Sleep well my precious one. You gave all you could give and then even more. Without you I would not have become me. Thank you.
The creative force behind Chazou Gallery started well over twenty years ago when Canadian artist Tricia Sellmer traveled to France for a summer-painting sojourn. During the sojourn she was told that she must "study, compose and splash paint." This she did. She enrolled in art school, completed a BFA, opened Chazou , then a "back alley studio" that became one of the cultural hubs of her home community, participated in artist residencies and then went on to complete an international MFA in 2009. Four years later she was encouraged to open an art gallery. Sellmer agreed but only if the gallery's mandate followed her direction and assumed the name Chazou , a word coined by Sellmer during that early painting sojourn so many years ago. Chazou Gallery closed June 2, 2016, the moment her beloved partner's heart stopped.
Chazou Gallery is a private, contemporary art gallery located in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Chazou Gallery is considered one of the cutting edge, contemporary art galleries in the interior of British Columbia.
Chazou Gallery exhibits contemporary Canadian and International visual artists.
Chazou Gallery curates and rotates solo, group or collaborative exhibitions at least six times a year.
Chazou Gallery selects work from emerging, mid-career and established visual artists.
Chazou Gallery is a diverse contemporary art gallery that consists of three exhibition or project spaces that can become one gallery or three individual galleries.
Chazou Gallery's integrity and commitment to the dialogue of contemporary art provides audience members with a rigorous and well-grounded curatorial perspective within a warm and inviting setting.
A component of Chazou's mandate is to document a number of the exhibitions in published catalogue form.
Below are the exhibitions held at Chazou Gallery during its operation.
Please click to view exhibition and Gallery Contents.
Curated by Ben Eastabrook & Kristina Bradshaw
Tricia Sellmer is a multi-layered, multi-media Canadian artist working primarily within the parameters of painting and drawing. Her work is about ideas and narratives, from the poetic to the political. For more than twenty years, she has concentrated on making the invisible visible. Her interests are three-pronged. The first probes the personal and veiled subtleties of the garden and the shifting patterns of the landscape. The second finds the extraordinary in the ordinary and focuses largely on the domestic lives of women and in particular those whose lives have often been forgotten within the dialogue of history or silenced through circumstances beyond their control. The third connects the dots and blurs the boundaries between genres, often in collaboration with other artists who work in a different medium.
As an independent working artist, Tricia Sellmer also writes, lectures and curates projects and exhibitions. In 2012 she opened Chazou Gallery, a private project space and hybrid gallery that caters to emerging, mid-career and established contemporary Canadian and International artists. She holds four degrees from three universities and has participated in numerous residencies. Her work is widely sought after and is in private collections throughout North America and Europe.
Working exclusively on paper, Ann Kipling has established herself as an important figure in Canadian art. Kipling was born in Victoria, British Columbia and entered the Vancouver School of Art in 1955. She graduated with honours in 1960 and in 2008 was awarded an honourary doctorate from the Emily Carr University. In her early years she studied with Jan Zach and Herbert Seibner in Victoria and attended the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Kipling's work can be found in numerous public and private collection across Canada including the Kamloops Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the McMichael Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada.
Jayne Holsinger is a New York based painter whose work has been exhibited worldwide. Her paintings highlight American culture and landscape as a natural outcome of her investigations into identity, family history, and the natural environment. Holsinger's images are based primarily on photographs.
Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, Jayne Holsinger worked one year as an illustrator before moving to New York city in 1978 to attend the New York Studio School for Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. She studied at Ringling School of Art (BFA), the New York Studio School, and the Transart Institute (MFA). Amongst her honours are grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation. Holsinger is widely respected and her work can be found in numerous private collections. She is married to Hugh Seidman, a poet and lives in Greenwich Village, New York.
Aganetha Dyck is a Canadian artist whose artistic career spans four decades. Based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Aganetha Dyck's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and in England, France and the Netherlands, and is held in such prestigious museums as the National Gallery of Canada, the Glenbow Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Britain.
Aganetha Dyck's interest lie within the realm of environmental issues and the power of the small. She is renown for her collaboration with honey bees and the transformation of commonplace objects such as shoes, buttons, and figurines into objects with are simultaneously metaphysical, delicate and sometimes humorous.
Aganetha Dyck received the Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction in 2006, the Canada Council's Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2007, the Spotlight on 40 years; Artworks from the Canada Council Art Bank in 2012, the Art city Star Award, Winnipeg in 2013 and recently, the Making a Mark Award: in recognition of excellence in professional artistic practice, through the Winnipeg Arts Council in 2014.
Astrid Menze graduated in Audiovisual Media at the Gerrit-Rietveld-Academie, Amsterdam and the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999. she received her MFA in New media from the Transart Institute (Linz/New York) in 2010. She lives and works as an interdisciplinary artist in Berlin with a focus on time-based media. Astrid Menze's work is based on the concept of the potential of the gap and the system error. Starting with given or found material, she searches for irregularity, lacks and thresholds within patterns and structures. Teaching motage a the L M University, Los Angeles and A & M Texas University within the "fits Europe" program of the Academy of International Education in Bonn, editing and visual communication at DEKRA Academy and MET Film School in Berlin. Her approach to transmit and create plays with the reciprocity of praxis based theory and concept oriented experiments.
Steve Mennie was born in Revelstoke, British Columbia and was educated at the Ontario College of Art. After working as a freelance editorial illustrator for a number of years, he returned to B.C. in 1970. Since that time, Mennie has worked in various media, and has shown his work nationally and internationally. His work has been included in the collections of B.C. Tel, Weyerhaeuser Canada Ltd., Ernst and Young, and the Bronfman collection, Montreal. In addition, Steve Mennie has twice been commissioned by the Canada Post to design commemorative postage stames.
All of Steve Mennie's work is marked by an interest in reality, and much of his work reveals a unique sense of humour. Throughout his career, he has experimented with a variety of media, including hand-pulled silkscreen prints, acrylic, oil, and /or watercolour paintings. He moves between high realism and abstraction.
New York artist, James Rauchman received an MFA in painting from Columbia University in 1987. In 1997 he visited Cuba for the first time and then returned over forty times in which he spent documenting the Cuban landscape through the eyes of the citizens. His Cuban portraits of friends and acquaintances were exhibited in the Cuban Biennial in 2006. Rauchman has received a number awards which include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and Best Short Documentary for his film Flowers for San Lazaro from the Tallahassee Film Festival. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections that include the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Barnard College, Bristol-Myers-Squibb Corporation and the University of Delaware.
Jen Dyck is an artist and musician living in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, with degrees in music, theology and classics. Her approach to art is narrative with her primary interest in providing a commentary running alongside her own life, a visual narrative with a decidedly theatrical bent through re-purposing and re-contextualizing found images into a collage format. In 2015 Dyck participated in a group exhibition at the Westbeth Gallery in New York. Her work can be found in a number of private collections in Western Canada.
Canadian artist, Glenn Clark was born in Kelowna, British Columbia and received his BFA (painting) in 1991 from the University of Calgary. In 2013 he was commissioned by the Kelowna Art Gallery to produce work for a 2014 solo exhibition at the Kelowna International Airport Gallery. Fascinated with Canada's national game, Clark produced The Best of Seven, a 28' mixed media installation that gives a retro nod to the popular table top hockey game of the mid-twentieth century. He has received numerous awards and honours including the 2015 Okanagan visual Artist of the Year. Clark maintains a busy studio practice and is the art preparatory for the Penticton Art Gallery.
