What if birds could read?
What if it really did rain cats and dogs?
What if Chicken Little was right, and the sky was falling?
This is what happens when the prompt you give to a group of artists is ‘what if?’
“We were sitting on a lovely garden porch outside last summer and we had gone through different themes that we might want,” said Linda Bachman as she recounted how the Cariboo Art Society came up with the theme for their 2025 exhibition at the Station House Gallery in Williams Lake.
“We were saying ‘what if we did this colour theme, what if we did this subject, what if we did this segmentation, what if we all did something crazy.”
They went on like that until one member stopped and suggested ‘what if?’
“It makes it an unlimited theme,” Bachman said about the theme the society agreed upon.
“Well, you know as artists we just thrive on changing things up and making it fun and our imagination just explodes.”
Bachman said the artists also wanted to create work which was ‘outside of the box,’ and the result is a gallery filled with curious and creative works from papier mâché to prints to acrylic paintings.
"We see some concerns about the future in our paintings, we see delight, and overload, we see some fear...we see fantasy, we see spiritual enlightenment, we see nature all around us of course and the wonders of the world that we always like to absorb as an artist,” Bachman said as she described the different work her fellow artists produced for the show.
Every year the art society prepares a show for the Station House Gallery, and the 16 artists contributing to this year’s show did not disappoint. Their work is featured in the gallery’s lower showroom from June 6 to July 5 and can be visited for free between 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every week from Tuesday to Saturday.
“So, here’s your last what if,” said Bachman as she concluded her opening of the Cariboo Art Society’s exhibition. “What if we all became famous artists from this show,” she said with a laugh.
Throughout the month of June the Station House's upper gallery will also feature a collection of work called Maarsiimaan/Grateful by Natasha Lepine. Stay tuned for the Tribune's coverage of this exhibition. This month's exhibits are sponsored by the late Mary Skipp and by Taseko: Gibraltar Mine.
The gallery’s next exhibition is called Reflections: The Art of Self Portraiture and invites artists of all mediums to submit work exploring identity, emotion, experiences and transformation within oneself. Submissions will be accepted until June 14 and will be on display from July 11 to August 23.
