Unearthed Artifacts: Post-Cyberpunk Relics from a Forgotten Future
January 9–18, 2026 | Opening Reception: Saturday, January 10, 12–4 pm

THIS Gallery opens its 2026 season with Unearthed Artifacts, an exhibition of new work by Vancouver-based artist Wilson Makgawinata. Drawing on the methodologies of speculative archaeology, Makgawinata constructs ceramic forms that appear as technological remnants from an unrealised future. His hybrid process—combining wheel throwing, handbuilding, and the integration of slip-cast components resembling ports, connectors, and mechanical fittings—produces objects that complicate the boundaries between vessel, device, and artifact.

Rendered in black mirror glazes and accented with cobalt and neon elements, these works evoke containment modules, reactor cores, and fragments of obsolete machinery. Their surfaces oscillate between engineered precision and organic irregularity, positioning the pieces as both materially tethered to the present and uncannily displaced from it.

By framing these sculptures as archaeological specimens, Makgawinata interrogates assumptions surrounding ceramics as a functional or tradition-bound medium. Instead, the exhibition prompts a broader inquiry: what forms of material evidence might our own technologically saturated era leave behind, and how might future societies interpret such traces?

Unearthed Artifacts invites viewers to consider not only the imaginative worlds these objects imply, but also the cultural, technological, and ecological narratives embedded in the material practices of our time.