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.

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

Acclaimed Canadian photographer Greg Girard receives his first-ever career retrospective this summer. Girard began his career as a photojournalist before developing an artistic focus on the social and physical transformations of urban centres, especially in Asia. He was based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, and is renowned for his images of that city’s rapid, and at times violent, metamorphosis through the beginning of the 21st century. Girard has also produced a number of award winning photobooks, including Phantom Shanghai (2007), which The Independent newspaper cited as one the top 10 photographic books ever produced, as well as Under Vancouver, 1972 – 82 (2017), which is now in its fourth printing. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Sunday Times Magazine (UK) and many more.