March 22, 2025 – May 10, 2025

Main Gallery:
Tsuneko Kokubo: Following the Water

https://tsunekokokubo.ca/

Note: Tsuneko Kokubo will be doing a performance in conjunction with her exhibition at 7pm on Saturday, March 22 as part of the Opening.

“A moment of beauty appears suddenly, like a breeze. I try to capture that fleeting moment on canvas or paper before it is gone”. ~ Tsuneko Kokubo

Born in Steveston, BC, in 1937, Koko is a Sansei - a third-generation Japanese Canadian whose grandparents immigrated from Japan, and whose parents were born in Canada. In 1940, at the age of three, she traveled with her grandparents to visit family in Shiga Prefecture, east of Kyoto on the island of Honshu, home to Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake. What was meant to be a short visit extended indefinitely as Japan’s war efforts escalated, culminating in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Canada’s declaration of war against Japan later that month.

Along Canada’s west coast, fears of a Japanese invasion quickly led to the forced registration of Japanese Canadians as “enemy aliens” under Order-in-Council P.C. 9591 and P.C. 9760, enacted through the War Measures Act. Order-in-Council 365 established a “protected area” along the British Columbia coast, and on February 24, 1942, the Canadian government issued Order-in-Council 1486, mandating the expulsion of all Japanese Canadians living within 160 kilometers of the Pacific coast.

In the months that followed, approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians were forcibly dispossessed, relocated, and sent to internment camps. Their homes, businesses, and property were seized and liquidated by the federal government. As part of this action, Koko’s mother, Eiko, and her sister were interned in Lemon Creek, while her father, Hideo, was incarcerated in the Angler POW camp in Ontario.

Reflecting on her extended time in Japan separated from her family, Koko recalls a childhood shaped by her grandmother’s struggles in raising a spirited child, learning sumi ink painting and calligraphy at school, and the unforgettable date of August 6, 1945. What began as a carefree summer day playing in the local river ended with adults hurriedly gathering the children, distracting them with watermelon as they tried to process the devastating news from Hiroshima. As an eight-year-old, these must have been deeply confusing times for Koko and her family, and she could never have not foreseen just how profoundly these experiences and memories would continue to shape and define her life more than seven decades later.

At the end of the war, her family faced a ‘second relocation’ as her parents traveled to Japan to reunite with her and her grandmother. They remained there until 1952, when they were finally allowed to return to Steveston, where her father once again found work as a fisherman. Though this was the place of her birth, it must have been a disorienting time for a teenager trying to reconcile her past with an unfamiliar present, navigating the complexities of identity, belonging, and cultural adjustment.

Upon graduating from high school, Koko enrolled at the Vancouver School of Art, where she studied under modernists Jack Shadbolt and Don Jarvis. These dynamic and formative years inspired her to develop a multidisciplinary practice that seamlessly blended Japanese tradition and ceremony with contemporary dance, circus arts, street theatre, and painting. This fusion of disciplines led to a uniquely immersive and expansive creative practice, which was recently celebrated in her career retrospective exhibition, Of Light Itself, curated by Maggie Tchir.

At 88 years old, Following the Water marks Koko’s most ambitious undertaking to date. The exhibition features three monumental canvases, each measuring 30 feet long by 5 feet tall, created specifically for this exhibition over the past three months. These massive paintings are complemented by 35 additional pieces, most of which have been painted over the last five years, along with a selection of earlier pieces that provide additional context and continuity. Together, they weave a powerful narrative that explores the profound impact water has to shape and define both the physical environment and the human experience.

The catalyst and inspiration behind this series of works can be found in the numerous field sketches done at the sites of former Japanese internment camps. At each site, Koko documented the landscape with a particular focus on the bodies of water adjacent to each location. During these visits, she created numerous preliminary sketches, which she later developed into a series of paintings in her studio. The culmination of this process is represented by the three large-scale studio works that form the core of the exhibition.

In these paintings, Koko delves into her profound and sometimes complex relationship with water, and its potential to serve as a vessel for carrying and holding memory. Water’s constant movement and cyclical nature, coupled with its deep ties to the past, make it a powerful symbol in her work. Koko seamlessly weaves together history, emotion, and the natural world, capturing the poignant and layered significance of each site she documents. The result is a rich and meaningful narrative in which water serves as both a means of personal reflection and a tool for broader cultural exploration.

When considering Koko’s work, it’s also interesting to remember that humans are made up of 50-60% water, and all the water on Earth today is the same water that has existed for nearly 5 billion years. The only thing that changes is the form water takes as it moves through a circular cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. With that in mind it’s hard not to consider that this element has the capacity to carry with it the collective memory of everything that has come before, linking the past, present, and future.

At the heart of Koko’s creative practice over the past 70 years is a deep reverence for nature and the interconnectedness of all things. Her paintings evoke the rhythm, power, and tranquility of rivers, rain, and oceans, inviting viewers to reflect on how water shapes both the natural world and the human experience. Through her work, Koko weaves a layered narrative rich in memory, metaphor, and personal symbolism, where water becomes a portal to understanding the cycle of life. In her painting and performance, she offers a poetic meditation on movement, time, and the profound interconnectedness of all things, encouraging viewers to contemplate their own emotional and physical connections with water, memory and the passage of time.

Tsuneko Kokubo ~ Artist Statement

This exhibition combines my current passion for painting water, with an homage to my Japanese Canadian ancestors. The long canvas scrolls and the Metamorphosis video performance are inspired by bodies of water near various internment sites in the Kootenay/Boundary region: Greenwood, Sandon, Slocan, Lemon Creek, Rosebery and New Denver.

Rivers and creeks remember. Rocks, pebbles, trees and their roots remember. Water flowing, taking their stories far beyond. What could they tell me?

After visiting each location, I transfer my thoughts, feelings and drawings onto a large scroll until all the sketches of creeks are placed and begin to flow together. At times something will call out saying ‘paint me’ or ‘look at my colour’. For this large-scale project I had to transform all the glorious hues of the water (viridian, lapis, sage, sap, moss, umber, amber….) as I had decided on a monochromatic approach - perhaps as another challenge, or perhaps because of my familiarity with black ink and brush since childhood.

Creeks change constantly, especially after the spring run-off when tons of boulders come tumbling downstream, trees are uprooted and new creeks form every season - different but the same, as the water proceeds. It is fluid and fits into any container, space or crevice, but never stays forever. It can be hard as ice and gentle as mist rising or snow drifting down.

Is this what grandma meant when she told me to ‘be like water’? I could not figure out how or why, but now I understand. She and I could never have thought that one day I would become obsessed by a ‘painting deity’.

Gradually the voices of the ancestors fade leaving only the sound of water moving. It has been not a ‘walk down memory lane’ but a walk alongside memory river, with the water holding all

together.

The canvas may end but the water will keep on gliding and surging and flowing - nurturing trees, shrubs, moss and all the many creatures... on its way to the ocean…

Tsuneko Kokubo ~ Biography

Tsuneko Kokubo was born in Steveston BC in 1937 and raised in Japan. Returning to Canada in her late teens, she studied Fine Arts for four years at Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), focusing on drawing and painting. She has worked extensively in theatre as a performer (physical theatre and dance) and costume designer and continues to do so. In 1990 she returned to being a full-time painter, working mainly in oils and acrylics. She has had numerous exhibitions, and has paintings in private collections in Canada, Europe, Japan, Mexico and the USA.

Tsuneko Kokubo gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society (JCLS).

Toni Onley Gallery:
Raghu Lokanathan: ScriPT

https://tworiversgallery.ca/see/exhibitions/object-decay/

Note: Raghu Lokanathan will be doing an Artist Presentation at 7pm on Sunday, March 23 at the Gallery, admission by donation.

