Surrey Art Gallery Association announces the first Thursday Artist Talk of the season with exhibiting artist Cat Hart from remember the earth, remember the sky. Admission is free.

Join Hart as they speak to their work in the exhibition in connection to their artistic practice.

Influenced by queer ecologies and Indigenous teachings about good land relations alongside the deepening

climate crisis, Hart has developed a site-responsive, ecologically accountable art practice that is connected

to place. Using experimental photography, wild clay, and other land-based methods, their work reflects on

memory, place, migration, and biodiversity.

By using traditional, pre-Industrial craftsmanship and creative processes in combination with experimental land-based and site-responsive artistic methods, Hart starts from a place of curiosity, allowing the plants, waters, and soils to guide

and shape the work. “I try to move away from perfection and embrace all outcomes” Hart states. “I seek to highlight

the plants and ecologies that have survived and thrived in spite of our interventions on the land or, in the case of

invasive and introduced species, because of them.”

The saga shop will be open before the talk, 3:30pm to 7:30pm.

Explore rug hooking using recycled textiles and coffee sacks. Guided by Jamie Girouard, this three-session workshop is perfect for beginners and experienced crafters. Learn simple techniques to design, create, and finish a small hooked piece while developing your unique style and discovering sustainable approaches to traditional craft.

Some materials will be supplied, but feel free to bring your own. Small frames and hooks will be available for purchase from the instructor.

You will acquire simple, yet effective techniques to create your own hooked pieces from start to finish. You should be able to finish a small piece of the course of three sessions.

Please join exhibiting artist Lorna Brown for a live reading of several easement descriptions that were composed for audio recordings within her installation, followed by a conversation with Gibson Director Kimberly Phillips. The brief descriptions speculate upon the conditions of each easement—its flora and fauna, its history, access and egress, its volume and scale—and the imaginary possibilities of easements as workarounds to our restricted and regulated understanding of property.

Lorna Brown’s artistic practice is concerned with questions of public space, social phenomena, and institutional structures or systems. For her installation Easements in Edge Effects, Brown accessed an online resource called VanMap which allows users to download a map depicting in red every easement registered in Vancouver, thus indicating all the ways a person could traverse the city using this legal right of passage. Brown used graphics software to cluster the indicated easements together, densifying them into an image reminiscent of a medieval city. Redrawn by hand in red ink directly on the gallery wall, they suggest a community of anomalous spaces. Brown then scaled up a select number of easement shapes into soft sculptures, placing them in clustered relationships to the Gibson’s own architecture logic. In bringing these objects into direct relationship with visitors’ bodies—offering them a place to sit or lean against—the easements move from mapped abstractions to supports for imagining a city differently.

Easements can exist as long fingers of land at ground level, or they can hover overhead, as in the case of a suspended sign or elevated walkway. They might be as narrow as the width of a brick, running the length of a city lot, or L-shaped, wrapping around the corner of the property. Granting ease or relief, an easement can describe a curved seam of a garment or a curved joint in architecture.

Interdisciplinary artist and activist Dread Scott has spent his career using art to disrupt norms, question corrupt systems of power, and ignite necessary political conversations. His work, he writes, “looks towards an era without exploitation or oppression,” challenging the notion that current political and economic structures of America as inevitable. In 1989, his now-iconic artwork “What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” was denounced by President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. Senate. The resulting Supreme Court case cemented its place in art history as a touchstone for debates about patriotism and dissent.

From the Ground explores the interconnectedness of the natural world and our reciprocal relationship with the ecosystems in which we are embedded – expanding our awareness of both the visible and invisible in our environments and broadening our sense of time. The exhibition is rooted in the learning principle articulated by the First Nations Education Steering Committee, which emphasizes “connectedness, reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place.” Within the urgency of the climate crisis, From the Ground invites shared dialogue and connection through creative and educational practices.

Curated by Holly Schmidt and Amelia Epp, From the Ground brings together drawings, sculptures, prints, and photographs representing the natural world through stories, materials, time, and natural processes. Works by contemporary Canadian artists Amelia Butcher, Xinwei Che, and Genevieve Robertson are shown alongside selections from the Artists for Kids and the Gordon Smith Gallery’s Permanent Collection which include, Lauren Brevner, James Nexw’Kalus-Xwalacktun Harry, Karin Bubaš, Edward Burtynsky, Victor Cicansky, Anna Binta Diallo, Toni Onley, Gordon Smith, and Charlene Vickers.

