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intervene

Presented as part of STEPS Public Art’s RECLAIM Residency Program

13-16 August 2025

STEPS Public Art in partnership with the Victoria Arts Council is excited to announce a unique land-based art initiative taking place within the traditional territories of the Malahat, Cowichan, Tsawout, Tsartlip, Pauquachin Nations, known as Mill Bay, British Columbia. 

Led by artist David Martinello, Intervene is an immersive, inquiry-based workshop designed to create art that communicates with—and emerges from—nature. Drawing inspiration from Shawnigan Creek and its surrounding environment, a select group of invited artists will craft temporary, site-specific installations using only natural materials, honoring the strength and resilience of the land.

A public reception will be held Saturday 16 August from 12PM-3PM at 2911 Wilkinson R in Mill Bay (limited on site parking available).

About the project lead:

Since he was a toddler, David Martinello has been gathering interesting sticks, and his first memory is of being presented with wood scraps, a hammer, and nails. Today, Martinello’s reverence for wood and craftwork continues, his practice now informed by a BFA from Queen’s University and years of managing his furniture-making company, Alternative Woodworks Ltd. He employs print, sculpture, painting, film, poetry, installation, and performance, alongside traditional woodworking, to investigate the expressive attributes of wood. By contemplating the material’s value and legacy, his work develops a holistic account of wood’s influence in natural and constructed environments. 

Martinello’s art has been showcased in spaces across Canada, and municipalities in BC and Alberta have commissioned public artworks from him. He has curated several shows and operated a commercial gallery. Martinello has participated in residencies worldwide, volunteers for Tofino’s Public Art Committee and is a member of Nanaimo’s Urban Design Roster and several artist collectives. Community outreach is facilitated with his family-friendly workshops and presentations. Martinello has gathered curatorial experience in several spaces, including owning Points Art Gallery in Duncan.

About the participating artists:

With a background in both graphic and jewelry design, Christi York‘s contemporary craft work naturally flows towards mixed media. Vintage textiles, wild crafted inks, botanical contact printing with real leaves or flowers, and hand stitching all make their way into her mixed media collages. As the world around us becomes increasingly inundated with content created by generative AI, she invites people to pause and remember the slow process of crafting hand made objects. Her sculptural basketry was chosen as one of 50 finalists (from over 2000 submissions) in the 2019 Salt Spring National Art Prize. That same year her work was juried into the Sooke Fine Arts show, receiving an honourable mention judges prize. Shown and collected internationally, her pieces tends to find homes with nature lovers, creative souls, and people who appreciate the lengthy process that goes into the work. York has spent her entire life on the West Coast of British Columbia, living in both Victoria and Vancouver, and now resides in the Southern Gulf Islands. Her first job was in a flower shop, where, perhaps, it all started.

Debra Gloeckler explores the human experience of transition through the lens of ecological relationships. In her studio practice, she engages with rainwater to transform sunlight-sensitive paper and plant dyes into abstract monoprints. Informed by community collaboration to protect native plant and pollinator habitats, her work reflects on human accountability to attune with nature amid a shifting climate. Debra lives in the same coastal community where she grew up, on the ancestral homelands of the W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples’, Tsawout, Tsartlip, Tseycum, Pauquachin and Malahat First Nations (Saanich Peninsula, BC). With interest in ecologically sensitive art practice, Debra participates in environmentally focused art residencies and exhibitions abroad, JOYA: arte + ecologia AiR 2024 and Arteventura/OPEN AIR 2025, in Spain. She takes part in collaborative multi-disciplinary initiatives, such as ecoartspace’s international Soil Shroud Project and the research project, Reconciling with Water, shared at the Royal BC Museum. Her involvement in community based art exhibitions ,includes the fifty fifty arts collective and curatorial work with Metchosin ArtPod. Debra completed Collaborative Artist’s Mentorship Programs after receiving a Diploma of Fine Arts from Vancouver Island School of Art.

Project Partners:
STEPS Public Art is a Canadian charity and social enterprise. STEPS offers services in public art management, hoarding exhibits, cultural planning, and artist capacity building. Our charitable programs support artists and foster vibrant and inclusive communities across the country. www.stepspublicart.org

Established in 1968, the Victoria Arts Council supports artists living and working in this region through exhibitions, education, and advocacy. www.vicartscouncil.ca

The VAC recognizes the continued support of the CRD Arts & Culture; and the Province of British Columbia through the Community Gaming Fund as well as BC Arts Council.

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670 For Street 670 Fort Street News Uncategorized Visual

[window][window][window]

Victoria Arts Council
PROJECT SPACE
670 Fort Street

July 2025 – June 2026

Unique art presentations across the three windows on Fort Street

Amplifying our public presence over the coming year, the Victoria Arts Council’s Project Space at 670 Fort Street will host four unique window installations by local, national, and internationally-recognized artists. 

Project curator, and VAC executive director, Kegan McFadden notes that the Council’s presence downtown has taken many forms over the decades from traditional exhibitions, to large-scale community projects, to storefront installations. Since opening the Project Space in January of this year, the VAC hosted an evolving exhibition in the form of an experimental reading room/library, titled ANOTHER LIFE, where interpretations of what makes a book and where printed matter enters the realm of contemporary art was the focus.

The project, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] builds on the VAC’s partnership with The Bay Centre, and contributes to the long history of contemporary artists activating storefronts for means beyond the commercial, and will be viewable from the street at all times of day and night.

