Exhibition Dates and Locations
The Canadian Art Preservation Foundation (CAPF) exhibition Looking Forward, Looking Back is on display from April 26th - June 5th, 2024 in our Main Hall Gallery located at the Aldergrove Kinsmen Community Center (26770 29 Ave, Aldergrove, BC V4W 3B8). For information regarding the CAPF Looking Forward, Looking Back speaker program events CLICK HERE.
About the CAPF and the Exhibition
Looking forward, Looking back
Art is a passion for many, but finding a definition of what is important to collect is an elusive challenge. Landscapes, portraiture, still life, or natural forms; political ideas or social criticism, humour, imagination; or abstraction and spiritual ideas: all these ideas and more run through every era influenced by prevailing styles and schools of thought. There are many -isms and styles to choose from even in a single field like Realism whether it be Romantic, Photo, Surreal or Tromp l’oeil. Abstraction, too, has many forms.
For many art collectors, their interests encompass all of these means of expression. What binds their collection together is altogether different. It is the search for creations ones that astonish, inspire, or ignite ideas. Art that makes one think. Art that echoes one’s feelings. Art that makes you change your way of looking at the world around you.
Their enthusiasm is widespread for the creativity that finds new ways to say something about the times we live in and the things we live with. There is a need for possession, or at least, an urgent need to ensure that art, especially art that has been crafted with skill and understanding, can endure into the new generations as a documentation of our heritage.
Amidst a growing concern for the fate of excellent works of art, five passionate people created a new foundation in 2020, the Canadian Art Preservation Foundation. Most museums and collecting galleries have had insufficient storage space for new artworks, and primarily collect the preeminent artists of every era. While art collectors and appreciators might possibly absorb some of the last century of art expression, much more excellent art is being destroyed or lost at critical times of an artist’s life. This happens because of moving, downsizing, or ultimately at the time of an artist’s death. When the size of an artistic estate is overwhelming and the ability to protect it are insufficient or the beneficiaries are unable to absorb it, even more is lost.
Five individuals banded together to create the Canadian Art Preservation Foundation (CAPF). Its mission is to collect, evaluate and preserve Canadian visual art heritage, and to ensure the work of merited artists and their artifacts can be stored in an archival manner so that their legacy can be examined, catalogued, studied and reintroduced to the public, keeping essential heritage alive.
The Canadian Art Preservation Foundation looks for handmade works with technical expertise. We look for fresh, original ideas that speak to moments of time in Canadian history. We favor works that astonish, inspire, and enlighten, or which express emotions that portrays the human condition. This exhibition introduces the viewer to the breadth of Canadian work in CAPF’s collection, gathered in the first three years.