Alex Turner’s work is a love letter to Harrison Hot Springs nearly 60 years in the making.
Turner’s exhibition – dubbed “Transformations” – will be on display at the Ranger Station Art Gallery (98 Rockwell Drive) during the Harrison Festival of the Arts starting July 8 and running to July 24. There will be an opening held on Thursday, July 7, at 7 p.m.
Turner was born in Vancouver in 1940 and moved to a chicken farm in Haney five years later. They relocated to Harrison in 1953, and the Lillooet Street home has been lovingly maintained for 57 years; it was sold in 2010. He is a graduate from Agassiz High School and attended the Vancouver School of Art and University of British Columbia. He taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of Central Technical School for 24 years. He passed away in Toronto in 2019.
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Turner left Harrison Hot Springs when he was in his late teens but returned every summer to his family home on the Harrison beachfront to be with friends, continue his mother’s garden and explore the mountains and lakes.
Turner’s husband, Lucian Childs, and local artist Rosa Quintana Lillo have worked together to produce “Transformations.” Both Quintana Lillo and her partner, Mike Edwards, were both students of Turner.
“Transformations” marks the first time Turner’s work has been displayed in Harrison. His multimedia artwork spans street photography, hand-cut and digital collages and more.
“He’s just a really learned, intellectual visual artist who saw art everywhere,” Quintana Lillo said. “Everything, to him, meant something. Everything was interpreted through the eye of art for Alex.”
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Sometimes the art celebrates the natural beauty of the Valley while other works critique the urbanization of Harrison Hot Springs and the surrounding area. As an example, Childs points to a collage of photos Turner took of the area adjacent to East Sector lands over the years, watching it morph from natural landscapes to an urbanized corridor.
“It’s about motion and the passage of time,” Childs added. “That’s what the whole series is about, really lamenting what’s happened in this area from a more rural and forested area that he knew to what we have now.”
To see more of Turner’s work, visit www.alexjturner.ca.
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