Vernon Public Art Gallery

Art from the Heart
2025-03-15 10:00 - 2025-04-10 17:00 (America/Vancouver) | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T2H3, Canada
SD#22 Elementary Students

Community Gallery & Up-Front GalleryMarch 15 – April 10, 2025

Opening Reception: March 15, 2025

Art from the Heart is the annual exhibition by elementary students from School District No.22. Their artwork delights viewers with their creativeness under the guidance of their art teacher. The opening day for the exhibition is Saturday, March 15th, please join us in celebrating this beautiful exhibition with all the artists and their loved ones.

Caleb T: Heart, mixed media collage, Hillview Elementary, Gr. 3

Art and Soul
2025-04-17 18:00 - 2025-05-14 17:00
SD#22 High School Students

Community Gallery & Up-Front GalleryApril 17 – May 14, 2025

Opening Reception: March 15, 2025

Gathered
2025-05-22 10:00 - 2025-06-13 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T2H3, Canada
SD#22 Indigenous Students

Community GalleryMay 22 – June 20, 2025

Gathered celebrates the creativity, cultural knowledge, and artistic expression of Indigenous students from across School District No. 22. Showcasing work by students from elementary through high school, this exhibition highlights a wide range of media.

The exhibition reflects both traditional knowledge and contemporary influences, with many students drawing from their cultural heritage while engaging with present-day themes and personal experiences. The result is a vibrant and diverse collection that speaks to identity, community, and the evolving nature of Indigenous art.

Image Description: Juliet Logan, gr. 5, Baeirsto

UBCO Emergence
2025-05-22 10:00 - 2025-07-12 17:00
Amy Bugera, Brenna Lam Kennedy, Ella Cottier, Faith Bye, Fredrik Thacker, & Kate Nicholson

Topham Brown GalleryMay 22 – July 12, 2025

Emergence is an annual group exhibition showcasing the work of graduating students from the University of British Columbia Okanagan’s Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Media Studies programs. This year’s exhibition features six emerging artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, assemblage, and digital media.

Each artist draws from personal experience, critical theory, or cultural observation to create work that engages with pressing contemporary themes. From interrogations of consumerism and environmental degradation to explorations of memory, grief, sexuality, and identity; Emergence presents a deeply considered and diverse body of work. These practices traverse the boundaries between tradition and experimentation—some manipulating family archives and found materials, others working with digital manipulation or painterly abstraction.

Since 2009, the Vernon Public Art Gallery has proudly supported the final exhibitions of BFA/BMS graduates from UBC Okanagan. This annual showcase continues to serve as a platform for emerging artists to present ambitious work to new audiences and step into the next phase of their creative journeys. Emergence invites viewers into intimate, challenging, and thoughtful visual worlds shaped by a generation of artists who are attuned to the complexities of the present moment.

Exhibition Publication

Amy BugeraAmy Bugera critiques the spectacle of consumer culture through print-based installation. Drawing influence from Guy Debord’s theories on media, advertising, and capitalist disillusionment, Bugera examines the ways in which platforms like Amazon mediate our experiences through reductive, persuasive design. Her work manipulates familiar digital commands such as “Add to cart” or “Buy now,” transforming them through encaustic print processes to highlight their absurdity and ubiquity. By repeating and distorting these icons, Bugera reveals how advertising functions as a tool of disconnection—encouraging consumption while suppressing reflection. Her practice is both satirical and sincere, inviting viewers to pause and reconsider the systems we navigate daily.

Brenna Lam KennedyBrenna Lam Kennedy is a multimedia artist and photographer whose work reflects on intimacy, time, and digital mediation. In her photographic series Proximity, Kennedy captures tender moments between subjects, where these images exist outside linear time, imbued with warmth and a quiet sense of longing. Subtle digital interventions and filmic colour grading collapse the distance between viewer and subject, heightening the emotional resonance of touch and gesture. Kennedy’s interest in the temporality of relationships is central to her practice: how we mark moments of closeness, how we remember them, and how digital technologies alter our perception of time itself.

Ella CottierElla Cottier’s sculptural installation Cans investigates the ecological, archaeological, and philosophical implications of what we leave behind. Working with slip-cast ceramic forms derived from discarded aluminum cans, Cottier explores the tension between the “natural” and “unnatural” in the Anthropocene. Her practice considers trash as artifact, reframing the overlooked or unwanted as future remnants of our current civilization. While the work is rooted in environmental concern, it also evokes a meditative sensibility—drawing attention to our embeddedness in ecological systems. By casting everyday waste in fragile ceramic, Cottier prompts viewers to reflect on legacy, permanence, and the quiet material traces of human activity.

Faith ByeFaith Bye’s mixed-media paintings explore the emotional weight of everyday objects through acts of memorialization. Created in the aftermath of her grandmother’s sudden passing, Bye’s assemblages incorporate inherited domestic items—band-aids, sheets, household ephemera—embedded into sculptural grounds of modeling paste, gesso, and acrylic medium. These physical materials are then overlaid with painted still-life scenes, allowing the boundary between the real and the represented to blur. Her work speaks to the quiet rituals of grief and remembrance, and how material things—once ordinary—become saturated with memory. Through painterly layering, Bye constructs intimate dialogues between loss, family, and the texture of daily life.

Fredrik ThackerFredrik Thacker’s expressive paintings are visceral interrogations of queer desire, sexual consumption, and the politics of visibility. Drawing on pornography as both subject and conceptual framework, Thacker collapses bodies into abstracted forms that pulse with intensity and urgency. Influenced by theorists like Linda Williams, his work probes the ways pornographic images are consumed, fragmented, and fetishized—particularly in relation to queer and trans identity. Through rapid paint application, mixed media layering, and disrupted figuration, Thacker recreates a “frenzy of the visible,” evoking what he describes as visual “regurgitation” of desire and disgust. His paintings simultaneously seduce and resist, offering no stable ground for interpretation.

Kate NicholsonKate Nicholson’s paintings reflect on the instability of memory, the complexities of growing up, and the disorientation of nostalgia. Using family photographs as source material, Nicholson reinterprets childhood scenes through a mix of figuration and gestural abstraction. Her works disrupt the original images with energetic markings and overlays, creating a sense of interference—like a corrupted digital file or fleeting mental image. The result is a visual language that is both deeply personal and broadly relatable, capturing the tension between sentimentality and unease. Nicholson’s practice sits at the intersection of memory and media, probing how we reconstruct the past and contend with its emotional residues.

In Conclusion

Together, the works in this years Emergence exhibition reflect a generation of artists attuned to the social, environmental, and emotional contours of contemporary life. With practices grounded in research, lived experience, and material experimentation, these artists offer not only a snapshot of where they are now, but a glimpse of where they are headed. The Vernon Public Art Gallery is proud to support these emerging voices at a pivotal moment in their creative evolution, and we look forward to seeing how their practices continue to develop and resonate beyond this exhibition.

Image Description: Brenna Lam Kennedy

Smoky Summers
2025-05-22 10:00 - 2025-07-12 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T2H3, Canada
Nicola Tibbetts

Caroline Galbraith GalleryMay 22 – July 12, 2025

In Nicola Tibbetts’ Smoky Summers, the landscapes we think we know are rendered through the soft veil of smoke – a filter that is no longer temporary, but emblematic of a broader ecological shift. These quiet, expansive oil paintings speak to the visceral and visual impact of climate change on the West Coast of Canada. They are not overtly didactic or alarmist; rather, they are quietly devastating in their familiarity. The scenes Tibbetts depicts – recreational lakes, basketball courts, mountain ranges – are recognizable to many who live in British Columbia. But beneath their calm surfaces lies a shared, unsettling truth: summer is not what it used to be.

The title of the exhibition, Smoky Summers, evokes both nostalgia and disruption. Where summer once meant blue skies, carefree days, and a reliable rhythm of warmth and recreation, it now increasingly signals evacuation alerts, smoke advisories, and the dread of escalating wildfire conditions. In her artist statement, Tibbetts reflects on the changing character of summer: “Wildfires, a new summer reality, and the smoke that envelops the landscape in inescapable.” The work emerges from lived experience – both personal and collective – offering a visual archive of summers marked by crisis yet tinged with beauty and resilience.

Exhibition Publication

Image Description: Nicola Tibbetts, Airplane with Pink, 2024, Oil on Panel

Auction Preview
2025-06-26 10:00 - 2025-07-15 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, V1T2H3, Canada
Midsummer’s Eve of the Arts

Community GalleryJune 26 – July 15, 2025

Opening Reception: July 3 from 6 – 8 PM

The MEA Auction Preview offers a first look at the full collection of artworks generously donated by local and regional artists in support of the Vernon Public Art Gallery’s annual MEA fundraising auction.

Installed in the gallery throughout the month leading up to the event, this exhibition invites visitors to experience the artworks in person, explore a wide range of creative practices, and learn more about the participating artists. Whether you’re a seasoned collector or a first-time bidder, the preview provides the perfect opportunity to plan your bids in advance and support the arts in your community.

Don’t miss this chance to discover new artists, connect with the gallery, and help ensure the continued success of one of VPAG’s most important fundraising events of the year!

HOT OFF THE PRESS
2025-07-25 08:00 - 2025-09-24 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, V1T2H3, Canada
UBCO Printmaking

Community GalleryJuly 25 – September 24, 2025

Opening Reception: July 24 from 6-8 PM

HOT OFF THE PRESS showcases a diverse selection of new work created by students in the printmaking program at UBC Okanagan. Ranging from traditional techniques such as intaglio and relief printing to experimental, mixed-media approaches, the exhibition offers a vibrant cross-section of contemporary student print practices.

Selected with the guidance of UBCO professor Briar Craig and sessional lecturer Dr. Darian Goldin Stahl—who also led the courses from which these works emerged—the exhibition reflects the rigour, play, and conceptual inquiry fostered in the studio. With students at different stages in their academic and artistic journeys, the exhibition highlights both those just beginning to explore the fundamentals of printmaking and those using the medium to push the boundaries of process and form.

Together, these prints speak to the evolving possibilities of printmaking as both a technical and expressive medium. HOT OFF THE PRESS celebrates the creative voices of a new generation of artists, offering insight into the thoughtful, hands-on, and critically engaged work being produced in UBCO’s dynamic printmaking studios.

Soft Architectures
2025-07-25 08:00 - 2025-10-08 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, V1T2H3, Canada
Sylvan Hamburger

Caroline Galbraith GalleryJuly 25 – October 8, 2025

Opening Reception: July 24 from 6 – 8 PM

In Soft Architectures, Vancouver-based artist Sylvan Hamburger transforms everyday materials—bedsheets, plywood, floral fabrics—into large-scale installations that reflect on the changing face of our cities. Using printmaking, sculpture, and found objects, Hamburger captures the textures of demolished homes and disappearing buildings, turning them into poetic imprints of memory, loss, and resilience.

His prints don’t just depict buildings—they are made from them. By pressing fabrics against salvaged wood and walls, Hamburger gathers physical traces of the spaces we live in, and the ones we’ve lost. These haunting, delicate works explore how the surfaces around us—like the grain of old floorboards or the floral pattern of a bedsheet—can hold personal and collective histories.

Soft Architectures brings together work from the past five years, documenting not only physical spaces, but the emotional and cultural imprints they leave behind. At a time of intense change in our communities, Hamburger’s work offers a thoughtful reminder to look closely at the surfaces around us, noticing the textures and traces that are often erased in the rush of redevelopment.

Exhibition Publication

Image Description: Sylvan Hamburger, Open House Press (detail), 2020, relief print on bedsheet, wooden dowels, shiplap boards.

Through Our Eyes
2025-07-25 08:00 - 2025-10-08 17:00 | Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Ave, Vernon, V1T2H3, Canada
Teen Junction

Up-Front GalleryJuly 25 – September 24, 2025

Opening Reception: July 24 from 6-8 PM

Through Our Eyes is a community-based exhibition created by youth from the Teen Junction Youth Centre in partnership with the Vernon Public Art Gallery. This ongoing project gives voice to the lived experiences of Vernon’s youth, offering a platform for expression, representation, and connection through the arts. Teen Junction provides a safe, supportive after-school space for youth to connect, learn, and access resources when needed.

Image Description: Chloe Zimmerman, Untitled, lino-prints, 2025.

Leaving Home
2025-07-25 10:00 - 2025-09-24 17:00
Rhonda Neufeld

Topham Brown Memorial GalleryJuly 25 to September 24, 2025

Opening Reception: July 24 from 6-8 PMArtist Demo: September 5 from 1-3 PM (part of First Friday’s Art Trail)Artist Talk: September 11 from 6-7 PM

In Leaving Home, artist Rhonda Neufeld shares a deeply personal body of work that reflects on her connection to the landscape she called home for over 40 years. Through walking, touching, and closely observing the natural world around her, Neufeld captures the details of place—tree bark, stone surfaces, shifting light—and translates them into prints that hold both memory and presence.

Using traditional printmaking techniques, Neufeld makes rubbings directly from trees and rocks, transferring those impressions onto copper plates, wood blocks, and lithographic stones. The result is a series of works that feel both grounded and poetic, inviting viewers to slow down and experience the land in a more intimate way.

This exhibition is a quiet celebration of place, a reflection on the joy of being close to nature, and a way of saying goodbye to a landscape that shaped a lifetime of artmaking.

Exhibition Publication

Photography: Digital Perfections

Current Exhibitions

any

January 8, 2026

Kitchen Corner

Samuel Roy-Bois

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October 16, 2025

Whispers of Home

Marzieh Homayoun

Read More

October 16, 2025

Exposed!

Members’ Exhibition

Read More

October 2, 2025

Populated

Mark Thibeault

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Populated
2025-10-02 18:00 - 2025-12-24 17:00
Mark Thibeault

Topham Brown Memorial GalleryOctober 2 – December 24, 2025Opening Reception: October 2, 2025Artist Talk: November 27, 2025

Populated by northern B.C.–based artist Mark Thibeault features large-scale abstract paintings exploring the shifting connections between people and the natural world. Initiated during the pandemic and continuing today, the series embraces intuition and improvisation, drawing on the biodiversity of northwest British Columbia. Thibeault’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, music, and lutherie, with his work reflecting both the fragility of ecosystems and our shared responsibility to them.

Exhibition Publication

Exposed!
2025-10-16 18:00 - 2025-12-20 16:00
Members’ Exhibition

Caroline Galbraith Gallery & Up-Front GalleryOctober 16 – December 20, 2025Opening Reception: October 16, 2025

Our annual Members Exhibition, Exposed!, provides a unique opportunity to showcase the breadth of talent within our local art community. This exhibition offers the public a chance to appreciate the diverse approaches and styles embraced by our members, reflecting a deep engagement with artistic practice.

Whispers of Home
2025-10-16 18:00 - 2025-12-24 17:00
Marzieh Homayoun

Community GalleryOctober 16 – December 24, 2025Opening Reception: October 16, 2025Artist Talk: November 15, 2025 at 6PM

Marzieh Homayoun, an immigrant artist from Iran whose practice draws on the delicacy of Persian miniature painting. Her work blends natural imagery with surrealist elements, offering a unique lens on the world around her. We look forward to featuring her work in the Community Gallery this October as part of our ongoing collaboration with Mackie Lake House.

Marzieh Homayoun, Traces of a Life, 2025, ink on paper

Kitchen Corner
2026-01-08 18:00 - 2026-03-11 17:00
Samuel Roy-Bois

Topham Brown Memorial GalleryJanuary 8, 2026 to March 11, 2026

Kitchen Corner is the title of a Depression-era photograph by Walker Evans. While not adirect source for the works assembled here, its rediscovery during the preparation of thisexhibition proved resonant. Evans’s image operates as a portrait of a context articulatedthrough objects. Documentary in nature, it renders a modest interior where things—a frayedrag, a slanted broom, a patinated chair—assume the status of characters seemingly asking tobe observed, “objects in a moment of pause between use.”1 What is striking, however, isthat Kitchen Corner withholds the very signifiers conventionally associated with a kitchen(no sink, no stove). In this disjunction between title and referent, the photograph underscoresthe complexity of representation and the capacity of objects to exceed their functionalidentity.

The works in this exhibition similarly dwell in thresholds of recognition. They positionobjects, sculptures, and bodies in states of indeterminacy: what reads as structure functions assupport; what appears fragmentary gestures toward wholeness; what suggests immediacyproves resistant, even opaque. Produced over the course of eighteen months, these workswere not initially conceived as a unified installation. Their subsequent convergence, however,revealed affinities of form and sensibility, generating conditions for thought and affect thatexceed the sum of individual pieces.

The works composing this exhibition invite tension into the domain of the built environment.Each references architecture obliquely: through the evocation of house foundations, theabstracted language of the maquette, or vestiges of timber-frame construction. Despite theirvaried scales and spatial logics, they converge around a shared problematic: the negotiationbetween the self and the possible. In their oscillation between recognition and estrangement,they foreground the contingencies of agency and the fragility of ideals. Failure, unfulfillment,and speculation emerge not as deficiencies but as constitutive modes of experience, openingonto a broader meditation on how subjectivity is continually shaped, unsettled, and redefinedthrough material encounter.

1 Richon, Olivier. Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner. MIT Press, 2019.
