The Polygon Gallery is honoured to organise the largest solo exhibition to date of artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard. Drawing on her mixed Secwépemc and settler-Scottish ancestry, Willard has developed a collaborative, land-based practice, which attends to the history, present, and future of the land and community. The focus of this ten-year survey is her ongoing experiments with photography, as a technology of both colonisation and decolonisation. Combining new and existing works, and showcasing a broad and inventive array of photographic printing, materiality and presentation techniques, the exhibition materialises the artist’s paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research.

Willard considers photography as a medium and material that dates back millennia, not centuries. In her words, “Light has been making life, images, shadows, and reflections for billions of years. Those photographs are called stones – geological formations – the grandmothers and grandfathers embodied in the volcanic rocks used in sweat lodges.”

The title Photolithics (combining ancient words for light and stone) calls up Willard’s expansive notion of working directly with the sun’s changing rays, and with varied formations of soil, crystal, metal, and sediment. Throughout, Willard poses key questions about the confines of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and kekuli (pit house) architecture simultaneously ancient and current. For The Polygon, she devises a distinctive treatment for the gallery’s windows, recasting the building as a “lens” and turning the sun’s rays into a “safelight” for future encounters with sensitive historical records. Committed to a practice rather than a fixed appearance, the exhibition will transform as the days lengthen and the weather filters available light.

Explore our Museum after hours with Pay-What-You-Can admission every Thursday evening!

Be it date-night, an evening of family fun, or your own cultural excursion, step into our galleries and let curiosity be your guide as the stories of North Vancouver come to life under a whole new light

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Time: 5PM –8PM
Audience: All Ages
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A new sculpture by James Harry marks The Polygon Gallery’s seventh collaboration and co-commission with Burrard Arts Foundation. Eye of the Ancestor is a striking yellow cedar wooden sphere, carved with Coast Salish designs on the surface and holding a mirror-polished stainless steel sphere inside. The composition creates layered reflections and viewpoints that shift with the viewer’s movements around the sculpture. The title of the work draws from Coast Salish visual language, where the eye is a form associated with awareness, presence, and continuity beyond the individual. Harry’s sculpture translates that form into a multiscalar design that enacts a subtle intergenerational choreography, reflecting Indigenous pedagogies wherein knowledge is relational, accumulative, and often revealed incrementally across the arc of one’s life.

Simranpreet Anand’s latest body of work weighs the spiritual significance of sacred materials against the costs and modes of their mass production. Working from a Sikh perspective, her installation of ceremonial fabrics, lenticular prints, and embroidered photographs considers the notion of the “eternal” in terms of religious significance, as well as the synthetic nature of products manufactured to last forever. Collapsing commercial and domestic spaces, her exhibition at The Polygon Gallery will feature a living room — with custom wallpaper, a couch, and a television — beside the Gallery’s gift shop, probing multivalent ideas of worship, value, and sustainability in the 21st century. Anand was the winner of the 2023 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize.