The Artists
Aidan Weinrib
Aidan Weinrib is a self taught interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver whose work explores the expressive possibilities of natural materials. She is also the founder of Things From Gardens, a floral studio known for artful, atmospheric arrangements that merge wild, foraged elements with cultivated flowers.
Weinrib’s practice includes weaving, sculpture, and installation, where she works with organic matter in ways that challenge ideas of impermanence, repetition, and transformation. Her approach is informed by her background in the floral industry, where the fleeting cycle of cut flowers often conflicted with her reverence for plants and the natural world. By preserving and reshaping materials such as grasses, branches, and remnants of past installations, she creates works that are at once delicate and enduring.
Aidan Weinrib is a Vancouver-based floral designer and interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the potential of natural materials to take on new forms. Her work emerges from her background in floristry. The speed and disposability of the floral industry often conflicted with her deep respect for plants and her need for connection to the natural world in a digital age. Shifting into art has allowed her to negotiate this contradiction. Working with her hands, she shapes and combines organic and manufactured matter, often recycling materials from floral installations or garden finds.
Endurance, a series of weavings created during a 2024 residency at Eden Textile Studios, marks a pivotal point in her practice. Using grasses collected over a year, she learned to weave on a floor loom, transforming fragile stems into works of structure and strength.
Her new site-specific piece Tend extends this inquiry into three dimensions. Grasses strung along winding wires reveal and conceal themselves depending on the viewer’s perspective, embodying rhythm, return, and accumulation. Across these works, Weinrib invites reflection on beauty within humble matter and the evolving relationship between humans and the natural world.
Ben Stephenson
Ben Stephenson is an author and artist. His first novel, A Matter of Life and Death Or Something (Douglas & McIntyre, 2012) was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award, and prompted CBC Books to name him one of “Ten Canadian Writers to Watch.” His work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, Joyland, The Ex-Puritan, EVENT, and King Skateboard Magazine, and he’s a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. He lives in what the settler colonial culture now calls “Vancouver, BC,” where he teaches kids to write and make books. He is the founder and publisher of L.A.S.E.R. Press. His latest exhibition was new landscape paintings at Liquidation World, this past summer. Find him on Instagram: @bbbbbbbeeeeeeennnnnnn and @laser.press.
Stephenson makes images with oil paint when he doesn’t feel like making sentences with words. The two paintings in this exhibition—Tracks (1) and Tracks (2)—are entirely up for your own interpretation and are presented to you here without any linguistic explanation or context aside from their titles.
Emily Mueller
Emily Mueller is a multimedia artist and curator working primarily with drawing. Her conceptual interests lie in the meditative practice of mark making and the investigation of intuitive form and color. Based in Saint Louis, she teaches photography, design, and fine art classes at universities around the city and she is the Gallery Director at Kodner Gallery. Mueller has exhibited work in both online and physical publications as well as galleries in California and the Midwest. She received her MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis and currently runs a micro-gallery called The Nook in her house in St. Louis.
Emily Mueller makes pattern-based drawings that are filled with small, repeating marks and colors. These compositions within her drawings grow from shaped, handmade paper and the process of navigating a pencil to make marks repeatedly across the textured surface of paper and around deckled edges is like a playful doodle, like language that isn’t quite legible, like a meditation. Mueller is interested in abstraction’s ability to communicate the ineffable – and connect to something transcendental through material.
Mueller’s approach to artmaking is process-based and must be felt and not read or necessarily understood. She attempts to reach a feeling of embodiment and connection to the world as well as gain some kind of understanding through the process of her repetitive marks. Mueller’s paper work included in Again & Then is created with unbleached abaca and recycled paper fibers that are colored with natural, powdered dye. The pulp is painted into custom shaped moulds and arranged into quilt-like patterns. Instead of applying a pattern to paper, in these pieces, the pattern is embedded in, and creates the sheets of paper.
Jeremy Pavka
Jeremy Pavka (b. 1987, Lethbridge, Alberta) is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working across analogue and digital technologies. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Media Arts + Digital Technologies from the Alberta College of Art + Design (2011). Pavka’s practice explores the absurdities of daily life, often through the lens of comedic tropes and an intentionally laborious process.
Working in large-scale sculpture and contemporary furniture design, Pavka employs a range of materials including metal, wood, concrete, and bronze. His work navigates the intersection of humor, routine, and technology- transforming the mundane into thoughtfully crafted visual commentary with a sculptural and spatial presence.
In again & then, Jeremy Pavka works with two white oak stumps- planed square, charred by fire, and set on hand-fabricated steel legs, to consider how repetition, routine, and transformation shape both objects and our perception of them.
The process is intentionally physical and time-consuming: planing, burning, polishing, colouring. The shou sugi ban technique preserves the oak while revealing its grain through fire, an act of destruction that paradoxically protects. The steel legs, heated and coloured with an oxy-acetylene torch, bear the traces of that same transformative energy.
Like much of Pavka’s practice, again & then is about process as much as outcome: about doing something once, then again, and recognizing how that repetition changes both the object and the maker.
Justin Hauber
Justin Hauber is a celebrated Canadian dancer from Saskatchewan, with a decade of experience working with esteemed organizations worldwide sharing movement and live performances. Justin’s artistic practice has taken him to over 40 countries where he’s had the chance to connect with diverse audiences.
Drawing inspiration from his personal experiences and the vast expanses of the prairie lands, Justin's movement work is deeply rooted in authenticity. He recently completed an artist residency at Remai Modern, collaborating with Dance Saskatchewan to develop new choreographic works that drew upon childhood memories. His original pieces have been showcased in art shows, including "Shoulders Back" in Vancouver's Circle and upcoming work with 525 Art Pop Up.
In "It's Not You," Justin explores the patterns and habits that lead to heartbreak and disconnection in relationships. Through an introspective lens, he examines the dynamics of giving and receiving, shedding light on the often-unbalanced dynamics that can leave one feeling drained. This visual journey invites the audience to reflect on the fragility and beauty of connection, and the capacity for growth, healing, and transformation.
Katherine Koniecki
Katherine Koniecki is a visual artist working in photography and design. Drawing from her background in garment construction, editorial photography, and film production, her practice explores materiality and shapeshifting through still images. Using textiles and industrial materials, she creates sculptural forms and compositions that exist as standalone objects or become subjects within her photographs. Her lens often isolates macro details, textures, and abstracted views that connect to fragments of a broader story. Influenced by the tactile qualities of materials and the process-driven nature of construction, her work investigates how surface becomes subject, evolving through her blend of sculpture and image-making.
Katherine’s work Space Between Sounds draws on her ongoing practice of combining sculpture and photography. Through a hands-on process of shaping fabric and resin, she creates sculptural forms that become the foundation for her photographic compositions, preserving the fabric’s peaks and folds as they harden into glossy surfaces. Macro details of the transformed texture are captured through interactions with light. She also works with garments, exploring their inherent structure and design by photographing pieces off the body, focusing on the spaces and shadows between folds. The resulting images are further transformed through printing onto large panels of Habotai silk, extending her exploration of material transformation and the continuous nature of shifting states.
Ketty Haolin Zhang
Ketty Haolin Zhang (b. Chaoyang, Liaoning) is a Vancouver-based visual artist. Her practice is rooted in her diasporic experience as a 1.5-generation immigrant, having spent half of her life so far in China and half in Canada. She is interested in creating works that embody both intimacy and emotional tension. For the past two years, she has been making paintings of nighttime scenes that navigate placelessness, liminality, and (non)belonging, and more recently, found object sculptures that explore personal history, desire, and spirituality.
