Alan Wood Diane Farris Gallery & Lewarne Gallery, Vancouver October 27 - November 7 Souvenir of the Sea #3 (1998), acrylic on wood Alan Wood is a senior Vancouver artist whose work with installations, wood montages and large-scale paintings has affected two decades of B.C. artists. Wood’s powerful sense of creative invention and personal presence have been instrumental in grounding and influencing the aesthetic of West Coast art. Working from a huge collection of drawings, notes, photos and natural objects collected near Point-No-Point and China Beach on Vancouver Island last fall, Wood continues to take motifs found in the scuffed and weathered debris of the shore: driftwood, shells, rocks and pebbles, shards of glass and rope. The two current and related exhibitions present wood montages relatively small in scale but with an interleaving conceptual depth. While the references are directly to objects of the sea and shore, his loose and textured paper collages and the more deliberate wood reliefs act as emblematic “equivalents” rather than representations. A strong sense of indigenous art processes and spirituality underscores Wood’s stress on “story” or “history” rather than actual event and artifact. © Mia Johnson