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.

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

Celebrating Takao Tanabe’s extraordinary contributions to Canadian art, this retrospective marks his 100th birthday on September 16, 2026, and features over sixty paintings spanning more than seven decades. It offers a comprehensive look at his evolving visual language and the remarkable breadth of Tanabe’s artistic practice.

Born in 1926 in Seal Cove, Prince Rupert, British Columbia, Tanabe is a second-generation Japanese Canadian whose work has profoundly shaped the landscape of Canadian art. Renowned for his abstract and representational landscapes, he distills the essence of place through masterful control of form, colour, and brushwork. Across his oeuvre, familiar terrains and coastal scenes are transformed into luminous compositions that balance serenity with energy, reflecting a deep, contemplative engagement with land and water.

Alongside iconic coastal and prairie landscapes, Takao Tanabe: Inside Passage showcases lesser-known bodies of work, including the Emperor series, hard-edge paintings, and intimate river scenes, providing a more comprehensive appreciation of Tanabe’s creative range. Each canvas, whether modernist abstraction or tranquil coastal sky, demonstrates his lifelong pursuit of visual and emotional resonance in shape and nature.

Tanabe’s influence extends beyond his technical mastery, merging Eastern and Western traditions with the modernist movements of postwar Canada. His contributions have been recognized with numerous honours, including the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Order of Canada, and the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. This exhibition invites visitors to celebrate Takao Tanabe’s centennial, reflect on his enduring legacy, and experience the quiet power and poetic refinement that define his remarkable body of work.

Presented in Inside Passage is Tanabe’s extraordinary ability to capture a visual expression of emotion through abstraction, as well as the essence of picturesque places. From tranquil rivers and mountains to dramatic coastal vistas, his work evokes both stillness and grandeur, offering a poetic reflection on nature and a lasting testament to his artistic legacy.

BAG Offsite presents Michael de Courcy: one in a million, an exhibition spanning across both Bob Prittie Library and McGill library sites.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Expo 86, the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, an event that attracted over 22 million visitors from around the world.

Artist Michael de Courcy made a point of attending each day of the event, with the intent of documenting family groups, friends and individuals parading along the Expo thoroughfares absorbed in the moment. The result of this undertaking, the one in a million archive, contains 1700 images of an incredibly diverse group of people, a collective snapshot of a time when Vancouver and the region was emergent on the world stage, and undergoing growing pains.

BAG Offsite presents Michael de Courcy: one in a million, an exhibition spanning across both Bob Prittie Library and McGill library sites.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Expo 86, the 1986 World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, an event that attracted over 22 million visitors from around the world.

Artist Michael de Courcy made a point of attending each day of the event, with the intent of documenting family groups, friends and individuals parading along the Expo thoroughfares absorbed in the moment. The result of this undertaking, the one in a million archive, contains 1700 images of an incredibly diverse group of people, a collective snapshot of a time when Vancouver and the region was emergent on the world stage, and undergoing growing pains.

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.

Geographical Meltdowns, Dysfunctional Landscapes are portraits of landscapes, poetic and observational drawings of real and imaginary topography. One can recognize mountains and valleys, ravines, and rivers, or traverses and peaks. At the same time, these works are abstractions of a nature that is equally majestic as it is crumbling. These are inaccessible landscapes, manufactured in our imagination through observation, or a form of collective memory of nature. The works in Geographical Meltdowns, Dysfunctional Landscapes also speak of the impact of human intervention on nature. They document the social, emotional and physiological landscapes of the territories we idealize and at the same time wreak havoc onto. They evoke majestic sceneries of complicated relationships between humans and the natural environment.

Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce Marking the Season featuring work from members of the South Surrey and White Rock Arts Society, on display from August 8 until November 1. Admission is free.

Over the past year, members of the Society took their sketchbooks, paints, and folding chairs and headed outdoors to depict the ever-changing landscape of Bear Creek Park. Working plein air through sunshine, clouds, blossoms, and falling leaves, each artist returned to favourite spots throughout the park, capturing the changing seasons one brushstroke at a time.

