Edge Effects features a combination of new commissioned works and projects never before seen by audiences in Canada, such as Liz Magor’s still poignant Blue Students/Alumnos en azul (1997). Originally commissioned by INSITE97, the public project centred on photographic portraits of students from the School of Creative and Performing Arts in San Diego, California, and the Preparatoria Federal Lázaro Cárdenas in Tijuana, Mexico, that were placed throughout both cities. The film negatives were pressed with paper covered in iron salts, which converted into positive blue images as they were exposed to sunlight. By the end of the installation period, only a few portraits had not been completely obscured, with the artist stating that the legibility of the images represented the power of circumstance and chance that governs people’s lives.

Photo credit: Jin-me Yoon, video still from As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations), 2025. 4K and thermal 3-channel video installation with sound, sandbags, netting, and wood. 15:05 minutes, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

Kintsugi, the Japanese art of “golden joinery,” is a 500-year-old tradition of repairing broken ceramics with natural Urushi lacquer and powdered gold. Rather than disguising damage, it highlights it—honoring imperfection and the passage of time.

Vancouver-based artist Naoko Fukumaru draws on this ancient practice as both a craft and a meditative process. Through her work, she offers a powerful metaphor for personal healing: like broken pottery, our cracks can become part of our story—transformed, illuminated, and made beautiful.

Respecting traditional materials and methods, Fukumaru also pushes the boundaries of kintsugi through instinctive, innovative techniques. Her approach redefines what restoration can mean—bridging history and emotion in work that is both raw and radiant.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what it means to be beautifully broken—and to find strength and beauty in the imperfect.

Bobbie Burgers is a Vancouver-based artist celebrated for her large-scale floral works that explore themes of ephemeral beauty and refined strength through expressive, gestural abstraction. Her work captures the tension between decay and vitality, inviting viewers into a sensorial experience of colour and form. Originating in emotive and expansive brushstrokes, Burgers’ work extends from painting into collage and printmaking elements. In reconfiguring recognizable representations of floral forms, she contends with the long history of the still-life in western art, asserting an atmosphere entirely her own, while simultaneously challenging conceptions of femininity and domesticity.

As we enter late winter, with slivers of spring poking through the lengthening days, Burgers’ work offers contemplations on time and transition. Her work speaks to cycles—the lifecycles of flora and fauna, as well as cycles of human interaction and introspection. Assembly invites visitors not only to explore the lifecycle of an artwork, but also an invitation into the process of creation itself. Just as the life of a flower, which inevitably requires decay and decomposition, involves assembly and reassembly—nutrients blooming into new florals, florals into gardens—so too do the gestural marks, stains, drawings and prints emerging from Burgers’ studio transform.