ALEX TURNER

ALEX TURNER: TRANSFORMATIONS | a retrospective exhibition

TRANSFORMATIONS ran July 8 - 24, 2022

In association with the 2022 Harrison Festival of the Arts and the Kent Harrison Arts Council.

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Artist’s work a sixty-year love affair with Harrison Hot Springs and the Fraser River Valley.

Alex Turner was a man in love with his home town of Harrison Hot Springs. After leaving the area in his late teens, for almost sixty years, he returned each summer to his family home near the Harrison beachfront to be with friends, to work in the garden his mother began in the early ‘50s and to hike and swim in the surrounding mountains and lakes. A gifted visual artist, there he gathered material for his art.

Transformations brings this body of work home to Harrison Hot Springs for the first time. It spans the street photography and hand-cut collages of the ‘70s, the video manipulations of the ‘80s and his digital collages post-1990. Many celebrate the natural beauty of the Fraser River Valley or document its increasing development and urbanization and the loss of the wild lands that Alex so loved.

Born in Vancouver in 1940, when Alex was five he and his family moved to a chicken farm in Haney, BC. Unable to make a go of the business, in 1953 they relocated to the small house in Harrison, which the family lovingly maintained for the next fifty-seven years. After graduating from Agassiz High School, he attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and the University of British Columbia. Upon attaining his education degree, Alex taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of Central Technical School, where for twenty-four years he was a profound influence on his students. He passed away in Toronto in 2019.

He maintained a consistent artistic practice during his lifetime, exhibiting both in Ontario and BC. His realistic photos bring his eye for colour and composition to insightful commentary on the natural and urban environments in which he lived. Of his vibrant abstract art, he has said: “I’m interested in how close to abstraction I can push the original image. These compositions seek an alignment of visual elements into an abstract whole. The results are often more like paintings or etchings than photography.”