2026Dana Claxton Adad HannahJessica JohnsJake KimbleSarah M. MillerSiobhan McCracken Nixon Kimberly PhillipsEva RespiniKaterina StathopoulouMonika SzewczykAlthea ThaubergerStephen Waddell Emmy Lee Wall2026
® The TD logo and other TD trademarks are the property of The Toronto-Dominion Bank or its subsidiaries.Bringing together the power of our people and philanthropy to help foster change, nurture progress, and support local communities.Proud to support this year’s 2026 Capture Photography Festival. At TD, we support organizations focused on increasing access to art and cultural events and activities that work to create opportunities for people to participate in shared experiences that reflect the diversity of their community. Learn more at td.com/artsandculture
Dana Claxton Adad HannahJessica JohnsJake KimbleSarah M. MillerSiobhan McCracken Nixon Kimberly PhillipsEva RespiniKaterina StathopoulouMonika SzewczykAlthea ThaubergerStephen Waddell Emmy Lee Wall
Capture 2026 2Please share your Festival experience with us on Instagram @capturephotofestBoard of DirectorsDouglas Coupland, Co-ChairBruce Munro Wright, Co-ChairPresthaya FixterMel Fowle Mike HarrisR. Stuart KeelerTanner KiddLeslie LeeIain MantAlison MeredithDonna MolbyJordan ReberMahdi ShamsAdrienne WoodKim Spencer-Nairn,Founder and Chair EmeritaAdvisory BoardGrant ArnoldClaudia BeckSophie HackettHelga PakasaarDonors$20,000+Presthaya Fixter and Conrad WhelanDonna Molby$10,000–19,999Justin AnisRob BrunoThe Giustra FoundationJane Irwin and Ross HillLeslie Lee and John MurphyTara and Christopher PoseleyThe Dr. Ann Worth CharitableFoundationBruce Munro WrightTimothy A. Young Family Foundation$5,000–9,999AnonymousClaudia BeckBradshaw Family FundCelia Dawson and Dermot StrongIain MantJohn and Helen O’BrianThe Michael and Inna O’Brian FamilyFoundationRon Francis ReganSaeedeh and Sean SalemApril 1–30, 2026305 Cambie StVancouver, BCV6B [email protected]#CapturePhotoFest2026Capture TeamFestival and Communications Coordinator William J. BetancourtCatalogue and Grants Coordinator Adrienne FastAudain Curatorial Fellow Jake KimbleAssistant Curator Anna LuthExecutive Director and Chief Curator Emmy Lee WallTD Assistant Curator of Engagement Sarah Danruo WangGraphic Designer Nadine HalstonCopy Editor and Proofreader Brian LynchPrinting and Assembly Mitchell PressWe acknowledge the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), qʼʷa:n̓ƛə̓ n̓(Kwantlen), kʷikʷəƛə̓ m (Kwikwetlem), Lilwat7úl (Lil’wat), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), ̓SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), sc̓əwaθən (Tsawwassen), Máthxwi (Matsqui), and Semá:th (Sumas) First Nations on which Capture Photography Festival takes place.Front Cover:Michelle Sound Wherever You Are, 2026Courtesy of the Artist and Ceremonial / ArtThe BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project is generously supported by Presthaya Fixter and Conrad Whelan, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and sponsored by MLT Aikins LLP, Downtown Van, and MNP LLPAll content © 2026 the artists, authors, and Capture Photography Festival Society. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. All images are reproduced Courtesy of the Artist unless otherwise specified.Capture is not responsible for the specific content or subject matter of any work displayed or advertised. Some images may be offensive, upsetting, or disturbing to some members of the public.Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in PublicationISBN 978-1-7773547-5-6Capture Photography Festival is produced by the Capture Photography Festival Society, a registered not-for-profit.For the most up-to-date programming information, please visit capturephotofest.comTo support Capture’s catalogue, exhibitions, public art, and public programs, please donate by scanning here:
3Media SponsorCapture’s 2026 Catalogue is generously supported by Leslie Lee and John MurphyPresenting SponsorWe gratefully acknowledge the support ofPartners$1,000–4,999Anonymousfabric living, Dionne and Jordan MacDonaldFasken Freybe FoundationThe Hamber FoundationSamuel LiDana Lynn MontalbanoZahra and Nick SalisburyStill Creative (stillcreative.ca)Christopher StottStrong Family FoundationTerrence and Lisa TurnerDenis WalzFounding DonorsAnonymous AnonymousStephen CarruthersJohn and Nina CassilsChan Family FoundationMike and Sandra HarrisBrian and Andrea HillJane Irwin and Ross HillHy’s of Canada Ltd.Jason and AJ McLeanMichael O’Brian Family FoundationRadcliffe FoundationRon Francis ReganEric Savics and Kim Spencer-NairnLeonard ScheinIan and Nancy TelferSamantha J. Walker (in memory of)Bruce Munro WrightThank You Rui Mateus AmaralRebecca BairLisa BaldisseraMary CurrieChristos DikeakosManon GauthierGreg GirardJackie GrahamShaun InouyeMarc KazimirskiR. Stuart KeelerFred LeeJoshua McVeityRoy NgTara and Christopher PoseleyElliott RamseyElias RedstoneEva Respini Conrad WhelanFoundationIn-Kind SponsorsSupporting SponsorsContributing Sponsors
Capture 2026Welcome to Capture 2026 At a time when intellectual freedom is under attack, providing a platform for artists who challenge the status quo, advocate for change, posit alternative futures, and joyfully celebrate diverse ways of existing in the world is more urgent than ever. This is the work that Capture does. Welcome to the 2026 Festival!We are thrilled to share our catalogue this year, which includes a newly commissioned text by Sarah M. Miller considering the ways in which lensbased artists engage with increasingly present AI technologies, sometimes to critique, sometimes to co-produce. This year, our signature BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project is by Michelle Sound, and we have an interview with the artist as well as an expansive, poetic text by Jessica Johns. Featured Exhibitions at the Audain Art Museum, the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, The Polygon Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery are accompanied by texts by Adad Hannah, Kimberly Phillips, and Monika Szewczyk, and an interview between Siobhan McCracken Nixon and artist Stephen Shore, respectively. We hope these offerings give insight into some of the myriad conversations our Featured Exhibitions spark this year.The Festival exists because of the incredible generosity of committed donors and sponsors, many of whom support year over year. I would like to particularly acknowledge TD Bank, Capture’s Presenting Sponsor – it is a great privilege to work with an organization whose vision in amplifying diverse voices so closely aligns with Capture’s own mission. To everyone who has provided support to Capture, thank you so very much for giving the gift of lens-based art to a broad and diverse audience.I am deeply grateful to Capture’s incredible Board, helmed by Douglas Coupland and Bruce Munro Wright – we could not do what we do without the Board’s sage counsel and enthusiastic support. The Festival is the result of the Herculean efforts of a small but mighty team who coordinates the exhibitions and public art, catalogue, communications, public programs, and events. I learn so much from Capture’s staff daily, and their enthusiasm and commitment make work a pleasure.Finally, I would like to say a sincere thank you to the community that Capture serves – the artists, curators, writers, organizations, audiences, and funders who come together to celebrate lens-based art annually. It takes a village, as they say, and Capture would not exist without you. A special note of gratitude to every artist, writer, and curator who participated in the Festival this year – the work you do at this polarized time to delineate your thinking, share your perspective, and express your opinion is critically important in creating shared meaning and greater understanding for us all. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Emmy Lee WallExecutive Director and Chief Curator