Kamloops based artist, Marie Scott studied at the Kootenay School of Fine Art while also majoring in English at Notre Dame Unviersity in Nelson, British Columbia. She received a B.Ed., in 1972, taught in the public school system and established a solid art practice. As a visual artist, educator and poet, Scott is concerned with colour, line, and delicate marks with strong forms. She uses simple objects to connect the land to the home, the human to the landscape, and is interested in the emotional memory attached to both. Scott's poetry enhances the understanding of her images. Her work can be found in private and public art collections including the Kamloops Art Gallery's permanent collection. Scott's website is www.mscottart.com
With over twenty-five years of experience working as a commercial artist and illustrator, William Frymire is currently focused on sustainable public art as well as creating art pieces from found objects, natural stone tile and recycled materials. Frymire, born of Metis heritage in Prince George, British Columbia, studied at Langara College and Thompson Rivers University where he was acknowledged with a Distinguished Alumni award for Professional Achievement. Frymire has completed a number of large scale public art projects including a piece in Fort Chipewayn, Alberta that incorporates 17,000 translucent onyx tiles, a work at Fort Saskatchewan's city hall which integrates 28,000 hand painted glass tiles and two mosaics for the City of Edmonton's Borden Park Pool. He maintains his demanding art practice in Kamloops, British Columbia.
Laura Hargrave is a Kamloops-based visual artist working in experimental drawing, mixed media and installation. She obtained her BFA from the University of Victoria and her MFA from the University of Regina. During her MFA program (2006 -08), Hargrave developed an experimental drawing technique, empathetic drawing, in which she worked behind her back in order to reflect the feeling of memory loss. In her recent five finger drawings on loss, she attaches drawing materials to multiple fingers and engages them simultaneously, thus challenging the normal observation / recording process. Hargrave has exhibited her work in numerous Canadian galleries.
Shannon Ford was raised on a farm west of Calgary where she grew up loving Art and knowing horses, cattle and wildlife. She earned a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design. After 30 years as an award winning sculptor and jeweler, Ford developed a unique painting process that incorporates precious and semiprecious gemstone powders, and at times 24 Karat Gold into contemporary images that reflect extraordinary surfaces of light and colour.
Ford's work is widely sought after and is held in numerous Canadian and US collections. She divides her busy art practice between studios in Alberta and British Columbia where she and her partner breed Mangalarga Marchador horses.
Printmaker and freelance illustrator, Samira Zamani grew up in Iran and received a BSC in Agricultural Engineering in 2001. She then went on to earn a BFA in 2005 followed by an international MFA in 2009. In 2011 she completed a year of printmaking studies in Belgium. Zamani collaborated with the Iranian artist, Negin Ehlesabian under the banner of SaNg - Art. Chazou Gallery exhibited their collaborative work in Paper Works in 2013 and Ex-Change(s) in 2014. Zamani has received a number of awards. Her work has been shown in Iran, Europe, Canada and the US. She currently resides in The Netherlands.
Royden Josephson was born in rural Manitoba in 1945. He studied at the University of Manitoba School of Art (BFA 1969) where he was awarded a campus commission for sculpture, completed in 1970. In 2003, after a career in art education, he retired from formal teaching to devote full time to the pursuit of his own artistic interest, beginning with a six month period of study in drawing, painting, and sculpture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Josephson recently completed a collaborative, commissioned public art piece in Bifuka, Japan. He currently resides in Ashcroft, British Columbia where he maintains his studio practice. His work is in a number of private collections throughout Canada, the US and Europe.
Born in Kansas, USA, Linda Kamille Schmidt earned her MFA in Painting and a MA in Drawing from the University of Iowa. She received a BA in Art from Bethel College in Kansas and took additional studies at the Wichita State University and the University of Kansas. She is represented in public and private collections in the US, Switzerland, England, Japan and Hong Kong. As well Schmidt has been granted a number of solo exhibitions in the US and has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, Hong Kong and the US. She completed commissions for the Osaka Bay and Tokyo Hilton Hotels in Japan and for the lobby at the New York University Hospital's Ambulatory Center in New York City. Linda Kamille Schmidt has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1989 and maintains a studio in Bushwick.