Her sculptures often take the form of small assemblages—objects gathered and reconfigured into shrines or relic-like forms. These works reflect on how memory and desire attach themselves to material things, turning the everyday into sites of devotion and transformation. By weaving together fragments of the familiar and the symbolic, Zhang creates pieces that speak to shifting identities and the search for meaning in transient spaces.
On her paintings, she said in a recent feature with Dazed: “I want to think about belonging without centring it on cultural specificity, but instead through the places and behaviours that shape how we move through the world. It wasn’t until later than I realized most figures in my nighttime paintings were faceless; maybe it's because I struggled for so long with who I was and who I wanted to become that the figures I paint are also caught in the same uncertainty, whether alone or in the company of others. I want to recognize that this uncertainty is also what connects us, and that the search for belonging can be as meaningful as belonging itself."
Zhang holds a BA Double Major in Visual Art and Art History from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the US, Mexico, and China.
The beginning of a new series, Ketty Haolin Zhang’s works in this exhibition explore manifestation culture through shrine-like assemblages that hover between devotion and desire. She uses photography as a sculptural element: images from her personal archive and found sources are digitally collaged, printed on vinyl, and encased in semi-transparent boxes layered with quasi-religious and quasi-Orientalist decorative motifs. These hybrid objects become personal shrines where image, myth, and aspiration accumulate into sites of both projection and reflection.
These small-scale sculptures investigate the psychic and emotional architectures of self-transformation through repetition. Combining photographs, found objects, and industrial materials, each work functions as a contemporary altar—intimate yet layered in symbolic charge. Inspired by creatures like the anglerfish, whose lures and reproductive strategies embody paradoxes of allure, survival, and identity, the sculptures probe the tension between magnetism and boundary, between drawing in and letting go. Repetition here acts as ritual, suggesting that selfhood itself is shaped through iterative gestures of construction, adornment, and offering.
Lauren Kurc
Lauren is a commercial and editorial photographer living and working in Vancouver B.C - her aesthetic is strongly informed by natural light, human gesture and analogue processes.
This ongoing body of work reflects on how memory can be shaped by repetition and how objects tied to personal history can shift in meaning over time. Lauren is interested in the tension between preservation and change - what happens when an object is taken apart and reassembled.
Working with treasured letters between Lauren’s grandfather and his family during World War II - she explores how familiarity can be transformed through repeated gestures and how pattern and fragmentation can open up new ways of seeing memory and the past. Rooted in a deep attachment to personal artifacts, this work is not about nostalgia but about how reconstruction can quietly reshape what we think we know.
M'Beth Schoenfeld
M’Beth Schoenfeld is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of technology and handcraft. Her practice bridges algorithmic structure with tactile, analog making, revealing the inherent beauty of mathematical order while preserving the warmth of human touch.
Schoenfeld builds algorithms - often based on slope fields, mathematical visualizations of differential equations - that generate the frameworks for her compositions. These layouts are then translated into physical form through adapted machines, such as a vinyl cutter fitted with a mechanical pencil. The machine provides precision but never autonomy: Schoenfeld constantly intervenes, advancing leads, responding to breaks, and guiding the work to completion. She finishes her pieces by hand, ensuring that each carries the subtle irregularities of human involvement.
Her work is deeply concerned with perception. From a distance, her moiré drawings appear as translucent, shifting patterns in motion; up close, they reveal dense fields of graphite lines, arranged with mathematical rigor yet softened by material texture. This interplay embodies cinetism, creating the illusion of movement in a static medium. It also engages Gestalt principles, where ordered repetition transforms chaotic detail into unified wholes. Beyond the visual, Schoenfeld’s rhythmic patterns evoke a neurological calm, echoing the soothing left–right rhythm of reading and settling viewers into a state of rest and ease.
Influenced by Op Art pioneers such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley as well as contemporary generative artists like Tyler Hobbs, Schoenfeld continues to expand the dialogue between digital structure and analog presence. She lives and works in Vancouver.
