Tricia Sellmer is a multi-layered, multi-media contemporary Canadian artist working primarily within the parameters of painting and drawing. Her work is about ideas and narratives, from the poetic to the political. At times she will step away from the easel and curate projects or deliver lectures focused on the connections between modern art history and populist culture. Although born in Penticton, British Columbia, Tricia spent most of her childhood in the Similkameen Valley and now lives and works in the Interior of British Columbia. Tricia can be found almost daily working or teaching from her studio in Casa Décor, 960 Victoria Street, Kamloops, B.C..
Tricia holds degrees from the University of British Columbia and Thompson Rivers University and a Master of Fine Art from the Transart Institute of Creative Research. She has studied painting and drawing at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, the New York Studio School and the School of Visual Arts, both in New York. As well she has participated in a number of residencies, including the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles, Montreal, the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Umbria and the Toni Onley Artist Project in the Cariboo Region of British Columbia.
Tricia’s works have been reviewed in media including City TV Vancouver, CNN and CBC. Tricia has held solo and collaborative exhibitions throughout British Columbia, Canada, North America, New York, Boston, Berlin, London, Hong Kong, Vienna, and Italy.
Tricia Sellmer’s interests are four pronged. The first probes the personal and veiled subtleties of the garden and shifting patterns of the landscape. The second searches for truths to right a wrong. The third finds the extraordinary in the ordinary and focuses largely on the domestic lives of women and in particular those lives that have been silenced. And the fourth connects the dots and blurs the boundaries between genres, often in collaboration with other artists who work in a different medium.
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Tricia documented Medicos en Accion medical team’s work in Guatemala. Two significant works, All is not Gold, and Surgeon, resulted from this experience.
Tricia delivered a lecture on Percy Shelley’s Ode to the Westwind to graduate students on a Tuscan hillside.
A private collection of Tricia Sellmer’s paintings graced the walls of the opening of Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Arizona.
In 2005, Tricia started a conversation with an English artist and gentlewoman, Julia Bullock Webster who had lived for a short period of time in Tricia’s childhood valley over a hundred years before. Three years later, Endless Little Bits, the dialogue between Tricia and Julia was exhibited at Penticton Art Gallery in 2010.
Tricia, as a major patron for the Kamloops Art Gallery’s inclusion into the 2005 Venice Biennale, toured the Lucian Freud’s exhibition off of St. Mark’s square with other Venice Biennale patrons from the Guggenheims.
Tricia painted “Postcards from Umbria” on top of the castle in Montecastello di Vibio and found that the sky’s tints and music merge and change with the endless shifting of colour and poetry within the Umbrian landscape.
Tricia participated in a 30-day Drawing Marathon, facilitated by Graham Nixon, at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.
Tricia opened the “Sun Records and Texaco Stadiums” project with Canadian poet Alexander Forbes at the Mountain Island Gallery, in Wells, BC. Most townsfolk arrived with paste on Elvis sideburns, and spent the evening singing Elvis’ greatest hits with the Japanese and German tourists.
Tricia travelled to the Burren in Ireland and participated in plein air painting during the day and storytelling and country dance during the night.
Tricia traced Manet’s muse, Victorine Meurent’s footsteps in Paris and then produced Erased, an edition of 25 handbound, handprinted books, one of which was placed in the Canadian National Library permanent collection and archives in Ottawa, a second in the Musee Municipal d’Art et d’Historie de Colombes in Paris, France and a third exhibited in Berlin.
Tricia danced with Luis, a New York based, Venezuelan choreographer, in Berlin, to the live music of two young gypsy street musicians, while members of their international graduating MFA cohort looked on.
Tricia curated Connecting the Dots, an exhibition that brought together thirty-nine artists, twenty-one artists from the International Transart Collective and eighteen artists from Arnica Arts Center and, included two time slots, three venues and a published catalogue.
Tricia opened Chazou Contemporary Art Gallery, a hybrid gallery that intermingled international artists with local emerging artists.
Coinciding with the exhibition in a tube, Bobbin with Mr. Mynah, in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Tricia climbed aboard a single engine Cessna 170 and flew north to Fort Chipewyan in order to paint with the community’s school children.
Tricia delivered a lecture titled Canadian Signatures: the art and movements that signify the Canadian art identity to a New York audience.
On the 1st of January, 2018, Tricia, crossed the US border and travelled along the Pacific coast searching for the unexpected. When she reached the Mexican border, she inched her way back up to the Ghost Ranch near Santa Fee and found Georgia’s presence in the expansive landscape patterns and dancing wind of New Mexico. Two series grew from these experiences: Searching for the unexpected and Interludes.
Tricia donated 66 works to the British Columbia Interior Health Authority in memory of her husband, Wolfram, (2018) and then completing a donation of a significant number of paintings to Thompson Rivers University. (2021)
Tricia presented a solo exhibition, Tapestry Gardens at the Kamloops Art Gallery, that was opened by Iona Campagnolo, Lieutenant Governor for British Columbia.