106 ARTIST INDEXFILM PARTNERSHIP100–103 Dana ClaxtonAlthea ThaubergerStephen WaddellCapture x The Cinematheque SELECTED EXHIBITIONS74–99 Selected ExhibitionsFEATURED EXHIBITIONS Into the Wosk Collection: Discovery & WonderAudain Art MuseumHannah Rickards: I am the infant and I am the bird Marianne and Edward Gibson Art MuseumTania Willard: PhotolithicsThe Polygon GalleryStephen Shore’s Uncommon PlacesVancouver Art Gallery50–5556–5960–6566–71Kimberly PhillipsMonika SzewczykSiobhan McCracken NixonAdad HannahPUBLIC ARTBC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Billboard Public Art ProjectsCanada Line Public Art Project18–2526–3940–47EDITORIAL8–13 How are photographic artists engaging artificial intelligence? Sarah M. Miller
Capture 2026Torbjørn RødlandPink Roof and Window, 2019–22 Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky GalleryPart of the GreyChurch Billboard Public Art Project
Capture 2026 8Minne AtairuBlonde Braids Study IV, 2023text-to-image3400×2267 pxCourtesy of the Artist
9 TEXTSHow are photographic artists engaging artificial intelligence?Sarah M. MillerIn 2024–25, I was fortunate to get a front-row view of choices facing artists who seek to engage AI in a photography-based practice. I don’t mean artists who are merely seeking a new tool kit, but rather those adopting aspects of AI to examine the future and the identity of photography itself. While guestediting an issue of the journal Photography and Culture and contributing to a special issue of Aperture, both on the relationship of AI to photography, I learned from my collaborators that there are two main paths currently open. And while those paths appear divergent for now, they may, thanks to rapid changes in the field, soon intersect to form a complex mesh of possibilities.
Capture 2026 10Widespread anxiety arose about AI’s incursions into creative work in late 2022, when ChatGPT and generative image AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney became widely accessible. But for a significant group of artists, AI wasn’t new. Whether identifying as photographers, new media artists, or conceptualists focused on the socio-politics of technology, some artists had been exploring AI as both subject and method for years. American artist Trevor Paglen is perhaps the best known amongst these. For more than a decade, his practice has combined photography, appropriated archives and datasets, and purpose-built AI models in projects that graphically expose the human biases informing computer vision, especially in the labelling of photographs for machine-learning training sets and the development of algorithms for interpretating images.1Paglen’s work is the template for what I’ll call the tech-jamming approach. This path can only be taken by artists with the know-how to train AI models and build custom systems, but it is defined more by goal than by technique. Typically, the objective is to flip the technology back on itself in a subversive or critical way, or to query the ethical implications of AI applications that increasingly pervade everyday life. Josh Azzarella’s project Untitled #310 (2021), published in our special issue of Photography and Culture, is a compelling example. Using a free database of labelled sounds, the artist trained an AI model to recognize the acoustic fingerprint of a gunshot (akin to the ShotSpotter™ technology deployed by many police departments); when the sound of “gunshot” was identified by the AI it immediately triggered a skyfacing camera to capture an image. When exhibited, each work in the series is composed of three different representations of the same data, evoking Joseph Kosuth’s famous conceptual One and Three works of the 1960s: the photograph of the sky, the spectrogram of the triggering sound, and the readout of the sound’s classification (“gunshot, gunfire”) along with the AI’s threshold data for that identification. “Unlike private surveillance devices utilized for public safety,” writes Azzarella, “Untitled #310 is transparent about its failures and its images openly indeterminate.”2Untitled #310 highlights how AI’s “reliance on algorithmic recognition introduces the potential for misinterpretation” – a potentially deadly consequence in the growing number of surveillance, drone, and facial recognition systems that make identifications, draw conclusions, and execute actions through artificial intelligence. Simultaneously, the project poses questions about how AI will challenge fundamental definitions of the photograph. Photography’s reputation as truthful witness derives from its status (however contested) as indexical; the photograph, as a sign or representation, is understood to be caused by the very thing it pictures. What kind of evidence will the photograph become when initiated by the non-human trigger of algorithmic determination? What does that picture represent, relative to the (unreliable) phenomenon that caused it and the (potential) violence it cannot record?The tech-jamming approach is, at least for now, likely to result in artworks more conceptual than pictorial. The product might be an oozing visualization of statistical patterns, a series of glitchy images rendered by algorithms operating on limited datasets, or a torrent of prompt-generated pictures intended to distort the data pool associated with a word or proper name. The second approach, one whose possibilities for photographers and artists is growing daily, is one I’ll call “co-creative.” When diffusion-based AI models became available as consumer products, capable of generating images from a text prompt that can pass for camera-made photographs, commentary focused on whether AI threatened to “replace” photography and whether
11 TEXTSits “photoreal” outputs constituted fraud. Photo artist and AI engineer H. Rashed Haq argues such a binary distinction is already outdated, given that the computational photography of smartphone cameras already uses AI enhancements to “pre-process” our every captured image. Photography, at least digital photography, is better understood as a technological spectrum in which generative AI presents a dramatic extension. Haq calls this moment the advent of “computational creativity.”Computational creativity may be in early stages but already presents rich possibilities for visual expression within a realm still recognizable as photographic – meaning expression that calls on photographic aesthetics and their associations to make its point. Haq identifies several emerging modes: perceptual realism (deploying traditional photo aesthetics to assert the existence of something that was not or could not be photographed), stochasticity (exploiting the role of chance), multi-modality (combining visual and text inputs and outputs), combinatorial creativity (algorithmic blending of diverse elements or styles), and most expansively and provocatively, “the ability to photograph the imagination.” Several are combined in Haq’s ethereal rendering of the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a pre-photography edifice, with Easter-egg anachronisms embedded in the composition. Transcending the limitations of time and space, he argues, generative AI allows artists to render dreamed landscapes, abstract concepts, or surreal scenes “with precision and creativity.”3 We may be tempted to protest the imaginary is not photography’s proper subject, but recall that artistic advances in photography have always been driven by efforts to make the medium convey ideas and values beyond the visible. Although early outputs leaned to gimmick, several recent projects demonstrate computational creativity’s powerful promise. In just one notable sector of contemporary practice, it provides the means to alter the past or speculate futures for racialized subjects who’ve historically experienced photography as violence or erasure. Minne Atairu, featured in the Aperture special issue, works with Midjourney to generate AI-photographic images of blue-Black beauty, harnessing the aesthetics of Afrofuturism to a critical Josh Azzarella,Untitled #310, 2021chromogenic printdimensions variableCourtesy of the ArtistLeft: Image created after the AI detection of a gunshotUpper right: Audio spectrogram of identified soundLower right: Identified sound classes and confidence rate