From vinyl wraps to collage to banners and hand-painted imagery, [WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] will showcase one artist at a time in three-month-long presentations from July 2025 – June 2026.

These presentations are supported financially by CRD Arts Services Branch, BC Arts Council’s Community Arts Program, and the Province of BC’s Community Gaming Fund, with additional consideration courtesy of The Bay Centre and STEPS Public Art. 

[WINDOW][WINDOW][WINDOW] is inaugurated with an installation by Vikky Alexander.

Tokyo Showrooms (VAC mock up) by Vikky Alexander

In February of 2014, on a trip to Tokyo, I wandered around the shopping district of Aoyama.

The district was predominantly high end retail boutiques, such as Prada, Comme des Garçons and Roberto Cavalli.   

It had just snowed, a rare occurrence in Tokyo.

Following my 2009 series ‘Paris Showrooms,’ and a much earlier series from1992, ‘West Edmonton Mall’,  I took photographs of the streets as reflected in the shop windows, visually sandwiching the indoor displays with the passersby.

I chose the circular framing device to refer in, a self-conscious way, to scopophilia — the love of looking.

The photographs are characterized by my ongoing consideration of illusion and material desires framed within the language of architecture and design.  The works examine how these formal signs reveal and shape meaning in contemporary culture, bringing to the foreground discussions of late-capitalism and its commodification of culture.  The photographs also foreground a utopian desire within the parameters of fantasy and cultural longing.

These are consistent themes in my work. – VA

Vikky Alexander (b. 1959, Victoria, BC) is a Montreal-based artist celebrated for her ongoing contributions to Pictures Generation strategies of critique by appropriation. Engendering a quietly reflective feminism that investigates the power of framing devices within the architectures of corporate branding, her works assess the fetishistic, bureaucratized and aspirational—generating recombinatory mixtures of appropriated scenes of natural landscapes and typifications of beauty that demarcate the romanticization of nature and the naturalization of romance. Activating a jarring fracture between embodied experience and its idealized presentation, her sensual and stylized works spanning installation, sculpture, photography, and video cumulatively denature the commercial annexation of personal capacities for self-reflection.

Vikky Alexander’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dia Art Foundation, New York; White Columns, New York; Musée d’ art moderne et contemporain, Genève; Downs & Ross, New York; New Museum, New York; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; International Center of Photography, New York; Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Canada House, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Barbican Art Gallery, London; and Yokohama Civic Art Gallery, Yokohama. Her works are included in the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Deste Foundation, among numerous others. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she lives and works in Montreal, Quebec. Upcoming presentations of her work include exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; and Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano.

This special presentation of Tokyo Showrooms will be the first exhibition of Alexander’s work on the Canadian west coast since her survey with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Extreme Beauty, in 2020.

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670 Fort Street Community News Programs Visual

Queer Island

INTRODUCING THE LARGEST ARTS FESTIVAL IN VICTORIA … taking place city-wide throughout June.

A ground-awakening initiative by one the longest-running grassroots arts organizations in our city, this coming together across literary, performing, and visual arts celebrates the breadth of queer art and the tenacity of queer artists practicing in the face of adversity.

The Victoria Arts Council is partnering with two dozen cultural groups/organizations/businesses towards a city-wide festival of queer arts, that might just be the largest such cross-disciplinary collaboration in our region’s history.

​The West Coast has long been considered a queer haven, and this exciting new festival reinforces that notion. At time when our community and our rights are facing an uncertain future, globally, we know that coming together is one way to prove that we’re still here and we’re still queer. 

​In organizing this inaugural Festival, we have been guided by the words of the late bell hooks (1952-2021), who offered, 

​“Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

​​With that, I hope to see you at many of the events planned throughout June. A complete list of events can be found online: queerisland.ca

Welcome to Queer Island!

Kegan McFadden
Festival Producer 2025

QUEER ISLAND FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS is supported by:
CRD Arts Services, Province of British Columbia (Community Gaming Fund), BC Arts Council (Community Arts), and the VAC members + donors.

Community Partners include:

Arc.hive artist-run centre 
Aunty Collective
The Bay Centre (VAC Project Space)
Carr House National Historic Site
Camosun College 
the.Dock Centre for Social Impact (VAC Satellite)
Fernwood Community & Arts Association 
The Fifty Fifty Arts Collective 
Gallery Merrick
Greater Victoria Public Libraries (VAC Satellites) 
Habit Coffee 
Hands On Collective 
Intrepid Theatre
Ministry of Casual Living
Planet Earth Poetry 
Madrona Gallery
Mark Loria Gallery
The Regional Assembly of Text 
Saanich City Hall 
Sunday Afternoon
University of Victoria’s Library / Special Collections 
Victoria Film Festival
The Vicious Poodle
XChanges Gallery and Studios 

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DONATE TODAY

We need your support today!

With the ever-increasing costs to operate, the VAC is in the very unfortunate circumstance where we now need financial help from our core supporters — the community of artists, educators, and arts enthusiasts we’ve served for decades.

If you’ve enjoyed our programming, or have been one of the hundreds of artists we’ve uplifted through exhibitions and other opportunities, we’re now calling in the favour.

Please donate to the VAC today …
no amount is too little or too much!

{charitable tax receipts issued at time of donation}

Though we have been able to increase and diversify our revenue stream over recent years, it just isn’t enough to cover costs anymore.

We’ve been there for you since 1968, and together we’ve built something incredible and unique to Victoria … please help us raise the much needed funds to keep the VAC going!

Donate to the VAC today