Lyse Deselliers lives by the lake near Skaha Bluffs. In the summers, she swims in the blue waters, and kayaks for hours at a time. Her connection to the water is ever-flowing, and a special kinship that she’s spent the past few months cultivating into her new exhibit.
Deselliers’ new show at the ART GALLERY Osoyoos ‘Our Lakes: Connecting the Dots’ is primarily a homage to the lakes in the Okanagan region. It’s about the connection between the lakes themselves, but also the connection people have with them.
The exhibit consists of 45 paintings in which Deselliers honours the lakes, portraying them in an ethereal light.
But the show is more than just her work. Deselliers also interviewed a number of people who work within local organizations like the Osoyoos Lake Water Quality Society, and Love Your Lake, to understand their own relationship with the lakes.
Conservation efforts play a central theme in these interviews, as well as Deselliers’ exhibit. In a major way, she is trying to harness the power of art to promote conservation.
“Art has the ability to make you lose yourself and find yourself at the same time . . . so I’m hoping that they’ll see something in the paintings and then they’ll feel connected to this amazing land,” she says.
Out of the many issues she tackles in the exhibit, Deselliers explains that as people living in the Okanagan region, we operate off a myth of abundance.
“It looks like we have a lot of water but we don’t actually; A lot of it that falls every year just evaporates. We only have the equivalent of three and a half feet or so of new water every year and most of it evaporates,” says Deselliers.
In one of her paintings at the show, she highlights this specific point by showing the dryness of the hills alongside the lake. Now as a complimentary addition to the painting, Deselliers will have write-ups from her interviews that specifically talks about this false sense of water abundance.
The knowledge from local conservationists and Deselliers work weave together in the show to paint an honest picture of the region’s landscape. In this way, the exhibit is orchestrated for visitors to see and connect to the lakes, and get a more nuanced understanding of how to preserve them.
In her artist statement for her new exhibit at the Art Gallery Osoyoos, Lyse Deselliers writes “first, it’s about our lakes.”
Neha Chollangi photo
“To me, climate change is the big thing and, of course, the lakes will be affected. Few of [the experts] talked about that because it’s somewhat depressing. But you don’t want to feel depressed. You want to be hopeful, because depression just stops you in your tracks, whereas hope at least gets you to do something.”
Committed to conservation herself, Deselliers drives an electric car, has solar panels, limits her meat consumption, and grows her own vegetables in the summer.
Deselliers hopes that those who come to see the show will primarily understand how privileged we are to live in this area, and accept the responsibility that comes with it to play a part (no matter how small) in preserving these pristine lakes.
The exhibit runs from April 1 – April 24 at the ART GALLERY Osoyoos.
