Comox Valley Art Gallery announces its next slate of exciting art exhibits which opened last Friday evening May 29 at 7pm.

The opening reception welcomes the public to enjoy a social evening of light refreshments and an opportunity to meet the artists. These four new exhibits will run for 6 weeks and close on July 11.

Admission is always free or by donation and all ages are welcome.

- The Second Path features two internationally exhibited artists: Marco Montess and Andy Shutse Lou.

Marco Montess was born in Barcelona of Spanish-Asian heritage, and as an adult he was trained by French and Italian fine arts masters during his years of apprenticeship in France. He holds a Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, France. As a sculptor, Montess works in wood, bronze, silver but feels his greatest affinity is with stone. He also engraves in wood, glass and metal and paints on canvas, wood and in fresco (pigment in water on wet plaster, as in ancient Mediterranean murals).

A small selection of his exquisitely crafted wood sculpture will be exhibited at the Comox Valley Art Gallery. His work combines modernist form, the geometry of ovals, with art-deco lines and seem to be retro and yet futuristic all at once.

Chinese-Canadian painter Andy Shutse Lou exhibits his poetic watercolour paintings depicting scenes inspired by nature and the great outdoors. Combining traditional Chinese technique with his own personal interest and artistic style, landscape is Lou's main subject matter. His dynamic compositions and vibrant colours illustrate the influence of the West. Lou says, "It's different from the traditional way in which with colours are really soft. And the usual ink painting of bamboo. You know, when people think of Chinese brush painting, they think of bamboo with a few birds. That's not what Chinese brush painting is all about, so my style is really a surprise." Lou will also be hosting a Chinese Brush painting workshop on Saturday May 30 a the gallery, registration can be done by phone 250-338-6211.

- A Measured Act by Japanese-Canadian artist Norman Takeuchi of Ottawa, Ontario is an exhibit on tour from the Japanese Canadian National Museum in Burnaby. Takeuchi creates artworks from his memories of the Japanese Canadian internment invoked by the War Measures Act during World War II. 22,000 people of Japanese heritage were removed from their homes and shipped by railway car and truck to Hastings Park in Vancouver to await reassignment elsewhere.

This show features 5 life sized painted paper kimonos, deliberately created from a cheap grade of utility paper (paper used by movers to pack fragile personal belongings) and named after WWII internment camps. The accompanying charcoal drawings depict personal objects from the artist's memories of the internment. Takeuchi was only 5 years old in 1942 but he was old enough to remember: "...I have only faint memories of what happened, but the events of that time still haunt and sadden me."

- What Are the Chances, are Kate Hemenway's brightly coloured paintings which work in the borderland between art and science. Featured in the Window Gallery, you can examine how she utilizes statistics, mathematics, and chance in the form of dice throws to randomize a field of similar shapes. She often explores global indicators of well being and sometimes various probability distributions. The result is a body of work of paintings that look like fields of multicoloured jellybeans. They can be viewed just as they are, or, if one is more curious, the title of each piece will give the viewer something to think about. "Chance not only plays a role in health, but also in physics, genetics, accidents, lotteries, and the environments in to which we are born."

Hemenway will be at the gallery to give an Art Talk on Sat. July 4 at 2pm. This talk will explore the ways in which the two usually separate fields of art and science have many overlaps.

- Map My Culture, exhibited in the George Sawchuk Gallery, is a show about the CURA (Community University Research Alliance) conference in the Comox Valley examining community and space in small cities. CURA is a Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops BC) based research program focusing on mapping quality of life and culture of Canada's small cities. The research team includes 37 community research partners and 26 TRU researchers working in collaboration with faculty from the UNBC, U of N. Brunswich, Saint John and University of Waterloo.

This exhibit features photographs, maps, drawings, sculpture and creations from the conference. The CURA conference recently took place at various locations around the valley May 14 - 16, coordinated by Dr. John Belshaw (Associate VP of Education, NIC) and was co-hosted by North Island College. This conference brought together local cultural agencies to explore places of culture and community and how it contributes to the quality of life in our small city.