“Briana Palmer’s multi-layered installation might appear whimsical at first glance – a miniature world designed for entertainment and delight. But her references to trains, toys and childhood all have deeper, troubling meanings. Palmer grew up in Revelstoke, BC, a small city near the western edge of Canada’s colonial frontier. The railway passed through town. Towering trestles featured in everyday life. At night, the sound of rail cars crashing over the tracks soothed children to sleep in their beds. For Palmer it was a comfortable life. Troubling terms like “settler” and “colonial” only emerged for her after she left Revelstoke, gained more life experience, and began to question what she calls the “white bread” assumptions of her upbringing…”

– excerpt from exhibition essay by Sally McKay

“… Mountains are constants in the series of mixed-media prints featured in Make or Break. Green combines personal documentation of “wilderness” with appropriated and recovered images from historical travelogues and wilderness survival guides. These natural monoliths are interweaved with provisional man-made structures or supports. Dovetail cabins, lean-to shelters, hoarding, and half-constructed walls are fleetingly insubstantial containers and supports for the jagged peaks carved over many millennia.

With the sketchy incomplete rendering of these structures, Green imbues the prints with a generative ambiguity. Are these man-made incursions into mountain environments failed projects? Ambitious beginnings? Are they meant to support and preserve? Or are they fool-hardy attempts to contain and conquer? There provisional and insubstantial nature in the face of the overriding enduring mountainscape is the only clarity we receive…”

– excerpt from Deep Time Laid Bare – exhibition essay by Matthew R. Hills

“Let me be blunt: the work in Angela Snieder’s current show, Obscura, lies to us. It lies deliberately, fully aware of its willful duplicity, while wearing a disingenuous “Who me?” smile. Her photographic prints and sculptural installations alike conspire to draw the viewer in and tell them a story, one that at first appears indexical and truthful, but which on deeper inspection reveals itself to be nothing more than a tissue of lies (literally tissue, in the case of her most recent camera obscura projection). And in this untruth lies the truth of the show’s critique of mimesis, of the idea that we can uncritically believe the evidence of our eyes, and its blurring of the distinction between mimeses and anti-mimesis as it plays with the constructed nature of art in general, and particularly the (presumed) truthfulness of photographic representation…”

– excerpt from Clarity through duplicity: On Obscura – exhibition essay by Daniel Harvey

“The first word that comes to mind upon viewing John Graham’s series, Fiercely Open is “vulnerability”. His pieces contain such a potent vulnerability that simply viewing them is a vulnerable experience for the audience, a closer look at the pieces reveal a common theme – the occurrence of relationships in the content and the collages. A character with a tree. A pair of pagan-like figures engaging one another. And in these relationships, and in these prints, there is a longing for something. Connection. Discovery. Truth. Sometimes sought after playfully, and sometimes just yearned for in something like silence. And the fulfillment of that longing is available through the act of openness. And the opening of one’s self is a sensation that lives at the very core of vulnerability. Where most things worth having are found. And that is when it becomes clear that John Graham’s work is indeed printmaking poetry. And that his show could bare no fitter title than Fiercely Open…” 

– excerpt from Fiercely Open – exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford

“…The body is often viewed as nothing more than a vessel for some higher identity – a concept that Madeline Mackay discards and reframes, immediately differentiating her work conceptually from what has come before. She presents flesh as an entity in itself, exploring its journey from animate to inanimate. From the body to the Earth. Whatever lines are crossed or edges leapt from in that evolution are impossible to determine. Instead, in the exhibit Not Yet Earth, Mackay explores substances like flesh and mud to pose questions about the space between these states, what they echo from either side, and what they can tell us about what Mackay calls, “the relationship between the bodily self and the sense of an autonomous identity.” ..”

– excerpt from Not Yet Earth – exhibition essay by Shaun Crawford