Big Rock Candy Mountain is an artist-run flavor incubator and taste-making think-tank between Hannah Jickling, Reed H. Reed, a variety of guest artists, and elementary school students. After Wrappers is an exhibition by Big Rock Candy Mountain that features new installations of previous projects along with new creative experiments, and educational programs. Projects featured in the exhibition include sculptures, video, prints, and edible objects. SOUR VS SOUR is a chocolate bar developed with Grade 3 and 4 students at Queen Alexandra Elementary School in East Vancouver, that combines fine dark chocolate from East Van Roasters, with the flavour preferences of the kids. The artists have also created a How-It’s-Made-style film about the creation of these bars. The title of the exhibition was taken from After Wrappers, a collaboration with Grade 5 and 6 students from Hätrʼunohtän zho/Robert Service School in Dawson City, Yukon, in which the participants designed glass bottle shapes and a soda flavour concept. The artists commissioned glass blower Jesse Bromm to bring these unconventionally shaped bottle designs to life. The exhibition also includes collagraphs and monoprints created from street and school grounds refuse. The SOUR VS SOUR chocolate bars will be present in the gallery and available for purchase in the Gallery Store. Big Rock Candy Mountain produces edible editions, workshops, and installations with a focus on sensory experience. Schools become candy factories, where artists and children work together to critically riff on the cultural industries that address young people, and to create new tastes on our own terms. Big Rock Candy Mountain takes its name from the popular folk song that has been rewritten countless times to reflect changing comic utopia. Big Rock Candy Mountain is where we can hear a “buzzin’ of the bees in the peppermint trees, ’round the soda water fountains.” It strives to be an expanded world where adults, authority and rationality no longer define the rules and limits of what is possible. After Wrappers is the second exhibition through which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question How can we play together? Feature Image: Beet Boba Bottle, detail from After Wrappers, 2024. Dawson City, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Territory. Custom glass lid and bottle, with nerds and beet boba, as designed by Grade 6 student Taliyah. Approx 6 x 2.5″. Photo by John Howland.
