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. *

Forestry is a primary industry in British Columbia, comprising hundreds of responsibilities and skill sets. Yet there is relatively little familiarity with the roles that these people play in the regional economy and its culture; their relationships to the environments they live and work in; or the impact that shifting political, ecological and technological conditions have on their lives and the social fabric of the province. Dennison’s images offer a glimpse into these contexts and experiences.

Dennison is attentive to analogue photographic processes. He shoots in small, medium and large film formats; then develops and prints his negatives in a darkroom that he built. He also hand milled and constructed the wood frames that the works are presented in. 

Pale Fire will also release Dennison’s first photography book, Under 60 tons this spring. Co-designed and co-produced with Information Office, the book features over 90 photographs that he took while working as a crew member aboard small, versatile tug boats, which are classified as ‘under 60 gross tons’. These boats are being retired by companies in favour of larger, more stream lined vessels to comply with the tightening of Transport Canada regulations. Dennison’s photographs capture crew members who navigate marine machinery, infrastructure and the elements, including hands on chart work, compass work and manual labour. Many of these skills and duties are being rendered obsolete by technology. Dennison observes and reflects on this industrial and cultural transition.

Co-published by Pale Fire and Information Office
Edited by Reave Dennison, Amy Kazymerchyk 
Designed by Reave Dennison with Derek Barnett
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
Size: 28 x 21.5cm
Pages: 160
Colour: Black & White Duotone
Edition: 500
ISBN 978-1988860275

Under 60 tons is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, John & Helen O’Brian, Jane Irwin & Ross Hill, and Claudia Beck.

You may purchase the book in Canada below.

* The gallery is closed for August. Books may be picked up/ shipped after September 1.

WATER / COLOUR draws on Williams’ practice of making watercolour paintings of natural and cultural encounters on Redonda and Cortes islands, where she has lived since the 1970s. She is a keen observer of the way that human events shape places, habits and objects, and vice versa, which informs her approach to making paintings as well as books, assemblages and installations of experiential research and collected materials. In the 1990s, her long-term investment in the mid-coast islands sharpened her focus on the historical and living imprint of Indigenous communities on the territory, as well as the influence and impact of early European explorers and settlers.

Williams exploration of Bute Inlet led to her exhibition High Slack at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (1993/4) and the publication of High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996). Through this project, she developed a methodology of “poetic archeology”, which informed her artistic practice and the research and writing of four more books about the region: Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893–1998 (2001), Dynamite Stories (2003), Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast (2006), and Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs (2019).

Cougar Companions emerged following Williams’ introduction to Bute Wax, a beguiling substance that intermittently and inexplicably emerges in Bute’s waters. She was gifted a jar of the wax that was collected in the 1920s by the Schnarr family, who were early settlers in the inlet, and it is featured in WATER / COLOUR. As Williams collected water, she encountered oral and material data about cultural, geological and marine phenomena like the wax. This led her to explore stories from the Homalco Nation, historical settlers and current residents; as well as to research power projects from the 1920s to the present. In previous iterations of the exhibition, the investigative material she collected was presented in booklets and a display cabinet.

In 2021, Williams resumed gathering water after a significant landslide lurched down Elliot Creek into the Southgate River. The Homathko Icefield at the north end of the inlet––the third largest outside of the Arctic––was melting, and its recession exposed a large rock that separated from the mountain and fell into Elliot Lake, displacing a massive amount of fresh water, which in turn propelled the slide. The event was evidence that the inlet is threatened not only by industrial exploitation, but also by the rapid warming of the atmosphere.

Ronan Stewart also approaches steel with patience, inviting time itself to be a material in his process. His sculptures emerge one bead of molten MIG wire at a time. They accumulate like wax into forms that resemble the slow rise of stalagmites. These fragments are pruned and sutured together to form figures that echo the fragile posture of withering plants. In Stewart’s Husk (2025) series, the stability of steel confronts the ephemerality of flora, presenting an arrested encounter between what endures and what fades.

Mahsa Farzi is motivated by the liberatory potential of de-creation. Her installation Untamed (2025) draws together images and text from Persian miniature painting, folklore and literature. Farzi cuts limbs, orifices, sexual organs and flowers out of acrylic panels, to which she applies diluted metal paint which shocks the plastic, creating an etched and stained effect. She then works with a high-temperature propane torch that distorts and deforms the figures. Farzi’s process materializes the disorientation of cultural and ideological alienation, which slowly renders the world fragmented and unfamiliar. In her work, she explores the potential for release and renewal that this psychic and social erosion offers.

Evan McGraw’s calligraphic work is a ritual of precision and calculated experimentation. He plays with the visual and syllabic form of single words and short expressions in ways that unravel their legibility. Through repetition, letters drift, float, coil and dissolve. Ruin, Seraphic and Get Bent (2025) convey unique energetic states, expressing elegance, destruction and refusal. Repeating each word vocally is a form of incantation that both summons their energy and diffuses it.

Marcel Lessard also works with repetition. His graphite mosaics 1.31 (1 & 2) (2024) present iterations of two environments: the shoreline and an abstraction of space. He develops the compositions sequentially from the outside in, and each unit is a unique drawing that builds off of elements in the previous one. Lessard is interested in these two geographies as physical and psychological boundaries. He is curious about how the perception of each space is altered through reduction and reoccurrence.

In Shayne Weston Abbott-Arcan’s portfolio of sketches and drawings, the phenomenon of transfiguration frequently rears its head. Bodies of real and imagined animals are hyphenated or morph into one another. Some beings have anthropomorphic features, while others express qualities of a more-than-human spirit. For Abbott-Arcan, drawing was a means of wandering through his emotional and sensual experience of the world. He wasn’t afraid to explore the darkest corners of his encounters. In them, he often found a stray thread that led back to the light.

While riding, he liked to test my grip on the reins by sneaking bites of grass. I focused on maintaining gentle contact, enough to remind him I was there—although whether I was or not, I knew he would follow the pack. I never felt bad about robbing him of his roadside snacks, because in the off-hours he would be turned out to graze freely.

On a rest day, the horses lingered on a sandbar, their bodies relaxed and quiet, huddled together for protection. In the silhouette of the herd, I could make out close friends grooming and nuzzling each other. Free from the fetters of saddles and bridles, their demeanor suggested lazy bathers standing knee high in cool waters to best the Sunday heat. I reflected on learning to ride in stables that only turned out horses for short, sporadic periods, and how their resentment was palpable in the holes they had kicked through their stalls’ walls.

What began as an attempt to hold on to my memories, morphed into a story about two friends who peeled away from the pack after being set free to roam for the evening. In a tight span, the partners commiserate on work and comfort each other against all else. Much like ourselves, who, after the whistle blows, spend our evenings striving to reclaim our natural state only to be pulled back into the grind come sun up.

– Graham Landin, August 2024