KAMLOOPS-Galleries within a gallery. This Thursday, May 13th, a unique display opens at the Kamloops Art Gallery: miniature art galleries, each containing their own miniature exhibitions.

Created by UCC Fine Arts students in response to a project from “Models and Maquettes,” a third-year special-topics course, the miniatures are scale models of actual galleries, along with some imagined exhibition.

A few of the students/artists, including Carl Doherty and Andrea Taylor, worked directly from the Kamloops Art Gallery. The varied scale of their models and their equally varied use of materials highlights the very individual approach that each student made in thinking about this project. Where such an individual approach comes together with traditional notions of craft is evident in such works as Jack Byette’s model of UCC’s Fine Arts Gallery its walls carefully joined together and its window mullions constructed of many minute pieces of wood.

Several of the models represent artist-run galleries across much of Canada: Stewart Charlebois’ model of Calgary’s Truck Gallery; Teria Davies’ and also Sandra Scheller’s models of Vancouver’s Or Gallery; Stephanie Farrell’s model of Vancouver’s Artspeak Gallery; Kristina Fiedrich’s model-in-a-suitcase of Toronto’s Gallery 44; Nak Hoon Park’s model of Kelowna’s Alternator Galler. Other public galleries in western Canada are represented as well: in Stacey Moore’s model of the Nanaimo Art Gallery; in Paul O’Regan’s model of the Kelowna Art Gallery; in Matthew Tremblay’s model of Regina’s Sherwood/Dunlop Art Gallery; and in Tina Warren’s model of Penticton’s Art Gallery of the South Okanagan.

Matthew Tremblay’s second work, Micromuseum 1:1, actually from a different course, celebrates the very idea of the miniature and its endless possibilities of imagining. This work, his title suggests, is not really a model at all because its 1:1 scale is actual size and, instead, calls upon an imaginative leap of faith on the viewers’ part that it might be a real place. Whether a small world to imagine oneself stepping into or, as Kristina Fiedrich’s work suggests, one to be carried on a journey, each work represents a physical, tangible means by which these artists/students have researched the range and potential of Canada’s art galleries.

The display will run through May 27. For more information, please contact Donald Lawrence at 828-5189.