World at Hand: Aileen Bahmanipour, Jesse Gray, Danan Lake, Christian Newby, Kuh Del Rosario
June 12–July 25, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday June 12, 7–10pm
Closing Reception: Saturday July 25, 7–10pm
World at Hand gathers the work of five artists who are curious about the purpose, meaning and value of the natural and manufactured phenomena around them. Aileen Bahmanipour, Jesse Gray, Danan Lake, Christian Newby and Kuh Del Rosario draw attention to the potential of the tools, objects and elements at their fingertips, the stories they have become imbued with, and how playing with their composition, context or utility can expand these narratives.
Jesse Gray is a seasoned scavenger who collects plastic garbage from beaches and shorelines around Nanaimo and other parts of Vancouver Island. She is drawn to bits of resilient debris that have become separated from the biodegradable elements of their utilitarian forms. Stripped of commodity value, the unique shapes, textures and pliability of each fragment become the subject of her assemblages, which she casts in bronze. Mesomonuments: Scrap Figures After Elza Mayhew (2020) cites Victoria-based modernist sculptor Elza Mayhew (1916–2004), who created monumental bronze sculptures and innovated a technique of hot-carving polystyrene models. Meso, meaning middle in Greek, refers to a debris size classification (called mesoplastics in marine ecology) as well as the indeterminacy of Gray’s source materials and the size of her sculptures, neither monument nor anti-monument.
Scavenging also influences Kuh Del Rosario’s practice. She collects fragments of natural and cultural materials and works them into the skins of her assemblages, which become evidence of the artist’s experience in certain places and times. idigit, there’s no place,and hip to waste ratio (all 2025) were made during a residency at the Badlands Art Department, along the Rosebud River in Treaty 7 Territory, Alberta. The program draws artists’ attention to the surrounding environment, which is informed by Blackfoot culture, coal and clay mining, natural gas, and paleontological and geological phenomena. Del Rosario approaches materials such as used denim, metal filings, clam shells, garter snake skin and wild clay with an animist perspective that is influenced in part by Filipino mythology and values. She is interested in the agency of the elements she works with and pays close attention to how they crack, shift, peel and stain over time. Observing how an artwork is affected by human and weather pressures is a means of understanding how an environment may be impacted by similar forces.
Danan Lake is likewise sensitive to the pressure of natural and human events. In 2024, he was one of the community responders to the Argenta Creek wildfire that ravaged the rural community of Argenta, British Columbia. One of the few belongings sent out of the fire evacuation zone was a banjo that a farmer had handmade for his daughter thirty years prior. Part of Lake’s contribution included fixing the damaged instrument. His subsequent work Tubaphone (2025) is a collection of bronze forms that he cast from potatoes that the farmer gave him as a gesture of thanks. The gesture was significant because Argenta residents, including Lake’s family, have been gifted, traded or paid in potatoes by this man for generations. In Lake’s work, tubers—usually eaten, planted or composted—are preserved in bronze, making visible the plant’s social value.
Garden plants reflect social relations in Aileen Bahmanipour’s work, too. Cartography of a Typography (2025) is an iterative project inspired by the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which has sought greater political and religious freedoms for women in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Bahmanipour observed the events at a distance from Northern British Columbia. Isolated from her community, she began playing with black-eyed bean sprouts, organizing them into the shape of the Farsi word for “Us” (ما). As the fully grown plants wilted, she traced their shadows onto canvas with iron ink and acrylic, painting multiple superimposed traces of the word. The daily ritual offered time to reflect upon what constitutes an Us across geographic and cultural distance. Bahmanipour chose the black-eyed bean because it conjures the image of a bruised face, reflecting the dangers activists in the movement confront daily. The paintings are messy, dripping and unfinished—much like the process of political and cultural change.
Christian Newby’s practice took a significant turn when he discovered an industrial handheld carpet-tufting gun, originally manufactured in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and became curious about unorthodox ways of using it. The industrial approach to tufting is disciplined and repetitive: the pile is supposed to be consistent and dense, and not show the woven substrate. Newby simultaneously uses a range of fibres, including acrylic yarn, baling twine, rattan and Scottish lambswool, and cuts the substrate into imbalanced shapes that can’t be evenly covered. He also works improvisationally and abstractly, composing the tapestry as he tufts. The ragged handmade-ness of Swatch (2024) contrasts the smooth machinic quality of industrial production. *
Scavenging also influences Kuh Del Rosario’s practice. She collects fragments of natural and cultural materials and works them into the skins of her assemblages, which become evidence of the artist’s experience in certain places and times. idigit, there’s no place,and hip to waste ratio (all 2025) were made during a residency at the Badlands Art Department, along the Rosebud River in Treaty 7 Territory, Alberta. The program draws artists’ attention to the surrounding environment, which is informed by Blackfoot culture, coal and clay mining, natural gas, and paleontological and geological phenomena. Del Rosario approaches materials such as used denim, metal filings, clam shells, garter snake skin and wild clay with an animist perspective that is influenced in part by Filipino mythology and values. She is interested in the agency of the elements she works with and pays close attention to how they crack, shift, peel and stain over time. Observing how an artwork is affected by human and weather pressures is a means of understanding how an environment may be impacted by similar forces.
Danan Lake is likewise sensitive to the pressure of natural and human events. In 2024, he was one of the community responders to the Argenta Creek wildfire that ravaged the rural community of Argenta, British Columbia. One of the few belongings sent out of the fire evacuation zone was a banjo that a farmer had handmade for his daughter thirty years prior. Part of Lake’s contribution included fixing the damaged instrument. His subsequent work Tubaphone (2025) is a collection of bronze forms that he cast from potatoes that the farmer gave him as a gesture of thanks. The gesture was significant because Argenta residents, including Lake’s family, have been gifted, traded or paid in potatoes by this man for generations. In Lake’s work, tubers—usually eaten, planted or composted—are preserved in bronze, making visible the plant’s social value.
