Artist Adrian Norvid performing "Adrian’s Awetopsy" in 2024.

Image Credit: Guy L’Heureux

The prospect of going to an art gallery might suggest walking slowly in a quiet room with delicate landscape paintings or confusing modern art, but a new exhibit at the Kelowna Art Gallery is painting a different picture.

The “Seriously? Comedy and Satire in Canadian Art 1970-Now” exhibit opens this Saturday, Sept. 6, and is sticking around until Jan. 11. 

The exhibit includes work from 20 artists from different generations and different parts of the country who all use comedy and political satire to reflect on culture and community.

The exhibition’s curator Melissa Feldman said she fell down a rabbit hole of funny artists and thought bringing their work together would give people a different perspective of Canadian art than traditional landscapes or high-minded conceptual work.

“People who are interested in art will be aware of the Group of Seven and the landscape painters, that work is so beautiful and appealing. Part of my interest in a scene like comedy is that I'm always looking for ways to interest broader audiences in art, not just people who know about art,” she said.

The exhibit has a variety of mediums like videos, performances, drawings, paintings and so on. Feldman said the through-line is the whimsical style and humour, whether it’s a harsh critique or something that’s just meant to be fun.

“I discovered that this vein — kind of a spectrum from playful and whimsical to stabbing social, political satire — is really pervasive,” she said.

Vancouver-born Judy Chartrand is one of the artists in the exhibition who has spent years poking at issues in Canadian society with a dark sense of humour.

Judy Chartrand, Enlightenment Brand, 2001. Slip-cast clay, underglaze, lustre. Courtesy of Rennie Collection, Vancouver.

Image Credit: Kenji Nagai

Her mom spent 12 years in the residential school system and she said humour is a good way to get a difficult message across so that people might find it easier to accept.

“A lot of the work I do is actually sociopolitical, and it's focusing on the concept of whiteness and white racism,” she said. “It opens a way for people to actually sort of have an understanding of the politics, without it being like, you know, punching them in the gut. Although there are gut punches, but it's a little easier for them to swallow.”

Chartrand said shows like this are important since it can be hard to find a platform when you’re pushing a topic people would rather ignore like racism in Canada.

“I was given a warning quite a few years ago that I should kind of soften up my approach. And I haven't because racism is just something that's affected me my entire life,” she said. “I've been working on it for years and it just seems to be like a non-ending sort of battle, which is sad.”

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