Where Mountain Cats Live is a lush invitation for strengthening community bonds, while acknowledging the precarity that we often build our roots upon. Via table-based installation, prints, and accompanying artist’s books, artist Jenie Gao collapses layers of global and local colonization, childhood memories, and familial narratives of home, displacement, and perseverance, embedded in individual objects.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is the iconic ‘lazy Susan’ table, a post-colonial innovation emblematic of Chinese American and Canadian restaurants. The table features hand-carved images of rabbits and cats in a cyclical chase, from a story that Gao’s mother tells of her bravery while facing ‘mountain lions’ outside her childhood home on a mountainside in Keelung, Taiwan. The work captures a moment when a mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, and as Gao deals with their present-day dilemmas: the predatory realtors encroaching upon their mother’s home in rural Kansas, increasing pollution and land destruction, and the stubborn resilience of native flora and fauna that nevertheless persist and return.

Where Mountain Cats Live is an investigation of material culture, an homage to the ‘imagination of the oppressed,’ and a love letter to Jenie Gao’s mother and extended communities who, in the face of many uncertainties, maintain a sense of home.

Featuring artworks by gsindlinger, Colby Lincoln, Matthew Hildebrandt, and Robin Smith

January 3 – 31, 2026

Opening reception: January 3, 6 – 8 pm. Free & open to the public.

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm

This month, we are pleased to present works by four artists we have not previously exhibited. gsindlinger is a self-taught mixed media artist based in Vancouver, BC. Colby Lincoln works in ink and pencil and is based in Duncan, BC. Matthew Hildebrandt is a self-taught painter who lives and works on Denman Island, BC. Robin Smith is a self-taught book artist living and working in Ladysmith, BC.

Colby Lincoln

“I began to focus more seriously on my art in high school, during a time when my sense of belonging and understanding of my place in society was unraveling, and art became my only immediate source of meaning and stability amid that alienation. Encouraged by a close relationship with my high school art teacher, I applied to and was accepted into the four-year fine art program at UBC Okanagan, completing my first year with mixed experiences before losing faith in the pursuit and leaving the program early in my second year. What followed was a prolonged period of difficulty, during which I briefly stopped making art before ultimately returning to it; since then, my practice has been the central focus of my life and a vital source of purpose and direction. Aside from my initial year of formal education, my artistic development has been entirely self-directed, shaped by my internal experience rather than academic structures.”

Matthew Hildebrandt

Matthew is a self-taught artist living on Salt Spring Island.

“My work centers on the relationships we have with one another, ourselves, and all the other wildernesses in which we live.

Nature as a thing inside us, not an opposing force. Life without opposite sides.  A singular wholeness to which all life belongs.

This is what I paint.

Presently the subject matter for my work comes more from my dreams than anything else, but my experiences with nature and other human beings also inspire much of my work. Exploring the use of symbolism rather than realism, to convey ideas, feelings, and relationships, I blend ancient ideas with a modernist perspective and palette, creating paintings that live in a world that is both familiar and unique”

Robin Smith

Artwork grows from an exploration of sustainable fashion, eco-dyeing, felting, and bookbinding, rooted in the influence of India Flint and her School of Nomad Arts. Guided by the concept of topophilia, my practice is shaped by attentiveness to place, patience, and trust in process, allowing ideas to emerge organically through close listening to nature. I dye pages using local berries, plants, mushrooms, and trees, transforming old books, maps, and vintage marine charts—infused with salt water, memory, and landscape—into journals, sketchbooks, and artworks that carry the essence of their environment. Ideally, each journal becomes a collaboration between me and the person who fills it.

gsindlinger

My art arises from thoughts, feelings, perception, and the impulse to bring their essence into the physical world. I am drawn to generative moments—when an idea arrives with force—and to the challenge of finding a direct, accessible way to realize it. Works like Fingertips and Slowglidelung emerged from dreams, memory, place, and emotional convergence, distilled into simple forms, limited colours, and elemental gestures that reflect how I move through life. While the imagery may appear minimal, the process is largely mental and can unfold over months. I aim to create work that is deeply idiocentric, embraces ambiguity, and resists clear recognition, inviting viewers to sit with uncertainty and respond through feeling rather than explanation. In confronting aging, illness, time, loss, fear, and other uncomfortable truths, I seek to hold space for both the difficulty of existence and the compassion, beauty, and kindness that persist alongside it.

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.