In partnership with Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) through the Ta na wa Ns7éyx̱nitmta Snew̓íyelh (Language & Cultural Affairs Department), MONOVA is proud to present Gifts to be Shared, Protected, and Carried Forward, a new exhibition celebrating Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history, artistry, and living cultural practices.

Through Coast Salish storytelling, weaving traditions, and cultural belongings, the exhibition creates a living connection between past, present, and future while offering visitors a deeper understanding of place rooted in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history.

The exhibition brings together rare pieces from Chief Dr. Janice George’s personal collection of weavings and cultural belongings alongside significant loans and community-held pieces connected to Sḵwx̱wú7mesh history and teachings, including a canoe, woven works, and Chief Joe Capilano’s belt.

 Photo: monova.ca

The artists in this exhibition all have direct connections to Surrey. The selected artworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection explore place from different perspectives. Some offer notions of place that are fantastical, such as the miniature home in Al McWilliams’ mixed media sculpture Eggscape II. Others represent local ecology, as in Arnold Mickelson’s elegant wooden carving Sandpiper with Egg. Still others document changing moments in the city’s landscape, as painted in Jeremy Herndl’s View from Whalley BC, April 18, 2011. The artworks encourage visitors to consider where we are, how we engage with communities, and how we act as stewards of the natural world.

RESIST! brings together works by Rawan Hassan روان حسن, Gord Hill, Laurence Hyde and Elizabeth MacKenzie, artists who have used their work to educate and to inspire significant social change. Since its inception, the medium of print has been employed to create and disseminate information, from early newspapers to posters, flyers, books and zines. This exhibition considers the role of artists in recording and responding to the world around them.

Rawan Hassan روان حسن is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Her works explore the complex relationship between preserving and evolving Palestinian craft traditions, such as tatreez (embroidery). She explores materials that embody the questions of what was and what could possibly be through textile-based artworks and drawings. Her hope is that her practice might open up conversations on Palestinian identity, grief, resilience, resistance against erasure, ongoing occupation, colonization and potential forms of Palestinian futurism.

Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw Nation) is an artist, author and political activist. Hill is known for his work in decolonization, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, and is the author and artist of the acclaimed graphic novels The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010), The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book: From the WTO to the G20 (2012), The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2021), and The Antifa Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2025).

From the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, Laurence Hyde’s rare work Southern Cross (1951) is a 118-part wordless novel exploring the devastation caused by nuclear testing and warfare. Chronicling the US-led atomic testing that took place in Bikini Atoll, Pacific Islands, this poignant woodblock series is one of only two in existence.

For the past several years, Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth MacKenzie has been working to process the act of witnessing the devastation of genocide in Gaza, where over 70,000 people have been killed, more than half of whom have been children. Her work Cleave (2023-ongoing) is made up of hundreds of intimate works on paper, layered upon each other, acting as a site to acknowledge and lay bare the immense suffering that is ongoing in Gaza and elsewhere in the world.

The Deer Lake Artist Residencies 2026 Annual Exhibition brings together new work by five artists working across photography, painting, mineral pigments, repurposed materials and mixed media.

Exploring cultural memory, migration, ecological grief, identity and belonging, the artists consider what we carry with us, how familiar images and materials acquire new meanings, and how art can help us navigate a changing world.

The exhibition opens to the public on Monday, September 14, at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Join us for the Opening Celebration on Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 pm. Meet the artists, experience their work and celebrate another year of artistic exploration and creation at Deer Lake. Light refreshments will be served.

DIS – displaced, dispersed, dispossessed pairs concurrent group exhibits at the Nikkei National Museum and the Legacy Gallery, Victoria, bringing together work from contemporary artists exploring the lasting influence of the Second World War on Nikkei communities globally.

Through installation, video, sculpture-informed 2D/3D work, performance, illustration, and text-based practices, participating artists engage inherited memory, cultural continuity, and intergenerational experience.

Bringing together textile, sculptural, and text-based works, this exhibition considers weaving as an embodied practice through which acts of making become gestures of memory, inherited knowledge, and self-exploration.