Garden plants reflect social relations in Aileen Bahmanipour’s work, too. Cartography of a Typography (2025) is an iterative project inspired by the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which has sought greater political and religious freedoms for women in Iran following the murder of Mahsa Amini in 2022. Bahmanipour observed the events at a distance from Northern British Columbia. Isolated from her community, she began playing with black-eyed bean sprouts, organizing them into the shape of the Farsi word for “Us” (ما). As the fully grown plants wilted, she traced their shadows onto canvas with iron ink and acrylic, painting multiple superimposed traces of the word. The daily ritual offered time to reflect upon what constitutes an Us across geographic and cultural distance. Bahmanipour chose the black-eyed bean because it conjures the image of a bruised face, reflecting the dangers activists in the movement confront daily. The paintings are messy, dripping and unfinished—much like the process of political and cultural change.
Christian Newby’s practice took a significant turn when he discovered an industrial handheld carpet-tufting gun, originally manufactured in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and became curious about unorthodox ways of using it. The industrial approach to tufting is disciplined and repetitive: the pile is supposed to be consistent and dense, and not show the woven substrate. Newby simultaneously uses a range of fibres, including acrylic yarn, baling twine, rattan and Scottish lambswool, and cuts the substrate into imbalanced shapes that can’t be evenly covered. He also works improvisationally and abstractly, composing the tapestry as he tufts. The ragged handmade-ness of Swatch (2024) contrasts the smooth machinic quality of industrial production. *
Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian Canadian visual artist whose practice explores contemporary forms of iconoclasm and the politics of perception. After living and working for over a decade in Vancouver and the Bella Coola Valley, British Columbia, she relocated to Grande Prairie, Alberta, where she teaches visual arts at Northwestern Polytechnic. Her work has been exhibited at GlogauAIR in Berlin, Germany; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta; grunt gallery, Burrard Arts Foundation and Artspeak in Vancouver, British Columbia; and Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, British Columbia. Bahmanipour holds a BFA in Painting from Tehran University of Art, Iran, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She was longlisted for 2026 Sobey Art Award. Cartography of a Typography (2025) was previously presented at Doris Space for Art in Beaverlodge, Alberta, and was generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. An earlier iteration was included in the group exhibition It’s Still Living at Artspeak in Vancouver in 2023.
Jesse Gray is a multidisciplinary artist working and living on Snuneymuxw Territory / Nanaimo’s South End. She works in drawing, painting, bronze casting, printmaking, digital illustration and environmental social practice. Mesomonuments (2020) was first exhibited at Artspeak in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2020. A selection of the sculptures were acquired by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver and exhibited in Another Green World: Works from the Collection in 2024. A selection were also presented in Be True to Your School, Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts alumni exhibition at its Audain Gallery in Vancouver in 2025.
Danan Lake is an artist, curator and craftsperson from Argenta, British Columbia, a community of about 150 people. His practice uses folklore and folk culture as a lens to consider relationships to place, community and nonhuman beings. His upbringing in a remote community where both self-sufficiency and collective care are part of everyday life shaped his approach to material and process. His practice spans sculpture, installation and image-based media, and he works with wood, stone, metal, digital print, electronics and found objects. Lake studied for his BFA at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin, Germany, followed by an MFA at the University of Guelph, Ontario. He currently lives in Montréal, Québec. Mushrooming (2025) was previously shown at Doris Space for Art in Beaverlodge, Alberta, and Tubaphone (2025) was previously show at Garden Variety Volume V in Toronto, Ontario, both in 2025.
Christian Newby is a Vancouver-based artist and researcher whose practice spans drawing, textiles and publishing. He holds a PhD in Fine Art from Kingston University London, England (2022), and is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work has been shown internationally across the UK, Canada, Europe, Asia and South America. Newby has participated in residencies at Matadero in Madrid, Spain; Triangle in Marseille, France; Gasworks/URRA in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Academy of Visual Arts in Hong Kong. Swatch (2024) was previously exhibited at CSA Space in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2025
Kuh Del Rosario is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Québec. Born in Manila, Philippines, she immigrated to Calgary, Alberta, where she earned a BFA in Painting from the Alberta College of Art and Design before completing an MFA in Sculpture and Ceramics at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Montréal’s Fonderie Darling (2023–26), supported by the Collections Desjardins, and is looking forward to a residency with Arteventura in Andalusia, Spain, and a solo exhibition, Une Pierre Tremblante se Lève, at Centre d’exposition Yvonne L. Bombardier in Valcourt, Québec, later this year. In 2026, her work was featured in the group exhibitions Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp at Livart in Montréal; Keeper at Indigo+Madder in London, England, and March in New York, New York; Faire Eau at Musée d’art contemporain Baie-Saint-Paul, Québec; Precious objects performing non-precious tasks at the plumb in Toronto, Ontario; and Holding Still at McBride Contemporain in Montréal. idigit, there’s no place, and hip to waste ratio (all 2025) were previously shown in the group exhibition Entwined, at Calgary Contemporary, and in her solo show na dadaanan at the Badlands Art Department, Drumheller, Alberta, both in 2025. The palette carries things and Under the Balete tree were shown in An unhusked grain of rice fills the whole house at Galerie B-132 in Montréal, Québec.