Join interdisciplinary visual artist Solange Adum Abdala for a hands-on exploration of photography, light, and layered storytelling. This Date Night draws on her work in our Image / Object Photosculpture exhibition, which will be on display in our gallery alongside the workshop as part of this year’s Capture Photography Festival.

A palimpsest is an ancient manuscript that has already been used, with the original text erased or scraped away for another. This was often done because writing materials were scarce or expensive. In this Date Night, we will creatively explore printed materials, books, magazines, encyclopedias, and more as palimpsests that accumulate layers of information.

Working with light, thin pages and cutouts, we will activate printed materials, discovering what publications conceal and seeing the revealed in new ways, like a three-dimensional collage. Using flashlights, lamps, and a lightbox, we will create photographs and interventions that engage with photography, archives, writing, and memory. The workshop will provide a playful and reflective space to rethink how we see and what lies beneath the surface.

By the end of the workshop, participants will take home a set of digital photographs, along with their own intervened book containing cutouts, overlays, and illuminated discoveries that capture the layered effects explored.

Cost:

• $40 or buy 2 for $70

What to expect:

• Explore hidden layers in printed materials.
• Transform books into illuminated, interactive works that combine photography, archives, and writing

Skills Learned:

• Combine photography, archives, and writing.

Who should attend

• Anyone interested in photography, writing, archives, or hands-on creative exploration
• People curious about experimenting with light, texture, and layered storytelling

What you need to bring

• Old books, magazines, or notebooks (optional, we will supply)
• Camera or phone camera

Join us for a guided tour of our current exhibition, Marian Penner Bancroft: Long Story, led in Farsi.

About the exhibition

Marian Penner Bancroft’s work is deeply rooted in photographic explorations of the imagination and the material world. These interface with colonial histories, migration, objects and identities, allowing contemplation of durations ranging from deep time to the ephemeral.
Marian Penner Bancroft’s “Long Story” is an installation that brings together photographs, videos, and wall texts featuring both new works and related pieces created since 2000. These reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with complex questions addressable through a careful examination of visual traces of human activity with reference to the natural world, providing viewers the possibility of considering their own stories in relationship to the spaces they inhabit.

An extended presentation of the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection, From Sea to Sky celebrates the collection’s evolution from its inception in 2016 to the present. Built on the generous donation of over 200 works by Founders Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, the AAM’s Acquisition Committee has since guided the holding’s expansion through purchase, commission, and donation, to almost 300 outstanding pieces representing the art of British Columbia. Carving, painting, and photography serve as the pillars of the collection, featuring notable works by artists active from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first century. Such a display offers a unique visual evocation of the cultural differences that continue to shape BC’s socio-political identity.

From Sea to Sky showcases familiar masterpieces alongside newly acquired and previously archived works of art. These pieces by artists from the province, and those inspired by local environs, are all housed in Patricia and John Patkau’s stunning example of contemporary West Coast architecture. Among the active carvers and photographers of note are Robert Davidson, Dempsey Bob, Jeff Wall, Jin-Me Yoon and Stan Douglas, while paintings by Emily Carr, AY Jackson and BC Binning add a historical dimension to this sweeping display. Works acquired from Karin Bubaš, Rebecca Belmore, and Russna Kaur are indicative of a mid-point in their respective careers and each have also been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum.

This exhibition shares the importance and depth of art education in the Surrey School District. Participating artists range from grades one through seven. Artworks on display highlight a wealth of subjects, both personal and universal.

Working across mediums such as 3D geometric string art, papier mache, and painting to name a few, Art by Surrey Elementary School Students provides visitors with insights into the critical thinking and visual literacy skills of young developing artists.

Along with the accompanying text, the exhibition demonstrates how teachers connect with BC Education Big Ideas curriculum.

The Polygon Gallery is honoured to organise the largest solo exhibition to date of artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard. Drawing on her mixed Secwépemc and settler-Scottish ancestry, Willard has developed a collaborative, land-based practice, which attends to the history, present, and future of the land and community. The focus of this ten-year survey is her ongoing experiments with photography, as a technology of both colonisation and decolonisation. Combining new and existing works, and showcasing a broad and inventive array of photographic printing, materiality and presentation techniques, the exhibition materialises the artist’s paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research.

Willard considers photography as a medium and material that dates back millennia, not centuries. In her words, “Light has been making life, images, shadows, and reflections for billions of years. Those photographs are called stones – geological formations – the grandmothers and grandfathers embodied in the volcanic rocks used in sweat lodges.”

The title Photolithics (combining ancient words for light and stone) calls up Willard’s expansive notion of working directly with the sun’s changing rays, and with varied formations of soil, crystal, metal, and sediment. Throughout, Willard poses key questions about the confines of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and kekuli (pit house) architecture simultaneously ancient and current. For The Polygon, she devises a distinctive treatment for the gallery’s windows, recasting the building as a “lens” and turning the sun’s rays into a “safelight” for future encounters with sensitive historical records. Committed to a practice rather than a fixed appearance, the exhibition will transform as the days lengthen and the weather filters available light.

Hannah Rickards’ artistic practice studies the relationship between perception and experience. Resistant to the construction of narrative, she employs a range of conceptual tools and media to create works that measure the limits of language and map conditions of uncertainty in our attempts to discern and describe the world. Rickards’ solo exhibition of new work at the Gibson, I am the infant and I am the bird, is informed by her relocation from London, UK, to an acreage in Syilx Okanagan territory in the interior of British Columbia. Life in this new context, with its markedly different tempo and scent—a rural valley thick with orchards, pastures, and lumber mills, encircled by rocky benchland—invoked a metabolic shift in the artist’s approach.

Rickards’ characteristically spare installation rewards a willingness to slow down: single channel videos capture brief glimpses of hummingbirds recorded in the soft grey light before dawn. A large-scale video work depicts footage gathered over years by an infrared trail camera erected in Rickards’ pasture. Triggered by motion, the camera does not differentiate between the types of activity it detects. Depending upon the duration of their visit, viewers may experience the erratic flight of a moth, a grazing deer that pauses to stare arrestingly at the camera or simply long stretches of wheatgrass nodding in the breeze. A series of photo-lithographic-and-silkscreened prints, created by Rickards using remote viewing—a paranormal practice of perceiving a distant or hidden subject without the aid of the senses—reconsider questions of landscape and place.

In its alertness to the agency of the world, I am the infant and I am the bird shares much with early interpretations of photography. For the first decade of its existence, the photographic image was understood not as “captured” or “taken” but rather as something “received from the world.” As William Henry Fox Talbot observed in an 1839 letter, “It is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself.” While the question of where and how we place our attention has always been fundamental to Rickard’s work, I am the infant and I am the bird invites an uncoupling from contemporary culture’s relentless “attention economy” to allow a consideration of how we might more carefully attend to the world’s ways of revealing itself to us.

Explore our Museum after hours with Pay-What-You-Can admission every Thursday evening!

Be it date-night, an evening of family fun, or your own cultural excursion, step into our galleries and let curiosity be your guide as the stories of North Vancouver come to life under a whole new light

Thursdays, Weekly
Time: 5PM –8PM
Audience: All Ages
Pay-What-You-Can

All drop-ins welcome!

Marian Penner Bancroft’s work is deeply rooted in an exploration of memory, landscape, colonial history, migration, and identity. Her images often layer personal history with geography, functioning as visual documentation with poetic reflection. The work offers more than just observation—it evokes a sense of emotional and intellectual resonance.

Long Story is a multimedia installation that brings together photographs, videos, wall texts, and sound. The exhibition comprises both new works and selected pieces created between 2000 and the present. Each image and video is linked to the others to reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with complex questions; questions ranging over a lifetime that are approached from diverse photographic perspectives and tied to a broader thematic investigation.

This exhibition opens space for deep contemplation. It highlights the interconnectedness of histories, places, and people, while embracing complexity. By engaging multiple senses and mediums, Bancroft encourages viewers to reflect on their own relationships with memory, land, and belonging.

Experience Whistler’s most extensive collection of community art all in one place!

Discover over 300 original 8 x 8-inch works by established and emerging talent from the Sea to Sky and beyond. From intricate metalwork and sculptural clay to oil on canvas and mixed media, the Anonymous Art Show showcases an incredible range of styles and disciplines.

The twist? Every piece is displayed anonymously. Spend the afternoon exploring, guessing, and perhaps even recognizing a familiar hand behind the work.

