2026 Events
Saturday April 11, 7pm
Book Launch for Andrew Witt’s Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles
The launch will be accompanied by a concise 30-minute slide presentation featuring material from the book. The Salon will be open.
Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2025) explores how artists and activists reimagined the aesthetic and political capacities of documentary photography and film from the 1970s to the present, with chapters on Agnès Varda, Allan Sekula, Asco, John Divola, Gregory Halpern, Guadalupe Rosales, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Anthony Hernandez, and the collaborative practice of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art. He is currently the 2025–2026 PERICULUM Foundation for Contemporary Art Discourse Fellow. His book "Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles" was recently published by MIT Press (2025). Andrew's writing has appeared in Camera Austria, History of Photography, Momus, Oxford Art Journal and Philosophy of Photography. Witt completed his PhD at University College London in 2017 and his MA at UCL in 2010. From 2018 to 2022 he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
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Saturday February 7, 7pm
Judith Williams Artist Talk
Judith Williams will talk about her investment in watercolour painting, which she has practiced since the 1970s. She will show images of work that has informed her approach to making WATER / COLOUR. She will also share stories about collecting water in Bute Inlet, and reflect on how her ecological and cultural research and projects in the region have developed over five decades.
Judith Margaret Williams is a visual artist and author living on Cortes Island, B.C., Canada. She was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia from 1979 to 2001. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis MN; Cranbrook Art Museum, Detroit MI; Vancouver Art Gallery, B.C.; UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, B.C.; The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, B.C.; Surrey Art Gallery, B.C.; and the Richmond Art Gallery, B.C., amongst others. She is the author of five books published with Harbour Publishing and New Star Books, that are listed above. She has also made numerous artist books and pamphlets to accompany her projects and exhibitions, including Naming and Claiming: the Creation of Bute Inlet (2011), Salmon Stock (2003) and High Slack (1994).Her work is featured in the public collections of the B.C. Cultural Services Branch, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Canada Council Art Bank, Carleton University, UBC Graduate Student Collection, The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vancouver City Public Collection.
2025 Events
Thursday October 30, 7pm
Nocturne Artist Talk: Mahsa Farzi & Marina Roy
Friday November 14, 7pm
Nocturne Artist Talk: Evan McGraw & Amy Kazymerchyk
Mahsa Farzi (b. 1992, Tehran, Iran) works across painting, drawing and sculpture. She examines how censorship, migration and patriarchy fracture continuity, giving rise to a language of disruption in which humour is inseparable from survival. Within this language, grief and resilience are coexisting conditions,that she explores through material processes. Farzi’s work has been shown at THIS Gallery in Vancouver, BC (2025); Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC (2025); and A+ in Beirut, Lebanon (2018). She has been recognized with the Joan Wright Hassell Prize in Visual Arts (2024) and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2025).
Marina Roy is an artist, writer and educator who lives and works in Vancouver, based in Vancouver, on the ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her aesthetic can be described as grotesque and her research focus spans materiality, ecology/natural history, psychoanalysis, feminism, and linguistics. Roy has written two books that use the encyclopedic form as conceptual conceit. sign after the x (Artspeak/Arsenal Pulp Press/Advance Editions, 2001) and Queuejumping (Information Office, 2022).
Evan McGraw (b. 1990, Sechelt, Canada) is a visual artist who has had exhibitions at High Art in Paris, France (2025); Turley Gallery in Hudson, NY (2024); BIKINI in Basel, Switzerland (2018); Dem Passwords in Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Paul Kasmin in New York City, NY (2015). He completed a BFA at Cooper Union, New York City,
NY (2015).
2024 Events
Friday, November 29, 8pm, Tix $10 cash at the door
Trail’s End (closing event for Graham Landin: Tight Span)
Performances by Julian Hou, Mendel Skulski with Aiden Ayers, Maggie Tiesenhausen (S. Wurm). Lighting by Adam Flynn.
Julian Hou is an artist based in Vancouver. His multidisciplinary practice includes the fostering and organizing of productions through a fluid collaborative art, audio, publishing and apparel entity (Second Spring), as well as an ongoing artistic practice that involves the accumulation of new skills and application of personal symbolic invocations, collective meaning, and original methods of divination that probe the darker recesses of psychic awareness. His stalwart mediums are drawing, sculpture, songwriting, album production, and clothing as art. He will be performing songs from his upcoming album Country Balance.
Mendel Skulski is a storyteller with the podcast Future Ecologies: a show produced on (and often about) unceded Indigenous territories across the Salish Sea. Future Ecologies has been featured on curricula at the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and Western Washington University, and has received honours from the Webby Awards and the New York Festival Radio Awards. Trained in Industrial Design, and steeped in reverence for nature’s infinite, entangled beauty, Mendel opted to devote themself to a less material form of production — that of sounds and ideas.
