Wayfinding

November 14, 2020 – January 31, 2021

The exhibition Wayfinding brings together recent work by local artists Leanne M. Christie, Sara Graham and Devon Knowles, who live and create art in response to their cities—Coquitlam, Port Moody and Vancouver—and the urban architecture that makes up these spaces and others like them. Through mediums such as oil painting, photography and experimental stained glass, the artists consider the language and materials of city building.

About the Exhibition:

Have you lately found yourself walking along the same routes in your neighbourhood time and time again? These familiar spaces, already well trodden, have become sites for repeated investigation under the restraints of the global pandemic. You might have started looking a little closer, noticing previously unseen details, documenting your surroundings with a fervour formerly reserved for exploring new places encountered on holiday. This practice of walking, of slow looking, of being in relation to your surroundings is a practice as old as humankind, and for many artists this way of “being in the world” is central to creative practice. This is true of Leanne M. Christie, Sara Graham and Devon Knowles, whose art explores a common interest in (to borrow Christie’s concept) conversing with the urban environment. Author Rebecca Solnit describes how “walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it,” and the same can be said of art. 

Through mediums such as oil painting, photography, experimental stained glass and casting, Christie, Graham and Knowles consider the language and materials of city building. They look closely at the city—its architecture, infrastructure and detritus—refashioning their discoveries through colour, patterns, shapes and expressive renderings. Each pushing toward abstraction, they respond to their rapidly developing surroundings and the speculative possibilities of the built environment. These artists’ individual ways of being in the world are communicated through their art, which at the same times feeds back into the world as it is shaped by humans.