There is always so much to explore and discover in Lower Lonsdale, whether you are a first-time visitor or an experienced local! With so many local galleries, museums, pop-up exhibitions, and public art displays, there is something for everyone. Most of these experiences are also free or low-cost, which makes supporting cultural enrichment within the community that much easier. Here is what is happening in Lower Lonsdale:
Across successive bodies of collage works, Anna Binta Diallo has portrayed complex interconnections between human activity and the natural world. These series began with Wanderings, which analysed folk stories and the tales that structure a society’s perception of the world. Gathering visual material from scientific, literary, and historical sources, Diallo applied a diasporic and cross-cultural approach as she constructed various folkloric motifs and archetypes. Continuing from Wanderings, her Voyageur/Almanac works expanded into ecology, speculating on how different mythologies and folklores across cultures might inform our coexistence with various forms of life, and broaden environmental awareness.
Predictions, the newest iteration of this project, extends Diallo’s work into the study of forecasts – scientific and otherwise. With visual references to geology, earth science, mapping, weather events, and topography, the artist has researched data pertaining to astronomical cycles, calendars, tide tables, and farmer’s almanacs of the past and present. Her latest works ask: What was projected into the future by past peoples? What has come true? What hasn’t? What could?
Diallo envisions her own imaginative set of predictions, proposing infinite loops of imagery that can be re-interpreted multiple times, in different cycles. She integrates nonlinear and even nonverbal storytelling, suggesting both new and ancient notions of narrative formed by images in relation. Through layering flora, fauna, human connection to land, and the cosmos, Diallo imagines speculative paths that our ecological and cultural landscapes might follow, and the unexpected constellations of meaning that can guide us through uncertain times.
About the artist
Anna Binta Diallo (b. 1983, Dakar, Senegal; lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba) explores how memory and nostalgia create unexpected narratives around identity. Her work addresses migration, displacement, and the relationship between language, history, and identity. Diallo holds an MFA from Transart Institute (Berlin) and a BFA from the University of Manitoba. Her exhibitions include venues such as MOCA Taipei, SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), and the African Photography Biennial in Bamako, Mali. She has received multiple grants, awards, and nominations, including the Sobey Award longlist. Diallo is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba on Treaty 1 and is represented by Towards Gallery.
Participating artists: Daniel Boyd, Vija Celmins, David Horvitz, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Radul, Thomas Ruff, Carrie Mae Weems, Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber), Paul Wong.
Star Witnesses assembles works by a constellation of artists whose insightful observations of the cosmos bring new understandings of exploratory and migratory movements on Planet Earth. The artists involved deftly combine found and newly produced images showing planets, moons, constellations in distant galaxies, and the light of our closest star – the Sun – to address earthly concerns.
The title alludes to the artists’ precise visions – honed at the technical limits of photography – and to how encounters with their artworks may transform audiences into ‘star witnesses’ in turn. Certain works in the exhibition evolve in close dialogue with scientific imaging, while others go beyond or deviate from the focus of telescopic cameras, the logic of astronomy, and the path of satellites. Together, they attest to the fact that there is no universal way of gazing at the universe.
Each work offers the image of the cosmos as material evidence for a distinctive perspective, worldview, or imaginary. They give substance to vital histories, which struggle to see the proverbial light of day: one woman’s survival in an internment camp; one man’s narrow escape from a racist mob; underexposed connections between a war in West Asia and peace in a mid-sized German town; an artist’s moment of grace on top of a moonlit mountain, far from home.
Questions of POV are paramount: much depends on where on Earth we – the humans, the stardust – were born and where we have travelled, migrated, settled recently, or remained for generations, if not millennia. Dark matter abounds. And this too is evidence awaiting fresh interpretations.
I Got Us the Moon presents a monumental new work by Vancouver-based Argentinian artist Alejandro A. Barbosa, consisting of 280 individual prints tiled together to form an atlas of the moon. The image is drawn from the “CGI Moon Kit”, a publicly available digital asset for non-scientific purposes, created from data assembled by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera and NASA’s laser altimeter instrument teams. Combining his extensive research with this specific, aesthetic representation of the moon, Barbosa steps into the role of amateur astronomer – astronomy being notable as one of the only scientific fields to which hobbyists make meaningful contributions.
Motivated by the current potential of a new space race, with the moon viewed as an asset to colonise or mine for resources, Barbosa engages with histories of naming-as-claiming, while disrupting the exclusive naming rights of the International Astronomical Union. These rights were granted in 1982 by the United Nations as a way to standardise a proliferation of systems by which lunar features had, until then, been named. Barbosa references these prior histories, here renaming lunar geographical features after a wide range of figures: some unknown, others infamous, and many significant to queer and feminist histories. In doing so, Barbosa posits the Earth’s satellite not as a commodity or frontier, but rather as a parallel world: one that becomes a site of collective fantasies, alternate timelines, and queer world-building.
Alejandro A. Barbosa is a 2SLGBTQIA+ Latinx visual artist born in Argentina who lives and works on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Barbosa’s practice focuses on lens-based media and investigates the flaws of representation, queer lived experience, and the politics of looking. Barbosa holds an MFA in visual art from the University of British Columbia, a BFA in photography from Concordia University, and has been non-regular Faculty at Emily Carr University of Art + Design since 2022. In 2025 Barbosa presented their project Unsavoury Witness at SUM Gallery in Vancouver. Their work has been exhibited and collected in Canada, Argentina, Peru, and the United States.
Figures & Faces is an upcoming exhibition celebrating the work of 20+ local artists showcasing a variety of styles, media, and approaches. Figures & Faces reimagines the human form and face in scenes that range from the everyday to the fantastical. Figures & Faces will run July 25th, 2025 – Sept 6th, 2025
