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.

Takao Tanabe’s fascination with landscapes comes vividly to life through his travels across British Columbia, North America, the Arctic, and Europe. With his camera always at hand, he journeyed widely to explore the wonders of places that sparked his curiosity and creative drive. Tanabe captured their geographical features and unique atmosphere, translating them into paintings in his studio that balance careful observation with poetic reflection. His works invite quiet contemplation, as if he listens intently to the land itself.

Machu Picchu (1990-2012) is a look back on Tanabe’s journey there in 1977. Each brushstroke, layer of colour, and element of composition evokes the memories and spirit of the place, which Tanabe revisited in his mind while working on the painting. He returned to it in 2012, completing it to his satisfaction at that time.

In Suffolk Village (1996–97) and Peninsula, N.L. (2014), Tanabe demonstrates precise attention to form, colour, and space. Suffolk Village depicts a historical coastal town under dramatic skies, while Peninsula, N.L., pares the landscape to sky, land, and sea, emphasizing its clarity. In contrast, Arctic and northern interior landscapes such as High Arctic 2/91, Aston Bay, Somerset Is. (1991) and Chilcotin 1/89, Frozen Lake (1989) use diffused light, soft contours, and muted greys and blues to evoke solitude, introspection, and the emotional resonance of extreme environments.

One of the highlights of this exhibition is a triptych, N.W.T.1/97: Beaulieu River (1997), donated by the artist to the Audain Art Museum in 2018. This large-scale river painting has a quiet intensity, offering the viewer an immersive engagement with nature, while capturing Canada’s breathtaking scenery.

Across continents, oceans, and lands, Tanabe’s travel paintings in this exhibition reveal both the poetic essence of the world and its quiet, meditative spirit, offering a deeply contemplative vision of place.

In partnership with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) through the Ta na wa Ns7éyx̱nitmta Snew̓íyelh (Language & Cultural Affairs Department), MONOVA is proud to present Gifts to be Shared, Protected, and Carried Forward, a new exhibition celebrating Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history, artistry, and living cultural practices.

Through Coast Salish storytelling, weaving traditions, and cultural belongings, the exhibition creates a living connection between past, present, and future while offering visitors a deeper understanding of place rooted in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history.

The exhibition brings together rare pieces from Chief Dr. Janice George’s personal collection of weavings and cultural belongings alongside significant loans and community-held pieces connected to Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history and teachings, including a canoe, woven works, and Chief Joe Capilano’s belt.

 Photo: monova.ca

Celebrating Takao Tanabe’s extraordinary contributions to Canadian art, this retrospective marks his 100th birthday on September 16, 2026, and features over sixty paintings spanning more than seven decades. It offers a comprehensive look at his evolving visual language and the remarkable breadth of Tanabe’s artistic practice.

Born in 1926 in Seal Cove, Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Tanabe is a second-generation Japanese Canadian whose work has profoundly shaped the landscape of Canadian art. Renowned for his abstract and representational landscapes, he distills the essence of place through masterful control of form, colour, and brushwork. Across his oeuvre, familiar terrains and coastal scenes are transformed into luminous compositions that balance serenity with energy, reflecting a deep, contemplative engagement with land and water.

Alongside iconic coastal and prairie landscapes, Takao Tanabe: Inside Passage showcases lesser-known bodies of work, including the Emperor series, hard-edge paintings, and intimate river scenes, providing a more comprehensive appreciation of Tanabe’s creative range. Each canvas, whether modernist abstraction or tranquil coastal sky, demonstrates his lifelong pursuit of visual and emotional resonance in shape and nature.

Tanabe’s influence extends beyond his technical mastery, merging Eastern and Western traditions with the modernist movements of postwar Canada. His contributions have been recognized with numerous honours, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Order of Canada, and the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. This exhibition invites visitors to celebrate Takao Tanabe’s centennial, reflect on his enduring legacy, and experience the quiet power and poetic refinement that define his remarkable body of work.

Presented in Inside Passage is Tanabe’s extraordinary ability to capture a visual expression of emotion through abstraction, as well as the essence of picturesque places. From tranquil rivers and mountains to dramatic coastal vistas, his work evokes both stillness and grandeur, offering a poetic reflection on nature and a lasting testament to his artistic legacy.

Animals play important roles in Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh Úxwumixw and Líl̓wat7úl cultures-we honour them in many ways. We wear their hides as clothing, feature them in artwork, and they’re the central character in our stories, songs and dances. They’re important educational tools, sharing history, morals and values with our children.

In the Squamish Legend known as Ta X̱aays (the transformers) after light was created and then land was created, the first animal(s) to be created were all that can fly, and next to be created were all that can run on four legs, and the next that was created were all that can crawl & swim and the last to be created were the Human beings. So being the last to have been created makes the humans the sḵa7ḵ (younger sibling) and everyone else the kwepkwúpits (older siblings).

In the Lil’wat Legend known as How the Animals and Birds Got Their Names, told by Nts’elasq’et, or “s7á7a7” Crow in his early years, late Elder Charlie Mack, during the Great Flood all of the animals and birds died waiting to find dry land. The Kúkwpi7 (the Chief) called all of the people to a special gathering. At the meeting, they were asked to sing their songs, for whatever power they had. Everyone sang. One by one, they all made the sounds of different animals and birds and then turned into them. Animals, birds, people and land are one and the same.

This exhibit features artwork from Sk̲wx̲wú7mesh Úxwumixw and Líl̓wat7úl youth created as they learn more about their own culture. Jazmine (Ts̓qáxa7) Andrew, Hayden Sampson, Nakeisha Williams, Melody Bruce Joseph, Qawam Redmond Andrews, T. Ben Lewis, Leanne Bird Lewis, Matthew Cole, the Project Based Learning Class St’a7mes School – Learning Expeditions, and the Yéw’Yew Classroom St’a7mes School – Learning Expeditions..

Join us as we explore the roles animals play in our songs and dances.

Kaur’s practice unfolds within the lived realities of the South Asian diaspora, where culture is shaped by movement, memory, and re-telling. Working across painting, sculpture, digital media, embroidery, poetry, and performance, Kaur draws from Sikh and broader Indic poetic traditions—ways of thinking and making in which metaphor and image are used to hold ways of living and understanding. Within Sikh culture, such imagery has long offered guidance: poetic forms and natural elements are used to reflect on humility, devotion, balance, and relational responsibility.

If Gardens Could Dream brings together a recurring set of forms that appear across materials and scales. Rather than functioning as fixed symbols, these motifs shift and gather meaning through repetition and change, offering points of reflection rather than instruction. The moon gestures toward cycles of time, discipline, and return, echoing Sikh understandings of attunement to larger rhythms beyond the self. The heart appears as both a bodily organ and a site of feeling and devotion, foregrounding sincerity and inner alignment. The pomegranate, dense with seeds, speaks to abundance and interconnection, resonating with communal values and diasporic networks of care. The lotus, rising from muddy water, reflects principles of humility and steadfastness—remaining grounded while moving through worldly conditions.

Kaur’s interdisciplinary approach emphasizes translation—between mediums, histories, and ways of knowing. As forms move from textile to image, from language to performance, they reveal how cultural memory survives not through preservation alone, but through adaptation and care. Tradition, here, is not static; it is responsive and alive.

If Gardens Could Dream invites viewers into a contemplative space where personal experience and collective history meet. The exhibition offers symbols as open gestures—capable of holding loss and continuity, intimacy and inheritance—and proposes cultural meaning as something continually nurtured, like a garden shaped by time, tending, and return.

Strategies of Assembly presents print matter documenting over four decades of social, cultural and political life in this province, drawn from two collections held by SFU’s Special Collections & Rare Books: an expansive poster archive collected by Perry Giguere (aka “Perry the Poster Man”), and a series of photographs taken for the weekly Vancouver labour newspaper, the Pacific Tribune. A singular print by Black Canadian artist Deanna Bowen punctuates the installation.

Viewed together, these materials not only offer an historical overview of social life in BC. They also highlight enduring contentions between differing visions of the social itself, expressed through demands for better living conditions, struggles for fair wages and working hours, transparency in public spending, Indigenous sovereignty, ecological preservation, and freedom of expression.

Any such history of social gatherings is also, by definition, a history of exclusions. It is a history of those unable or unallowed to gather, and of those whose gatherings have been permitted under “special conditions,” never far from the threat of sanction, discipline, and violence. It is a history of events whose documentations, if any, survive in forms inaccessible here.

Selected from the SFU Art Collection’s print holdings, Working Proof presents key works by four artists—Leslie J. Fawkes, Susan Gransby, Libby Hague, and Anna Wong—whose decades-long practices have consistently expanded the possibilities of printmaking.

The selections span an especially vibrant period of printmaking in Canada—between 1975 and 1990—when institutions such as the Malaspina Printmaking Society and the Print and Drawing Council of Canada, run by printmakers themselves, responded to growing public awareness of printmaking as an art form and furthered this interest through dedicated workshops and exhibitions.

Working Proof draws attention to the artists’ varied contributions to such institutions. Whether as educators, editors, or arts administrators, their individual printmaking practices went hand in hand with efforts to increase access to print education and to develop wider audiences for the medium.

BAG Offsite presents Michael de Courcy: one in a million, an exhibition spanning across both Bob Prittie Library and McGill library sites.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Expo 86, the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, an event that attracted over 22 million visitors from around the world.

Artist Michael de Courcy made a point of attending each day of the event, with the intent of documenting family groups, friends and individuals parading along the Expo thoroughfares absorbed in the moment. The result of this undertaking, the one in a million archive, contains 1700 images of an incredibly diverse group of people, a collective snapshot of a time when Vancouver and the region was emergent on the world stage, and undergoing growing pains.

BAG Offsite presents Michael de Courcy: one in a million, an exhibition spanning across both Bob Prittie Library and McGill library sites.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Expo 86, the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, an event that attracted over 22 million visitors from around the world.

Artist Michael de Courcy made a point of attending each day of the event, with the intent of documenting family groups, friends and individuals parading along the Expo thoroughfares absorbed in the moment. The result of this undertaking, the one in a million archive, contains 1700 images of an incredibly diverse group of people, a collective snapshot of a time when Vancouver and the region was emergent on the world stage, and undergoing growing pains.

Acclaimed Canadian photographer Greg Girard receives his first-ever career retrospective this summer. Girard began his career as a photojournalist before developing an artistic focus on the social and physical transformations of urban centres, especially in Asia. He was based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, and is renowned for his images of that city’s rapid, and at times violent, metamorphosis through the beginning of the 21st century. Girard has also produced a number of award winning photobooks, including Phantom Shanghai (2007), which The Independent newspaper cited as one the top 10 photographic books ever produced, as well as Under Vancouver, 1972 – 82 (2017), which is now in its fourth printing. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Sunday Times Magazine (UK) and many more.

Angela Rae is a mixed-media painter who knows something about living between two worlds. After years riding the chaotic conveyor belt of Vancouver city life, she traded it for a self-designed mountainside home on the Sunshine Coast—where the pace is slower, the air is cleaner, and the yard is shared with mellow goats, a few ducks, and a flock of famously unruly chickens. The city shaped her. The country freed her. And somewhere in the tension between the two, her paintings found their voice.

Built from layered gesso, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite, Angela’s work is informed by a career designing and art directing theatrical film sets, bringing cinematic scale and atmospheric depth to raw, expressive abstraction. But it’s that push and pull between worlds—urban and rural, structured and instinctual, planned and surrendered—that runs like a current through everything she makes.

Her paintings can be found in galleries and public spaces in Vancouver and beyond, though she’s happiest when the work is out in front of people, starting conversations she didn’t plan for.

Her debut solo exhibition, Between the Lines, is a body of work that lives in exactly that in-between space—where chaos meets calm, city meets country, and structure quietly gives way to something more honest.

Geographical Meltdowns, Dysfunctional Landscapes are portraits of landscapes, poetic and observational drawings of real and imaginary topography. One can recognize mountains and valleys, ravines, and rivers, or traverses and peaks. At the same time, these works are abstractions of a nature that is equally majestic as it is crumbling. These are inaccessible landscapes, manufactured in our imagination through observation, or a form of collective memory of nature. The works in Geographical Meltdowns, Dysfunctional Landscapes also speak of the impact of human intervention on nature. They document the social, emotional and physiological landscapes of the territories we idealize and at the same time wreak havoc onto. They evoke majestic sceneries of complicated relationships between humans and the natural environment.

The title marks a shift from Kaur’s painting Symbol Harvester, where the term functions as a noun and an active verb, emphasizing movement and transformation. From a central, blue-hued figure, green vegetation grows from the character’s hands, unfurling into living vines that bear evolving symbols. These forms suggest an inner world, seeds of imagination producing symbolic fruit that functions as a visual language. Translating imagery from a three-foot-wide acrylic painting with hand embroidery and beading, the work reflects on farming and harvesting as practices of care and gathering.

Exhibition begins 30 minutes after sunset and ends at midnight.

Photo credit: surrey.ca

Jeff Wall: Inside presents a selection of the artist’s work over the past 30 years, with the emphasis on pictures made in the past decade and not previously seen in Vancouver.
Wall has stated that, from the outset, he wanted to have the same artistic freedom as painters, poets, or composers, the freedom to find what he calls “starting points“ anywhere—in things he witnessed, heard about, read about, or imagined.
The interiors are varied, from private rooms to busy public spaces, from present time to imaginary past moments, giving a sense of the artist’s wide-ranging fascinations.
The often-large size of the works emphasizes the visual impact of composition, colour, and form as well as the intimacy of seeming to share space with the subjects.
The pictures invite both contemplation and discussion, blending composition and artifice with the complex character of the different subjects—the approach that Wall has elaborated over his almost five-decade long career.

The Ferry Building Gallery is delighted to present Tam Irving’s Dimensions, an exhibition of work sitting at the intersection of colour, form, and perception—where the boundaries between painting, object, and optical experience begin to dissolve.

Long recognized as a master potter, Irving turns here to a broader visual language, extending his practice beyond function and into a sustained inquiry into the relationship between art and craft.

At the heart of the exhibition is a rigorous exploration of colour: its capacity to create tension or harmony, to advance or recede, to unsettle or resolve. Drawing on the legacy of colour field painters such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Irving examines how subtle shifts in hue and contrast can produce spatial effects.

This investigation is paired with an equally probing study of form. Circles are cut, folded, layered, and interrupted; vessels are reimagined and surfaces deceive. Objects that appear flat reveal themselves as dimensional, while others hover ambiguously between two and three dimensions. Irving approaches these transformations with the precision of a scientist, dissecting and reconstructing shapes to test their limits. The result is a playful yet exacting visual language, where perception itself becomes unstable.

The work draws from early 20th-century abstraction, particularly the structural clarity of Lyubov Popova and the Constructivist ethos of building compositions through colour and line. Echoes of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism and the spiritual minimalism of Hilma af Klint surface in Irving’s restrained yet deliberate use of form and palette. There are also resonances with the quiet, contemplative grids of Agnes Martin and the gestural freedom of Jackson Pollock, though Irving’s work remains distinctly his own, grounded in materiality and objecthood.

Tam Irving is the featured artist for the 2026 Harmony Arts Festival.

Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce Marking the Season featuring work from members of the South Surrey and White Rock Arts Society, on display from August 8 until November 1. Admission is free.

Over the past year, members of the Society took their sketchbooks, paints, and folding chairs and headed outdoors to depict the ever-changing landscape of Bear Creek Park. Working plein air through sunshine, clouds, blossoms, and falling leaves, each artist returned to favourite spots throughout the park, capturing the changing seasons one brushstroke at a time.

Marking the Season will be celebrated along with the Gallery’s fall exhibitions at the opening art party on October 3 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

On Thursday, October 1 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., exhibiting artist Jess Rice, from Marking the Season, gives an artist talk and leads a watercolour-making activity as part of Surrey Art Gallery Association’s free Thursday Artist Talk series.

Layered Landscapes explores how landscapes, both natural and built, become vessels for memory, imagination, and cultural inheritance. Moving beyond landscape as a purely physical site, the exhibition considers terrain as a living archive shaped by ecology, power, mythology, technology, and personal history. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, the artists blur the boundaries between reality and myth, past and present, place and psyche. Forests, urban environments, and imagined worlds become sites of storytelling where memory, displacement, and speculation intersect, inviting viewers to reflect on how we occupy and respond to space, and how the stories embedded in landscapes shape our sense of belonging and identity. Bringing together four artists whose practices approach landscape through ecological, folkloric, political, and psychological lenses, Layered Landscapes offers a poetic and timely reflection on how our relationships to place are being reshaped.