Joan Balzar (Canadian, 1928-2016) is recognized as a key figure in the development of abstract painting on the West Coast in the 1960s, a time when Vancouver emerged as a city of increased energy and experimentation in visual art. A graduate of the Vancouver School of Art, Balzar adopted a vocabulary of large-scale, optical, hard-edge paintings, often including a neon element. These paintings were meant to create excitement in the retina. She was dedicated to the exploration of abstract art, spatial illusion and the psychology of colour, which stayed as a constant through her practice. Balzar incorporated an interest in mass-produced industrial materials, while continuing to explore the possibilities of psychological manipulation through colour, light and spatial illusion. The result is work that moves beyond the conventional frame of painting, attempting to create a more experiential relationship, strongly related to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and the psychedelic movement.

Tom Burrows (Canadian, b. 1940) has been a leading figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the 1960s. In addition to his photography and sculptural works with aluminum, fibreglass and porcelain, he is known for his research into squatting and homelessness. Burrows’ primary artistic focus since the late 1960s has been creating polymer cast panels, which he began experimenting with while attending Saint Martin’s School of Art in London (1967-69). Burrows returned to Vancouver where he became a founding faculty member at the University of British Columbia’s newly formed Bachelor of Fine Arts program, where he taught until 1974. This period coincides with him living at the Maplewood Mudflats in North Vancouver. In recent years, part of Burrows practice has been the creation of almost monochromatic panels that revive the modernist concern with the material nature of the object reduced to issues of surface, scale and the occupation of space. His work is represented by Bau-Xi Galleries, Toronto and Vancouver (since 1995) and Foster White Gallery, Seattle (since 2004); prior to that, his work was represented by the Isaacs Gallery, Toronto until it closed in the early 1990s. Burrows has had solo exhibitions in London, Rome, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and across Canada. His work is included in private, corporate and public collections in Europe, Asia and the Americas. The 2015 exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery was the first major survey of Burrows work.

Gabi Dao (Canadian, b. 1991) is an artist and organizer currently based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Dao’s research-based practice culminates in collage, sculpture, sound and moving image installations. They also generate olfactory experiences in both their installations and their small-batch perfume business, PPL’S PERFUME. Through non-linear conceptions of memory, time and truth, Dao confronts Western ocularcentrism and the rigid binarism of capitalism. Dao also engages with writing and community building in her work. Dao is currently an MFA candidate at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and received a BFA from Emily Carr University. Dao was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2021) and received the Portfolio Prize Award for Emerging Artists (2016). She has exhibited in galleries and artist-run spaces across Canada, Asia and Europe, including solo exhibitions at grunt gallery and Spare Room, Vancouver; as well as group exhibitions at the Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art, Hà Nội, Vietnam; Centre Clark, Montreal; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Kamias Triennale, Quezon City, Philippines; Nanaimo Art Gallery; Libby Leshgold Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver; Burnaby Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; Western Front, Vancouver;  Artspeak, Vancouver; 221a, Vancouver.

Sarah Dobai (British, b. 1965) is a London-based artist with family roots in Budapest who works with photography, film, publication and performance. Her recent works have re-enacted and repurposed historical works of cinema or literature, frequently working between image and text, as a means of addressing present day concerns in a historical setting. Through a response to classic literature by making of images and words within the present moment, she is able to engage with concerns across time that continue to remain relevant. Dobai’s work is in dialogue with the history of contemporary photography in Vancouver, having received her MFA from UBC in 1995 and holding an active presence in the city’s art scene during this time before returning to London.

Jesse Gray (Canadian) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice looks at patterns of waste accumulation and explores the underlying histories of human-made objects. Working primarily with found materials and garbage, Gray’s work deals with the ways that culture and the sciences intersect, and is based in salvaging, hand-craft and labour-intensive practices. Gray holds an MFA from UBC (2009) were they experimented with making work from found discarded objects. They also hold a BFA from SFU (2002), and studied jewellery design at Vancouver Community College (2012). Their work engages with a transformation of discarded material through bronze casting into artwork or jewellery which often replaces the waste from the site it was collected from.

Antonia Hirsch (German/Canadian, b.1968) lives and works in Berlin. She was born in Frankfurt, Germany and earned her BA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England. Hirsch’s practice engages a variety of media, including installation, film, video and photography. The World Map Project is a series of works by the artist that challenge the form and traditions of mapping. The various maps reimagine state markers by reconfiguring our understanding of the usefulness of mapping —choosing instead to organize countries within new or interesting paradigms and classifications. Her writing projects include the anthology Intangible Economies (Fillip, 2012) and the reader Negative Space: Orbiting Inner and Outer Experience (SFU Galleries, 2015) and from 2009 to 2015, she was associate editor at Fillip.

