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:
Featuring over 100 pieces from MONOVA’s rich museum collection, Echoes of Memory weaves together untold stories of aging, memory loss & dementia, and the power of community on our collective human experience.
Dementia & Memory Loss Today: Directly affecting over 3,700 people on the North Shore, Echoes of Memory welcomes one and all to immerse themselves in this touching tribute to lives lived across BC and beyond.
A Window to the Past: From ornate brushes and egg cups, cherished toys and tins, to antique chairs, trunks and quilts, the collected items will stir strong memories of the past, and connect them with local stories from those with lived experience of dementia and other related conditions.
A Crow A Day: Experience the trailblazing touring display by Canadian Artist Karen Bondarchuk, whose illustrated creations honour the memory of her late mother following her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease.
Mosaic Revival: Three Contemporary Expressions brings together the works of three internationally acclaimed mosaic artists from British Columbia: Daryl Wood, Lilian Broca, and Maria Abagis. Join the artists for the exhibition opening on Thursday, May 1, 6pm-8pm and for their artist talk on Saturday, May 24, 2pm—4pm. Shining the spotlight on this ancient medium; these artists challenge the viewer’s perception of what a mosaic is, and its relevance in the art world today. Mosaics, the art of arranging small pieces of coloured glass, stone and ceramic to create intricate images, has played an important aesthetic, cultural and historical role throughout the millennia. While lesser known in North America, there is a growing community of mosaic artists in Canada, many of whom are making a splash and a name for themselves on the international stage, including the artists in this exhibit.
The Polygon Gallery presents a new outdoor installation by Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Tau Lewis. This monumental work marks the sixth installment in a 10-year commissioning partnership with Burrard Arts Foundation, supported by the Chan Family Foundation.
Tau Lewis constructs intricate sculptural portraits and quilts using found, gathered, gifted, and recycled materials drawn from her personal environments. Utilising a wide variety of sculptural techniques, including hand-sewing, direct carving, and assemblage, Lewis’s work honours the materials and modes of creative expression intrinsic to African diasporic histories.
A storyteller as much as a sculptor, Lewis frequently revisits previous bodies of work as though writing the next chapter in their visual narrative. The work installed on The Polygon’s façade draws from the Realm of the T.A.U.B.I.S. (Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls) – a series originally developed as the “judicial sector” of Lewis’ sci-fi universe. Reimagined as a profusion of oversized flower vines that breach the Gallery’s roof and climb across the building, the latest realisation carries on the T.A.U.B.I.S. archetype, blossoming year-round. For this work, as in her practice more broadly, Lewis sourced second-hand materials, seeking out weather- and waterproof fabrics including vinyl movie posters, parachutes, boat sails, and firehoses, among others.
Tau Lewis expands on Coloratura with a second site-specific sculpture, Fantasia, located in the Denna Homes Gallery on The Polygon’s upper floor, on view July 12 – September 29 and November 9 – February 2. Fantasia marks Coloratura’s germination point. From here, a lone vine grows up from the central seated figure and into the ceiling, linking the indoor and outdoor works.
In xʷəlməxʷ child, Manuel Axel Strain draws on Musqueam, Secwépemc, and Syilx ways of knowing, and the discipline of Western psychology. Compositing theories of mind from across their different cultures, Strain imagines the perspective of a child who contemplates the world from beyond these existing frameworks. Through figurative paintings, transformed into pictographs and set against photographic murals, Strain’s work proposes a way of seeing that suspends judgement and challenges divisions such as past and future, old and new, self and other.In this context, Strain embraces the uncertain and unfamiliar.
The table and chairs situated throughout the installation evoke a domestic setting, but their odd dimensions create a sense of strangeness, as if the viewer is very small, or these furnishings have purposes beyond what is expected. Here, the unknown is a powerful presence. Speculation and wonder are productive points of inquiry for Strain, inviting visitors to inhabit the imaginative, transpersonal vantage of xʷəlməxʷ child
“On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for….Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose.” – Rotimi Fani-Kayode
Beginning in the early 1980s, Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorisation, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures. Channelling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989.
Organized by Autograph (London) and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of colour and black-and white photographs, along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951-1992), Fani-Kayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode (b. 1955, Lagos, Nigeria; d. 1989, London, United Kingdom) produced genre-defying photographs that speak to his experience as a gay African man living in England in the 1980s. He emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping civil war as a political exile. He relocated to the United States in 1976 to pursue undergraduate art studies at Georgetown University and continued his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Returning to London in 1983, Fani-Kayode became an active participant in the Black British art scene, exhibiting at London’s Brixton Art Gallery, among other community-oriented spaces, and publishing his photography in magazines such as Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became chair of Autograph (London), a visual-arts charity devoted to supporting photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation
Guided Tours take place every Saturday at 1:30pm
Events
May 1: To Catch The Sprit Of The Old Rites
May 15: Embodied Generations: Drawing + Movement Workshop with Odera Igbokwe
May 22: If Beauty Is The Mother Of Pathology, What Is Desire?