Aiden Ayers is an artist based in Vancouver BC. He creates timeless music with warmth and care, defying genre and categorization.
Maggie Tiesenhausen (and pseudonymously S. Wurm) is a northwest Albertan settler music producer and artist. The hushed argument of layers in their work – rural found sound, field recordings, barely audible confessions, amplified noise floors, and recordings of dilletante performance— bring clouded internal sites into view. Often emotionally charged, atmospheric, and unresolved, these auditory worlds summon a cinematic visuality. Tiesenhausen lives in Treaty 8 territory, in the hamlet of Demmitt, Alberta. In addition to their music production, they share a collaborative singing practice with artist and musician Jen Reimer called Tunnel.
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September 14–December 15, 2025, Saturdays 7–10pm
Ron Tran: Kind Pot
Ron Tran is the fall 2024 artist in residence in Pale Fire’s salon. Their weekly series "Kind Pot" will take place on Saturday evenings.
Kind Pot is a direct English translation of Ron's Vietnamese birth name, Hien Huu. It is an ongoing hospitality project that began during his residency in Berlin, and continued in his home, garden and studio in East Vancouver as well as artist-run spaces. During his residency, Tran will share his interpretation of Vietnamese street food.
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May 25–August 31, Saturdays, 7–10pm
Derya Akay: Girl Dinner
Derya Akay will be the first artist in residence in Pale Fire’s salon. Their weekly series "Girl Dinner" will take place on Saturday evenings.
Derya Akay (they/she, b. 1988, Turkey) is an interdisciplinary artist who poetically interprets cooking as a metaphor. She explores the tension between preservation and decay, control and chance, trial and error. Her artistic strategies embrace the realities of time and transformation using organic materials. Dumpster diving, recalling dreams, hacking and pirating, alley walks and studying weeds also contribute to her process-based practice. Derya has initiated numerous food cultivation and hospitality projects including “Estradiol Kitchen” (2022–23) at Moodswing Bar in New Westminster; collaborative projects “Garden Don’t Care”, “Green Grocer” and “The Neighbour’s Plate” (2018–22) at Unit 17 in Vancouver; and “Sikma Gunu” (2022) at the Toronto Biennial in Mississauga. In 2023, Derya was the Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston. Her recent exhibitions include "Flowers from a Story" (2024) at Unit 17; "The Willful Plot" (2023) at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and "Meydan" (2021) at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.
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Saturday, June 22, 4:30–5:30pm
Artist Talk with Janine Dunn and Amy Kazymerchyk
Co-presented with the Contemporary Art Society of Vancouver (CASV)
CASV and Pale Fire invite you to a conversation between Janine Dunn and Amy Kazymerchyk. Janine will introduce the audience to the site and context that she works in, as well as the environmental and social conditions that motivate her work. Janine and Amy will discuss historical and contemporary influences on her painting methodology, and parallels between her pictures and other artists' works.
The talk takes place on the last day of Janine’s exhibition cover the taken bone. She will be present at the gallery between 12–10pm to greet visitors. Pale Fire will host a public closing reception in the salon from 5:30–10pm. The artist talk is free, however, seats in the gallery are limited. Please consider RSVP’ing here.
Following the artist talk, CASV will host a members-only reception and tour of Jeffrey Boone and David Wong’s home. For the past 25 years, Jeffrey and David have been collecting art with a growing focus on contemporary representations of culture in landscape. To become a member of the CASV, visit their membership page for more information.
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Friday April 26, 9pm
Rosalind Nashashibi: Vivian's Garden (2017)
16mm/Digital, 29:50min
Free, Limited seating
Courtesy LUX
British Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi's 2017 film Vivian's Garden observes Austrian émigré artists Vivian Suter (b. 1949, Buenos Aires) and her mother Elisabeth Wild (b. 1922, Vienna) in their shared home in Panajachel, Guatemala. Nashashibi, who is known for chronicling intimate moments of contemporary life, witnesses the pair's domestic and artistic relationships with people, plants and animals.
Vivian Suter is known for her large-scale loose canvases that she paints in her open-air garden studio. In addition to oils, she works with volcanic minerals, earth, botanical matter and microorganisms from her environment. Suter's work is often exhibited outside, such as in Athens, Greece for documenta 14, where Vivian's Garden premiered.
Suter's practice bears influence on Puerto Rican artist Maru Aponte and her process of plein air painting, which is expressed in her exhibition Salt Stains.