at 2260 Oak Bay Avenue

Preview Saturday, November 3, 2007 10 am - 5:30 pm

(work subject to prior sale)

Opening Reception Sunday, November 4, 2007 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Artist in attendance

Elizabeth Ely, harpist; Karel Roessingh, piano

Exhibition continues until November 24, 2007

Duncan Regehr lived the first three years of his life in Lethbridge. In 1956 his family moved to Victoria. Encouraged by his parents to develop his interest in drawing, painting and writing, he studied literature, psychology and sociology at Camosun College and theatre through the University of Victoria. In his early twenties he acted in plays across Canada, including the Stratford Festival where, in 1974, he had his first exhibition. During the 1980's he pursued a career in film-acting; however his primary creative focus has always been drawing and painting, and poetry.

In his current series of drawings and paintings, titled Magic, Regehr continues to explore aspects of transformation, a theme he developed in the Corvus Rex images in 2000, and continued through 2005 with the Chrysalid works. These projects explore ideas of gestation, birth and metamorphosis. In addition, the Magic series references illusion, the unknown, myth, the psyche and prestidigitation.

Regehr creates dream-like vignettes and figures with personal details that separate them from everyday life; the real world is reduced to an ordinary village glimpsed through a window or door. His art inspires interpretation while eluding easy reading. Like a well-told story, it is difficult to be elsewhere when viewing these works of art.