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. They produce edible editions, workshops, and installations with a focus on sensory experience. In Big Rock Candy Mountain, 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.

After Wrappers is an exhibition by Big Rock Candy Mountain that features reconfigurations of previously exhibited projects along with new creative experiments and educational and outreach programs. 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?