Shifting baseline syndrome is an acclimatization to one’s surroundings. In 1995, Daniel Pauly used this term to reference fisheries and the environment. In regards to climate change, it means that each generation adapts to its current environment and defines a new baseline. As extreme weather, fires, floods and droughts become commonplace, forthcoming generations will know this as the reality and may have little understanding that the world was and could be different.

This installation features a collection of images gathered while examining the changing climate through the North West Passage. These waters – situated between Kugluktuk, Nunavut and Greenland – have a deep history of colonial conquest and now, once impassable due to ice, are open to commercial passage, mining of resources, and military access…

… Baseline is an attempt to shift this narrative: to challenge us to change, to listen, to act.

A/P presents Lasting Impressions 2026, our annual member exhibition!

This year’s exhibition features over 60 artists who are working in a broad range of printmaking and multi-media techniques.

This exhibition showcases 9 emerging artists who use printmaking as a means of questioning and discovery. For each artist, meaning emerges through process. Initial ideas, images, and concepts concerning nuanced themes of self, interconnection, and change have transformed slowly through the materiality, repetition, and layering that is characteristic of print media–allowing depth of understanding to surface.

“Soot on the inside of a fireplace. Drops of candle wax on a dining table. A felt blanket draped over the armrest of a chair. Ashes! Ashes! is an exhibition grounded in the materials of charcoal, beeswax, paper and wool combined with printed gestures of cutting, redrawing, and wiping away. As I reflect on the 14 houses that I have moved in and out of over the last decade, I turn to drawing as both an archival and speculative practice. The works exhibited here trace both real memories and imagined scenarios of these homes and the 25 people I shared them with, manipulating the images through techniques of monotype, collagraph, and mokulito to reveal themes of comfort, deterioration, and repair…”

“My mother lives in a rural area of Kansas, threatened in recent years by encroaching suburbanization. Since 2024, my spouse and I have taken turns visiting my mother to help her with house repairs and to assert our presence to overly inquisitive realtors and developers eager to displace older residents.

The centrepiece of this exhibition is a TV tray table in my mother’s home, where we share our meals. In this modest and intimate setting, my mother steps into one of her most profound roles as our family’s knowledge keeper. Her stories—simultaneously historical, allegorical, almost mythic, and sometimes prophetic—come alive.

In one story, my mother explains how she sees herself, brave and capable of doing things alone. When she was a child in Taiwan, her family rented her a third-story bedroom separate from their first floor flat. Every night, she had to ascend the staircase outside into the mountains under the watchful eyes of mountain lions.

The works in this exhibition capture moments when my mother’s stories are suspended between a child’s imagination and an elder’s recollection, one in which there might truly have been lions in Taiwan’s mountains, or perhaps an elusive Clouded Leopard before habitat loss caused them to die out and disappear. The tension of disappearance in these stories alludes to the repeated displacement my own family members, who have lost their homes to multiple occupying governments across generations.

The mountain lions of my mother’s childhood ended up being feral cats. Yet for a moment, as she passes her stories to my stewardship and safekeeping, the common becomes mythic.

Via this work, I interweave the personal and political, to strengthen local-global perspectives of colonization’s impact. I share my family’s stories as a frame through which we can better understand one another as different peoples connected through shared struggles—and shared imaginings for something beyond what our stories seem to be.”

Jenie Gao (they/she) has run an anti-gentrification arts business since 2014, specializing in printmaking, public art, social practice, and community storytelling. They consult for cultural organizations and the public sector on equity and ethics.