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

Thursdays, Weekly
Time: 5PM –8PM
Audience: All Ages
Pay-What-You-Can

All drop-ins welcome!

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.

Items explores the notion of value around objects commonly seen as valueless. Visual artist, Adrian Duchateau collects useless and meaningless items to reconfigure their value by forcing them to withstand a pristine aesthetic canvas. These images aim to build a poetic or fantastic narrative around the objects to convey different feelings and/or stories for the spectator, thus increasing the appreciative value of such meaningless objects. Duchateau’s photographic exercise requires some sculptural and installation work that only exists through photography, as these objects can only be appreciated because they exist through the photographic medium.

Every day consumption is surrounded by disposable items which become trash once their one-time instant use is fulfilled. These items are a burden for the planet and its invaluable resources due to their mass production and immediate disposal. Single-use objects are deemed meaningless due to their single-use nature, but their existence and overly common use are a statement of society’s unsustainable consumption, which disregards the impact on (and the needs of) the ecosystem that sustains all life.

Items seeks to be an evaluation of what can be appreciated as valuable. If meaningless objects or discarded trash can become an aesthetic experience, then there can be a shift in our perspective about what we cherish. This possibility extends to our capability for cultural change that can modify the established consumption order that has our world on the brink of irreversible damage.