The internationally acclaimed Toronto-based artist Edward Burtynsky will present a selection of large-scale photo-based works for this exhibition at the Audain Art Museum. Over the past 40 years, Burtynsky has focused his camera lens on the impact of human industry around the planet. This display of recent works in Whistler entitled The Coast Mountains captures the pristine grandeur of British Columbia’s natural environment, while highlighting the pressing issue of glacier retreat due to global warming.

Burtynsky reflects: “Recent reports on the world’s remaining glaciers provide sobering news. Estimates are that most of Western Canada’s glaciers will be lost to melting within the next 80 years. By the end of this century, they could all be gone. My daughters, who are in their 20s, will not be looking at the same world when they are my age. These images are a reminder of what’s being lost – relics of ancient ice and an essential resource for ecosystems and freshwater in these parts of the world.”

Such an exhibition in the AAM’s Upper Galleries brings a relevant sense of aesthetic wonder that has attracted visitors to Whistler for decades and the underlying dilemma of how the local mountain landscape continues to change. The Museum is honoured to host Edward Burtynsky, as he continues to be a leader in artistic discourse that speaks to a greater social consciousness.

We are currently living through a very critical time of recurring natural disasters caused by climate change. Indigenous people and communities are some of the most impacted by these disasters. Our traditional territories are being affected by flooding, fires, drought, and in many areas a decline of the species that we rely on for hunting and fishing. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of environmental activism for generations and continue to actively fight for our traditional lands.

Vital Signs is a group exhibition that features artists who are discussing the impact of climate change through personal experiences and effects on their traditional territories in a variety of mediums. The title, Vital Signs, refers to the measurements of the body’s most basic functions, but is also a reference to how the land is essential to our being and is a living entity itself.

The artists featured in this exhibition are Jade Baxter (Nlaka’pamux), Jasper Berehulke (Syilx/Okanagan), Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena), Kwiis Hamilton (Hupačasath/Leq’a:mel), Rebecca Baker-Grenier (Kwakiuł, Dzawada’enuwx, and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), and Sage Nowak (Tahltan).

This undergraduate student exhibition follows the life story, art and legacy of the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw artist Ḵaḵaso’las-Ellen Neel (née Newman).

Ḵaḵaso’las-Ellen Neel was an innovative force in the Indigenous art scene who continues to influence Indigenous artists. She was part of a lineage of artists and leaders, which she passed on to her children and grandchildren. As a political leader, advocate and knowledge keeper, she left an impact on the world and the city of Vancouver that can still be seen today. Key to the exhibition is Ḵaḵaso’las, the totem pole that stood in Stanley Park for nearly 50 years and was returned to MOA in September 2024.

Just as “Umami” represents the rich and complex layers of flavour in cuisine, this exhibition delves into the depth and richness of nikkei artistic identity. Featuring a diverse range of artists, from emerging to established, including Japanese Canadian Legacies Art fund awardees. From traditional to contemporary art practice, the Umami exhibition shares the rich essence of our Japanese Canadian creative community.

Anchoring the full run of the exhibition is an interactive heritage inspired contemporary multi-media installation by Annie Sumi and Brian Kobayakawa called Kintsugi. Kintsugi is best known as a traditional Japanese technique of mending ceramics with gold. Annie and Brian’s Kintsugi conceptually mends broken and shattered experiences of what it means to be Canadian of Japanese ancestry through original music and spoken word activated by the visitor manually manipulating a Singer sewing machine that survived the era of Japanese Canadian internment and dispossession.

In Part 2, we introduce Molly JF Caldwell, the estate of Yoshiko Hirano, Marlene Howell, Vivien Nishi, and Reiko Pleau.  All of the artists investigate Japanese Canadian experience in their own style and media. Caldwell reimagines vintage textiles. Hirano, a long-term resident of Nikkei Home honed her skill in sumi-e.  Howell paints for the love of her heritage and sometimes dark history. Nishi honours her father’s internment era experience with manga-like illustrations, and Pleau mines the complex history and connection to her maternal ancestors. Artists, and Robert Hirano representing his mother’s work, will be in attendance at the Thursday, May 29,  2025 opening and artists’ conversation. The public is invited to attend.

Griffin Art Projects is thrilled to announce its 10th anniversary program, which offers audiences a unique glimpse into the lives of the private collectors at the heart of the gallery’s programming. Kicking things off is the summer exhibition TENXTEN, on view from May 31–Sept. 7, 2025, which features artworks from the vaults of 10 Vancouver-based collectors.

A companion exhibition titled Christos Dikeakos: The Collectors, on view from Sept. 20–Dec. 14, 2025, will feature intimate portraits by Dikeakos, an eminent photographer who has captured lush images of collectors pictured amongst the artworks they have devoted their lives to collecting.

On the BMO Mainstage it’s a new production of Much Ado About Nothing directed by Johnna Wright, packed with Shakespeare’s wittiest wordplay, romance, and intrigue. It will play in repertory with Shakespeare’s comedy of love and disguise, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, directed by Dean Paul Gibson and performed with a unique ‘80s twist. In the Douglas Campbell Theatre, two productions will play in repertory: the company debut of the global smash-hit The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] [again], directed by Mark Chavez; and the intriguing new Canadian work The Dark Lady, written by Jessica B. Hill and directed by Moya O’Connell.

Used in photography and painting to illustrate the radiant effects of the sun when it is near the horizon, the term golden hour describes the way light shifts to warmer tones just before sunset and just after sunrise. This exhibition shares views of landscape, light and luminosity from multiple perspectives, investigating the cyclical nature of day to night, beginnings and endings.

Curated by the entire Burnaby Art Gallery team, this exhibition brings forward responses to the collection from the perspectives of those who produce public programs, work closely with the collection and visitors and work towards maintaining the building itself. The exhibition includes audio guides illuminating the works.

With works by Vikky Alexander, Hana Amani, Gillian Armitage, Manuel Barbadillo, Joan Bell-Irving, Marcel Dzama, Gathie Falk, J.C. Heywood, Luke Marston, Gary Lee-Nova, lessLIE, Edna Myers, Hiromi Nakatsugawa, Mary Plumb Blade, Gita Teearu, Arnold Shives and more.

Rarely Seen Masterworks from the National Gallery of Canada—Degas, Klimt, Munch & More at the Audain Art Museum!

The Audain Art Museum proudly presents a landmark exhibition featuring rarely seen drawings from the National Gallery of Canada’s renowned Prints and Drawings collection. Established in 1921 as the first of its kind in Canada, this collection spans the 15th to 20th centuries, showcasing works in graphite, ink, pastel, watercolour, and more.

Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault is organized by the National Gallery of Canada (NGC). This exceptional exhibition highlights masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and many other celebrated artists, alongside newly acquired and never-before-displayed works. The selection ranges from preparatory sketches for iconic paintings to striking depictions of history, mythology, portraiture, landscapes, abstraction, and intimate explorations of the human experience.

Accompanying the exhibition is Gathered Leaves: Discoveries from the Drawings Vault, a richly illustrated catalogue by Sonia Del Re with Kirsten Appleyard and contributions by Erika Dolphin. Published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Canada, the catalogue showcases remarkable discoveries from the collection.

Flowers of Resistance brings together a collection recent artworks by internationally well-known architect, artist, and writer, Tony Robins. Currently based in Vancouver with projects and awards from Paris to Japan, Tony is a recipient of Canada’s 1994 Prix de Rome in Architecture, Lieutenant Governor of BC/AIBC’s 2014 Special Jury Award and Western Living Magazine’s 2014 Architect, Interior Designer and Eco Designer of the Year, to name a few.

For over 40 years, Robins has created artwork in parallel with his architectural practice. His works, coined “Narrative Minimalism”, explore the formation, transference, and deformation of meaning in a materialistic, psychological, and socio-historical context. This was the main theme of Robins’ 2018 exhibition Transmediation at the gallery.

From June 21st to August 9th Paul Kyle Gallery will be presenting Robins’ second solo exhibition, Flowers of Resistance. With a bold referential approach, these timely paintings, installation and video works feature floral emblems adopted by resistance movements across the globe and as far back as the 17th Century. These ethereal emblems are often contextualized by way of various tactile interventions; a delicate rendering of a peacock flower becomes obscured by four overlaid sheets of steel, the background of an iris painting systematically laser etched with Base64 computer code. In the artist’s words, “The juxtaposition adds material tactility and weight that relates to the brutality of regimes”.

A catalog with insight by Robins alongside the exhibition’s works is available.

Star Witnesses assembles works by a constellation of artists whose insightful observations of the cosmos bring new understandings of exploratory and migratory movements on Planet Earth. The artists involved present fragments of found and newly produced photographic evidence showing planets, moons, constellations in distant galaxies, and the light of our closest star – the Sun – to address earthly concerns.

The title alludes to the artists’ precise visions – honed at the technical limits of photography – and to how encounters with their artworks may transform audiences into ‘star witnesses’ in turn. Certain works in the exhibition evolve in close dialogue with scientific imaging, while others go beyond or deviate from the focus of telescopic cameras, the logic of astronomy, and the path of satellites. Together, they attest to the fact that there is no universal way of gazing at the universe.

Each work offers the image of the cosmos as material evidence for a distinctive perspective, worldview, or imaginary. They give substance to vital histories, which struggle to see the proverbial light of day: one woman’s survival in an internment camp; one man’s narrow escape from a white mob; underexposed connections between a war in the Middle East and peace in a mid-sized German town; an artist’s moment of grace on top of a moonlit mountain, far from home.

Questions of POV are paramount: much depends on where on Earth we – the humans, the stardust – were born and where we have travelled, migrated, settled recently, or remained for generations, if not millennia. Dark matter abounds. And this too is evidence awaiting fresh interpretations.

This 50th anniversary exhibition pairs permanent collection artworks acquired from the first ten years of collecting (1975–1985) and the last ten years (2014–2024) through themes of landscape, architecture, portraiture, and movement.

Works paired under the landscape theme showcase the transformation of Surrey’s cityscape through urbanization, industrialization, and resource extraction. For example, a painting by Abani Sen and a photograph by Dana Claxton consider how traditional art forms can be reinterpreted in a contemporary context. Both artists emphasize cultural meaning and storytelling through representative animals in the landscape.

In architecture, the selected works draw attention to overlooked and unnoticed spaces or places that might feel peripheral but are important to forming the whole of the image. Gwen Curry’s and Karin Bubaš’ works reveal the hidden corners of our everyday life.

Through portraiture, the exhibition considers shifting conversations about identity and the formation of the social and cultural self. A pairing of works by Jim Jardine and Lakshmi Gill questions who is represented in a portrait and how identity is conveyed and interpreted.

The theme of movement considers both time and material. Lyse Lemieux and Gailan Ngan use sculpture to evoke a sense of motion and stillness. A spotlight is given to Sherrard Grauer’s Sky with Swimmers, installed in the lobby of the Surrey Arts Centre, where it complements the movements of all who pass through the space.

Through all these comparisons and contrasts, the exhibition shares a re-telling of the collection’s stories. Interspersed amongst the permanent collection artworks are written reflections from Surrey-based artists Ying-Yueh Chuang, Kiranjot Kaur, Manjot Kuar, Chito Maravilla, and Helma Sawatzky. Their material practices and perspectives introduce new conversations with the works in the collection.

Alongside the exhibition, a timeline featuring archival markers forms a visual narrative of the Gallery’s past and present. A ten-year span is often considered a milestone and, looking ahead, the hope is that in the next ten years, new stories will continue to unfold.

This exhibition brings together the work of longtime friends Brittney Appleby and MV Williams. The artists’ practices inform one another and build upon each other’s growth. The mediums and processes they work in are time-based and are often done alone, like with the development of film in a darkroom or with the temporal and slow process of cyanotype photography, where one is subject to the intensity and longevity of the sun’s rays.

Appleby’s and Williams’ work grows from the unexpected and everchanging nature of their mediums. The allusion of control over these experimental processes relates to the subject matter of their work: Appleby often refers to experiences with chronic illness and disability and Williams reflects on memory and the relationship to place and home.

Appleby, in particular, often incorporates their background in painting, printmaking, and drawing into their film and photographic works. Williams leans into process-based methods of making, experimenting with fibre works, image transfers, and collage. As part of the exhibition, there will be a large-scale window installation looking out to the Arts Centre courtyard of the artists’ collaged photographic negatives and analogue film cells.

Vibrant Visions: The Art of Black Girlhood in Canada, is an ode to the registers of freedom, refusal, and self-regard that compose Black girl being and belonging in the Great White North. This dynamic assemblage of media and material objects recovers sight lines of Black girl joy and defiance across time and geographies. It illuminates these important modes of agency, which are often obscured by media representations and traditional archival practices that overlook and distort the vibrancy of black life in our shared history, through moving and still images, soundscapes, and memory work.

The exhibition takes its name from the radical imaginings and ways of knowing shared by the teen girl co-researchers of the SSHRC-funded Mapping Black Girl Geographies and Belonging in Canada project, many of whom live in the Greater Toronto and Vancouver areas. A selection of their analogue collages reflects the many ways that Black girls navigate hypervisibility and invisibility in spaces that are sometimes inhospitable.

Visitors will be invited to contemplate how adornment practices offer opportunities for care and alternative worldmaking through hair-based, sun-activated and interactive works. Broadening our field of vision will be a series of historical portraits that confront and refuse the formal erasures of the fullness of black lives in early-20th century Vancouver with imagination, care, and ethical storytelling. Together, these aesthetic accounts offer a reparative unfolding of black lives and histories where futures are conjured, reshaped, and fiercely claimed.

Film noir, that uniquely American cycle of mid-century crime movies positively dripping with style and the depravity of human behaviour, returns for another cruel summer here at The Cinematheque. Last year’s season leaned into the first half of noir’s classic corpus, drawing the majority of its roster from formative 1940s fare. Our 2025 lineup offers a more generous distribution: a collection of eight exemplars from which to trace the trajectory of noir, from bedrock (1944’s Double Indemnity, in a glistening new restoration) to burial ground (1961’s Blast of Silence, arguably the agonal gasp of the original era). Along the way, we’ll be serving up some pearl-clutching premieres (including, gasp, our first ever 3D noir!), resurrecting a favourite or two long-unseen at The Cinematheque (Curtis and Lancaster punch-out Sweet Smell of Success anyone?), and, in the case of André de Toth’s pithy, pulpy Crime Wave, providing the exceedingly rare opportunity to experience a newly minted 35mm print. Oh, and bah-humbugs take note—there’s a surprising amount of Yuletide violence in the proceedings too.

