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.

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.

New Acquisitions celebrates recent gifts and purchases to the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, a creative resource that tells the story of our community and connects Burnaby to artists and practices worldwide. Representing both the collection trends of local citizens who have generously donated artworks, as well as the mandate of the Gallery to preserve works from diverse perspectives into the future, New Acquisitions showcases a deep plurality of voices. The exhibition features recent work from Shuvinai Ashoona, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Rawan Hassan, Karice Mitchell, Kimberly Fulton Orozco, Manuel Axel Strain, and Tania Willard, as well as historical works by Garo Antreasian, Glenn Brown, Honoré Daumier, Salme Kaljur, Concordia Klar, Pedro Puerta, Ann Newdigate, Robert Rauschenberg, Parviz Tanavoli, Kunisada Utagawa, Andy Warhol, and more.

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.

Edge Effects features a combination of new commissioned works and projects never before seen by audiences in Canada, such as Liz Magor’s still poignant Blue Students/Alumnos en azul (1997). Originally commissioned by INSITE97, the public project centred on photographic portraits of students from the School of Creative and Performing Arts in San Diego, California, and the Preparatoria Federal Lázaro Cárdenas in Tijuana, Mexico, that were placed throughout both cities. The film negatives were pressed with paper covered in iron salts, which converted into positive blue images as they were exposed to sunlight. By the end of the installation period, only a few portraits had not been completely obscured, with the artist stating that the legibility of the images represented the power of circumstance and chance that governs people’s lives.

Photo credit: Jin-me Yoon, video still from As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations), 2025. 4K and thermal 3-channel video installation with sound, sandbags, netting, and wood. 15:05 minutes, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

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.

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.

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.

Phantom Scripts revisits three works by Geoffrey Farmer from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection — Vampire Archive, November 22, 1974 (2010 – 2025), The Politics of Appearing (2012 – 2025), The Good Sweeper (2017 – 2025)— reframing them through newly composed scripts, annotations, and didactic texts authored by the artist. The texts function as interjections — speculative, contextual, poetic — that reexamine and complicate the earlier works. In doing so, Farmer explores how art can be returned to, re-read, and re-situated under shifting historical and ethical awarenesses.

This exhibition is a return — not only to Farmer’s past works, and to the evolving conditions in which they are understood. Phantom Scripts highlights the artist’s curiosity to revisit the assumptions, forms, and the silences embedded in his earlier productions, treating the past not as fixed, but as an unsettled field of interpretation and implication. Early aesthetic elements remain — vivid, disorienting, alive — but are now considered by the artist within a broader awareness of colonial entanglements and queer disidentification, foregrounding the role of the museum not as neutral host, but as a site of complicity, memory, and potential transformation.

Kintsugi, the Japanese art of “golden joinery,” is a 500-year-old tradition of repairing broken ceramics with natural Urushi lacquer and powdered gold. Rather than disguising damage, it highlights it—honoring imperfection and the passage of time.

Vancouver-based artist Naoko Fukumaru draws on this ancient practice as both a craft and a meditative process. Through her work, she offers a powerful metaphor for personal healing: like broken pottery, our cracks can become part of our story—transformed, illuminated, and made beautiful.

Respecting traditional materials and methods, Fukumaru also pushes the boundaries of kintsugi through instinctive, innovative techniques. Her approach redefines what restoration can mean—bridging history and emotion in work that is both raw and radiant.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what it means to be beautifully broken—and to find strength and beauty in the imperfect.

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.

Some extraordinary places in nature evoke an immediate, almost spiritual connection. The natural honeycomb sandstone formations known as Tafoni, found along the shorelines of many Gulf Islands in British Columbia, are among these places.

Edges is an exhibition featuring the work of five women artists — a painter, a photographer, a potter, a sculptor, and a poet/dancer — from across Canada’s east and west coasts and regions in between. Though coming from different disciplines and backgrounds, each artist has, by chance, encountered the Tafoni formations and found deep inspiration for their creative practices in these erosion-sculpted coastal forms.