[BCMA] Kamloops Art Gallery Media Release | Keith Langergraber opens May 10

[Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv]

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Keith Langergraber
Horses at Highland Valley Copper Mine, 2024
digital photo
55.9 x 71.1 cm
MEDIA RELEASE

For immediate release from
Kamloops Art Gallery
April 30, 2025

[Picture 1, Picture]

Keith Langergraber: Staircases Leading Nowhere
May 10 to August 30, 2025
May 10 Opening Reception 6:30 to 8:00 pm
Curated by Charo Neville

Floating architectural sculptures, sprawling drawings, and immersive video and sound environments play with the thin veil between reality and fiction at the Kamloops Art Gallery.
Vancouver based artist Keith Langergraber’s exhibition, Staircases Leading to Nowhere, opens at the Kamloops Art Gallery on May 10, transforming the Central Gallery. Langergraber creates worlds that draw on popular culture and historical references to examine current global states of instability informed by the pandemic and the climate emergency. At once familiar and uncanny, his multi-faceted work collapses timelines and geographies, offering glimpses into a fractured present and speculative futures.
Often site-specific, this new body of work focuses on the Interior of BC. A key video work, In Hell Everyone Needs a Glass of Water begins in the Mojave Desert where Langergraber’s self-performed character discovers an abandoned mine. Inside, a mysterious map etched on a ruined wall compels him to travel north. He settles in Ashcroft, BC, where he tracks the Upper Ski Trail Herd—a sub-herd of the approximately 250 wild, mostly inbred, horses that have existed in this region for over 200 years. Langergraber has researched and documented this herd that roams the mountains around the Highland Valley copper mine as their lives have increasingly come under threat due to wildfires, drought conditions, and pollution from the mine’s tailings ponds. An accompanying large-scale floating sculpture expands on these themes in three dimensions.
Creating a slippage between genres and forms and unearthing elements of the recognizable and unrecognizable, the works in Staircases Leading to Nowhere offer a journey through the otherworldly to open up questions about how we see ourselves in relation to longing at a critical moment in history. As we collectively face real and existential threats, Langergraber’s work ruptures honed belief systems, takes stock of the current state of the world, and offers an opportunity to contemplate our place within it, along with space to dream about other versions of our future.
Artist Biography
Keith Langergraber received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Victoria and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and he currently teaches at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. His work has been exhibited widely in Canada and abroad, including commissions by the Vancouver Art Gallery for Offsite in 2022, a project recently featured in an Offsite anthology. His work is held in the collections of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery, Burnaby Art Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
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The public is warmly invited to the opening reception on Saturday, May 10 from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm at the Kamloops Art Gallery. The evening will include welcome remarks, a conversation with Keith Langergraber and curator Charo Neville, and a lively reception with live music, wine from Twisted Spirits on 3rd, beer from Bright Eye Brewing, and coffee, with art-making activities for children.
Media Information
Charo Neville, Curator
250.377.2410
cneville at kag.bc.ca<mailto:cneville at kag.bc.ca>
About the Kamloops Art Gallery
The Kamloops Art Gallery, established in 1978, is situated on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwepemcúl’ecw, the traditional territory of the Secwépemc people. The largest art gallery in Secwepemcúl̓ecw (the Interior of British Columbia), the Gallery offers national caliber art experiences through a diverse range of accessible and affordable exhibitions, talks, tours, and studio-based programming for all ages and abilities, and boasts a collection of over 3,000 works of art.





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CRAIG WILLMS [he/him]

ASSISTANT CURATOR



cwillms at kag.bc.ca<mailto:cwillms at kag.bc.ca>

250.377.2400 ext. 2406





KAMLOOPS ART GALLERY

101 – 465 Victoria Street, Kamloops, BC  V2C 2A9

250.377.2400  |  www.kag.bc.ca<http://www.kag.bc.ca/>





The Kamloops Art Gallery is situated on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc within Secwepemcúl’ecw, the traditional territory of the Secwépemc people.


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