Tupananchiskama: Ancient Andean Cosmovision explores the enduring worldviews of ancient Andean civilizations through nearly 100 exquisite pre-Columbian ceramic, textile, bone and wood works, some dating back more than 2,500 years. These works were collected by former UBC Professor Alan R. Sawyer and donated to MOA. The Andes are home to some of the world’s most complex cultural traditions, and its knowledge lives on in landscapes, practices, languages, and material culture.

This exhibition highlights Andean cosmovision—a holistic and spiritual understanding of the universe grounded in reciprocity, balance, and the recognition of nature as a living being. Far more than artistic objects, the belongings on display embody relationships between humans, ancestors, and sacred forces.

Tupananchiskama, is a word in Quechua, an Indigenous language of the Andes. It means “until life brings us together again” and reflects an ancestral view of life and death as part of a continuous cycle. In Andean philosophy, death is not an end but a transformation. Through the belongings in this exhibition, visitors are invited to reflect on continuity, resilience, renewal, and the promise of reunion.

Uncommon Places is a landmark series of photographs by American photographer Stephen Shore (b. 1947, New York, NY). Taken over the course of multiple road trips across North America between 1973 and 1981, this series played a pivotal role in establishing the importance of colour photography as a fine art form.

During his travels, Shore photographed intersections, parking lots, buildings, interiors, landscapes, objects and people, defining a photographic vernacular rooted in everyday Americana. Through Shore’s lens, such seemingly mundane subject matter becomes uncommon—framing, composition, colour, clarity and perspective work together to create a world of compelling images in which we see ordinary matter anew. Shore’s approach to the series is marked by a contemplative, attentive and detached quality, shaped by his use of a tripod-mounted, large-format camera that facilitates precision, sharpness and vivid clarity. Uncommon Places was originally published as a book in 1982.

Following a major gift from the Chan Family of eight hundred and one photographs from the series, the Gallery’s collection is one of the most comprehensive representations of this highly influential body of work held by any museum in the world. Together, these works offer insight into the development of Shore’s photographic approach, as well as the thematic strands, range of subjects and formal concerns that unfold across the series. Alongside iconic images of life on the road, this exhibition foregrounds Shore’s photographs from Canada and highlights his encounters with the people he met along the way who shaped his journeys.

Ser Serpas (b. 1995, Boyle Heights, California) lives and works in New York City and received degrees from Columbia University, New York, and HEAD, Genève. Notable institutional solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; the Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris; and Swiss Institute, New York. Serpas has also participated in group exhibitions at the Rubell Museum, Miami; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; MoMA PS1, New York; the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2024 El Museo del Barrio Triennial, New York; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Genève; Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Istituto Svizzero, Rome; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Punta della Dogana, Venice; and Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland. Serpas has a solo exhibition upcoming at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Germany.

In Rafik Greiss’ work, we encounter a state between wakefulness and dreaming. Driven by the artist’s itinerant drifting within and across disparate urban landscapes, Greiss’ photographs, installations and videos reflect deeply on the complexities of movement and time, pursuing an impression of simultaneous distance and proximity.

In Public Image, Greiss presents a pair of photographic projects across CAG’s public sites. On the gallery’s façade is an arrangement of images from By the Highway, a series made in collaboration with Ser Serpas, depicting her creation of impromptu, temporary sculptures. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Greiss has installed photographs of glass vitrines taken in the Agricultural Museum in Giza. Responding to the function of the display case to make its contents visible yet physically inaccessible, these deliberately ambiguous photographs double the station’s windows, taking glass itself – as opposed to what it reveals and encloses – as their subject.

Known for his meticulously rendered sculptures of social architectures — from bars and bookstores to clinics and changerooms — Douglas Watt’s work takes up the complex relationship between public space and the construction of self. Building on legacies of appropriation, assemblage and the readymade, Watt’s practice draws on quotidian materials and forms, producing model, set and prop-like works that engage questions about the performance of everyday life.In Mayor of the Village, Watt brings together a series of new and recent works that find their point of departure in Vancouver’s Davie Village, a historically significant centre of queer life in the city. Loosely staging the gallery as a café, Watt hangs within this environment a “survey” of his miniaturized model works from the past several years. Referencing tropes of the café art display, the resulting show-within-a-show at once evinces the ways that community is imagined and constructed in the public sphere — aesthetically, politically and otherwise — while nodding to the inevitable failures, fragilities and exclusions of these same structures.

Fazakas Gallery is pleased to present Re-counting Coup, the first solo exhibition in British Columbia by Matthew Provost Naatsikapamatoosin (Two Smudge), an artist from the Piikani and Kainai Nations (Southern Alberta), part of the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Confederacy).

Two Smudge’s practice explores how Siksikaitsitapi knowledge systems persist and adapt within contemporary contexts. Working across painting, material interventions, installation, and hanging mobile sculpture, he engages histories of mark-making, land, and value to consider how cultural knowledge is carried forward.

The exhibition’s title draws on the Blackfoot practice of counting coup, a Plains Indigenous tradition in which warriors demonstrated bravery through close physical proximity to an opponent—touching rather than killing. Emphasizing risk, precision, and restraint, the act held deep social and cultural significance.

In Re-counting Coup, Two Smudge reinterprets this gesture through his materials and process. Painting over maps and financial documents such as cheques—tools historically tied to colonial systems of land and economy—he disrupts their authority without fully erasing them. These works function as acts of “re-counting,” where layered marks assert presence and challenge imposed structures.

This approach connects to earlier visual traditions, including winter counts—pictorial records used by Plains Indigenous communities to mark significant events—and the later development of ledger art in the 19th century. While Ledger Art often emphasizes figuration and narrative, Two Smudge departs from these conventions. His compositions draw from the painted visual language of Niitoyis (lodges), where surface, structure, and meaning are intertwined. While the works may appear abstract, they are built through a Blackfoot visual vocabulary—circles, lines, and geometric forms that reference stars, celestial systems, and relationships to land.

Niitoyis remains central to the work. Beyond a formal reference, the lodge embodies teachings related to home, land, and community. Drawn from lived experience in Piikani Nation, these forms are rearticulated across each surface, creating spatial systems that resist the fixed boundaries of colonial cartography.

Across the exhibition, layers of information remain visible. Fragments of maps persist beneath painted fields, their borders disrupted but legible. This coexistence reflects an ongoing tension between imposed territorial frameworks and Siksikaitsitapi understandings of land as relational and lived.

Re-counting Coup considers what it means to act with courage today. Here, bravery is expressed through continuation—through the sustained act of making, learning, and transmitting knowledge. The work affirms that Siksikaitsitapi ways of knowing are not static, but continuously evolving and carried forward.

Step inside a 360° experience set within some of British Columbia’s last remaining ancient forests, offering both an adventure for the senses and an ecological awakening.

Presented as part of the exhibition Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, SANCTUARY: The Ancient Forest Experience is an immersive installation created by artist, ethnobotanist, educator and activist Dr. T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss in collaboration with filmmakers Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux.

At the heart of the exhibition is a life-sized replica of an 1,800-year-old red cedar. Inside, visitors enter a geodesic dome where a stunning 360° film transports them deep into some of British Columbia’s last remaining ancient forests—places rarely seen, increasingly threatened and profoundly sacred.

SANCTUARY features the Inland Temperate Rainforest in BC’s Kootenay region and the Dakota Bear Ancient Forest, known to the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) People as Stal’Kaya (Home of the Sea Wolves) and located on the Sunshine Coast in the unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation). These rich, intact forests, which have evolved since the last Ice Age, are set in stark contrast with nearby clear-cuts and tree plantations.

Narrated by Dr. Wyss, this multi-sensory work is accompanied by a layered soundscape of birdsong, flowing streams and waterfalls. It also highlights the flora and fauna of these ecosystems, including culturally modified trees, living evidence of the Squamish Nation’s long-term care and use of Stal’Kaya. Red and yellow cedars, traditionally used to make canoes, paddles, baskets and other vital cultural objects, feature prominently in the film, with a selection of works displayed in the gallery.

In 2021, following more than a decade of advocacy to halt logging in Stal’Kaya, the Squamish Nation and the Government of British Columbia reached an agreement to protect the forest. The film also explores ongoing efforts by the Valhalla Wilderness Society to protect the Inland Temperate Rainforest. While the creation of the Incomappleux Ancient Forest Conservancy in 2023 marked an important step forward, many ancient forests in the Kootenays remain unprotected—an increasingly critical pursuit in the era of climate change.

As the environmental crisis accelerates, artists around the world are responding with urgency, insight and vision. Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change is the first major exhibition in Canada to examine the intersection of the climate crisis and contemporary art on a global scale.

Featuring works from the past 25 years, this exhibition underscores the urgency and relevance of sustainability and the environment as defining issues of our time. More than 35 works across a range of media—from large-scale video installations to living sculptures—invite viewers to confront pressing questions about our shared future on this planet.

Presented across multiple floors, Future Geographies includes a newly commissioned work by Jeffrey Gibson and marks the first time several artists are exhibiting in Vancouver, including Teresita Fernández, Josh Kline, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jean Shin and Clarissa Tossin. The exhibition also features major works by BC–based artists such as Brian Jungen, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun, connecting global issues with local specificity. Together, the works in this exhibition invite dialogue and create space for imagining.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Vancouver Art Gallery is partnering with the University of British Columbia Climate Action Lab to create unique platforms for cross disciplinary dialogue. After its presentation at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Future Geographies will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Future Geographies will continue on the Gallery’s 4th Floor with the immersive installation SANCTUARY: The Ancient Forest Experience, by Dr. T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss, Damien Gillis and Olivier Leroux, and a presentation of cedar works by local artists, curated by Dr. Wyss.

A public artwork by Cannupa Hanska Luger will be featured on a billboard on 1611 E Hastings Street (near Commercial Drive) and is a collaboration with Capture Photography Festival.

THIS Gallery presents Objet D’Art, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Sara Robichaud.

Working from a personal archive of domestic objects (tools, utensils, furniture, and inherited items) Robichaud transforms still life into an active visual language shaped by memory, use, and time. Many works are rendered at a 1:1 scale, grounding the paintings in close observation, while shifts in scale introduce moments of metaphor.

Her process moves between precision and fluidity, combining hand-cut stencils with poured and manipulated paint to create surfaces that shift from raw canvas to reflective, iridescent finishes. Mirrors and plant forms appear throughout, linking perception to lived experience and situating the work within cycles of growth and change.

Objet D’Art invites sustained attention, offering a space to reconsider the quiet significance of everyday objects.

https://thisgallery.org/project/sara-robichaud-objet-dart/

Image courtesy THIS Gallery