Both artists engage with family histories and inherited cultural narratives. Cleave incorporates pine needles and rice grains into their woven sculptures—everyday materials with cultural significance across East Asia. Vega as Floodwater and Sieve reimagine the folktale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, known in Japan as Hikoboshi, a mortal man, and Orihime, a celestial deity. The two fell in love but were separated by the Milky Way. Using organic materials that warp and break, Cleave assembles delicate sculptures held together through a meticulous and laborious process.

Through his own interest in weaving, Jonathan Alfaro stumbled upon his grandfather’s weaving practice under Spanish colonialism. In Y Mis Huesos se Sienten Viejos,he examines the complex relationship between family lineage and self-identity. In addition to working with traditional weaving techniques, Alfaro developed techniques to deconstruct linen fabrics, creating intricate patterns that accentuate the texture of the material, reconstructing them into something new and beautiful.

Through their respective experimentation with the technique and materiality of weaving, Alfaro’s and Cleave’s works reimagine the medium’s form and dimensionality.

Solstice: Through Storm and Stillness brings together works from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection that reflect on endurance, resilience, and the quiet momentum of moving through difficult seasons.

Drawing on the imagery and atmosphere of winter, the exhibition considers how periods of stillness, isolation, and upheaval shape emotional and psychological landscapes. The featured artists, Andrew Dadson, Gathie Falk, Gordon Smith, Karin Bubaš, Kim Dorland and Landon Mackenzie explore weather as both a literal and metaphorical force. Through painting, sculpture, and photography, the exhibition invites viewers to consider winter not only as a time of hardship, but as a necessary season of pause, persistence, and eventual transformation.

Solstice: Through Storm and Stillness is curated by Cassidy Luteijn, Assistant Curator, Audain Art Museum.

Informed by their family background in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), SF Ho draws parallels between principles of TCM and human-ecology relationships, imagining how care for the land can be interpretated as a form of relationality.

Central to the exhibit is the floor sculpture Triple Burner Flower Field made from clay referencing the oracle bone character for 回, the Chinese character for “return to”. The sculpture, surrounded by silk banners hand-dyed with tea and yarrow and printed with oracle bone characters, evokes the plant origins of some of the earliest written characters that would later evolve into Chinese script. Together, these works trace connections between principles of healing and language back to the land that shaped them.

Farheen Haq and Russna Kaur reflect on transformation in their distinct yet interconnected practices. Their works engage with memory and language as something carried, inherited, and continually remade.

Haq’s time-based works in video, installation, performance, and photography remember and reimagine her South Asian Muslim Canadian female identity through the body and lived experience. Her new works focus on the teachings of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (a confluence of communal harmony and cultural respect in the areas around the Ganga and Jamuni rivers in northern India). Haq says these teachings can be applied to settler-Indigenous relationships on Turtle Island through culture making and ceremony.

Kaur’s expansive, multi-surface paintings unfold as living landscapes of recollection where colour, texture, and form trace personal, emotional, and intergenerational South Asian histories. Layer by layer, each work holds moments of recalling and losing, revealing memory not as something fixed but as continually carried, reshaped, and transformed.

This exhibit grows from two works in the permanent collection: Haq’s brick and video installation Revelation #2 and Kaur’s abstract painting Nice Ending. Added to these are new and loaned works where memory is embedded within materials and passed through gestures of mark-making. Threading the visual languages of embroidery, fabric, and painting, the artists reveal that textiles and texts are not simply objects but vessels of knowledge, care, and resilience.

Angles & Curves: Contemporary Hard-Edge Abstraction presents contemporary hard-edge abstraction by visual artists Dana Cromie, Janna Kumi & Erik Vaartnou. Through bold color, precise execution, organic components and architectural compositions, the artists present distinct yet complementary approaches to geometry as a language of clarity, rhythm, and tension.

Hard-edge abstraction, first named in 1959, emphasized crisp boundaries, flat colour, and visual clarity. While its early practitioners sought refuge from the emotional turbulence of mid-century expressionism, today’s artists revisit the style for new reasons. In an era shaped by environmental uncertainty, urban complexity, and information overload, geometric abstraction continues to be not just an aesthetic choice but a means for making sense of the world.

Geometry has long offered artists a way to bring clarity to a chaotic world. In Angles & Curves: Contemporary Hard-Edge Abstraction, three contemporary artists reinterpret hard-edge abstraction through the lenses of mathematical thought, botany, and ecology.

The result is an exhibition where conceptual geometry, botanical rhythm and organic pattern meet, revealing how the impulse toward order can emerge from nature, experience, and the abstract world of ideas.

A home doubles as a passport office. A restaurant doubles as a nightclub. A hair salon doubles as a child daycare centre.

This doubling of space and purpose is itself a kind of infrastructure; the kind we build between ourselves, as opposed to the kind of infrastructure the state builds for us. The necessity of these alternative spaces is born from the reality that very often the state’s infrastructure was not built to hold us or serve us. Not wholly. Architect and theorist Dele Adeyemo describes infrastructure not only as the buildings, roads, systems, and institutions that organize public life, but also the networks of people, practices, knowledge, and care through which we make life possible.

Featuring the work of exhibiting artists Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma, Reroute, Reroute! considers the spaces Black, queer and diasporic communities inhabit, and the ways we continuously contour those spaces, visibly or invisibly, to meet the evolving needs, desires and dreams of those communities.

Black diasporic and queer life have always involved forms of movement, translation, and adaptation: movement across the Atlantic and across borders; movement between languages and cultural systems; movement between the gender and desire we were assigned and those we have claimed for ourselves. But movement is not only displacement. It is also a means of carrying knowledge, relationships, and ways of being into new contexts, and of making new forms from what is already at hand. The spaces we create in this way reroute restrictive infrastructure, taking the shape our lives take rather than requiring us to take the shape it prescribes.

The work of Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma moves within this tension, between visibility and opacity, between the infrastructures that organize our lives and the infrastructures we create for ourselves. Their practices ask what becomes possible when space is not treated as fixed, when maps are understood as partial, and when the things that sustain us are allowed.

Angela Grossmann paints from an interior record where memory, emotion, and line precede narrative. Situated within a lineage of artists who privilege gesture and interiority over representation, Grossmann nevertheless resists abstraction. The human figure continually reasserts itself—partial, unstable, and deeply present. Her work begins with a contour, a trace that feels discovered rather than constructed. The figures that emerge hover between presence and erasure, suspended in a space where identity is suggested but never fully secured. Grossmann’s figures are not portraits, but fragile, unresolved beings perpetually in the process of becoming or disappearing. What we encounter is not portraiture but presence itself: fragile, shifting, and incomplete. It is in this pendulous space between articulation and disappearance that her figures feel most alive. They’re unfolding.

Through layered brushwork and restless drawing, Grossmann builds surfaces that feel intuitive rather than illustrative. Lines wander, double back, and dissolve. Similarly, her paint is scraped away, thinned, and reworked, allowing earlier marks and photographs beneath to remain visible. Thus, her work floats in a delicate balance—always on the verge of forming or vanishing, drawing the viewer into a process of emotional excavation rather than narrative resolution.

Within all of this lies a remarkable precision. Grossmann’s ambiguity is never accidental; every softened edge, broken contour, and layered revision carries emotional weight. It is through drawing that vulnerability, longing, unease, and introspection are held in suspension. And it is within this suspension that memory is sedimented and identity remains continually in flux. The viewer is not invited to decode a narrative but to inhabit uncertainty rather than resolve.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Audain Foundation and Equinox Gallery.

42 folds emerges from a collection of around 600 handwritten notes rediscovered in a tin box in the belongings of Lauraine Mak’s childhood friend. Opening the creased papers reveal the words, drawings, smiley faces and scribbles that have remained enclosed since the moment they were first read and folded neatly back. Penned and passed back and forth between the two over the course of high school and first year art school, the notes serve as a temporal passage through adolescence, teenage emotions and the universal experience of juvenile naivety. All these years later, the notes stand as relics that capture the tension between the repressed melancholia and cherished nostalgia that comes from having a friendship that lives on only in memory.

Lauraine Mak (b. 1991) is an artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her practice investigates philosophical notions, culminating in painting, sculpture, moving image and installation, with an interest in visual cultures produced by late capitalism. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, an MFA from Simon Fraser University, and was a guest student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Rita McBride. Most recently she presented a solo exhibition at Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo), with an upcoming solo exhibition at Wil Aballe (Vancouver) in October 2026. Her work has been shown in Austria, Germany, Korea and Hong Kong.

This exhibition is curated by Asia Jong, Curatorial Aide.

This exhibition focusses on the most fundamental of elements: water and its various forms. As a founding block of life on earth, water can be ubiquitous, scarce, overwhelming and calming. It forms the backdrop for leisure time, work activities, natural growth and survival. In an era of unsettling climate change, water—and how it does and doesn’t move, where it is and isn’t located—has grown increasingly unpredictable, following its own path, perhaps grounded in the Taoist characterization embodying strength and persistence. While the works presented here share the unifying element of water, they also reveal a diverse array of artistic strategies, animated by qualities of mystery, uncertainty and, viewed through a contemporary lens, an inscrutable tension.

Persistence of Water includes works by Gwen Curry, Sherry Grauer, Leslie Fawkes, Ken Pattern, Terry Snider, Joan Bell-Irving, Sheila Maki, Viviane Wong and Roy Henry Vickers.

This exhibition is curated by Cameron McLellan, Registrar.

Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love is my first collage work. It gave the questions I pursue their first shape: the story of Albertine, a woman I created from the fragments of others I’ve encountered through years of working with antique vernacular and archival photography.

This series recounts Albertine’s solitary return to the forested Champagne-Ardenne countryside in 1891 after falling in love in Paris. The bucolic scenes carry within them a sense of realization that the place she once believed safe had become what separated Albertine from her love. Each piece—an analog collage of two photos I shot on the grounds of Château d’Orquevaux in December 2024—creates one mis-remembering. I hand-treat each photograph with acrylic medium and gold before collaging them together as a gesture meant to materially and physically hold the weight of how time fragments memory and the story a woman tells herself of what her life had been. This is found in a texture or colour match. A path that folds into a river. Warped depth perception. Mirrors of light and colour. Through these, Albertine experiences her home altered by time and loss.

The stories of many real women find themselves in this state: fractured, mis-remembered, lost to the historical record. I created Albertine from the sparse details that remain of those women’s lives to give shape to how loss is experienced from a place of interiority. Mis-Rememberings: Fragments of Longing and Love doesn’t resolve this loss, it sits inside of it.

Afloat is an ongoing series of sculptures by local artist Valerie Arntzen. Each sculpture incorporates West Coast old-growth cedar fishing floats, once used extensively in the fishing industry and commonly referred to as cedar corks. Most were made by Thomas Goulding on Sea Island until they were replaced in the mid-1950s. Today, most fishing floats are made from expanded polystyrene (EPS) and other high-density foams.

Arntzen advocates for sustainability by recycling, salvaging, and reusing objects in her practice. Each form tells a story through its patina, wear, texture, and material. As the makers of many traditional trades have been lost, Afloat celebrates their history, labour, and artistry, creating space to consider what is lost when we discard these lovingly crafted handmade objects.

The You Are Here exhibition presents the original artworks selected for the 2027 You Are Here Fundraising Calendar. Artists submit artworks depicting places that are recognizably located in North Vancouver or West Vancouver. The 2027 calendar features artistic interpretations of scenic views across the North Shore, ranging from Lions Bay to Deep Cove. The calendar is a fundraiser for the North Shore Culture Compass, a free online map featuring the arts, heritage, and stories of the North Shore.

Featured artists:
Francine Bolduc, Yeong Hoon Chung, Maryam Dalivand, Sue Johnson, Shirley McKell, Boohee Nam, Ania Salmina, Nicole Sylvia, Alfonso L Tejada, Grace Zhu, Young-Ae Yune & June Yun

The artworks will be at the District Library Gallery until January 16, 2027 and will then move to the Silk Purse Gallery in West Vancouver.