An extended presentation of the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection, From Sea to Sky celebrates the collection’s evolution from its inception in 2016 to the present. Built on the generous donation of over 200 works by Founders Michael Audain and Yoshiko Karasawa, the AAM’s Acquisition Committee has since guided the holding’s expansion through purchase, commission, and donation, to almost 300 outstanding pieces representing the art of British Columbia. Carving, painting, and photography serve as the pillars of the collection, featuring notable works by artists active from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first century. Such a display offers a unique visual evocation of the cultural differences that continue to shape BC’s socio-political identity.

From Sea to Sky showcases familiar masterpieces alongside newly acquired and previously archived works of art. These pieces by artists from the province, and those inspired by local environs, are all housed in Patricia and John Patkau’s stunning example of contemporary West Coast architecture. Among the active carvers and photographers of note are Robert Davidson, Dempsey Bob, Jeff Wall, Jin-Me Yoon and Stan Douglas, while paintings by Emily Carr, AY Jackson and BC Binning add a historical dimension to this sweeping display. Works acquired from Karin Bubaš, Rebecca Belmore, and Russna Kaur are indicative of a mid-point in their respective careers and each have also been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum.

Wood Work is a dynamic group exhibition showcasing Sea to Sky artists who use wood for experimentation, transformation, and expression. Through a wide range of techniques and artistic approaches, the works in this exhibition push the material beyond its expected uses, revealing the versatility and potential of wood as an artistic medium.

Across functional design, figurative carving, architectural abstraction, and organic sculptural forms, the artists manipulate wood through cutting, carving, shaping, layering, and assembly. Precision and roughness, structure and intuition, restraint and play coexist throughout the exhibition, creating a rich dialogue between process and outcome. Each piece reflects a distinct way of thinking through making, where the act of working the material becomes central to the final form.

Wood Work invites viewers to experience wood not as a craft material, but as a site of innovation, curiosity, and creative possibility.

Growing from the 2023 Gallery exhibition Invisible Fish, and inspired by the Joy Harjo poem “Remember,” remember the earth, remember the sky is a group show focusing on ancestral connections through land, air, and memory as experienced and understood by early career artists connected to this territory and in conversation with works from the Gallery’s permanent collection by Salish artists.

Using an array of mediums, including painting, digital art, sound, sculptural installation, ceramic, and natural materials, the artists reflect on themes connected to place and environment, family history and ceremonies, migration and diasporic identities, and spirituality. This exhibition also includes hands-on experiences with art, including a visitor invitation where one can contribute to an interactive sculpture, weekly piñata breaking referencing its history of celebration and ritual, a collaborative playlist where visitors can dedicate a song to their ancestors, and more.

“remember the earth, remember the sky is partially inspired by my work with children with the Gallery’s school program Sharing Perspectives: Indigenous Contemporary Art Workshop,” says Alanna Edwards, Curator of Art & Education Initiatives. “Children are full of joy, curiosity, and wonder and are open to new ideas. I hope all who visit, no matter their age, can come and ground themselves by remembering their ancestors, their connection to place, and their journey.”

This winter, Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition Atheana Picha: Portals, on view from January 17–March 22, 2026. Admission is free.

Building on Picha’s Salish Weaving Residency at the Gallery from the summer of 2023, this exhibition features a

range of work including carving, sound, and hand-spun, hand-woven Salish blankets by Picha, an artist from q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen First Nation) with connections to Tsartlip through her grandmother.

Central to Portals is a Salish blanket full of blanket pins created by invited mentors, friends, family, and

people important to Picha. Relatively small, but essential, blanket pins are used to hold closed weavings worn

in ceremony and with regalia. They come in a range of shapes, sizes, and materials, all of which will be on display

with this collaborative work.

Curator of the exhibition Alanna Edwards said, “Picha’s contribution toward the canon of Salish art is ongoing,

and I’ve had the privilege of working with her in a variety of ways since 2018. Witnessing her evolution as an artist, I’m continually moved by her deep respect for, and connection with, community and mentors, as well as to the ancestors.

Portals draws on these elements, enriched by Picha’s dedication to innovation, skill, and research throughout her practice.”

Bobbie Burgers is a Vancouver-based artist celebrated for her large-scale floral works that explore themes of ephemeral beauty and refined strength through expressive, gestural abstraction. Her work captures the tension between decay and vitality, inviting viewers into a sensorial experience of colour and form. Originating in emotive and expansive brushstrokes, Burgers’ work extends from painting into collage and printmaking elements. In reconfiguring recognizable representations of floral forms, she contends with the long history of the still-life in western art, asserting an atmosphere entirely her own, while simultaneously challenging conceptions of femininity and domesticity.

As we enter late winter, with slivers of spring poking through the lengthening days, Burgers’ work offers contemplations on time and transition. Her work speaks to cycles—the lifecycles of flora and fauna, as well as cycles of human interaction and introspection. Assembly invites visitors not only to explore the lifecycle of an artwork, but also an invitation into the process of creation itself. Just as the life of a flower, which inevitably requires decay and decomposition, involves assembly and reassembly—nutrients blooming into new florals, florals into gardens—so too do the gestural marks, stains, drawings and prints emerging from Burgers’ studio transform.

This exhibition shares the importance and depth of art education in the Surrey School District. Participating artists range from grades one through seven. Artworks on display highlight a wealth of subjects, both personal and universal.

Working across mediums such as 3D geometric string art, papier mache, and painting to name a few, Art by Surrey Elementary School Students provides visitors with insights into the critical thinking and visual literacy skills of young developing artists.

Along with the accompanying text, the exhibition demonstrates how teachers connect with BC Education Big Ideas curriculum.

She – the Muse brings together three artists whose work dissolves the old divide between the artist and her subject.
Vikki Drummond’s surreal, symbolic figures, Maryline Lemaitre’s layered dreamer figures, and Judith Geher’s iconic and muse-like portraiture all speak to an inner dialogue where the feminine is both the observer and the observed, the dreamer and the dream.

Together, their paintings trace a visual journey of self-invention – from bold strokes of colour and texture to whispered layers of emotion – offering a world where the muse no longer waits to be seen; she sees herself.

Since they got married, Glen and Sandy Golden have celebrated every wedding anniversary by coming to the same cottage for a romantic getaway. This weekend marks a major milestone: 50 years of wedded bliss. Well, mostly bliss…. A week ago, Sandy cancelled their big anniversary party and kicked Glen to the curb. Now, he wants to talk. Join the Goldens as they recount the good, the bad, and the ugly of spending half a century together. From the writer of Bed and Breakfast and The Birds and the Bees, The Golden Anniversaries is a comedy-drama about marriage, memory, and a long-term love for the ages.

Rent it! Buy it! Love it!

We are excited to unveil the new 2026 Art Rental Collection with the Art Rental Show!

This salon-style exhibition will feature a great variety of techniques, styles, and subjects as diverse as the artists. Media include watercolour, acrylic, oil, and mixed media painting, woodcut and lithograph prints, photography, and more.

The works range in size from small to extra large – perfect fit for any space! Staging your home, decorating your office? Visit the show, find the work that moves you, and rent or buy it right off the wall! Monthly rental fees range from $10 – $60, with over 350 works of art to choose from.

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.

Hannah Rickards’ artistic practice studies the relationship between perception and experience. Resistant to the construction of narrative, she employs a range of conceptual tools and media to create works that measure the limits of language and map conditions of uncertainty in our attempts to discern and describe the world. Rickards’ solo exhibition of new work at the Gibson, I am the infant and I am the bird, is informed by her relocation from London, UK, to an acreage in Syilx Okanagan territory in the interior of British Columbia. Life in this new context, with its markedly different tempo and scent—a rural valley thick with orchards, pastures, and lumber mills, encircled by rocky benchland—invoked a metabolic shift in the artist’s approach.

Rickards’ characteristically spare installation rewards a willingness to slow down: single channel videos capture brief glimpses of hummingbirds recorded in the soft grey light before dawn. A large-scale video work depicts footage gathered over years by an infrared trail camera erected in Rickards’ pasture. Triggered by motion, the camera does not differentiate between the types of activity it detects. Depending upon the duration of their visit, viewers may experience the erratic flight of a moth, a grazing deer that pauses to stare arrestingly at the camera or simply long stretches of wheatgrass nodding in the breeze. A series of photo-lithographic-and-silkscreened prints, created by Rickards using remote viewing—a paranormal practice of perceiving a distant or hidden subject without the aid of the senses—reconsider questions of landscape and place.

In its alertness to the agency of the world, I am the infant and I am the bird shares much with early interpretations of photography. For the first decade of its existence, the photographic image was understood not as “captured” or “taken” but rather as something “received from the world.” As William Henry Fox Talbot observed in an 1839 letter, “It is not the artist who makes the picture, but the picture which makes itself.” While the question of where and how we place our attention has always been fundamental to Rickard’s work, I am the infant and I am the bird invites an uncoupling from contemporary culture’s relentless “attention economy” to allow a consideration of how we might more carefully attend to the world’s ways of revealing itself to us.

Featuring: Jade Baxter, Dahlila Charlie, Dawn Marie Duncan, Ashleigh Giffen, Melissa Gosselin, Kwiis Hamilton, Marion Jacobs, Inez Londono, and Brenda Prince

Response is an annual program comprised of workshops led by and for Indigenous People, culminating in an exhibition of participants’ work at The Polygon Gallery. The program invites ways of responding artistically to historical and contemporary images of Indigenous cultures. This year’s participants had the opportunity to work with several inspiring artists and Knowledge Holders including: Tracey Kim Bonneau, Nova Weipert, Lindsay McIntyre, and Jake Kimble.

Led by Mexican artist Aranza Bergés Navarrete, this Date Night invites participants to bring drawings to life through the magic of flipbook animation. Drawing on her background in experimental 2D animation and storytelling, Aranza blends technical skill with playful exploration, guiding participants through simple, hands-on approaches to creating movement on the page.

In this workshop, you’ll have the chance to create your own individual flipbook, as well as contribute to a collaborative group animation that will be digitalized on the night.

Cost:

• $40 or buy 2 for $70

What to Expect:

• Create your own individual flipbook animation
• Contribute to a collaborative group flipbook

Skills Learned:

• Fundamentals of flipbook animation and motion
• Skills to digitize your flipbook and animate at home

Who should attend

• Anyone curious about animation or storytelling

Marian Penner Bancroft’s work is deeply rooted in an exploration of memory, landscape, colonial history, migration, and identity. Her images often layer personal history with geography, functioning as visual documentation with poetic reflection. The work offers more than just observation—it evokes a sense of emotional and intellectual resonance.

Long Story is a multimedia installation that brings together photographs, videos, wall texts, and sound. The exhibition comprises both new works and selected pieces created between 2000 and the present. Each image and video is linked to the others to reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with complex questions; questions ranging over a lifetime that are approached from diverse photographic perspectives and tied to a broader thematic investigation.

This exhibition opens space for deep contemplation. It highlights the interconnectedness of histories, places, and people, while embracing complexity. By engaging multiple senses and mediums, Bancroft encourages viewers to reflect on their own relationships with memory, land, and belonging.

Celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year, by learning about the ancient art and practice of paper marbling! In this workshop, you will make designs on water to create a unique piece of marbled paper to take home. Parsa Khatami will share the cultural history of Persian marbling, demonstrate the process, and guide participants in creating their own pieces, inviting you to slow down, connect with tradition, and craft something uniquely your own. All materials will be provided.

No prior experience is required, just a willingness to explore and create. All materials will be supplied. Paper marbling is a method of aqueous surface design, which can produce patterns similar to smooth marble or other kinds of stone. Marbled paper (Abri) was once called “papers from the sky” during the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal rule. Traditionally made by hand, it was most commonly used as a writing surface for calligraphy but also used for book covers and endpapers in bookbinding and stationery. Each print is a unique monotype.