A visual artist who lives in a mountain valley near Nelson will be hanging her works in a Fort Langley gallery later this month.
During the past three years, Rachel Yoder has explored how working as a carpenter for 25 years has affected her art practice.
Now, the answer comes to life in a show called By This Means: Segment Ladders, which opens at the Fort Gallery on Aug. 20.
In her upcoming exhibition, Yoder takes the tools and the components familiar from her daily experience of construction and uses these images and processes in making paintings, prints, and sculpture.
The central tool explored is the ladder.
The repetition of the ladder echoes the repetition of the years of Yoder’s labour. The ladder empowered her to change the landscape by enabling her to work as a building carpenter.
However, as Yoder used the tools to change her environment, the tools themselves also changed her, she said.
They changed her body and her relationships, and later they changed her understanding of herself.
Now the tools no longer function as instruments for home-building; they are instruments for mark making.
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Her paintings have been shown in a variety of alternative venues and have exhibited at Touchstones Museum of Art and History, Oxygen Art Centre, and Gallery 378 in Nelson, BC, as well as Hidden Garden Gallery, in New Denver, BC.
In 2011, she received a major project grant from the Columbia Basin Trust/Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. The resulting body of work, Memento Mori, was exhibited in 2014 at Kootenay Gallery in Castlegar, then at the Campbell River Art Gallery in 2015, and is now on display at Kalein Hospice Centre in her hometown of Nelson.
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By This Means: Segment Ladders runs Aug. 20 through Sept. 25 at the Fort Gallery.
An opening reception will be held in the gallery’s back garden on Friday, Aug. 20 at 7:30 p.m.
And, a philosopher’s cafe will be held online via Zoom on Thursday, Sept. 9, also at 7:30 p.m.
The cafe will feature the artist and guest Nancy Pollak in conversation.
People can find out more about Yoder, the Fort Gallery, and upcoming events online at fortgallery.ca, or for more information and to RSVP to the philosopher’s cafe.
The gallery, located at 9048 Glover Rd., is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.
