Spring Arts: 5 gallery shows to blow your mind, pushing beyond traditional content and form

Think synthetic-hair dresses, eerily life-sized automatons, and photos that bridge art and architectural design in new ways

By Janet Smith

Ema Peter, Courtyard House, 2021, giclée on Dibond. Designed by Leckie Studio, Vancouver. Courtesy of the Artist

PUPPET-WIELDING AUTOMATONS, a wall-filling hyperreal tapestry, and photographs that blur the lines between art and design: galleries are full of surprises this spring, as artists subvert form and content.

Here are five of the most interesting shows happening on the Vancouver cultural calendar.

#1

The Decisive Moment: Ema Peter

April 12 to June 3 at the West Vancouver Art Museum

Architectural photojournalist Ema Peter captures figures moving, almost ghostlike, through the glass of some of this areas’s sleekest West Coast Modern homes. Born in Bulgaria, Peter spent much of her youth on set with her father, a cameraman for avant-garde films. The exhibition, which uniquely bridges art and design, is part of the Capture Photography Festival. Alison Powell curates.

Kathy Slade’s giant tapestry Sinking in the West (installation view), 2022. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.

#2

Kathy Slade: As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop

To May 7 at the Contemporary Art Gallery

The veteran Vancouver artist follows in the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, to the pyramid-shaped rock in lakefront Sils Maria, Switzerland, where he had his epiphany about the abyss and eternal recurrence. In sly and playful reference to those ideas, Slade depicts that same rock as a giant tapestry, rendered in cotton and wool weft with polyester warp, depicting the rock to scale. There are also well as more than 20 graphite rubbings from the rock’s surface. The exhibition also includes the obsidian Scrying Mirror, and an artist book that Slade created with Alejo Duque, featuring photos taken inside the Nietzsche-Haus in the Swiss town.

Shary Boyle’s Judy, 2021, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Patel Brown Gallery. Photo by John Jones

#3

Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me

To June 4 at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Canadian artist Boyle’s new exhibit is a carnivalesque trip into the mysteries of identity. Employing everything from life-size automatons and coin-operated sculptures, the show was inspired by the lyrics from the 2016 song “Europe Is Lost” by UK poet Kae Tempest, mining not just complex ideas around how we see each other and ourselves, but the larger social concerns that weigh on us. Boyle is groundbreaking in the way she uses costume, character, set design, and even trick mirrors and music, in a contemporary-art context.

Karin Jones, Worn, 2014-2015, hair extensions, cotton bolls, hair of the artist, from the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo by Eydis Einarsdottir

#4

Karin Jones: Ornament and Instrument

To April 16 at the Burnaby Art Gallery

Here’s a rare chance to check out Vancouver-based artist Karin Jones’s Worn, on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum: a Victorian mourning dress crafted entirely from synthetic hair—and a complex interweaving of ideas around African identity, colonial displacement, and slavery. She also puts her skills as a goldsmith to fascinating use in Damascene inlay work on farm tools, bringing ideas of beauty and value to historic objects of humble labour. Together, the thought-provoking, painstakingly crafted pieces leave visitors with much to ponder afterwards.

A still from Phase-Shifting Index, by Jeremy Shaw

#5

Jeremy Shaw: Phase-Shifting Index

June 23 to September 24 at The Polygon Gallery

North Van-born, Berlin-based Shaw’s seven-channel installation, premiering here after its buzzed-about run at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, captures people moving ecstatically in a trancelike state. Because they’re caught on outmoded media like 16mm film or Hi-8 video tape, the scenes feel like found footage, depicting everything from modern dance to popping and locking. But time and space don’t quite make sense here—the movement on the separate screens sometimes synchronizing, sometimes breaking down—disorienting the viewer in the coolest of ways.

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