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.

This exhibition gathers artists whose practices transform material and perception into experiences that linger, works that shift the way we see light, inhabit space, and feel the weight and presence of form. United by a balance of beauty and thought, these pieces invite us to step into moments where looking becomes a deeper act of seeing.

We are pleased to welcome Marion Landry, whose geometric abstract paintings, grounded in a deep engagement with light, perception, and phenomenology, offer meditative glimpses into atmosphere and stillness; James W. Chiang, a BC artist whose paintings merge chromatic purity and precision with an intense dialogue between passion and perception, creating what he describes as a “kinetic exchange” in which beauty and existence are unbounded by thought or time; Jan Hoy, whose elegant abstract sculptures in bronze and steel explore balance and spatial clarity; Ronald T. Crawford, a Salt Spring Island painter and sculptor whose practice unites contemporary painting with the physical poetics of stone, and whose influence reaches beyond his studio through the founding of the Salt Spring National Art Prize; and lastly, Edward Burtynsky, one of Canada’s most celebrated contemporary artists, whose monumental photographs confront the scale and complexity of our industrialised world, rendering beauty and devastation with equal and uncompromising clarity.

The exhibition also features new works by our beloved artists Michael Bjornson, Deirdre Hofer, Robert Kelly, David Spriggs, Charlotte Wall, and many more, whose evolving practices continue the gallery’s conversation with space, materiality, and form. A selection of newly acquired works will also be unveiled over the course of the exhibition, inviting visitors to return and experience how the dialogue develops.

The You Are Here exhibit presents the original artwork selected for the 2026 You Are Here Fundraising Calendar. Artists submit artworks of places that are recognizably in North Vancouver or West Vancouver. The 2026 You Are Here Calendar features Mount Seymour, Lonsdale Quay, Whytecliff Park, Seaview Trail, Horseshoe Bay, Grand Boulevard, Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve Gazebo, Lighthouse Park, Spirt Trail, Deep Cove and The Shipyards. This calendar is a fundraiser for the North Shore Culture Compass, a free online map featuring arts, heritage, and stories of the North Shore.

Revealing over a decade of research and visits with collectors from British Columbia and internationally, The Collectors presents Christos Dikeakos’ photo-portraits of collectors with their collections from across the spectrum. Artists, patrons, curators, writers and art lovers alike, these stunning portraits reveal the inside world of collectors and their collections, providing a close view of the relations to the objects that have held their fascination. Working in collaboration with the support of photographer Barrie Jones, these precise and carefully ordered images reveal intimacy, desire and wonder–and bring the collectors, whose efforts support artists, museums, gallerists and arts ecologies and ultimately audiences–from behind-the-scenes into the fore.

This dance film brings together two longtime collaborators Nancy Lee and Simran Sachar. These hands are still at work features wh/aacking infused with gestural elements performed by cyborg-like characters (portrayed by choreographer, dance artist, and actor Sachar, inspired by Corporate HR, Gen Z social media reels and early 2000s computer-generated characters), along with site-specific projection user interface design by media artist Lee. The resulting artwork portrays the power of movement, migration, and labour in a more-than-human world.

These hands are still at work was commissioned by FORM (Festival of Recorded Movement). FORM screens and commissions films that explore the limitless possibilities of the body in motion through film and provides a platform for youth and emerging artists. These hands are still at work is a part of the Kinesthesia fall exhibition and performance series.

Across successive bodies of collage works, Anna Binta Diallo has portrayed complex interconnections between human activity and the natural world. These series began with Wanderings, which analysed folk stories and the tales that structure a society’s perception of the world. Gathering visual material from scientific, literary, and historical sources, Diallo applied a diasporic and cross-cultural approach as she constructed various folkloric motifs and archetypes. Continuing from Wanderings, her Voyageur/Almanac works expanded into ecology, speculating on how different mythologies and folklores across cultures might inform our coexistence with various forms of life, and broaden environmental awareness.

Predictions, the newest iteration of this project, extends Diallo’s work into the study of forecasts – scientific and otherwise. With visual references to geology, earth science, mapping, weather events, and topography, the artist has researched data pertaining to astronomical cycles, calendars, tide tables, and farmer’s almanacs of the past and present. Her latest works ask: What was projected into the future by past peoples? What has come true? What hasn’t? What could?

Diallo envisions her own imaginative set of predictions, proposing infinite loops of imagery that can be re-interpreted multiple times, in different cycles. She integrates nonlinear and even nonverbal storytelling, suggesting both new and ancient notions of narrative formed by images in relation. Through layering flora, fauna, human connection to land, and the cosmos, Diallo imagines speculative paths that our ecological and cultural landscapes might follow, and the unexpected constellations of meaning that can guide us through uncertain times.

Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art presents the world premiere of NDN Giver, from September 17, 2025 – January 25, 2026. Curated by the gallery’s Assistant Curator, member of the Tsiits Git’anee clan, and passionate Haida Nation scholar Amelia Rea in her solo curatorial debut, the exhibition examines reciprocity, identity, and the evolving practice of gift-giving within potlatch traditions. Bringing together contemporary potlatch gifts such as prints and mugs alongside archival records of historical potlatches, NDN Giver features select pieces from Amelia’s personal collection as well as works by artists from communities across the coast, including the Haida and Heiltsuk Nations. For admission information and complete event details, visit: billreidgallery.ca

The Ferry Building Gallery is delighted to present Where are we now? a group exhibition that delves into locating the self through the act of creation.

In their sculpture, Coral Patola explores the complexities and intersectionality of their identity: the immigrant culture of Chinese Canadians, the Southeast Asian diaspora of Singapore and Malaysia, and their paternal Ukrainian heritage. Through sculpting and surface decoration, their work becomes a form of escapism inspired by their personal narratives and internal landscapes. Coral proudly identifies as not halves of cultures but a whole, entirely mixed identity.

Jenny Judge’s drawing practice is rooted in a deep sense of place, both as an inner exploration of belonging and not belonging, and the physical response of living between two countries. Her work is inspired by the idea of meeting points: imagined spaces where different worlds touch, merge or overlap. Where the sand meets the sea, where the Northern and Southern Hemispheres appear to touch—these liminal zones are constantly shifting, negotiated both physically and metaphysically, echoing the transient nature of identity and home.

Using collage as a response, Ilze Bebris engages with the fragmented nature of contemporary life. In a world where dominant narratives have unravelled and countless new voices and technologies compete for our attention, we are constantly challenged to navigate an overwhelming influx of information, distraction, and contradiction. This cultural oversupply leaves us feeling scattered, destabilized—perpetually on edge. Collage, with its inherent layering and juxtaposition, becomes a fitting medium for making sense of this disarray. Ilze’s collages invite the viewer to pause, reflect, and find moments of balance amid flux, highlighting not only the chaos but also the beauty and resilience within it.

For more than ten years now, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons have trafficked in the saturated and sensorial. Plumbing the space between abstraction and legibility, feeling and form, the language of Parsons’ work is an intuitive one. Building depth through accretion, collapsing interior and exterior realms, and traversing a shifting set of references — from the history of dance to the Gee’s Bend quilts of Alabama to her garden in the Catskill Mountains — her paintings give shape to intensities both atmospheric and embodied.

Louise brings together a selection of works produced by the Vancouver-born, New York-based artist over the past several years, surveying the dexterity of her movement between figuration and form and her canvases’ elemental approach to sensation, texture and tone. Titled after the work of poet Louise Glück — known for her decades-long meditation on the illusions and agonies of the self — the exhibition traces the enduring emotional registers, both individual and collective, that occupy Parsons’ time in the studio: desire, loss, isolation, redemption, resurgence.

Charles Atlas (b. 1949, St. Louis, MO) has lived and worked in New York City since the early 1970s. In 2024, the ICA Boston presented About Time, the first U.S. museum survey devoted to Atlas’ work. Other recent solo exhibitions include The Mathematics of Consciousness, a 100-foot long video installation commissioned by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Charles Atlas: Ominous, Glamorous, Momentous, Ridiculous, Fondazione ICA Milano, Italy (2021); and Charles Atlas: The past is here, the futures are coming and The Kitchen Follies, The Kitchen, New York (2018). Atlas’ work is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands. In 2024, Atlas’ archive was acquired by The Getty Research Institute.

Welcome to The Family Long, an exhibition featuring Molly, Ricky, and Fern Long.

Molly Long, the daughter, creates contemporary invisionings of Métis embroidery and beadwork through murals, paintings, fashion and tattoos. She has never formally trained but comes from many generations of artists and makers. Molly identifies a LGBTQ2S+ and is of Metis heritage.

Ricky Long, the dad, is also a self-taught artist. He is a father, grandfather, husband, auto mechanic, skateboarder, collector, hoarder, punk, recovering alcoholic, and all around nice human. “I like to take found objects and arrange them into visual objects of art. Collage is a main practice. Finding old photographs and cutting them up into some satirical observations. I will take a photo and add paint making the image colorful and unrecognizable. I use acrylics and oil pastels. I add words to collage making the viewer laugh or maybe think about it. Often I will take old photographs of children and give them cigarettes, or old people and give them rotten teeth. Frequently my portraits will have black spaces for eyeballs simply because I can’t paint a good looking eyeball.”

Fern Long, the mom, is formally trained who has a practice that moves between painting, photography and collage. Making collages and mixed media assemblages as a way to process her life as a mother, daughter, grandmother, and a postie as well as a way to respond to the epic saga unfolding daily in the world at large.

The Spaces of the Everyday exhibition came about after a thoughtful conversation with Erin McSavaney in which the role of architecture in painting first drew the curator’s attention to his practice. His depictions of houses and urban architecture offer a visually striking and intellectually provocative intersection of two historically divergent painting modes. McSavaney’s works are rendered with photographic precision—indeed, he uses a camera as a kind of sketchbook—evoking the immersive quality of high realism; meanwhile, at times, hard-edge abstraction takes over the subject matter as scenes are disrupted—sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly. Each of these traditions embodies a distinct discourse of image-making.

A multimedia art exhibit presented alongside the World Premiere of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, created by Dafne Sarlay-Blanco

Opening Reception: October 15, 6–8 PM, featuring an artist talk.

FREE Admission.

Co-presented with the Vancouver Latin American Cultural Centre (VLACC) as part of the Latin’s Expressions Festival.
To complete your experience, consider reserving tickets for the Preview of Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project the same evening at 7:30 PM. Bookings can be made at The Cultch Website

About The Exhibition:
Inspired by the play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project, The Alchemist Heart is based on the concept of an open heart suffering because of injustice and oppression: an image of a heart open to ongoing, active loving and caring for others. Ultimately, the heart is an alchemy lab where the transmutation from lead –pain and suffering, into precious matter happens through our active commitment to social justice, despite the personal cost of militancy for so many over the course of history.

Inspired by an upcoming exhibition in the gallery, we’ll explore gestural abstract art by creating our own mark-making tools from a variety of materials. Participants will experiment with different types of ink, including making their own natural inks, and use their handmade tools to investigate the connection between the body, movement, and abstraction through pattern, texture, and colour.

Suitable for all skill levels. Note the gallery will be closed to the public during the workshop.
Cost: $45.00 – All materials will be supplied.
Register at 604-925-7270 (course # 200984 ) or through our website.

This exhibition highlights a vital current in contemporary artmaking today: the intersection between visual art and dance. Named for the process whereby a body comes into awareness of itself in space, Kinesthesia brings together an eclectic gathering of artists and groups whose respective practices acknowledge and celebrate the human body’s many ways of being in movement.

Kinesthesia includes visual artists, choreographers, dance collectives, and other performers from across the worlds of dance and art in Canada. Throughout their respective practices, visitors will experience extraordinary artworks that foreground the unique wisdom of bodily experience. The exhibition includes a vibrant variety of media, including sculpture, painting, textile, photography, film, and virtual reality. Combined, the array of work on display reflects ongoing conversations in the fields of dance and live artmaking, speaking to critical topics such as embodiment, choreography, healing, ritual, performance, and transcendence. Drawn from across the country, selected artists include All Bodies Dance, ĀNANDAM dance theatre, Justine A. Chambers, Fran Chudnoff, Brendan Fernandes, Ronald Li, Tanya Linklater, Lucy M. May, Dana Michel, Maisie O’Brien, Evann Siebens, and Sarah Nash Wong.

In all of their work, these artists, dancers, and performers present powerful models for the ways that a human body can present itself in space, whether as the grieving embodiment of inherited trauma, or the wisdom of healing; as an expression of the ways a body can query the paradigms of public space, and unpack their unspoken logics; as sites for both the enactment and subversion of choreographed movement; or as the presentation of alternative modes of identity. Dance relentlessly proposes and then enacts its own possibilities, in movement.

Along with objects and installations, Kinesthesia features a series of live performance works. These include an excerpt from Montreal-based choreographer Lucy M. May’s The Conditions; a dance battle with Funk’N’Sole Street Dance Society; an interpretation of Toronto-based ĀNANDAM dance theatre’s Ephemeral Artifacts sculptural installation; a staging of Vancouver and Surrey-based Justine A. Chambers’ and Simran Sachar’s Today is the evening to strike lightning / Aaj To Bijiliyan Girane Ki Shaam Hai; and a rendition of Montreal-based live artist Dana Michel’s durational work MIKE. For more details about these performances, visit our Events section.

For twenty-two years, the Heart of the City Festival has been grounded in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and focused on listening and learning from the community’s cultural practices. The Festival works with, for, and about the Downtown Eastside community to carry forward our community’s stories, ancestral memory, cultural traditions, lived experiences, and artistic processes to illuminate pathways of resilience.

This year’s Festival invites artists, neighbours, and audiences to reflect on what it means to live with dignity – on unceded land and with each other. Dignity in Community honours the everyday and extraordinary ways people care for each other, resist displacement, and make space to belong. We celebrate the strength and creativity found in our connections and imagine what is possible when dignity is a shared foundation for us all.

The 2025 Festival features over 100 events at over 40 local venues, including music, stories, poetry, theatre, ceremony, films, dance, readings, forums, workshops, discussions, gallery exhibits, art talks, history walks, and more!