Capture 2026 12H. Rashed HaqSt. Paul’s Under Construction, from the When It Happened series, 2023archival pigment print from a generative photograph45.7 x 60.9 cmCourtesy of the Artist
13 TEXTSexploration of AI’s limitations. Her results reveal that algorithms are trained to associate “beauty” with lighter-skinned complexions, and point out how gaps in underlying datasets make prompts like “Black woman with blond braids” nearly impossible to render. More poignant is Igùn (2025–), her series in which a custom AI model is trained on archival photographs of the Benin Bronzes to realize, via 3D printing, a continuance of her ancestral homeland’s artistic legacy uninterrupted by colonialism and looting.4 Atairu’s art suggests that much-needed critique of AI operations and datasets can be compatible – even in a single artist’s practice – with the technology’s co-creative capacities to summon new and alternate realities. Atairu’s mix of conceptual goals and varied AI tools points to the imminent future. As generative-image AI continues to evolve, Haq points out, users in 2026 no longer need to know how to code from scratch; they can use coding assistants like Cursor AI to generate their own AI models, which can now be trained on consumer-grade hardware without sophisticated cloud-storage resources (unimaginable just two years ago). An increasing number of tools also enable local customization of massive “frontier” models like Midjourney for individualized aims. These developments expand the tool kit and potential output formats for all artists – including those who take tech-jamming or socio-critical approaches to AI as a subject. Prompting, meanwhile, becomes an ever more important and nuanced skill for wielding models effectively, putting speech on par with pre-visualization in this newly elastic version of photography. For photojournalism, political messaging, and advertising, among the many fields where we count on photographic aesthetics to assure us of facts, there’s ample cause for caution. But for artists pushing toward photography’s creative future, the horizon is boundless.1. Sarah M. Miller, “Trevor Paglen, Ways of Seeing: A Conversation with Sarah M. Miller,” Aperture no. 257 “Image Worlds to Come: Photography and AI” (Winter 2024): 38–49.2. Josh Azzarella, “Untitled #310,” Photography and Culture vol. 18, no. 3–4 (October 2025).3. H. Rashed Haq, “The Work of Art in the Age of Computational Creativity,” Photography and Culture vol. 18, no. 3–4 (October 2025).4. Tiana Reid, “Minnie Atairu: Model Studies,” Aperture no. 257 “Image Worlds to Come: Photography and AI” (Winter 2024): 51–61.
Capture 2026 14Camila FalquezCristiana Martínez Quiñonez, She/Her, Buenaventura, from the Compañerx series, 2024 Courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Traore GalleryPart of the Arbutus Greenway Billboards Public Art Project
15The Compañerx series was created in collaboration with stylist Lorena Maza, writer César Vallejo, and activists Juli Salamanca and Yoko Ruiz
Capture 2026Sheida SoleimaniThe Blind Owl, from the Ghostwriter series, 2023Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, BrusselsPart of the Clark Dr Billboards Public Art Project
PUBLIC ARTBC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation 18–25Wherever You Are: An Interview with Michelle Sound18–21 Emmy Lee WallCanada Line Public Art Project 40–47 I’ll Be Right Here, and Here, and Here: Movement and Time Travel in Michelle Sound’s Wherever You Are22–25 Jessica JohnsBillboard Public Art Projects 26–39
Capture 2026 18BC Hydro Dal Grauer Public Art ProjectMichelle SoundWherever You Are, 2026Michelle SoundWherever You Are, 2026 Courtesy of the Artist and Ceremonial / ArtSite photo: Nelson MouëllicInstallation mock-up: Robert MarksCurated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography FestivalApril 2026 – March 2027944 Burrard St, Vancouver
19 PUBLIC ARTWherever You Are: An Interview with Michelle SoundMichelle Sound’s multidisciplinary practice explores cultural identity and knowledge, often highlighting the ways in which family and community are instrumental in building our sense of self. Wherever You Are (2026) is a site-specific photograph celebrating Indigenous presence in the city. When Sound was asked to create a new work for the façade of the Dal Grauer Substation, an image that the artist knew would have a monumental public presence in the heart of Vancouver for a year, her starting point was her memory of what it was like to grow up on the east side of the city. She recalls her aunts and sisters wearing beadwork during the 1980s and ’90s, a time when the cultural significance of beadwork was generally less understood and accepted. Shot against the familiar pink exterior of the Pink Pearl Chinese Restaurant on East Hastings Street, Wherever You Are features Métis and Cree artist Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire turned away from theThe BC Hydro Dal Grauer Substation Public Art Project is generously supported by Presthaya Fixter and Conrad Whelan, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and sponsored by MLT Aikins LLP, Downtown Van, and MNP LLP
Capture 2026 20viewer so that we might admire the back of the beaded jacket she is wearing. Borrowed from Cardinal Cire’s uncle, the garment once belonged to her great grandfather; it is both a family heirloom and a symbol of her ancestors, keeping her connected to her community and proudly making visible her cultural heritage in the urban terrain. Emmy Lee WallDid you have different considerations in mind while creating an artwork intended for a public space versus one that is created for presentation within gallery walls? Can you talk a little about your process in creating this image? Michelle SoundI was really having to think about scale and the details of the work. In some of my other pieces the details are best when people can stop and look closely at the piece, and that is not necessarily something that people do with a large-scale public artwork. I also had to think about the grid lines that are visible and covering the artwork. I originally photographed a few friends that were facing the camera, but the lines covered part of their faces and broke up the image, so it didn’t work as well.ELWThere is a long history of figures being reversed in art – I’m thinking of Watteau and Caspar David Friedrich paintings. I’m curious about your thinking in presenting the woman in your work with her back to the audience.MSI’m aware of those works but I was not thinking about historical references of the backs of figures. I am more aware of contemporary works such as Rebecca Belmore’s sister (2010), Jin-me Yoon’s A Group of Sixty-Seven(1996), and Shelley Niro’s This Land Is Mime Land series (1992) that have some of the figures facing