involved in this project because I truly believe all members of our community deserve to be celebrated in an uplifting, honest and respectful way. Cranbrook is growing and changing and it's a beautiful thing to see people supporting each other and uplifting voices and stories that haven't always had an opportunity to be shared.”

Robison will design unique, artistic “Faces of Pride” portraits that will be exhibited throughout the June, July and August.  The exhibition will open June 8 at the Key City Theatre, with a free to everyone Pride Party and gallery exhibition.  

Key City Theatre will host the exhibit until the end of June, and then the artwork will be hosted at various businesses and organization in the area for the summer months.  Manager of Events and Development Brenda Burley is seeking community partners to take part in the project. 

“We are looking for local organizations to sponsor a portrait, then once the exhibit moves out to the community for the summer months, we will be encouraging people to visit the artwork, get out in the community, go for walks and visit businesses along the way to see the Faces of Pride.   We are creating a map of all of the locations for people to visit.”  Burley hopes this creative initiative will open doors for conversations, education and will help people in our community get to know each other a bit better.  “We have a thriving, diverse community of people who have interesting lives and stories to tell. Faces of Pride will be one way for us to start to hear the stories, which will lead to greater understanding”.

Joel Robison also sees great potential for Faces of Pride. “I know that this project is going to cause positive and hopeful ripples throughout our community and hopefully reach people who might think they're alone or isolated, and show them that we're here too, that we're pillars of our community wanting to keep it safe, inclusive, respectful and diverse.”

Businesses and organizations who would like to host a Face of Pride portrait can get more information by contacting Brenda Burley at Key City Theatre.

Partners in Print

Celebrating All Types Print Exchange

Celebrating All Types is a print movement that aims to inspire reflection and civic action among letterpress artists and the community at large.

The Celebrating All Types Story
From Carefully Made Letters Come Powerful Words

Celebrating All Types got its start when letterpress artists attending the 2021 Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum Wayzgoose were invited to exchange posters exploring the creative possibilities of being inclusively in community with one another. In 2022 it expanded to the design community in the form of hands-on letterpress printing workshops that generated a public art installation at the AIGA National Design Conference in Seattle.

Today, it’s an open-ended call for letterpress printed art celebrating diversity and inclusion. All are welcome!

Participating Artists in this Gallery:

Neal Panton is a fine art photographer who specializes primarily in landscapes. He favours large-format prints and panoramas.

Photography for me is the purest and most personal way I can share what I feel about life. I try to create photos that are not passive but more reflective. In this reflection viewers can discover their own unique meaning and deeper connection to my photographs.

I make images intended to quiet the restless mind like the snow crunching underfoot in the dead of a winter night. My photography inhabits a wordless world showing how my subjects feel when you touch them, how every detail and texture resonates.

Neal has been photographing since 1984 exhibiting since 1992 and is primarily self-taught. He has won or been nominated for over three dozen awards, some in the Columbia Basin region, others from Europe and the USA.

He has worked as a photojournalist for Reuters, taught photography and visual literacy, been published in over 25 countries, had 16 solo exhibits and 59 group exhibits in Canada, Europe, the United States, and South America, and self-published nine books and catalogs showcasing his images. His work has been written about and featured over the past 30 years in magazines and newspapers worldwide. Neal is represented by Art Gallery Kimberley locally and internationally by Turning Art and Glasshouse Images in the USA. 

The Art of Creating Sense of Place
Written by Irma de Visser, Holly Truchan and Neal Panton

Artist Statement

How do we experience and make meaning of a particular place? Photographic artist Neal Panton uses his camera lens to create connection to a place. Photography nurtures Neal’s feeling of belonging. According to Neal, it is this deeper emotional connection that makes places worth caring about.

Neal’s latest solo art exhibition entitled, “Sense of Place” represents how people experience and make meaning of a particular area and encourage a feeling of belonging for the people who live there. For this exhibition, Neal’s focus was on the Kootenays in beautiful British Columbia. Over the years of living in the Kootenays, Neal has spent a lot of time exploring its diverse landscapes. The mountains in the Kootenays provide Neal endless opportunities to make great photographs. Neal says, “the challenge to me as an artist is to find a unique way of seeing things that people see all the time, to bring a unique point of view to the world around us”.