Tiziana La Melia (b. 1982) is a Vancouver-based artist and writer. She was born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on a rural farm in Winfield, BC. Her work is known for its ability to dissolve distinctions between painting, sculpture, performance, poetry and installation, and for creating evocative and complex narratives that move between language and form, the written and the visual. La Melia completed her BFA at Emily Carr University and her MFA at the University of Guelph. In 2014, she was a writer-in-residence at Gallery TPW, Toronto, and that same year won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition. La Melia’s poetry and images have been published in C Magazine, The Organism for Poetic Research, West Coast Line, Capilano Review, Agony Klub, Charcuterie, Moire, Art 21 and The Interjection Calendar. She is the author of three books, lettuce lettuce please go bad (Talonbooks, 2024), The Eyelash and the Monochrome (Talonbooks, 2018) and a collection of her writing and poetry, Oral Like Cloaks, Dialect: Selected Writings (Publication Studio and Blank Cheque Press, 2015/18). La Melia has exhibited at Magasin III, Stockholm, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Division, Montreal, Mercer Union, Franzkaka and Cooper Cole, Toronto and the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, the Apartment, Western Front and Unit 17, Vancouver.

Damian Moppett (Canadian, b. 1969) has long been engaged with the processes, materials, and history of painting and sculpture, which he uses for the construction of his own vernacular. Drawing equally from modernist formalism, classical figuration, and advertorial photography, Moppett’s practice is an accumulation of strategies that refract and reconsider the story of art history. Frequently alluding to the artist’s studio, Moppett renders the productive process as a subject in its own right. He consistently maintains transparency around his influences, often explicitly reappropriating the sculptures of Anthony Caro or the photographs of Dorothea Lange to explore how the historical techniques developed by past artists can be revisited to speak to a contemporary social context. Often, this shift in context is facilitated by a corresponding shift in material: black and white photographs become vivid and even grotesquely coloured paintings, while ancient caryatids translate to flattened silhouettes fashioned from architectural sheet metal. Moppett holds an MFA from Concordia University, and a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he has taught for over a decade.

Nadia Myre (Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation, b. 1974) is a contemporary visual artist whose multi-disciplinary practice delves into themes of resilience, belonging, transformation, and the politics of recognition. Her work brings together complex histories of Aboriginal identity, nationhood, memory, and handicraft, using beadwork techniques to craft laborious works. Through her evocative creations, Myre explores the structures of power that shape personal and collective narratives, crafting spaces for reflection on memory, ancestral connections, and the shared fragility of the human experience. Her art resonates deeply, sparking dialogues that bridge history, materiality, and the poetics of storytelling. Myre is a graduate of Camosun College (1995), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1997), and Concordia University, where she earned a Master’s degree in Visual Arts (2002).

Gailan Ngan (Cumberland, BC, b. 1971) has a practice centered on ceramics and sculpture. Ngan collects material from many sources, both commercial and gathered from nature. Her ceramic sculpture’s accumulate layers of fused surfaces into compositions of texture and colour. Ngan’s hand-built sculptural works testify to a profound understanding of form and material, and suggest the deep influence of the resource-rich West Coast where she lives and works. Her experimental approach to ceramics is evident in her wobbly, off-kilter vessels from her early career and here in her expanded ceramic practice of sculptures that explore shape, surface texture and colour. Ngan holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and apprenticed under her late father Wayne Ngan.

Jerry Pethick (Canadian, 1935-2003) was a visual artist who bridged artistic and scientific fields through an immersive study of optics and perception. Pethick’s lifelong interest in technology and the possibilities of visual perception led to experiments with unconventional materials in his art practice such as plastics and lenticular lenses. A key strategy in his experimentation was obscuring perspective, either through lenses or sculptural assemblages, which was reflective of his critique of modernism and linear progress. Pethick’s work gained popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, as it aligned with many counterculture concepts including alternative experiences of reality, op-art and mysticism. A graduate of Chelsea Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art in London, UK, Pethick’s work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1979, 1984), the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1989), Centre International d’Art Contemporain Montréal (1992) and the Toronto Sculpture Garden (1993). A major survey of his work was exhibited posthumously at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015.

Gordon Smith (1919-2020) was a key figure in contemporary Canadian art. Since the 1950s, he worked continuously to expand the dialogue between abstraction and representation. In his tangled paintings, there is the insinuation of entire fields of colour below the surface. Over the course of his 75-year long career he has made paintings employing that procedure of looping and overlapping, the movement of line to line, texture into texture and colour into colour. His work has been an evolving search for balance between abstraction and his love of the land, which has given us insight into both the act of painting, sculpture and the essence of the West Coast.

Mark Soo (b. 1977) was born in Singapore and lives and works in Vancouver and Berlin. Graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, Soo works in a variety of media including photography, sound and video, which he uses to investigate notions of perception, modes of representation and considerations of social space. As part of a critical reflection on image-making, he is interested in how information technology and popular media put the human body into question and, in turn, create composite categories of representation and emotion. Bridging varied references while examining slip-pages between their cultural values, Soo allows spectators to re-imagine relationships between their forms and the dynamics of their meanings.

Stephanie Stein (German, b. 1972) is a German artist based in Berlin. Stein studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie, Amsterdam, at the Cooper Union School for the Advanced Science and Art, New York, and Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In her work, Stein considers the light and shadows in parallel with space, which lead to an alteration of the space. Stein’s graphic works appear to be pure definitions of interspaces. Her sculptures and installations are delicately minimalist and the materials she uses are humble: wood, metal, graphite and paint. Her filigree, abstract minimalist works are precisely coordinated with spatial parameters such as light and shadow, dimension and motion. Stein’s work alters the perception of an entire spatial structure.