On Flux Media Art Gallery’s opening night, dozens of attendees gathered in the 600-square-foot office space to reflect on the work of artist Terry Haines, mingle over edibles, and greet the furry dog meandering through clusters of people.
This is not your typical art gallery.
Programming director Catlin Lewis has had almost a decade of experience working for MediaNet, the non-profit organization that launched the Flux Media Art Gallery, located on Quadra Street, in late May. Before the launch MediaNet was mainly a production office, which, for Lewis, meant that holding an exhibition involved creating partnerships with some of the local art galleries in town.
“We did a lot of collaborations with other galleries to have space for the things we were doing, and so we have done a number of things with Open Space and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and some of the smaller ones like Ministry of Casual Living,” says Lewis.
Now, however, MediaNet boasts the opportunity to present media works in their very own gallery space, allowing them to be more flexible with their programming. The new space offers more freedom for hosting events like exhibitions, film screenings, and artist talks; it even doubles as a studio space for artists working on bigger projects.
“Yoko Takashima, who is a professor at the University of Victoria, had an installation at the Legacy art gallery, and she actually worked on creating that installation within the Flux Media Art Gallery,” says Lewis. “She was able to see her work in progress and get feedback from our technical director, and just have a working space.”
In order to have a better appreciation of just how versatile the space really is, it is important to understand how the gallery came to be in the first place. In one of those outside-the-box moments where vision meets opportunity, the team looked around at their existing office space and literally cleared most of it out in order to transform it into a gallery.
“We decided that even if we didn’t have additional funding right now it was something that we wanted strongly enough that we were just going to make it happen,” says Lewis. “We just made a gallery.”
The new gallery will focus on the presentation of media art and on placing the art in context. Lewis explains that MediaNet aims to facilitate the production of media art as a means of expression in a culture where technology is criticized for undermining youths’ ability to communicate.
“From my experience with talking to people, I think they’re more connected, more educated, more aware of what’s happening in the world than any generation has been,” says Lewis. “It could be as simple as Instagram photos, but people are creating artwork whether they know it or not every single day, and discussing things. It is an art form for now, for this time period, and we just want people to be more aware of the various possibilities.”
Future exhibitions will display everything from local to international works, while the gallery’s current exhibition, titled Coyote Rising, spotlights contemporary video works by First Nations artist Terry Haines.
Haines’ powerful works were chosen to inaugurate the exhibition series partly to bring awareness to audience members who may not have had much interaction with First Nations works.
Coyote Rising: Video Works by Terry Haines
Until June 13
Flux Media Art Gallery, #110-2750 Quadra Street
medianetvictoria.org