Join Lake Country Art Gallery for the closing reception + artist talk with UBCO MFA Graduates, Brittany Reitzel and Sam Neal for their current exhibition Grounding, In Touch / Inland Watters II


Tuesday, June 29th, 2021, 6 pm – 8pm

This will be an outdoor event taking place at the Lake Country Art House. Access to Lake Country Art Gallery will be available as well.

Due to COVID public protocols, we will have a maximum number of 50 outdoor visitors and 10 indoor visitors. More information regarding our COVID protocols can be found here:  https://www.lakecountryartgallery.ca/announcement.html

Brittany Reitzel is currently an MFA candidate at UBCO whose primary interests are grounding practices, forest bathing and site-specific expanded painting practices. She graduated from Brock University in 2016 with a BFA (Honours).

Grounding, in Touch (2021) is a body of work that documents my process of grounding myself through creating site-specific artwork on the unceded traditional lands of the Syilx nation. As a settler I work directly on and with the land to open my body to ‘touch’ and be ‘touched’ by the land and provide a direct translation of the sensations I feel. I create works bare-foot and trade my paint brushes for my hands and other body parts, relating to the mindfulness theory of ‘grounding’, whereby is a process which our bodies “electrically reconnect to the earth when our skin is in direct contact with it”.

Sam Neal is currently studying for his MFA in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. His most recent work utilizes cyanotype, a photographic process, to create a collaboration between the artist and the environment.

Inland Waters II features detailed prints that incorporate digital and screen printmaking, alongside the original cyanotypes. The prints depict the reaction between chemicals, water and light on the paper’s surface during the initial contact with water and after it oxidizes in the following days.