Marking the Season will be celebrated along with the Gallery’s fall exhibitions at the opening art party on October 3 from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

On Thursday, October 1 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., exhibiting artist Jess Rice, from Marking the Season, gives an artist talk and leads a watercolour-making activity as part of Surrey Art Gallery Association’s free Thursday Artist Talk series.

In every memory is a piece of me, interdisciplinary artist Krystle Silverfox exhibits two bodies of photo-based work: Part of the Land and Connections. Both series explore the complex relationships between land, Indigenous culture, memory, and identity, reflecting on the ways colonialism has systematically disrupted connections to place and cultural knowledge. Through different approaches to photography, the artist transforms images of the Yukon landscape into visual explorations of loss and resilience. In Part of the Land, analogue collage and beadwork are used to piece together  fragmented landscapes, while Connections digitally disrupts photographs by removing data from their underlying code. Together, the works consider what has been lost, what remains, and the ways acts of care and creativity can help reconnect the pieces.

Part of the Land is a series of photos which use analogue collage and beading to stitch back together images of landscapes. The title of the work Part of the Land is inspired by the book Part of the land, Part of the Water – A History of the Yukon Indians, by Catherine McClellen. The title is also an acknowledgement of parts – blood quantum percentages, land allotments and land stewardship, and missing parts of culture. This work pays homage to the connections we have to the land through acts of care – beading – to reconnect broken links.

Connections is a series of abstracted landscape photographs, exploring the concepts of colonization, lost culture and land through glitches and disruptions within the images. The photographs are created by deconstructing the digital code of the images – data which dictates colour and alignment of pixels. The deletion of data is meant to be a reference to lost knowledge due to colonial practices such as the 60s scoop/millennium, residential school, incarceration, diaspora, and disenfranchisement. The photographs depict landscapes of the Yukon Territory, and pays homage to the reality of lost connections in the North– such as no cellular signals in rural stretches, and Internet outages due to extreme weather. The title also refers to disrupted connections through colonial practices such as residential school, and the 60s scoop (which continues today). In Connections, the original file size is shrunken and data is removed from the coding of the photograph – a symbol of land theft and missing culture. Many Indigenous people miss the connection to their language and culture, however we are resilient and work with the knowledge we carry.

Krystle Silverfox is a member of Selkirk First Nation (Wolf Clan), and interdisciplinary visual artist. She currently lives and works on the territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwach’an Council (Whitehorse, Yukon). Silverfox holds both a BFA in Visual Art (2015); a BA in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice from UBC (2013); also an MFA in Interdisciplinary studies from Simon Fraser University (2019). Her artistic practice explores different materials, methodologies, and symbols to create conceptual works. Krystle Silverfox is inspired by Indigenous feminism, trans-nationalism, decolonialism, activism, futurism, and lived experience.

The artists in this exhibition all have direct connections to Surrey. The selected artworks from the Gallery’s permanent collection explore place from different perspectives. Some offer notions of place that are fantastical, such as the miniature home in Al McWilliams’ mixed media sculpture Eggscape II. Others represent local ecology, as in Arnold Mickelson’s elegant wooden carving Sandpiper with Egg. Still others document changing moments in the city’s landscape, as painted in Jeremy Herndl’s View from Whalley BC, April 18, 2011. The artworks encourage visitors to consider where we are, how we engage with communities, and how we act as stewards of the natural world.

RESIST! brings together works by Rawan Hassan روان حسن, Gord Hill, Laurence Hyde and Elizabeth MacKenzie, artists who have used their work to educate and to inspire significant social change. Since its inception, the medium of print has been employed to create and disseminate information, from early newspapers to posters, flyers, books and zines. This exhibition considers the role of artists in recording and responding to the world around them.

Rawan Hassan روان حسن is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Her works explore the complex relationship between preserving and evolving Palestinian craft traditions, such as tatreez (embroidery). She explores materials that embody the questions of what was and what could possibly be through textile-based artworks and drawings. Her hope is that her practice might open up conversations on Palestinian identity, grief, resilience, resistance against erasure, ongoing occupation, colonization and potential forms of Palestinian futurism.

Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw Nation) is an artist, author and political activist. Hill is known for his work in decolonization, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, and is the author and artist of the acclaimed graphic novels The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010), The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book: From the WTO to the G20 (2012), The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2021), and The Antifa Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2025).

From the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, Laurence Hyde’s rare work Southern Cross (1951) is a 118-part wordless novel exploring the devastation caused by nuclear testing and warfare. Chronicling the US-led atomic testing that took place in Bikini Atoll, Pacific Islands, this poignant woodblock series is one of only two in existence.

For the past several years, Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth MacKenzie has been working to process the act of witnessing the devastation of genocide in Gaza, where over 70,000 people have been killed, more than half of whom have been children. Her work Cleave (2023-ongoing) is made up of hundreds of intimate works on paper, layered upon each other, acting as a site to acknowledge and lay bare the immense suffering that is ongoing in Gaza and elsewhere in the world.

The Deer Lake Artist Residencies 2026 Annual Exhibition brings together new work by five artists working across photography, painting, mineral pigments, repurposed materials and mixed media.

Exploring cultural memory, migration, ecological grief, identity and belonging, the artists consider what we carry with us, how familiar images and materials acquire new meanings, and how art can help us navigate a changing world.

The exhibition opens to the public on Monday, September 14, at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Join us for the Opening Celebration on Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 pm. Meet the artists, experience their work and celebrate another year of artistic exploration and creation at Deer Lake. Light refreshments will be served.

DIS – displaced, dispersed, dispossessed pairs concurrent group exhibits at the Nikkei National Museum and the Legacy Gallery, Victoria, bringing together work from contemporary artists exploring the lasting influence of the Second World War on Nikkei communities globally.

Through installation, video, sculpture-informed 2D/3D work, performance, illustration, and text-based practices, participating artists engage inherited memory, cultural continuity, and intergenerational experience.

Bringing together textile, sculptural, and text-based works, this exhibition considers weaving as an embodied practice through which acts of making become gestures of memory, inherited knowledge, and self-exploration.

Both artists engage with family histories and inherited cultural narratives. Cleave incorporates pine needles and rice grains into their woven sculptures—everyday materials with cultural significance across East Asia. Vega as Floodwater and Sieve reimagine the folktale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, known in Japan as Hikoboshi, a mortal man, and Orihime, a celestial deity. The two fell in love but were separated by the Milky Way. Using organic materials that warp and break, Cleave assembles delicate sculptures held together through a meticulous and laborious process.

Through his own interest in weaving, Jonathan Alfaro stumbled upon his grandfather’s weaving practice under Spanish colonialism. In Y Mis Huesos se Sienten Viejos,he examines the complex relationship between family lineage and self-identity. In addition to working with traditional weaving techniques, Alfaro developed techniques to deconstruct linen fabrics, creating intricate patterns that accentuate the texture of the material, reconstructing them into something new and beautiful.

Through their respective experimentation with the technique and materiality of weaving, Alfaro’s and Cleave’s works reimagine the medium’s form and dimensionality.

Solstice: Through Storm and Stillness brings together works from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection that reflect on endurance, resilience, and the quiet momentum of moving through difficult seasons.

Drawing on the imagery and atmosphere of winter, the exhibition considers how periods of stillness, isolation, and upheaval shape emotional and psychological landscapes. The featured artists, Andrew Dadson, Gathie Falk, Gordon Smith, Karin Bubaš, Kim Dorland and Landon Mackenzie explore weather as both a literal and metaphorical force. Through painting, sculpture, and photography, the exhibition invites viewers to consider winter not only as a time of hardship, but as a necessary season of pause, persistence, and eventual transformation.

Solstice: Through Storm and Stillness is curated by Cassidy Luteijn, Assistant Curator, Audain Art Museum.

Informed by their family background in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), SF Ho draws parallels between principles of TCM and human-ecology relationships, imagining how care for the land can be interpretated as a form of relationality.

Central to the exhibit is the floor sculpture Triple Burner Flower Field made from clay referencing the oracle bone character for 回, the Chinese character for “return to”. The sculpture, surrounded by silk banners hand-dyed with tea and yarrow and printed with oracle bone characters, evokes the plant origins of some of the earliest written characters that would later evolve into Chinese script. Together, these works trace connections between principles of healing and language back to the land that shaped them.

Farheen Haq and Russna Kaur reflect on transformation in their distinct yet interconnected practices. Their works engage with memory and language as something carried, inherited, and continually remade.

Haq’s time-based works in video, installation, performance, and photography remember and reimagine her South Asian Muslim Canadian female identity through the body and lived experience. Her new works focus on the teachings of the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (a confluence of communal harmony and cultural respect in the areas around the Ganga and Jamuni rivers in northern India). Haq says these teachings can be applied to settler-Indigenous relationships on Turtle Island through culture making and ceremony.

Kaur’s expansive, multi-surface paintings unfold as living landscapes of recollection where colour, texture, and form trace personal, emotional, and intergenerational South Asian histories. Layer by layer, each work holds moments of recalling and losing, revealing memory not as something fixed but as continually carried, reshaped, and transformed.

This exhibit grows from two works in the permanent collection: Haq’s brick and video installation Revelation #2 and Kaur’s abstract painting Nice Ending. Added to these are new and loaned works where memory is embedded within materials and passed through gestures of mark-making. Threading the visual languages of embroidery, fabric, and painting, the artists reveal that textiles and texts are not simply objects but vessels of knowledge, care, and resilience.

Angles & Curves: Contemporary Hard-Edge Abstraction presents contemporary hard-edge abstraction by visual artists Dana Cromie, Janna Kumi & Erik Vaartnou. Through bold color, precise execution, organic components and architectural compositions, the artists present distinct yet complementary approaches to geometry as a language of clarity, rhythm, and tension.

Hard-edge abstraction, first named in 1959, emphasized crisp boundaries, flat colour, and visual clarity. While its early practitioners sought refuge from the emotional turbulence of mid-century expressionism, today’s artists revisit the style for new reasons. In an era shaped by environmental uncertainty, urban complexity, and information overload, geometric abstraction continues to be not just an aesthetic choice but a means for making sense of the world.

Geometry has long offered artists a way to bring clarity to a chaotic world. In Angles & Curves: Contemporary Hard-Edge Abstraction, three contemporary artists reinterpret hard-edge abstraction through the lenses of mathematical thought, botany, and ecology.

The result is an exhibition where conceptual geometry, botanical rhythm and organic pattern meet, revealing how the impulse toward order can emerge from nature, experience, and the abstract world of ideas.

A home doubles as a passport office. A restaurant doubles as a nightclub. A hair salon doubles as a child daycare centre.

This doubling of space and purpose is itself a kind of infrastructure; the kind we build between ourselves, as opposed to the kind of infrastructure the state builds for us. The necessity of these alternative spaces is born from the reality that very often the state’s infrastructure was not built to hold us or serve us. Not wholly. Architect and theorist Dele Adeyemo describes infrastructure not only as the buildings, roads, systems, and institutions that organize public life, but also the networks of people, practices, knowledge, and care through which we make life possible.

Featuring the work of exhibiting artists Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma, Reroute, Reroute! considers the spaces Black, queer and diasporic communities inhabit, and the ways we continuously contour those spaces, visibly or invisibly, to meet the evolving needs, desires and dreams of those communities.

Black diasporic and queer life have always involved forms of movement, translation, and adaptation: movement across the Atlantic and across borders; movement between languages and cultural systems; movement between the gender and desire we were assigned and those we have claimed for ourselves. But movement is not only displacement. It is also a means of carrying knowledge, relationships, and ways of being into new contexts, and of making new forms from what is already at hand. The spaces we create in this way reroute restrictive infrastructure, taking the shape our lives take rather than requiring us to take the shape it prescribes.

The work of Alexis Chivir-Ter Tsegba and Fegor Obuwoma moves within this tension, between visibility and opacity, between the infrastructures that organize our lives and the infrastructures we create for ourselves. Their practices ask what becomes possible when space is not treated as fixed, when maps are understood as partial, and when the things that sustain us are allowed.