Whether you’re hoping to secure a piece by a sought-after local artist or simply looking for something special to bring your walls to life, the Anonymous Art Show is a rare opportunity to collect affordable original art.

Found a favourite? Art sales begin at our Anonymous Buying Night on April 10.

Launched in 2013, Capture Photography Festival is Western Canada’s largest lens-based art festival. Annually in April, lens-based art is exhibited at dozens of galleries and other venues throughout Metro Vancouver as part of the Exhibition Program, alongside an extensive Public Art Program, an Events Program that spans tours, films, artist talks, and community events as well as an educational partnership with Emily Carr University and Critical Image Forum, The University of British Columbia.

Capture’s vision is to connect Vancouver to the world through lens-based art. The Festival acts as a platform to expand visual literacy through lens-based art; strives to give voice to traditionally underrepresented communities and to present compelling, urgent lens-based art. We aim to connect communities to incite meaningful dialogue between artists, curators, audiences, organizations and institutions. Capture is committed to presenting perspectives from diverse backgrounds and members of underrepresented groups.

The Quiet Between explores the contemplative spaces where emotion, nature, and material meet — whether through still life, raw clay vessels, or graphite landscapes.

The seed for Kathryn Fullerton’s clay pieces began during her 2024 residency at Tidal Art Centre in Lund. By responding intuitively to the land and its materials, she began to form hollow spheres from local clay. These closed vessels gradually revealed themselves to her as containers for the generative pulse of life. Over time, the spheres began to open, as the quiet nature of these pieces guided her deeper into the cycles of place. Informed by her residency at Tidal and ongoing research into decolonial methodologies, this work explores what it means to sustain a life-affirming art practice that acknowledges the cultural and ecological implications of making. The process is both ritual and offering. Each act of making, opening, or releasing becomes a meditation on giving and receiving within the community of life.

A new sculpture by James Harry marks The Polygon Gallery’s seventh collaboration and co-commission with Burrard Arts Foundation. Eye of the Ancestor is a striking yellow cedar wooden sphere, carved with Coast Salish designs on the surface and holding a mirror-polished stainless steel sphere inside. The composition creates layered reflections and viewpoints that shift with the viewer’s movements around the sculpture. The title of the work draws from Coast Salish visual language, where the eye is a form associated with awareness, presence, and continuity beyond the individual. Harry’s sculpture translates that form into a multiscalar design that enacts a subtle intergenerational choreography, reflecting Indigenous pedagogies wherein knowledge is relational, accumulative, and often revealed incrementally across the arc of one’s life.

This exhibition brings together diverse practices that challenge the traditional boundaries of photography.

Exploring the dynamic intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation, these works ask viewers to encounter photography as something to be experienced with the body as much as the eye. Here, photography transcends the flat surface, emerging as a spatial, tactile, and conceptual practice.

By engaging with inventive materials including paper, wood, film, resin, plastic, metal, and found objects, the artists blur the lines between disciplines, transforming the photograph into sculpture, the image into an object, and the wall into space.

In rethinking what a photograph can be, this exhibition invites audiences to see and navigate photographic works in bold new ways.

Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art that will run from April 18 to June 7, 2026. The public reception and launch will take place Saturday April 18 from 6-9pm. Admission to the exhibition and reception is free.

Across numerous pavilions, multiple outdoor plazas, and within various museums and public galleries around the Lower Mainland, Expo 86 brought together a wide variety of artists and artworks from across Canada and around the world. At the same time, the world’s fair attracted a wide range of parallel art exhibitions and initiatives. On Expo’s 40th anniversary, In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art highlights some of the extraordinary art from around British Columbia’s Lower Mainland during Canada’s second world’s fair moment.

Simranpreet Anand’s latest body of work weighs the spiritual significance of sacred materials against the costs and modes of their mass production. Working from a Sikh perspective, her installation of ceremonial fabrics, lenticular prints, and embroidered photographs considers the notion of the “eternal” in terms of religious significance, as well as the synthetic nature of products manufactured to last forever. Collapsing commercial and domestic spaces, her exhibition at The Polygon Gallery will feature a living room — with custom wallpaper, a couch, and a television — beside the Gallery’s gift shop, probing multivalent ideas of worship, value, and sustainability in the 21st century. Anand was the winner of the 2023 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize.