About the exhibition

Echoing ancient winds, seas and sands, Royal Bay is a place of ingrained change and growth – a place where many have found new beginnings, new homes, new ways of coming together, and thriving together.

To celebrate the opening of Royal Bay’s new retail village, The Commons, we are transforming the space in the corner of Latoria Boulevard and Ryder Hesjedal Way with an art exhibition curated for this space, for this community, and for this important milestone in the growth of Royal Bay, the City of Colwood, and Vancouver Island at large.

The Sum of Our Parts is an art exhibition featuring the works of three Vancouver Island artists: Samantha Dickie, Laura Dutton, and Roberta Pyx Sutherland. The artworks curated for this show invite us to reflect on the idea of many different parts coming together and forming something greater. These works of art, sharing a space and a narrative, in closeness and in their own voice, remind us that each of us is made of a multiplicity of experiences and ideas, and at the same time we come together to form a greater, richer collective culture. Offering an opportunity to experience how we each see ourselves, how we see others, and to reveal the invisible forces that connect us.

About the artists

Samantha Dickie

Samantha Dickie is a Victoria-based contemporary ceramic artist who explores relationships between spaces through installation. 

Multiplicity, repetition and slight variations of organic shapes are recurrent in her work. Through natural ceramic colours like whites, browns and greys, she is able to maintain a minimalist aesthetic that creates serene environments. In creating her large clusters of abstracted clay multiples, she opens up possibilities for reflecting on the relationships that exist between entities—as well as on the spaces that exist within relationships. The gaps that exist between, and often within, the individual elements in her groupings are as important as the objects themselves—they create distinctive geographies that allow for imaginative, and sometimes actual, wanderings. These spaces are, equally, suggestive of restorative pause, of spaces that don’t necessarily need to be filled, either temporally or physically.  

Samantha Dickie received her BA in Gender Studies and Indigenous Studies, followed by her Diploma in Craft and Design in Ceramics. She has attended artist residencies in France, China, Yukon, and Alberta. Her minimalist abstract sculpture and architecturally scaled, multi- component installations have been featured in solo and group public gallery exhibitions across Canada. She has been the recipient of national and provincial grants, local awards, and has been the subject of numerous articles and reviews. Her work can be found in permanent public art collections, private commissions and corporate installations  including the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Louis Vuitton in Boston, One Hotel in Kauai, and is currently working on a large-scale corporate commission in Vancouver, Canada. 

Laura Dutton

Laura Dutton is a photo/video-based artist and an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria.  She received an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2011 and a BFA (Hons.) from Concordia University, Montréal in 2006.

Dutton works with photography and video installation to unravel the materiality of photographic images and disrupt our ability to look straight through to the referent described.  By obscuring, degrading, or removing the subject matter altogether, her images reveal their own process and become distilled suggestions of what once stood before the lens, offering an epistemological space for the viewer to meditate on the act of seeing and knowing.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art (Kelowna), Deluge Contemporary (Victoria), Esker Foundation Project Space (Calgary), PAVED Arts (Saskatoon), VU Photo (Québec City), and group exhibitions at The Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Jones (Vancouver), Chernoff Fine Art (Vancouver), and Open Space (Victoria).  She was included in the opening exhibition for the inaugural year of the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, and was the Québec winner of the 2006 BMO First Art competition.  She has received project grants from both the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.  Her work is included in collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Bank of Montreal, and the University of the Fraser Valley. 

Roberta Pyx Sutherland

Roberta Pyx Sutherland is a Canadian artist based in Victoria, British Columbia. From her first solo exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery in the 1980’s her work has focused on the relationships of cosmic patterning, divine intelligence, the environment and the inter-connectivity of all life forms.

A prolific artist, Sutherland uses a wide range of media in her work including hand dug pigments, natural inks, photography, and handmade papers. She also creates site-specific installations, the most well-known an Andy Warhol tribute for the Hornby Island Arts Council. Most recently Sutherland created a Lenten installation for the Chapel Gallery of Victoria’s St. Matthias Anglican Church. She has taught at the Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts, as well as mentored their artist in residence program.

She received her BFA (hon) from the University of Victoria and continues her research attending residences at the Bau Institute and Studio Ginestrelle in Italy and at Canada’s Caetani House and the Banff Centre. Sutherland has also trained in Shambhala Art instruction, studied Ikebana with the Ohara School, printmaking at the University of Sheffield, UK, worked for Oxfam in East Africa where she initiated a school of ceramics, studied Zen and calligraphy in Japan and mandala painting in Nepal.

Sutherland has exhibited in Canada, Mexico, Europe and the US. Her work is represented in a number of public collections including the Canada Council for the Arts, Burnaby Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Toronto Public Library, University of British Columbia, Concordia University Library, and the Bibliothèque de Genève. She is one of 50 artists featured in Canada’s Raincoast at Risk: Art for an Oil-Free Coast. Publications such as Lions Roar, Culturium, the Uncertainty Club and Shambhala Sun regularly include her work.