Opening August 18th in the Alternator Member’s Gallery is Clown Tears by Bree Apperley.
Bree Apperley is mixed-media artist who uses assemblage, drawing, textiles and photography to create her work. The main thematic threads of Apperley’s practice include the impact of technology on society, feminine expression in a capitalist system and the generally compromised nature of our current human experience.
In her sculptural pieces, she assembles objects and materials in the spirit of arte povera, a postwar Italian art movement which was a political statement about the increasing monetization of art, rampant industrialization and consumerism, and the rising economic instability of that time. Rather than expensive materials or fabrication processes, she prefers to use found items, organic matter, craft supplies or objects from the thrift store, and manipulates them with handcraft or clumsy DIY techniques. She creates weird, visually impactful, low-tech, low-skilled and potentially decaying juxtapositions that reference and reflect our confused, fractured and materially excessive times.
Bree also explores the ephemerality of the modern photograph in her artwork; how pictures have become inconsequential, fixed in succession with thousands of others on our phones. The camera has finally, truly, become our eyes, looking at everything banal and beautiful, literally capturing our every waking moment. She recognizes the flatness of this and the detachment from meaning, while at the same time tries to ferment a modern poetry that feels generative and expansive.
Bree Apperley is a mixed-media visual artist originally from Regina, Saskatchewan (Treaty 4 Territory). She holds two Fine Art degrees in Printmaking and Design Art, from the Alberta College of Art and Design (now the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta) and Concordia University (Montreal, Quebec). Bree currently lives and works in Kelowna, BC (Okanagan Sylix territory).
Recent solo exhibitions include Slug Eggs, Kamloops Art Gallery (2026), Cosmic Toothache, ARTSCO gallery (Kelowna, 2024) and Shrine On, Alternator Center for Contemporary Art (Kelowna, 2024). Publications include VUU Studio: Super Special Volume 2 (2017), and Crystallizations Zine (2016).
Over the last decade, Bree has been focused on the realms of image culture, domestic arts, photography and traditional fine arts such as drawing and sculpture. Overlapping themes include; the impact of technology on society, feminine expression in a capitalist system and the generally compromised nature of modern life. Check out more of Bree’s work on her website.