The De-composition of Raghu Lokanathan
~ Paul Crawford

Raghu Lokanathan’s creative practice is a meditation on materiality, transformation, and impermanence. Over the past 20 years, his artistic journey has taken him from singer-songwriter to playwright, actor, and, most recently, visual artist. Over this time, he has taken on the role of cultural anthropologist, approaching his creative practice as a space for inquiry, layering different disciplines to explore the naturally evolving nature of objects, stories, and identities.

His work increasingly draws its inspiration from the discarded remnants of a society fueled by consumerism, convenience, and disposability. Through these cast-off fragments, he seeks meaning, understanding, and connection, exploring the trace DNA of our collective presence, though language and mark making while creating space for reflection, interpretation and understanding.

At the heart of his practice is an engagement with decomposition, both literal and metaphorical. Blending his interests in literature, mythology, text, and mark-making, he examines what is lost, what lingers, and what transforms over time. Found objects, often discarded, overlooked, or abandoned, become focal points for reflection and experimentation, raising questions about memory, value, and impermanence. Through these materials, he reveals the tension between permanence and decay, tracing how meaning shifts as objects pass through different hands, places, and histories.

By working with discarded materials, Lokanathan challenges assumptions about waste and worth. His process, tracing, sketching, arranging, and performing, is open-ended, reflecting the fluid nature of meaning itself. Through mark-making and text, both real and imagined, he explores how time, touch, history, memory, and interaction shape materials and ideas alike. The result is a body of work that resists finality, embracing the constant state of change inherent in both art and life.

This exhibition presents and frames Lokanathan’s work as an act of slow observation, providing an invitation to pause, recalibrate, and reconsider the everyday while discovering meaning in what is often discarded or overlooked. Through his explorations and meditations on impermanence, decay, memory, and transformation, he challenges our assumptions about waste and worth, inviting us to observe more closely, engage more deeply with the world around us, recognize value in the ephemeral, and embrace the beauty of change.

Raghu Lokanathan ~ Artist Statement

Sometimes the way I think about what I’m doing is that it’s the art I’d make at the end of the world- what I’d do if all I had left to work with was the scraps that are lying around that I have to squeeze every bit of material and use from. What I mainly use is scrap paper and scrap pens, because I see how to get started with them- by writing and making marks. Then I like seeing what happens when I trace one set of marks on top of another, then trace marks on one side of the paper as they appear on the flip side, then trace marks that then appear on the surface the paper is on, then keep doing that until the pen runs out, then take the pen apart and pull the nub out leaving a naked gooey inky plastic tube to drag along marks or press into or blow into marks or place so whatever ink is left runs out in a blob that spread and soaks what it’s sitting on.  When I look at the results of this layering, though I see creatures, alien scripts and weather, mostly I find I don’t know what I’m looking at or how exactly to look at it, and that feels like a relief. A relief from sense, message, story, design, easy-to-see form. Other scrap materials I’ve been using are the unused end of receipt printer rolls and a folding knife I found last year in the Japanese Garden behind the Penticton Art Gallery.

Raghu Lokanathan ~ Biography

Raghu has been part of the BC arts scene since the early 2000’s when he got here from back east and started appearing at coffee houses and festivals as a singer-songwriter. He toured and put out albums as a solo artist, and also with bands including the Cottonweeds, the Chimney Swallows, and the Transfiguration Good News Band. You might still catch him on stage singing songs behind a guitar, but his work has also drifted into theatre and visual art. His short works for stage include Work(2015), A Sickness of Meaning(2017), Has There Been a Time Since(with Corwin Fox, 2021), and Cut Down(also with Corwin Fox, 2022). His first show of visual art was Object Decay, at the Two Rivers Gallery in 2018. Next was Observatory, an artist residence at the Omineca Arts Centre in 2020. Script is the third exhibit of his visual art.

