Joanne Salé, September Artist-in-Residence

Joanne Salé

Artist-in-Residence, September 2022

Joanne Salé earned her BFA from UBC-Okanagan in 2005, where she worked in sculpture, drawing, etching, and painting.

She has had solo exhibitions and been included in group exhibitions throughout the province.

Her professional activities have included teaching art, prop/set work for Runaway Moon Theatre, illustration work, and jurying group exhibitions. 

                     http://www.joannesale.com/                        @joanne_sale68

Residency Project

My newest body of work, collectively titled Dark Water, emerged from my stay at the Kasahara Gabriola Trust artist residency. I spent many hours in the quiet while there, looking out at the Salish Sea.

The thing that impacted me the most during my time on Gabriola was the sight of the ferries sailing past at night. I was captivated by the slightly surreal lights that slid past in the dark, almost appearing to be suspended in the velvety blackness. They were otherworldly to me. I started taking video of the ferries after dark, and created The Night Ferry, a video installation from some of these videos to be viewed surrounded by black draperies which I am making to
preserve that suspended quality.

The other part of this body of work is a series of relief prints, four of them to date and in various stages of completion. The images depicted in these lino cuts carry an implied narrative though they give nothing away and can be viewed in any sequence. 

They are fragmentary, like bits of a half-remembered dream or random frames lifted from a graphic novel and depict both observed and imagined scenes. Compositionally, they are a continuation of the forms that occur in my Connections body of work as well as the moonlight-on-water images that I revisit periodically.

During my residency at the Caetani House in September, I will be accessing the press at the Vernon Community Arts Centre in order to print as much of the editions as possible, in addition to completing the final tasks for the Night Ferry video installation. This work will be in an exhibition at Lake Country Art Gallery, opening on October 1 st .

This residency has been made possible in partnership with the Vernon Community Arts Centre.