When asked what Neal’s challenges were when creating this exhibition, he explains that in the last 10 years or so he has been working on panoramic stitches, the process of taking several photos that can be merged into one photo to make a larger photographic canvas. Neal explains, “in my practice, photography is a challenge of exclusion to make your work more impactful. Making panoramic images is another process altogether as the final product is the practice of inclusion. I find it more of a challenge to compose in this way and to maintain the impact of the final panoramic photograph.”

“Sense of Place” is a collection of largely panoramic photographs utilising metal printing. Printing the photographs on metal creates stunning images due to the smooth surface of the material as well as it helps keep down weight and cost of the artworks. Creating solo exhibitions to mount in physical spaces is a costly undertaking, but as Neal puts it “Like a song, all art forms require time from the viewer to absorb, contemplate and learn from the artwork. To make an emotional connection that is both visceral and intellectual requires time spent with the artwork”.

There are two things Neal enjoyed the most during the creation of this exhibition. Firstly, he feels privileged to be heading out into this part of the world with an idea in mind. “It’s a joy to be able to venture out and search out a point of view that illustrates the shared experience of the Kootenays.” Secondly, selecting photographs for an exhibition is challenging, exhilarating, joyous, and meaningful to Neal. “Reliving these moments helps me find the connection that exists between all the photographs. I’m a firm believer that we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. Creating an exhibition reinforces this belief.”

Artist Biography

Growing up in a blue collar, immigrant family in Hamilton, Ontario - an industrial city one hour from Toronto - exposed Neal to a great variety of people, cultures and points of view. Within the family, photographs were always being shared. This was how Neal got to know his family overseas and how his family shared their experience in Canada. It was through these early experiences that Neal developed an understanding of visual language.

Neal is a self-taught photographer. After taking one night school course in the basics of photography, he got his first camera at the age of 22. Most of Neal’s photography and art education has come from books and observation. Neal has worked as a university professor of Photography and Visual Language, and he spent a year as a photojournalist for Reuters news agency.

Photography has been Neal’s primary creative outlet since 1984 because it is closely associated with reality. Playing with this expectation helps him find his particular photographic point of view and personal style. As Neal often presents his work in black and white, he has had to train his eyes to see in that way, always keeping the final product in mind. Neal’s work is a combination of intuition and skill, and he creates photos that are reflective rather than passive. In this reflection viewers can discover their own unique meaning and deeper connection to the image. He uses digital cameras and also scanners to create his photography. Using photoshop, Neal creates photographs that resemble the darkroom photography process that highlights his particular style; “I have been told often that my photographs don’t look like photographs”. Photography is Neal’s way to communicate and form alliances in the

world. People often respond to his images with their own narrative; Neal’s photo, their story.

Acknowledgements

“Sense of Place” has been made possible by the support of Mike Paugh and associates at IG Wealth Management in Cranbrook and by the Columbia Basin Trust through its Arts Funding To Communities grant program which is delivered by the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. The exhibition will be available at Key City in Cranbrook from January 30 until march 31st. The opening reception will be held on February 9 from 7pm – 9pm with musical guest Tyrel Hawke. Due to maintenance issues at Centre 64 in Kimberley, Neal’s exhibition at the Centre 64 Gallery has been rescheduled for the fall of this year.

As an Interdisciplinary artist, Michael Hepher has built a fascinating artistic career over 20 years. His work is an exploration of unique ways of seeing the world. From the beautiful to the banal, his paintings and prints lead him to seek that one angle that gives each moment its particular voice. Colourful, textural works emerge with the goal of anchoring the viewer in a moment and seeing what they haven’t seen before. Painting in oil on canvas and wood or linoleum block prints, Hepher works with unique colour schemes and layers of texture to bring out the emotion of a landscape.

A professional artist in a variety mediums for more than two decades, Michael found his stride after founding Clawhammer Press (a historic printmaking studio) in 2011 where he focused his work on painting and printmaking. His works can be found in homes and collections all over the world as well as from quality Western Canadian galleries. Michael currently lives with his family in beautiful Fernie, BC.