Project Room Gallery:
Alexandra Bischoff: Homesick

http://www.alexandrabischoff.com/

* Note: Alexandra Bischoff will be in the exhibition participating in a durational performance every Saturday throughout the course of the exhibition from 11am to 4pm

We find ourselves at a pivotal moment where the cultural fabric that once provided comfort, connection, and stability is unraveling at an alarming pace, leaving more individuals feeling untethered and disconnected. Set against this backdrop, Alexandra Bischoff’s exhibition homesick feels oddly aligned with the current zeitgeist taking on even greater resonance exploring the lasting impacts and legacies resulting from the lasting impacts and legacies of familial instability.

Through a forensic examination of her own family’s history, Bischoff seeks a deeper personal understanding, drawing parallels between her own life and the lingering impact of choices made by those who came before her. But beyond the tangible traces of the past, she also considers the role of the unseen, the lingering ghosts embedded in our familial DNA, which unbeknownst to us, continue to shape our sense of self, belonging, and cultural connection.

Anyone who has been adopted and later meets their biological family for the first time can describe the strange, visceral connection that comes with looking into the eyes of a direct relative. It’s an unspoken recognition, a deep-seated familiarity that exists even before words are exchanged. This deeply felt recognition suggests that identity is not solely shaped by lived experience but is also woven from inherited memory, cultural lineage, and the silent imprints of those who came before us.

Through Bischoff’s exploration of her family’s history, we are invited to consider the weight of history that lingers in our bloodlines, the stories left untold, and the ways in which we navigate belonging in a world where the past is never truly gone but continues to shape our present in ways both seen and unseen. By engaging with these ancestral echoes, Bischoff’s work prompts us to reflect on the complexities of identity, the resilience of familial bonds, and the ongoing dialogue between past and present that informs our collective sense of place.

Ultimately homesick compels us to examine the ways in which these inherited legacies manifest in our lives, influencing our choices, relationships, and sense of home, not just as a physical space, but as an evolving emotional and cultural construct

Alexandra Bischoff ~ Artist Statement

Alexandra Bischoff’s exhibition "homesick" is a portrait of family, home, and loss as told through the artist’s family history. Much of Bischoff’s recent artworks unpack personal definitions of ‘home’; in “homesick,” Bischoff interrogates their maternal grandfather’s peculiar choices to understand how conceptions of ‘home’ can be inherited. 

Central to the exhibition is the artist’s book “Lloyd O” (2021–24), which unravels an unlikely family lore. In 1959, Bischoff’s maternal grandfather Lloyd Orville Moss founded a business called the Truth Tapes which produced how-to vinyl records espousing advice on cultivating Catholic households. He sunk all his savings into the project, but the records didn't sell. After Lloyd lost the family home to bankruptcy in '67, his solution was to take his musical children on tour through the prairies. Lloyd billed it as a 'Centennial Tour', aligning the family band as a wholesome extension of Canada’s colonial project. They didn’t succeed financially and Lloyd never recovered, forcing the family into a period of hidden homelessness. After moving his family from shelter to hotel to short-term rental multiple times over, Lloyd succumbed to alcoholism and died young, leaving his family to make homes for themselves.

This saga indelibly affected each of Lloyd’s thirteen children in various and highly personal ways, the repercussions of which extended to Lloyd’s grandchildren. Bischoff’s relative housing insecurity today stems from the circumstances of contemporary housing and rental markets and not because of their grandfather’s risk-taking entrepreneurialism; despite this, through ‘homesick,’ the artist wonders: what does it mean to be insecurely housed as a settler? How have definitions of ‘home’ changed over time, and what will they be in the future? And what value can be gleaned from unspoken family histories?

Alexandra Bischoff ~ Biography
Alexandra Bischoff (she/they) is a prairie-born performance artist and writer of settler descent. Her art practice is based on durational performance and installation; labour, precarious living, and the intimacy of archives are some of their primary artistic concerns. Bischoff holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from Concordia University. Currently, Bischoff is fortunate to live on the ancestral, unceded territories of the Syilx-Okanagan First Nation and is the Long-Term Artist in Residence at the Similkameen Artist Residency (Keremeos, BC).