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.

For more than two decades, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival has been BC’s signature, mid-winter cultural event delivering audacious, innovative, contemporary works of live arts by acclaimed local, national, and international artists.

Curated, multidisciplinary, international in scope—the Festival animates culture and accelerates social change with performance and multimedia projects that embrace creative risk and share a sense of cultural urgency.

Our artistic vision is to create new possibilities for artistic expression and how we relate to one another, expanding our sense of the world while challenging assumptions. As such, we seek to amplify our position as a connector, cultivating opportunities for artistic kinship and intercultural exchange through both live arts experiences, as well as community engagement and professional development initiatives. We think about accessibility as equity design, from the integration of tools that make our performances more inclusive for people with a range of lived experiences, to programming artistic work that rigorously centres audience experience through thoughtful dramaturgy.

Professional development opportunities at the Festival take many forms and forums. A highlight is the PuSh Industry Series: a performing arts industry initiative that brings together 200+ visionary local, national and international artists and arts workers to engage in professional development and curatorial research activities alongside the artistic Festival program. It’s an opportunity to collectively dialogue industry issues, to spark ideas, to make new connections, and to be transformed by live performance.