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November 2024 - March 2025

Celebrating the Return

Visuals: Tara Dunn , Supervised by Dr. Aleksandra Dulic

Audio: Dr. Miles Thorogood & Yahvardhan Joshi

Techincal Set Up: Dr. Miles Thorogood, Chris Anderson, & Yahvardhan Joshi

Gobo Light + Sound Installation at Kelowna Art Walk & Video Exhibition at the Kelowna Community Theatre

Colorful chalk art on a sidewalk at night, featuring abstract, circular patterns in bright pink, blue, and green neon colors, with a slightly cracked concrete surface and fallen leaves.

The exhibition consists of three elements viewed together: the gobo lights, the audio installation, and the three-channel video.

The exhibition highlights the cultural and ecological significance of restoring Sockeye Salmon and the cultural imperative of restoring Okanagan habitats, riparian systems, and biodiversity.

The Gobo Lights & Sound Installation

Kelowna Art Walk

The imagery created for Gobo Lights and Sound Walk celebrates the return of the Salmon to the Okanagan.

In response to the success of the salmon return to the Okanagan, École Okanagan Mission Secondary student Tara Dunn created the salmon imagery and symmetrical arrangement to mark this incredible initiative. Tara made this work as a math assignment for a tessellation project and a study of symmetry operations. Under the supervision of UBCO Associate Professor Aleksandra Dulic, this project was expanded to create variations across five Gobo lights.

Empty outdoor walkway at night with street lamps, blank billboards, trees, and colorful pink and purple light reflections on the pavement.
Colorful chalk art on a wet sidewalk with pink, red, and purple lines forming abstract shapes and patterns.
Colorful stenciled sidewalk art of a pink and green dragonfly with pink dots, illuminated at night.
Nighttime sidewalk with colorful neon laser light projections creating abstract patterns.

UBCO Assistant Professor Miles Thorogood and his undergraduate research assistant, Yahvardhan Joshi, created a sound installation that immerses the salmon in a flowing river of sounds. The flexible and generative composition of audio materials, composed of the sounds of diverse Okanagan waterscapes, allows sonic imagery to create relational and emergent compositions continually recomposed as the sounds of the water fill the space of the Art Walk.

The Video Installation

Kelowna Community Theatre

Okanagan Waterways, a three-channel video installation, is a flexible media journey that impresses the beauty and sensitivity of various ecosystems throughout the Okanagan region. The work addresses water sustainability in Okanagan from multiple perspectives to create an immersive cinematic experience that combines common themes of personal and collective water responsibilities.

The media was collected through a four-year process of shadowing Indigenous Knowledge Keepers and experts on the Land at the En’owkin Center, focusing on Syilx values and land-based knowledge as reflected in the images of the sensitive Okanagan Ecosystems. The recorded material includes the environmental and cultural details of the Okanagan environments, soundscapes, and community events.

Nighttime scene showing a group of people standing in front of a large window display with a nature-themed digital projection of trees and a lake, illuminated behind them.
A woman standing on a grassy area taking a photo of a building at night. The building has illuminated windows displaying landscape images, and there are lights and vehicles along a nearby street.
Night view of a building with large windows displaying landscape images and digital screens showing colorful, abstract patterns with numbers.

The media screens' flexible and generative composition allows video and photographic imagery to effectively create relational and emergent compositions that articulate new patterns through novel juxtapositions of media elements.

This work embodies shifting innovations in hardware and software developed for Kelowna Community Theatre windows to enable a new expressive community platform for social and cultural interactions. New representational possibilities and cultural meaning are complex products constructed from multiple sources of visual imagery to create vivid, sensual narratives of Okanagan waterways.

Colorful illuminated mural of berries and leaves displayed on a building at night.

Drs. Aleksandra Dulic and Miles Thorogood recorded images and created an immersive environment through dynamic processes that respond in correlated and co-dependent ways to each other, expressing equilibrium, which acts as a central narrative device in this work.