Edge Effects features a combination of new commissioned works and projects never before seen by audiences in Canada, such as Liz Magor’s still poignant Blue Students/Alumnos en azul (1997). Originally commissioned by INSITE97, the public project centred on photographic portraits of students from the School of Creative and Performing Arts in San Diego, California, and the Preparatoria Federal Lázaro Cárdenas in Tijuana, Mexico, that were placed throughout both cities. The film negatives were pressed with paper covered in iron salts, which converted into positive blue images as they were exposed to sunlight. By the end of the installation period, only a few portraits had not been completely obscured, with the artist stating that the legibility of the images represented the power of circumstance and chance that governs people’s lives.

Photo credit: Jin-me Yoon, video still from As the Crane Flies Bunker (Sonic Transformations), 2025. 4K and thermal 3-channel video installation with sound, sandbags, netting, and wood. 15:05 minutes, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

Phantom Scripts revisits three works by Geoffrey Farmer from the Audain Art Museum’s Permanent Collection — Vampire Archive, November 22, 1974 (2010 – 2025), The Politics of Appearing (2012 – 2025), The Good Sweeper (2017 – 2025)— reframing them through newly composed scripts, annotations, and didactic texts authored by the artist. The texts function as interjections — speculative, contextual, poetic — that reexamine and complicate the earlier works. In doing so, Farmer explores how art can be returned to, re-read, and re-situated under shifting historical and ethical awarenesses.

This exhibition is a return — not only to Farmer’s past works, and to the evolving conditions in which they are understood. Phantom Scripts highlights the artist’s curiosity to revisit the assumptions, forms, and the silences embedded in his earlier productions, treating the past not as fixed, but as an unsettled field of interpretation and implication. Early aesthetic elements remain — vivid, disorienting, alive — but are now considered by the artist within a broader awareness of colonial entanglements and queer disidentification, foregrounding the role of the museum not as neutral host, but as a site of complicity, memory, and potential transformation.

Kintsugi, the Japanese art of “golden joinery,” is a 500-year-old tradition of repairing broken ceramics with natural Urushi lacquer and powdered gold. Rather than disguising damage, it highlights it—honoring imperfection and the passage of time.

Vancouver-based artist Naoko Fukumaru draws on this ancient practice as both a craft and a meditative process. Through her work, she offers a powerful metaphor for personal healing: like broken pottery, our cracks can become part of our story—transformed, illuminated, and made beautiful.

Respecting traditional materials and methods, Fukumaru also pushes the boundaries of kintsugi through instinctive, innovative techniques. Her approach redefines what restoration can mean—bridging history and emotion in work that is both raw and radiant.

This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on what it means to be beautifully broken—and to find strength and beauty in the imperfect.

Within The Mould, Against the Grain establishes itself as a case study on the genealogies and emergence of Black culture from within the Continent ( Africa) and across the diaspora.

Utilizing Deforrest Brown Jr’s seminal text (Assembling A Black Counter-Culture) and Stuart Halls’s assertions on Black popular culture and identity as conceptual points of departure, this exhibition investigates the similarities, differences and connections that exist between instances of Black cultural production that have emerged from the Western Black diaspora as well as the Continent. Though united under the shared identity marker of “Black”, each one holds nuance based on separate histories, traditions, material conditions and varying stakes.

Through an intimate coalescing of lens-based works, schematics and sonic installations works, exhibiting artists Tati Au Miel, Odartey Aryee, Deforrest Brown jr, and Isabel Okoro expand on existing theoretical and conceptual frameworks that consider Black artists as knowledge keepers and producers, insisting that Black cultural identity, like Black cultural production, is a robust and complex process of both becoming and being that is ongoing.

Exploring themes like traditional spirituality, embodied knowledge, the limits of representation, global Black identity, and the tensions between appropriation, commercialization, and Black cultural production, this exhibition exemplifies the politics of style and oppositionality that position Black cultural production as existing against the grain, despite the hegemonic forces that attempt to dilute and subvert its potential.

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.

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.