Gam Gallery is pleased to present:

No Man is an Island
by our very own Julia K. Kreutz

Showing May 4th – EXTENDED TO JUNE 22

Opening Reception Friday May 4th | 8-11pm
Open House\Workshop Saturday May 5th | 1-5pm
Hrs: Tuesday Thursday Friday & Saturday | 1-5pm

No Man is an Island is a series of mixed media pieces using simplistic collaged images with drawn and inked additions. The use of collage is very minimal with people in desolate white voids, but with the addition of surreal notations Kreutz is able to visually represent the individuals’ wandering mind. The greatest influence for Kreutz while making these pieces was a term coined by the Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis in a TED Talk on endangered cultures. Davis states, ‘you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.’ This description of the ‘ethnosphere’ is rich with awe and reverence, which Kreutz aims to transcribe into shape and form.

This exhibition will run in conjunction with ‘National Youth Arts Week’, for which Kreutz will host a drop in collage workshop for people of all ages on Saturday, May 5th from 1-5 pm in the gallery. The workshop is free of charge and all materials will be provided.

Julia Kreutz started her studies at Red Deer Collage and then transferred to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr University in 2009. Since then Julia has been teaching drawing classes to children and is a co-Founder and Creative Director at the Gam Gallery. This will mark her first solo exhibition.

‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

-John Donne, Meditations XVII of Devotions of Emergent Occasions