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.

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.

This exhibition brings together diverse practices that challenge the traditional boundaries of photography.

Exploring the dynamic intersection of photography, sculpture, and installation, these works ask viewers to encounter photography as something to be experienced with the body as much as the eye. Here, photography transcends the flat surface, emerging as a spatial, tactile, and conceptual practice.

By engaging with inventive materials including paper, wood, film, resin, plastic, metal, and found objects, the artists blur the lines between disciplines, transforming the photograph into sculpture, the image into an object, and the wall into space.

In rethinking what a photograph can be, this exhibition invites audiences to see and navigate photographic works in bold new ways.

Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art that will run from April 18 to June 7, 2026. The public reception and launch will take place Saturday April 18 from 6-9pm. Admission to the exhibition and reception is free.

Across numerous pavilions, multiple outdoor plazas, and within various museums and public galleries around the Lower Mainland, Expo 86 brought together a wide variety of artists and artworks from across Canada and around the world. At the same time, the world’s fair attracted a wide range of parallel art exhibitions and initiatives. On Expo’s 40th anniversary, In the Shadow of the Pavilions: Expo 86 and Contemporary Art highlights some of the extraordinary art from around British Columbia’s Lower Mainland during Canada’s second world’s fair moment.

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.

The Ferry Building Gallery and the West Vancouver Memorial Library are proud to present Soundscapes, an exhibition featuring new work by Jane Adams.

In an era shaped by an ever-expanding digital landscape of shifting influences and opinions, Jane Adams offers a deeply personal and reflective body of work grounded in memory, music, and lived experience.

Her latest paintings draw from intimate reflections on home and studio life, as well as her years collaborating with her mother, the distinguished Canadian composer Jean Coulthard (OC, OBC). Together, they created illustrated music books for Royal Conservatory students and developed costuming for Coulthard’s opera adaptation of The Return of the Native. These formative collaborations continue to resonate within the artist’s practice.

The exhibition features Image Astrale I and Image Astrale II, abstract works inspired by Coulthard’s piano composition of the same name. Described musically as a “tone cluster,” the composition evokes vastness and layered intensity — qualities that the artist translates into painterly form. The canvases become meditations on the immensity of the universe, rendering the incomprehensible through tonal abstraction.

As a mature artist, this exploration of cosmic scale and musical structure represents a natural progression in her practice. Additional works in the exhibition further reflect her engagement with musical ideas drawn from both personal history and the broader canon of composers. Through abstraction, memory, and sound translated into visual form, Jane invites viewers into a contemplative space where music and painting converge.

Soundscapes is presented in partnership with the West Vancouver Memorial Library. The exhibition will be on display in the library exhibition space and at the Ferry Building Gallery.

Takao Tanabe’s fascination with landscapes comes vividly to life through his travels across British Columbia, North America, the Arctic, and Europe. With his camera always at hand, he journeyed widely to explore the wonders of places that sparked his curiosity and creative drive. Tanabe captured their geographical features and unique atmosphere, translating them into paintings in his studio that balance careful observation with poetic reflection. His works invite quiet contemplation, as if he listens intently to the land itself.

Machu Picchu (1990-2012) is a look back on Tanabe’s journey there in 1977. Each brushstroke, layer of colour, and element of composition evokes the memories and spirit of the place, which Tanabe revisited in his mind while working on the painting. He returned to it in 2012, completing it to his satisfaction at that time.

In Suffolk Village (1996–97) and Peninsula, N.L. (2014), Tanabe demonstrates precise attention to form, colour, and space. Suffolk Village depicts a historical coastal town under dramatic skies, while Peninsula, N.L., pares the landscape to sky, land, and sea, emphasizing its clarity. In contrast, Arctic and northern interior landscapes such as High Arctic 2/91, Aston Bay, Somerset Is. (1991) and Chilcotin 1/89, Frozen Lake (1989) use diffused light, soft contours, and muted greys and blues to evoke solitude, introspection, and the emotional resonance of extreme environments.

One of the highlights of this exhibition is a triptych, N.W.T.1/97: Beaulieu River (1997), donated by the artist to the Audain Art Museum in 2018. This large-scale river painting has a quiet intensity, offering the viewer an immersive engagement with nature, while capturing Canada’s breathtaking scenery.

Across continents, oceans, and lands, Tanabe’s travel paintings in this exhibition reveal both the poetic essence of the world and its quiet, meditative spirit, offering a deeply contemplative vision of place.

Marian Penner Bancroft’s work is deeply rooted in photographic explorations of the imagination and the material world. These interface with colonial histories, migration, objects and identities, allowing contemplation of durations ranging from deep time to the ephemeral.

Marian Penner Bancroft’s “Long Story” is an installation that brings together photographs, videos, and wall texts featuring both new works and related pieces created since 2000. These reflect the artist’s ongoing engagement with complex questions addressable through a careful examination of visual traces of human activity with reference to the natural world, providing viewers the possibility of considering their own stories in relationship to the spaces they inhabit.

Nine ceramic artists. Two cultural contexts — Taiwan and Vancouver. One exhibition.
“Where form meets the boundless” brings together artists whose works are held in collections from the Louvre to the Gyeonggi Ceramic Museum, from YVR Airport to temples in Shanghai. Among them: an IAC member under UNESCO, the president of Taiwan’s Ceramic Sculpture Association, and one of Vancouver’s most sought-after emerging ceramists.

But this show isn’t about credentials. It’s about what happens when radically different approaches to clay — shaped by different traditions, different educations, different landscapes — are placed side by side in a single room.

https://www.jigart.ca/whereformmeetstheboundless

Sashiko is a traditional Japanese running stitch used for mending and reinforcement. In this relaxed workshop, you’ll learn simple hand stitches, including sashiko, while exploring creative repair techniques. Bring jeans or textiles to mend or embellish. Please bring scissors and inspiring fabric, or use provided materials.

At its most elevated, sashiko is a fine art form, but its humble roots come from country folk mending their indigo dyed hemp garments. Mending is having a renaissance as we begin to look for ways to counter the incredibly wasteful and harmful aspects of the textile industry. Group sewing has always been a way for women to connect and share. Note the gallery will be closed to the public during the workshop.

Experience the beauty of the season with our Springtime Sculpt Series, a curated stone-carving experience at Fathom Stone Art. From March through May, guests are invited to carve their own spring-inspired soapstone sculpture—choose from elegant eggs, bunnies, tulips, or design your own completely custom piece.
This refined gallery workshop offers a calm and creative escape for families, couples, and art-lovers of all ages. Guests begin with raw BC Soapstone, sketch their design, carve and shape their sculpture, then polish and oil it to a radiant finish. Every piece is a keepsake, handcrafted and taken home the same day.
Perfect for Spring Break, Easter holidays, rainy-day indoor activities, or off-slope afternoons, the Springtime Sculpt Series provides a memorable Whistler experience that blends artistry, relaxation, and local craftsmanship.
Private bookings, family sessions, and group activations are available daily.