Phantom Scripts revisits three works by Geoffrey Farmer from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection — Vampire Archive, November 22, 1974 (2010 – 2025), The Politics of Appearing (2012 – 2025), The Good Sweeper (2017 – 2025)— reframing them through newly composed scripts, annotations, and didactic texts authored by the artist. The texts function as interjections — speculative, contextual, poetic — that reexamine and complicate the earlier works. In doing so, Farmer explores how art can be returned to, re-read, and re-situated under shifting historical and ethical awarenesses.

This exhibition is a return — not only to Farmer’s past works, and to the evolving conditions in which they are understood. Phantom Scripts highlights the artist’s curiosity to revisit the assumptions, forms, and the silences embedded in his earlier productions, treating the past not as fixed, but as an unsettled field of interpretation and implication. Early aesthetic elements remain — vivid, disorienting, alive — but are now considered by the artist within a broader awareness of colonial entanglements and queer disidentification, foregrounding the role of the museum not as neutral host, but as a site of complicity, memory, and potential transformation.

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.