away from the camera. The main reason I had her facing away was I did not want the grid lines to go through her face or eyes, which would be really distracting, but most importantly I wanted to fully show the amazing beaded smoked hide jacket she is wearing. I asked her to braid her hair, as I wanted the image to be active and have some movement. I was hoping that activating the image would have it not appear like it was a museum image or an archival document of the jacket.ELWThanks for sharing these contemporary references! Your work encompasses many different media, including photography, cyanotypes on hide, textiles, and incorporates beadwork and pompoms. Can you talk a bit about the way you use different media in your work? And has photography always been a significant component of your practice? MSI work with a lot of different materials, including photography, textiles, and Indigenous material practices like beadwork, drum making, and caribou fur tufting. When thinking about a project, I usually try to combine different practices in unusual ways – cyanotypes on elk hide, beadwork and tufting on ripped photographs, textiles and drums. These are the materials that I’m going to work with and these are some of the things that I know how to do, and I think about how I can create something that is unexpected. I want to incorporate things like beadwork and tufting in ways that make sense to my work. For example, I do not make clothing or jewellery, so there has to be a different way that I incorporate these materials into my practice. Photography has been an important part of my practice for a long time. I started taking photographs and working in the darkroom when I was in high school and did a few years of analogue work, taking pictures and printing in black-and-white, and I always really loved that process. Unfortunately, when I started art school and was in post-secondary, I did not have access to that, so I didn’t use photography in that way anymore. I do use photographs in my practice a lot even though I would not necessarily call myself a photographer, probably because I don’t work exclusively in photography and I don’t know all the technical things about cameras; that is not a part of the work that interests me or that I feel is relevant to what I want to say. But I would say I’m always working with the accessibility of photography, working with point-andshoot cameras and digital cameras and working with it in a way that is more related to the everyday and the home. It’s one of the reasons that I like working with family photographs. I take a lot of landscape photos and I’m interested in capturing images of the land in the way that most of us do, on our phones or just quickly capturing a moment, just taking snapshots.ELWThe work on the Dal Grauer features Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire, who is both Métis and from the Beaver Lake Cree First Nation. I think clothing and accessories play a big part in your work in signalling the significance of her culture. You and I chatted about navigating contemporary urban life as an Indigenous person and how you also used earrings as a marker in many ways to celebrate your heritage. Wondering if you can share a bit about that?
21 PUBLIC ARTMSI wear beadwork and Indigenous designers because I love our artwork and it’s so beautiful, and because I love to support Indigenous makers. I wouldn’t say it’s to signal to non-Indigenous people that I am Indigenous, but they will often then assume that if I am wearing beadwork. For this work, I was thinking about wearing beadwork as a way to carry a piece of home and family with you even when you are away from your community or family. I think wearing beautiful designs, with beadwork or on clothing, can make us feel more connected to our culture when we are living in the city. For Zoe, I asked her to wear whatever she wanted, but a bit dressed up, like maybe she was going to Indigenous Fashion Week, or hanging out with a bunch of aunties and cousins in the city. She was able to borrow from her uncle this amazing beaded jacket that belonged to her chapan (great-grandfather), and those kinds of pieces are so incredible to have, as we don’t all have beadwork or clothing that our ancestors owned or made. I was thinking about how beaded clothing is not only a family heirloom, but it keeps us connected to our ancestors and we carry them with us no matter where we are. I really wanted to photograph this in the city, as so many Indigenous people grow up or move to the city and the city is the Land too. We might be physically away from our communities, but we are still connected to them through our families, and being able to wear their items wrapped around us, like an embrace, is a gift.ELWPresenting work on such a grand scale, in the public sphere, for a full year is in many ways an amazing opportunity to capture the public’s imagination and broadcast your ideas to folks who may not necessarily seek out a contemporary art experience. What did you want to say with this image on the Dal Grauer? MSI was interested in showing an image that featured Indigenous presence in the city. I was working with memory to begin with, thinking about growing up in East Vancouver and what that experience was like for me. I was remembering how my aunts and sisters would sometimes wear beadwork around the city and how, back in the ’80s or ’90s, that felt like a riskier thing to do. Now Indigenous art feels more celebrated and accepted and it’s more common for me to see it in the city and not just on the rez or at powwows. I wanted to make a piece that featured the city and that was taken in East Vancouver, specifically; this photo was taken outside the Pink Pearl restaurant on Hastings. The photo is showing Zoe from the back, and it’s maybe hard to tell the time period in which it’s taken. It feels like it could represent any of our aunties, and this piece, to me, really felt like it was a way to take up space in places that were not always welcoming or safe for us. This is an acknowledgement of our strength and creativity wherever we are.
Capture 2026 22Michelle SoundWherever You Are, 2026 Courtesy of the Artist and Ceremonial / ArtGenerously supported by Presthaya Fixter and Conrad Whelan, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and sponsored by MLT Aikins LLP, Downtown Van, and MNP LLP
23 PUBLIC ARTI’ll Be Right Here, and Here, and Here: Movement and Time Travel in Michelle Sound’s Wherever You AreJessica JohnsThe first thing I notice about Michelle Sound’s photograph Wherever You Are (2026) is the subject’s hair. I’m looking at the back of Zoe Ann Cardinal Cire’s head. One braid, fully completed, falls down her back, longer even than the fringe that runs across the middle of the hide jacket she wears. Her shadow is cast on a dusty pink wall in the background. Most of Cardinal Cire’s shadow is amorphous, covered by her body, except for the clear shape of the ends of another section of hair that she holds out at an angle, her fingers working it into another braid. This piece of hair explodes into a tuft, which is then doubled in a shadow on the wall. It is an extension of herself. Her hair moves beyond what is held in her hand and attaches itself, if only briefly, to the building of the Pink Pearl restaurant on East Hastings. At the same time, since nehiyawak hair holds memories and is one of many connections to our homelands, this photo shows something not pictured: Cardinal Cire’s home community in Treaty 6 territory, over a thousand kilometres away. The hair doubling, of subject and shadow, signals her ability to be in, at least, two different locations at once.
Capture 2026 24The next thing I notice, of course, is the jacket. It is tanned hide and twotoned, mostly beige with darker brown pieces for the cuffs and upper back. It’s not often that a photograph can evoke a smell, but this one does. I know that it’s naturally smoked hide because of the way sections of the beige hide bloom darker, places where more smoke would have naturally gathered. I can smell the smoke this jacket holds through the screen of my computer, long after I look away from it. Intricate beadwork, blue circles, and bulbed red, orange, and pink flowers spread across the shoulders of the jacket, where you can imagine an arm would lie if it were draped across Cardinal Cire’s shoulders. This beadwork continues across the cuffs. Preparing a hide in this way and beading with such detail takes time. When I look at this jacket, I see hours upon hours of labour, patience, and preparation. I see a kind of care that comes from dedication.This is by all accounts and definitions a beautiful jacket, both aesthetically and in craftsmanship. It reminds me of a teaching my Elder, Jo-Ann Saddleback, often shares. She says we should always dress for the Creator, that we need to sparkle and shine so bright that Creator can’t miss us. I think about this teaching when I see Michelle Sound wearing a pair of earrings as big as her head; I think about this teaching when I see someone wearing Cheyenne Rain LeGrande’s signature platform moccasins; I think about this teaching when I wear a camouflage print ribbon skirt to ceremony, because I feel more aligned with my gender in darker colours. And I think about this teaching as I look at this photo of Cardinal Cire wearing a jacket so beautiful that it certainly could be seen from the stars.I am reminded, too, of another teaching from nôhkom Jo-Ann Saddleback. She says that nehiyawak have always understood our bodies to be a canvas. Traditionally, nehiyawak travelled year-round. We are moving people, people in motion with the seasons, with trails cut across territories leading to bodies of water and medicines. Because of this, the only way to carry our art with us was to put it on our bodies. In Michelle’s photo, Cardinal Cire is captured in movement as she braids her hair, which makes me think about the importance of movement to our dress, to our bodies, and to the way we have always claimed space in the world: dressing for the Creator while we make our way to our next destination.Wherever You Are is a photo that looks timeless, like it could have been taken anywhere at any time. It is at once, and repeatedly, everywhere and always. With Cardinal Cire’s back turned, without a face to place her, it also feels like she could be anyone, from any nation, any gender, any community. The effect of this, of course, is recognition. I look at this photo and I see my aunty in High Prairie in the 1980s. Someone else might look at the photo and see themselves or their kin in another place and at another time. This is all to say, this photo makes me think of someone I intimately know. It makes me think of my family. It allows the relief that comes with recognition. Yet it does all of this without falling into the trap of pan-Indigeneity. Though this photo looks like it could be anyone anywhere, there is, at the same time, too much specificity for that to be true. Like thumbprints or strands of DNA, unique patterns come from specific communities, so the beaded flowers on Cardinal Cire’s jacket are unlike the flower designs from my community, even though our nations are only 350 kilometres apart. Everything from the pattern, to the tones in the smoked hide, to the position and length of the fringe, tells a story about who Cardinal Cire is and where she is from, even without revealing her face.In this way, our clothing, like our hair, is also a compass pointing to where
25 PUBLIC ARTand who we are from, a direction to family and lineage and name. Wherever You Are, then, is as much a time travel piece as it is a photo of Cardinal Cire braiding her hair and wearing a beautiful jacket, bringing us through time, memories, and life in Treaty 6 territory to a shadow cast on a dusty pink wall at the Pink Pearl restaurant in East Vancouver.
Capture 2026 26Billboard Public Art ProjectCamila FalquezMarisol, She/He, Andrea, She/Her, Verónica, She/Her, Santuario, Risaralda, from the Compañerx series, 2023Courtesy of the Artist and Hannah Traore GalleryThe Compañerx series was created in collaboration with stylist Lorena Maza, writer César Vallejo, and activists Juli Salamanca and Yoko RuizSite photo: Dennis HaInstallation mock-up: Robert Marks
27 PUBLIC ARTCurated by Katerina StathopoulouMarch 14 – May 24Sited on seven billboards along the Arbutus Greenway between Burrard St and Fir St, VancouverPresented in partnership with the City of Vancouver and sponsored by Pattison Outdoor BillboardsThe Arbutus Greenway Billboards are generously supported by Bruce Munro Wright, Ron Francis Regan, and the Canada Council for the ArtsCompañerx (2023–24) is a series of portraits by Camila Falquez that accompanies a legislative proposal, titled Ley Integral Trans, Ya!, aiming to protect the rights of trans and non-binary individuals in Colombia. With a dedicated focus on social activism, Falquez – who is of Colombian heritage – interweaves the traditions of portraiture and fashion photography with elements of performativity. For Compañerx, Falquez collaborated with stylist Lorena Maza, writer César Vallejo, and activists Juli Salamanca and Yoko Ruiz, from the organization Liga de Salud Trans, to photograph eighty individuals from over thirty regions, ranging from the mountains of Risaralda to the seaside town of Buenaventura. The series includes seemingly disparate communities: Afro-Colombian and Indigenous people, sex workers, HIV-positive individuals, and victims of Colombia’s armed conflict, among others. Collectively, the photographs illustrate the multifaceted nature of gender identity and underscore Falquez’s commitment to telling their stories. The portraits honour the resilience and endurance of vulnerable communities whose existence remains under threat.Falquez believes in the power of photography to challenge Western traditional notions of beauty and power. Merging art-historical references from Surrealism to the Renaissance with a DIY aesthetic, Falquez reimagines her subjects evoking a sense of perseverance and possibility. In her compositions, she drapes her figures in boldly coloured silk fabrics, creating costumes and accessories that highlight the individuality of each subject. The arresting portraits often gaze directly at the camera, creating intimate connections between subject and viewer. These deeply personal photographs extend an invitation to diverse audiences seeking solidarity, safety, and a sense of belonging. Arbutus Greenway Billboards: Camila FalquezCompañerx
Capture 2026 28Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art ProjectJeremy DennisNot One More Step (To Protect Shinnecock Land), from the Sacredness of Hills series, 2018–Courtesy of the ArtistSite photo: Dennis HaInstallation mock-up: Robert MarksCurated by Jake Kimble, Audain Curatorial Fellow, Capture Photography FestivalHastings St Billboards: Jeremy Dennis, Maureen Gruben, Katherine Takpannie
29 PUBLIC ARTMarch 21 – May 31A multi-site public art project on five billboards along East Hastings St, between Hawks Ave and Vernon Dr, VancouverThe Hastings St Billboards are generously supported by the Audain Foundation, the City of Vancouver, and the Canada Council for the ArtsI’m Moveable Jake KimbleI often chuckle when people think the immovable can’t be moved – I mean, the very nature of the word suggests it can’t, and yet we see it happen again and again. An Indigenous reality that we have to live with is coexisting alongside systems such as land dispossession, the criminalization of culture, and the forced participation in colonial systems (the main one being capitalism). Indigeneity is immovable – and yet we move; the word is a trickster.
Capture 2026 30This is what Jeremy Dennis, Katherine Takpannie, and Maureen Gruben exemplify in their works brought forth for this year’s Capture Photography Festival. These artists grapple with and hold conversations with the attempted eradication of Indigeneity. The lens becomes a tool that all three artists use to carve out a presence that refutes dismissal.Jeremy Dennis, an enrolled tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, New York, constructs photographs of Indigeneity that directly confront structure, in every sense of the word. In his series The Lazy (2019), the artist positions himself confronting buildings and spaces that, under capitalism, have been seized and possessed. Dennis’s additional photograph from his ongoing series The Sacredness of Hills depicts an Indigenous woman resting in the bucket of a loader, tired from the excavation of sacred land. It’s ironic that the word “exhaust” comes from machines that quite literally exhaust Indigenous Peoples. The blatant disregard for Indigenous burial sites, stewarded land, and once-sacred spaces is a theme that Dennis evokes so brilliantly. This confrontation is not only pertinent but essential.An irrefutable declaration is what makes these works move me.Katherine Takpannie, playing Raven in her piece Tulugaq #6 | ᑐᓗᒐᖅ| Raven (2025), carries forward the permanence of Indigeneity. Like Dennis, she is both the photographed and the photographer – which adds to a new lineage of correcting how Indigenous Peoples are represented. Takpannie (an urban Inuk born in Montreal) demonstrates resilience by being a self-taught photographer. Historically, our stories have been shaped by those who thought us dead (*cough* Edward S. Curtis *cough*), and those who were governmentfunded mind you. Takpannie situates herself with a contemporary nature, combining traditional storytelling with a cheeky regard to today.Which brings me to the work of one Maureen Gruben (Inuvialuit). Born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, Gruben uses the camera to capture contemporary sustainability. Clothing survey tripods (which were recently salvaged from an abandoned 1980s oil camp) in vintage polar bear rugs (which were gifted to her by a museum in Vancouver) provides us with an image of what coexistence looks like. Aidainnaqduanni means “we are finally home” in Inuvialuktun – a call to a culture that remains. Framing two different Katherine TakpannieTulugaq #6 | ᑐᓗᒐᖅ | Raven, 2025Courtesy of the Artist and Olga Korper Gallery
31 PUBLIC ARTMaureen GrubenAidainnaqduanni, Morning, 2020Courtesy of the ArtistPhoto: Kyra Kordoskitechnologies asks the audience what they think about coexistence.These artists conjure dialogues of inhabitance and habitance. Holding two realities in one hand is a trick that Dennis, Takpannie, and Gruben make look easy. They show that the immovable not only moves, but shakes.
Capture 2026 32Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art ProjectTorbjørn RødlandSocks, Shoes and Tail, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and STANDARD (OSLO)Site photo: Dennis HaInstallation mock-up: Robert Marks
33 PUBLIC ARTGreyChurch Billboard: Torbjørn RødlandPublic BricolageCurated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival Sited on a billboard at Fraser St and E 15th Ave, VancouverMarch 14, 2026 – March 6, 2027Socks, Shoes and Tail, 2020On view March 14 – July 19, 2026Pink Roof and Window, 2019–22On view July 25 – November 22, 2026Eggs, 2019On view November 28, 2026 – March 6, 2027Torbjørn Rødland’s photographic practice includes a wide range of subjects, such as portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, united by their uncanny ability to both reinforce and destabilize the things and images that surround us daily. Connecting the language of pre-modernist painting, twentieth-century art photography, and popular contemporary illustration, Rødland’s photographs often recall dream-like tableaux due to their hyperreal and surreal nature. His work takes as its subject materials and objects that are often quite familiar, but through their juxtaposition, the artist’s intervention, and the highly sensory qualities of what he depicts, Rødland’s images prevent us from glossing over these things. Instead, they suspend the gaze through their ambiguity and the uncertainty they embrace. Rødland’s images entice the audience to look both longer and deeper, often provoking an emotional response and thereby exposing both personal and culturally conditioned ways of seeing and being. Although ripe with diverse subject matter and symbolism, Rødland’s photographs are united by the way they ask viewers to confront that which makes them uncomfortable and sit with this discomfort to explore its origins – asking what this feeling tells us about society, about ourselves. In connecting contemporary provocations to inherited forms, Rødland makes us question the meaning and acceptance of certain subjects and symbols in society. The GreyChurch Billboard is generously supported by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill, the City of Vancouver, and the Canada Council for the Arts
Capture 2026 34Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art ProjectSheida SoleimaniSafar, from the Ghostwriterseries, 2022Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, BrusselsSite photo: Dennis HaInstallation mock-up: Robert Marks
35 PUBLIC ARTClark Dr, Vancouver, and Dundas St, Toronto, Billboards:Sheida SoleimaniGhostwriterCurated by Emmy Lee Wall, Capture Photography Festival March 21 – May 31A multi-site project on three billboards on Clark Dr, Vancouver, and on two billboards on Dundas St, TorontoSited on three billboards on Clark Dr, between Adanac St and Napier St, VancouverSheida Soleimani’s work can be seen in a two-part exhibition as part of Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver (April 2026) and CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto (May 2026). Soleimani constructs detailed compositions that marry photographs, props, found objects, live animals, and people to create magical, dream-like montages. Deliberately combining her familial history with the political, Soleimani’s practice considers her cultural inheritance, the environment, and migration, all through evocative, visually sumptuous pictures. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani often creates work that includes her parents as subjects. Her works for Capture include Deliverance (2024), an image which pays homage to her father’s twoweek long trek on horseback to Turkey, traversing the Zagros Mountains. In this work, her father sits on horseback, a pose historically reserved in paintings for men in positions of power. He is depicted, however, without shoes, as a reference to the moment when his guide urged him to run in the snow to help regain sensation in his frostbitten toes. Safar (2022) similarly references her parents’ migration from Iran. The image features pomegranates, fruits her mom planted from seeds she brought from her garden at home to propagate in her newly adopted country. The red suitcase in the image is the one her father used as he escaped over the mountains; the tag is from JFK airport, where he eventually landed. Soleimani learned bird rehabilitation from her mother, and The Blind Owl (2023) features a bird, one of hundreds that have come into the artist’s care over the past five years. It arrived blind and unwell and eventually was euthanized by the artist and her mother. The image includes sour oranges suspended around the owl that were also grown from seeds brought by the artist’s mother from her garden when she escaped Iran. The work is symbolic of the owl’s burial in the family garden, which is no longer accessible to the artist and her parents. Each image demonstrates the deeply metaphoric nature of Soleimani’s works, embedded with personal and cultural histories. On view as part of CONTACT are Agitator and Dissident (both 2023), again centring the artist’s parents. For these works, Soleimani has constructed elaborate backdrops, which she photographed with her parents situated therein. Unlike standard portraits, the purpose of which is to capture likeness, both individuals face away from the camera, denying viewers access to their faces, thereby creating both singular portraits and anonymous figures. There is a long history of painted portraits featuring husbands and wives, often used to demonstrate wealth and social status. In these images, however, both her parents raise their fists, typically a gesture of solidarity, power, and resistance, often with a political movement. This gesture of defiance against authority, along with the titles of the works, serves to suggest her parents’ political beliefs, a critical part of the artist’s family narrative embedded in much of her work. The Clark Drive Billboards are generously supported by Tara and Chris Poseley, the City of Vancouver, and the Canada Council for the Arts