Heather Woolley, an environmental designer and artist, finds inspiration in the West Coast’s landscapes. Her work fosters a dialogue between humanity and nature, emphasizing sustainability and community engagement.

Central to Heather’s practice is her passion project on rammed earth, where she explores the intersection of material technique, construction art, and sustainability. Through this endeavor, Heather aims to create enduring structures that harmonize with the environment while advocating for responsible building practices. Her goal is to inspire stewardship and sustainability in her viewers, promoting a deeper connection with the natural world.

Since 2011, Choi has been creating traditional Korean folk paintings, drawing inspiration from centuries-old techniques while also infusing them with her own creative expression. She primarily works with Oriental watercolour, Mica Powder, and Hanji—a traditional Korean paper handmade from mulberry trees. She occasionally incorporates other traditional materials, such as Bunchae—a traditional Korean powdered pigment made by mixing finely ground natural or mineral pigments with animal glue— and Bongchae— a premium pigment made by mixing powdered pigments with animal glue and hardening the mixture into solid stick form.

The works featured in this exhibition reflect both homage and innovation. While rooted in the forms and motifs of traditional Korean folk painting, Choi’s works are not mere reproductions. Instead, she reinterprets and transforms these traditions, creating original pieces that embody both reverence and personal vision. Her goal is to highlight the enduring beauty and emotional depth of Korean folk art while bringing a fresh perspective that resonates with contemporary audiences.

Choi is particularly drawn to natural themes—peonies, birds, and other elements of the natural world—which are rich symbols in Korean culture.

Each piece is created through a meticulous process that may take up to six months, involving multiple stages: sketching, outlining, and layering of colours. Through this careful craftsmanship, Choi seeks to preserve the traditional while also exploring her own evolving artistic language.

Choi began her artistic journey in community art classes, initially painting as a hobby. Over time, her dedication and talent led her to participate in various competitions and exhibitions.

Outsiders and Others is proud to present Seema Shah: Missing Pieces, running from August 2 to 30, 2025.

This exhibition offers a subtle and nuanced representation of the lived experience of complex trauma, challenging preconceived ideas about how personal trauma manifests and is creatively expressed. The exhibition is centered around a collection of 366 miniature collages on 2 3/4 ” x 1 3/8” shipping tags, one created every day of 2024. Collages on vintage envelopes and book covers complement the tags.

Though the primary focus of my work is artistic expression, my creative process is intuitive and largely informed by my lived experience of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Spontaneous associations and unexpected

juxtapositions give form to subconscious and embodied “knowing,” leading to greater self-understanding. Metaphor and symbolic imagery capture a felt sense, translate what is beyond words, evoke connections between past and present, and link the personal to the universal.

The creative process behind the tags exemplifies how complex trauma can continue to live within and exert an influence yet remain outside conscious awareness. Examining the collaged tags collectively, themes common to complex PTSD emerge, including fragmentation, disconnection, and isolation. Viewed together, the tags convey the relentlessness of the long-term effects of complex trauma.

About the Artist:
Seema Shah is a Vancouver-based self-taught collage artist and writer. She was a recipient of The Beaumont Studios Artist To Watch Award 2022 and a highly commended artist in the 2022 & 2023 Contemporary Collage Magazine Awards. Her miniature collages have been exhibited in two dollhouse galleries in the UK, The House of Smalls and Small House Gallery, where she had a solo show in 2024.

The African Descent Festival is intended to celebrate the cultural diversity of people of African Descent within Vancouver, while recognizing and promoting attitudes of oneness among all ethnic groups and communities. The event focuses on activating public spaces and bringing a diverse range of programming to connect stakeholders working avidly for the long term sustainability of this population.

This cultural event will allow Canadians, specifically Vancouverites to enjoy and learn about different cultures and countries from Africa, some of which have strong embedded grassroot initiatives and history within the city. As this is a city event, it is envisioned to be free for the attendees with no admission fee but donations are encouraged as well as sponsorship opportunities. The goal of the platform for this year is to establish itself, while using the input gained to build on subsequent years. Culture and Art festivals are an amazing way to form strong bridges of which the team will look towards showcasing public art, installations, modern and traditional based showcases, night markets, crafts fair and musical performances. With a focus on rejuvenating the spirit of Hogan’s Alley, this platform will work with a wide range of city groups, main street businesses, and at large Vancouver organizations to bring awareness to Vancouver’s prominent and growing African community!