Through the lens of contemporary artists’ engagement with the metaphorical and literal processes of fire and the spaces it creates and displaces, The Structure of Smoke includes works that problematize the poetic, structural and political aspects of fire. These works complicate the inherent contradictions of wildness and domestication, technological progress and social control, colonial conditions, rebirth and death. Holding a smoked mirror to contemporary society, the works in this exhibition offer ways to undo the familiar in how we approach our uncertain future.

Speculative in nature, The Structure of Smoke is associative, contextual and driven by artistic practices that disturb existing power relations and question their own conditions and structures. With a focus on ecologies, interconnectedness and relationality the works and curatorial premise consider relating to land, community, family and wildfire ecologies including the non-human. As we have seen with the migration of smoke across the globe and the birth of a regular fire season, the ways in which we live with fire require new strategies that embrace specific Indigenous and ecological knowledges and the ability to develop relations with fire beyond the spectacle and devastation of its impacts.

The Structure of Smoke is curated by Melanie O’Brian and Tania Willard and made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and our Belkin Curator’s Forum members.

Western Front is pleased to present Image Syncers, a solo exhibition by Canadian-British artist Nina Davies. The exhibition responds to current TikTok trends in which people mimic artificially generated videos, with Davies reimagining this choreographic phenomenon as a tool to disrupt visual economies and open up alternative modes of meaning-making.

At the centre of the exhibition is a 12-minute video framed as an episode of the fictional podcast What’s Sizzlin’. In it, host Bryce Snyder interviews journalist Teagan Carroll about her exposé on a break-in at the Trutch Seed Bank. Carroll reveals that the group responsible, known as the Plot Corps, physically reproduced AI-generated imagery to evade detection. Their discussion expands into broader reflections on “perception-collapse,” “image syncing,” and the evolving relationships between language, images, and bodies, in a world shaped by synthetic media.

Accompanying the video are sculptural works that expand the narrative world. A series of holographic forms appear as spectral stand-ins for the fictional Image Syncers, while transparent, vitrine-like backpacks display their personal belongings. These include smartphones showing images and footage of performances that evoke AI-generated scenes, yet were created entirely through analogue means—costumes, props, makeup, and lighting—as well as the “cursed hands” used by the characters to interface with generated worlds or manipulate real-world events.

That Green Ideal: Emily Carr and the Idea of Nature is the largest solo exhibition of iconic British Columbia artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) at the Vancouver Art Gallery in over twenty years.

Featuring more than 100 works, it explores in-depth the artist’s obsession with the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, using close analysis of her paintings and writings to investigate how she understood nature and her relationship to it. The exhibition argues that Carr’s landscapes exist at the intersection between an experience of nature and an idea about how to transmit that experience through a painting, with the goal of expressing a divine essence in nature. It teases out the tension between individual and local references and the larger ideas and philosophies about nature in Western cultural traditions.

Guest curated by Salish artist Eliot White-Hill, Kwulasultun, this exhibition brings together the work of 11 Coast and Interior Salish artists working across sculpture, printmaking, textiles, painting, and mixed media. Together, their practices reveal the deep cultural, linguistic, and artistic relationships that flow across the Salish world.

While institutional narratives have often centered on Coastal Salish art, this exhibition broadens the lens, foregrounding the vital interconnectivity between Interior and Coast Salish communities. In doing so, it challenges the historic marginalization of Salish art within broader Northwest Coast art histories.

At the heart of the curatorial vision is the river, both a living presence and a powerful metaphor, linking land, water, identity, and evolving cultural practices.
The exhibition celebrates Salish art as dynamic, sophisticated, and forward-looking, affirming its place as both culturally essential and artistically visionary.

Featuring influential artists who have paved the way, including Susan Point and Angela Paul, alongside emerging voices shaping the future, this exhibition offers a resonant and timely exploration of continuity, connection, and creative resurgence.

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art presents Blossoming, a solo exhibition from Kwakwaka’wakw artist Jamie Gentry, curated by Aliya Boubard, from February 28 – May 24, 2026. After 12 years of creating moccasins by commission, this exhibition serves as an opportunity for Gentry to implement her handcrafted beadwork based solely on personal inspiration, culminating in a journey of self-discovery and growth, and a gift to create her own joy. The exhibition features a series of handmade moccasins adorned with realistic floral beadwork along with a selection of photographs showcasing the moccasins in the natural environment from which each pair was inspired. A workshop with the artist will be held during the exhibition run, further details to be announced. For admission information and complete event details, visit: billreidgallery.ca

Andrew James McKay’s Provisional Realism is comprised of six pictures — two landscapes and four portraits. The landscapes can be further divided into urban and rural settings (Expansion Project and Sunshine Coast Highway, respectively), while the portraits run the gamut — from self-portraiture (Impersonator), to staged direction (Showroom), to conceptual (Alisa with Textile), to meta (The Woodshop). Though the paintings align easily with realist criteria, their provisional status requires some thinking.

A first thought concerns an instance where landscape and portraiture meet in a single work, as in the mural portrait that appears in the Expansion Project landscape. This mural, which centres the words “THE PRESENT” across its figure’s chest, was a project of the now-defunct Vancouver Mural Festival, a controversial non-profit accused of “art-washing.” [1] As with many VMF projects, murals were commissioned with no guarantee of permanence. Although we could refer to them as provisional (existing temporarily, or in the present), the provisional aspect assumed in Expansion Project (Vancouver’s five-year Broadway Subway Line expansion) is in reality closer to an operative protraction than anything fleeting: a scenario in which governments and market forces collude to neo-liberally manipulate both time and space for profit, in a city young and ruthless enough to be cursed, like Modernism, with forever making itself new.

Kinship, a group exhibition of six Vancouver-based trans and gender-diverse ceramic artists curated by Jai Sallay-Carrington, runs March 19 through April 24, 2026. With Kinship, figurative ceramic practices become a means of grappling with queer and trans embodiment in all its complexity. Showcasing work by Rojina Farrokhnejad, Pedram Penhan, Cat Hart, Danya Gorodetsky, Felix Thomas, and Sallay-Carrington themself, Kinship is timed to coincide with International Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31) and is also a featured exhibition in the 2026 Canadian Clay Symposium (March 21–23). Arriving at a time when trans bodies remain highly politicized, these artists question how gender, sexuality, and desire shape one’s sense of belonging, or otherness, within culture.

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.