About
Pale Fire is an art gallery in Vancouver, BC, Canada that was established by Amy Kazymerchyk in 2022. The gallery currently presents exhibitions on a quarterly cycle, while establishing a foundation upon which it can nurture long term relationships with artists, audiences, collaborators and patrons. With time, the gallery’s program will expand to include site specific, temporal or ephemeral satellite projects.
In her curatorial practice, Amy Kazymerchyk has paid attention to moving image and time-based practices in dialogue with visual art, cinema, performance, and poetics. Previous to opening Pale Fire, she was the Curator of SFU Galleries’ Audain Gallery, the Events and Exhibitions Coordinator at VIVO Media Arts Centre, and Programmer of DIM Cinema at The Cinematheque. She inaugurated Pale Fire in part, to synthesize the aspects of artist run, academic and commercial art culture that are best suited to support artists at this time.
The gallery’s name is borrowed from a monologue in of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: “… the moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:” (Act IV Scene 3 488-95 ). Timon proceeds to describe how the sun, moon, earth and sea all derive their most vivid traits from one another, however, symbiosis fouled by greed turns to theft. Fire may be the defining element of the twenty-first century. Its generative properties continue to foster knowledge, technology and culture, and metaphysically it imbues us with insight, passion and faith. When fire is is exploited–as we’re experiencing–it quickly renders inner and outer landscapes parched, feverish and scorched.