Land Of Five Rivers Exhibition Featuring Indo-Canadian Artists At Surrey Gallery

A richly detailed black and white photograph of an elderly street musician in Jaipur, an oil painting of a woman clad in colourful traditional dress, an oil painting of a newly married couple locked in an embrace, pen and ink studies of sacred architecture, a photo-collage of passengers aboard the Komagata Maru collaged together with related text documents, and a precisely rendered oil paint portrait of the famous poet Gurcharan Rampuri.

From the Land of Five Rivers, an exhibition that runs May 13 to August 14 at the Surrey Art Gallery, presents forty recent paintings, photographs and drawings by six Lower Mainland-based artists: Vipin Kapoor, Baljit Kaur, Jay Panesar, Dave Singh Benning, Jarnail Singh, and Mandeep Wirk. The artists have represented the cultural traditions, history, street life, and domestic interiors of their cultural homeland of the Punjab, as well as their experiences living in southwestern British Columbia. The exhibition title reflects the ancestry of these artists, as the Punjab is also known as the ‘land of five rivers’ due to the network of winding rivers that trace the edges of the region. The artists have selected artworks that respond to complex notions of home, an ancestral homeland, place, history and memory. The artists will be in attendance at the exhibition reception on June 24 at 7pm—everyone is welcome.

Admission to the exhibition and reception is free.

Artist Biographies

Born in Ludhiana, Vipin Kapoor came to Canada in 1999 where he has worked as an artist and actor. Based in Delta, Kapoor mainly produces art in acrylic and oil paint and has experience in portraits, landscapes, murals, airbrush work, digital art, graphic design, photography, and videography.

Baljit Kaur is a Surrey-based artist who mainly paints portraits of women. Kaur has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Government College for Women (G.C.W.) in Chandigarh, where she focused on drawing and painting, as well as vocal music (classical raag). She came to Canada with her family in 2000. Baljit has been painting for close to 20 years, and her work has been presented in a number of group exhibitions in India and Canada.

Born in Chandigarh, Surrey-based Jay Panesar came to Canada in 2000 with his artist-parents, Jarnail Singh and Baljit Kaur. For the past number of years Panesar has taken up photography. He says it allows him to explore and capture the richness and authenticity of life as it is.

Born in the U.K., and living in Canada since the 1980’s, Surrey-based Dave Singh Benning studied graphic arts throughout school and college; more recently he has practiced as a graphic designer working in silk screens. While he is known primarily for his popular culture portraits in acrylic on canvas, the pen and ink work in the current exhibition is a move toward more historical and architectural subject matter.

Jarnail Singh is an artist, illustrator, designer, photographer, and art journalist. Born in the small town of Zira, he received a B.A. at Punjab University in Handigarh. He came to Canada with his family in 2000, and now resides in Surrey where he has become actively involved in the local arts community. In 2008, Singh was one of the citizens honoured with the City of Surrey’s first Civic Treasures Award.

Mandeep Wirk is very much a global citizen. Her grandfather emigrated from the Punjab and settled in Kenya, Africa where she was born. Soon after, she moved with her parents to England, and then in 1972 came to Canada where she has earned an M.A. in Psychology and began work as an educator. Now based in Abbotsford, Wirk’s current creative practice focuses on paintings, drawings and collages, in addition to photography, and freelance writing.