Capture 2026 36Sheida SoleimaniLeft: Agitator, 2023Right: Dissident, 2023from the Ghostwriter seriesCourtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, BrusselsCONTACT Photography Festival Public Art Project
37 PUBLIC ARTApril 27 – May 24Sited on two billboards on Dundas St at Rusholme Rd, TorontoPresented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival
Capture 2026 38Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art ProjectCannupa Hanska LugerFuture Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU, 2026Courtesy of the ArtistSite photo: Dennis HaInstallation mock-up: Robert Marks
39 PUBLIC ARTEast Vancouver Billboard: Cannupa Hanska LugerFuture Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOUCurated by Eva Respini, Vancouver Art GalleryMarch 28 – September 27Sited on one billboard on East Hastings St near Woodland Dr, adjacent to the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre SocietyAs new ecological realities reshape the planet, what role does art play? Artists are not scientists, nor are they journalists. But they invite us to think differently and imagine new futures. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s work offers one such mediation on the possibilities.Hanska Luger’s billboard, Future Ancestral Technologies: WE SURVIVE YOU(2026), is part of a larger body of work that includes sculpture, film, performance, and installation. Future Ancestral Technologies is a form of Indigenous science fiction that imagines how our culture confronts and shifts into the future. Featuring warrior- or sentry-like figures sporting brightly coloured and patterned regalia, WE SURVIVE YOUis both joyful and imposing. Who is implied in We and You? This work underscores that Indigenous knowledge is critical to human survival. In this century shaped by climate change and socio-political upheaval, Hanska Luger insists the act of imagining is necessary. This public artwork’s location has meaning that resonates both locally and globally. WE SURVIVE YOU is presented on the unceded and ancestral lands of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and is located adjacent to the Aboriginal Friendship Centre. East Hastings is one of Vancouver’s busiest streets, a commercial thoroughfare with intersecting histories of industry, immigration, poverty, and social upheaval. Together, these confluences give rise and context to the phrase: We survive you.WE SURVIVE YOU is part of the exhibition Future Geographies: Art in the Century of Climate Change, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 17, 2026, to January 10, 2027Billboard design by Cannupa Hanska Luger, originally commissioned for Landback.art, in collaboration with NDN Collective, INDÍGENA, and For Freedoms, 2021. This new presentation is commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival, 2026.
Capture 2026 40Ali McCannHannah ClausSami FarraYann PocreauSylvan HamburgerMichael LoveKeely O’BrienCanada Line Public Art ProjectPresented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program – InTransit BCCanada Line Public Art Stations MapFor the 2026 multi-site Canada Line Public Art Project, Capture has installed lens-based artworks at Canada Line stations throughout Greater Vancouver. This year’s project stretches across seven locations, from Waterfront to Richmond-Brighouse Station, and includes contributions from Capture, Booooooom, CONTACT Photography Festival, and Richmond Art Gallery. NVancouverWaterfrontVancouver City CentreOlympic VillageKing EdwardAberdeenRichmond-BrighouseLansdowneFraser RiverRichmond
41 PUBLIC ARTWaterfront Station: Ali McCannWorks from the Joy (No Dark Days) series, 2022–25Ali McCannRemote Release, from the Joy (No Dark Days) series, 2022Courtesy of the ArtistSponsored by Downtown VanGenerously supported by Rob BrunoCurated by Anna Luth, Capture Photography FestivalApril 1 – August 31Ali McCann is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist exploring the constructed nature of photography. Drawing upon the still-life genre and the history of photography, McCann’s surreal images evoke a sense of nostalgia and illusion.This series takes inspiration from Eastman Kodak’s 1979 guidebook The Joy of Photography, which offered practical instruction for aspiring photographers. This book was one of McCann’s first encounters with photography in her studies as a teenager. Each picture is captured on colour film using a 1970s medium-format camera. Incorporating a host of analogue and experimental techniques, the pictures are meticulously staged with kitschy props and backdrops that hark back to McCann’s adolescence. The picturesque images adopt a painterly style that has preoccupied generations of photographers. Using Romantic aesthetics such as soft focus and dreamy colour, these images evoke a sense of nostalgia that becomes an antidote to the imagesaturation of today. Through her embrace of sentimentality – a quality that is often dismissed – McCann’s work takes on a psychological charge. The title of the series, which refers to Kodak’s manual, simultaneously acknowledges and denies the presence of “dark days” and by doing so, echoes the tension of comfort and disorientation in the work. In this series, McCann interrogates the medium of photography itself: the potential for emotional affect and the collapse of our ability to “read” images in the age of artificial intelligence. With photography more accessible than ever before, the artist considers the material, optical, and social dimensions of the medium through the joy of the analogue process.
Capture 2026 42Vancouver City Centre Station: Hannah ClausWorks from the flatrocks series, 2024Hannah Clausflatrocks 1, 2024Courtesy of the ArtistSponsored by Downtown VanGenerously supported by Rob BrunoCurated by Anna Luth, Capture Photography Festival April 1 – August 31Hannah Claus’s artwork ranges from richly layered photographs to sensorial installations that consider relationships to the land, water, and one another. Claus is a multidisciplinary artist of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) and English ancestry and is a member of Kenhtè:ke Kanien’kehà:ka (Tyendinaga Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte). Claus takes interest in water as a connecting and transformational force. The series flatrocks is composed of many images of the Kaniatarowánen (St. Lawrence River) that flows from the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic Ocean. The river holds deep cultural significance for the Kanien’kehá:ka and is a source of food, medicine, and livelihood. This particular area by the water was once a community gathering place. In the 1950s, the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway – a water transportation system of locks, canals, and channels – dramatically altered and expropriated Kanien’kehá:ka land, cutting off the community from the river. Claus’s artwork addresses both the cultural significance and the colonial disruption of this place. Seamless movement and reflection in the images reveal new crystalline forms. Claus states that the repetition, altering, and mirroring of the photographs are a “means of disrupting and transforming the everyday to suggest alternative ways of seeing and understanding the worlds around us.” This process echoes the artist’s cultural belief that many parts come together and make one harmonious whole. Like intricate beadwork designs, the mesmerizing artwork gives way to the patterns of the natural world. As the light filters through the images, the serenity of water flowing over smooth stones suggests an understanding of place that surpasses remembered time.
43 PUBLIC ARTOlympic Village Station: Sami FarraFragile Monuments, 2021Sami FarraLight Cube, from the Fragile Monuments series, 2021Courtesy of the ArtistPresented in partnership with BooooooomGenerously supported Curated by Booooooom and Capture Photography Festival by Rob BrunoApril 1 – August 31Swiss architect and photographer Sami Farra’s installation Fragile Monuments investigates the way we understand the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional picture plane. In this body of work, Farra presents images of accidental sculptures formed from found objects – discarded, everyday detritus such as a pile of rocks and timber, plaster, or wood planks leaning against a wall. These items create precarious installations which Farra has documented, revealing the subtle beauty present even in that which is often overlooked. Other works in this installation demonstrate Farra’s ongoing contemplation of the materiality of photography itself through a process of printing and photographing misshapen and physically manipulated prints which form surreal, slouching sculptures. In considering the translation between picture and sculpture and back again, Farra asks the audience to deliberate on the constructed world as well as the way in which the photographic medium represents that which is around us. Presented in a myriad of sizes, floating across the face of the Canada Line’s Olympic Village Station, Farra’s installation emphasizes the poetic and metaphoric nature of our encounters with both the physical and visual.
Capture 2026 44King Edward Station: Yann PocreauArchipel, 2021Yann PocreauArchipel (detail), 2021Courtesy of the Artist and Blouin Division, Montreal and TorontoPresented in partnership with CONTACT Photography FestivalGenerously supported by Rob Bruno Curated by CONTACT Photography FestivalApril 1 – August 31Montreal-based artist Yann Pocreau works across photography, sculpture, and installation, and holds a keen interest in slide projections, light, and colour. He reimagines found photographs through interventions that consider photography’s complex connection to memory and time. Archipel is based on a found 35mm slide photograph, originally intended for projection in the context of a larger grouping of travel photographs. Projecting the image onto the wall of his studio, Pocreau repeatedly re-photographed the image with slight colour variations, suggestive of a film strip or contact sheet. Location unknown, the quintessential landscape captures the hazy horizon and the vastness of the sea, framed by a shadowy cliffside, with a solitary island at its centre. The artificial colours evoke a mysterious, dream-like quality that is both haunting and familiar, futuristic yet timeless. The subtle shifting of colour across the three images allows room for alternative narratives and emotions. Like an archipelago formation, Pocreau’s work creates the possibility of different spaces or experiences as the island repeats. Here, one can question photography’s role in understanding our relationship to the natural world: With the oversaturation of images in today’s public realm, are they becoming an “adequate” replacement for the real?Presented as a large-scale, three-part mural on the glass façade of Vancouver’s King Edward Station, a short distance from the Pacific coast, Archipel is a poetic meditation on time and place. The evocative, futuristic-yet-nostalgic stillness of the work suggests a sense of solitude and questions the future of our tumultuous world.
45 PUBLIC ARTAberdeen Station: Sylvan HamburgerRewilding (Autumn & Spring), 2024–25Sylvan Hamburger Rewilding (Autumn & Spring), 2024–25 Courtesy of the ArtistPresented and funded by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with CaptureCurated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art GalleryMarch 2026 – March 2027Rewilding (Autumn & Spring) considers the disappearance of the once-ubiquitous Vancouver Special within our changing urban landscape. Proliferating in the 1970s, the Vancouver Special was a quick and relatively affordable housing style that developed throughout the Lower Mainland and became associated with immigrant and workingclass families. Because of their proliferation, homogeneous design, and use by marginalized residents, this architectural style soon acquired a contentious reputation and was eventually halted by new municipal bylaws in the mid-1980s. Now these homes are being demolished to make way for new forms of urban development. This installation at Aberdeen Station is part of an ongoing project by the artist in response to the region’s changing built environment. The photo installation depicts two concrete lion finials salvaged from the gates of a demolished Vancouver Special. Each season, the lions are painted and placed in various overgrown locations throughout the city. Mimicking their original position at the gates of the former home, the reimagined lions stand guard at the entrance to the Canada Line station. As the Vancouver Special and its residing guardians disappear, Rewilding (Autumn & Spring) attempts to imagine new possibilities for inhabiting the city.
Capture 2026 46Lansdowne Station: Michael LoveNo Place, 2025Michael Love No Place, 2025 Courtesy of the ArtistPresented and funded by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with CaptureCurated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art GalleryMarch 2026 – March 2027No Place utilizes hand-cut collage, assemblage, and re-photography to forge layered connections between architecture, history, and ideology. The resulting composition serves as a speculative reconstruction that reimagines both physical and ideological spaces.Brutalist architecture once symbolized a progressive egalitarian society. Adopted widely by European Communist states, its raw, uncompromising aesthetic embodied a collective utopian vision. Over time, however, many of these structures have deteriorated, revealing the fragility of the ideologies they were meant to uphold. Today, they stand as monuments to unfulfilled aspirations.By dissecting and recomposing archival images of these forms, the artist evokes their original egalitarian ideals while also critically reflecting on their failures. This act of cutting and reconfiguring offers new imaginative entry points for thinking about idealized societies. It invites viewers to pause and consider how architecture and infrastructure shape, and are shaped by, human stories.With this work installed on a Canada Line station in Richmond, one cannot help but draw connections to the brutalist forms and the dominant architectural aesthetics surrounding the station. What ideals and failures does our current cityscape represent?
47 PUBLIC ARTRichmond-Brighouse Station: Keely O’BrienSecret Ingredients, 2024Keely O’BrienYou snore, from the Secret Ingredients series, 2024Courtesy of the ArtistSecret Ingredients was developed in Theatre Replacement’s COLLIDER artist residency, with support from the Canada Council for the ArtsPresented and funded by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art Gallery in partnership with Capture Curated by the City of Richmond Public Art Program and Richmond Art GalleryMarch 2026 – March 2027Secret Ingredients began as a call-out by the artist to the public to submit messages they found difficult to express directly to someone in their life, but felt ready to share. These messages were transformed into decorated cakes and delivered to the intended recipients as an edible form of communication. To date, over seventy-five messages have been submitted and fifteen cakes baked and delivered. Since the initial call, the project has expanded to include a live performance and a growing photographic archive of these intimate, resonant cakes.Exhibited now as a series of photographs at the Canada Line’s Richmond-Brighouse Station, they become an unexpected moment of reflection during a commute. The project aligns with the artist’s thematic focus on storytelling, community, movement, and histories, inviting viewers to consider the invisible emotional landscapes that surround them. Each cake is a private moment made public, connecting strangers through the humour, joy, challenge, and longing of relationships. Secret Ingredients offers a poetic, playful lens into the quiet emotional currents that travel alongside us every day.
Capture 2026 48Stephen ShoreStanley Marsh and John Reinhardt, Amarillo, Texas, February 15, 1975,1975 (printed 2013–14)chromogenic print50.8 x 61.0 cm Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gift of the Chan FamilyVAG 2024.14.6Photo: © Stephen Shore, Courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery