Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art presents the Canadian premiere exhibition of Sho Sho Esquiro: Doctrine of Discovery. The solo exhibition by award-winning designer, artist, and activist Sho Sho Esquiro showcases meticulously crafted couture gowns, textiles, paintings and photographs to celebrate the beauty and resilience of First Nations communities in the face of historical and ongoing trauma. Curated by Mirande Belarde-Lewis, Sho Sho Esquiro: Doctrine of Discovery inspires conversations around genocidal colonial practices, confronts the theft and murder of Indigenous women and children, and honours activists on the front lines.

SPOTLIGHT is a new collaboration between the Art Rental & Sales Program (AR&S) and the Curatorial Department of the Vancouver Art Gallery. AR&S is a not-for-profit program operated by the Gallery with a mandate of supporting emerging artists based in British Columbia.

In this collaboration, Gallery curators invite an artist represented by AR&S to create a mural on a feature wall in the Gallery Lobby. This special initiative aims to provide new opportunities for emerging artists, as well as to activate the lobby space for thousands of visitors each year.

The project launches with a new work by Vancouver-based visual artist Sandeep Johal, whose colourful geometric forms and intricate black and white line work is aesthetically and conceptually inspired by her South Asian heritage. Johal believes in the power of art to create awareness around issues related to cultural identity, gender equality and human rights. Her art practice is an expression of her social and cultural concerns, with a focus on gender justice. Johal has been represented by Art Rental & Sales since 2018.

For Centre A’s first experiential project “The Living Room” in 2022, our gallery space will be transformed into a furnished living room space. Our visitors will have the opportunity to sit down in our makeshift living room to watch a series of curated films and videos.

By converting the gallery rooms into a (semi-)domestic space, we hope to demystify and challenge the oftentimes inaccessible, highly curatorial nature of a contemporary art gallery. Through this project, we hope to host a space in which visitors can reconnect with us and each other after almost two years of isolation.

There will be two series of films programmed as part of The Living Room project: The first one, addressing reconnection, lineage, and exile, will take place from February to March 2022, and the second series will run from April to May 2022.

The second series is built upon an examination of Canada’s role in the Multicultural discourses in terms of inequality, intermediacy, and extraction. Bringing together an array of approaches, through documentary or futuristic lens, this program points to the making of a nationhood and its discontents from a sociopolitical perspective.

In partnership with Vtape.

The Imitation Game surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses) of artificial intelligence (AI) in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world. The exhibition follows a chronological narrative that first examines the development of artificial intelligence, from the 1950s to the present, through a precise historical lens. Building on this foundation, it emphasizes the explosive growth of AI across disciplines, including animation, architecture, art, fashion, graphic design, urban design and video games, over the past decade. Revolving around the important roles of machine learning and computer vision in AI research and experimentation, The Imitation Game reveals the complex nature of this new tool and demonstrates its importance for cultural production.