This exhibit expresses the ideas and processes in the work of five Vancouver Island artists: Jan Johnson, Dale Roberts, Alicia LaRue, Claudia Lorenz and Arlene Nesbitt. Their sculptures and visual arts are created from found material, detritus and garbage. This medium is appropriate to address our situation today as we struggle with the dichotomy of extinction/survival. We have been asleep. Our dream of material well-being has become a nightmare of consumption, violence and escape. We make tight little packages of people and things to define their value and use for the sake of security. The unacceptable is thrown away, destroyed. But absolute elimination is impossible.

We have to wake up. Survival is transformation.

With wit, ingenuity and skill these artists explore myth, networks, energy sources, the elements and the psyche. They invite us to dissolve categories, to crack open packages of definition and stereotype, to see with open minds, thereby to realize the universal in the particular and the spirit in the material. With the spark of energy released in the creative act we can regenerate ourselves, each other and the natural world to which we belong.

           -  curator Arlene Nesbitt