The moiré drawings form a distinct body of work within M’Beth Schoenfeld’s practice, dedicated to exploring how mathematical precision and human presence coexist on paper. At their core, these works are investigations into perception—how the eye, the mind, and the nervous system respond to repetition, rhythm, and illusion.
Each drawing begins with a set of instructions generated from slopefields, mathematical visualizations of differential equations. These instructions are carried out with the aid of a vinyl cutter modified to hold a mechanical pencil. The process demands constant attention: the pencil lead breaks, runs out, and must be advanced without interrupting the continuous line. This tension between exacting precision and inevitable imperfection is where the work comes alive. The drawings carry both the clarity of algorithmic order and the fragility of hand intervention.
The visual effect is deceptive. From a distance, the drawings appear to shimmer with translucent rectangles, as if composed of overlapping panes of glass. Step closer, and the illusion dissolves into tens of thousands of pencil lines, varied in spacing but carefully arranged. This shift between macro and micro readings creates a perceptual play that embodies cinetism—the illusion of movement within a static surface. The patterns oscillate and breathe, suggesting motion where none exists.
Just as important is how the work is felt. The rhythmic spacing of the lines echoes bilateral eye movements, the same left–right rhythm that soothes the nervous system in both reading and therapeutic practices. Viewers often describe a sense of calm, as though the drawings regulate more than just sight. This neurological dimension transforms the works into meditative encounters, blurring the line between optical art and embodied experience.
Gestalt principles underlie the compositions: many small units accumulate into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. What appears chaotic up close resolves into clarity from afar, inviting a shift in perspective both literally and metaphorically. This interplay between order and disorder, transparency and opacity, chaos and coherence, is central to the work’s impact.
The moiré drawings also resist reproduction. While much algorithmic art lends itself to digital prints, these pieces remain stubbornly original. The fine character of the pencil line defies photography, and the illusions dissolve in documentation. To reproduce them would require not only access to the original algorithm but also the same collaborative process of machine and hand. Their irreproducibility emphasizes their status as singular objects, rooted in the moment of making.
In creating these drawings, Schoenfeld seeks to translate abstract mathematical systems into physical works that are both precise and humane. They occupy a space between digital and analog, chaos and control, illusion and presence. Above all, they are designed to be experienced slowly: to pull the viewer close, then push them back, to reveal order within disorder, and to settle the mind in the quiet rhythm of looking.
Natalie Robinson
Natalie Robinson is a Chinese-Canadian artist based in Burnaby, British Columbia. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Deer Lake Art Gallery, Gibsons Public Art Gallery, Port Moody Art Gallery, and the BMO Theatre Centre, as well as in numerous group exhibitions throughout Vancouver and the Lower Mainland.
Working primarily with oil paint, Natalie’s practice reflects on the quiet rhythms of everyday life, inviting viewers to reconsider the seemingly mundane through careful observation.
Natalie is particularly drawn to the domestic space of home, exploring how the architecture and visual language of our childhood environments shape our aesthetic sensibilities. Since her time at Emily Carr University, her work has evolved from photo realism towards representational abstraction, allowing her to merge memory and materiality in new ways.
Rachel Ormshaw
Rachel Ormshaw is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, sound, and video. Weaving is central to her practice, binding together found objects, cast metals, wax, and field recordings into layered explorations of craft, memory, and value. She works with materials that carry histories, tracing how objects and sounds gather meaning over time.
Ormshaw holds a BDes in Textile Design from OCAD University and a Master's inVisual Studies from the University of Toronto.
"Angel Forms Which Lay Entranced, Thick as Autumnal Leaves, 2022 (video, handwoven linen 5' x 15"). Employing video techniques drawn from early 2000s skateboard culture, I document my encounters with linen cloth I have woven by hand. The footage is underscored by the recorded sounds of the loom, integrated into the work as both rhythm and residue of the fabric’s making. These videos stage the collision between the painstaking labor of weaving and the physical risk of falling, where my body becomes both subject and medium.
The culture of skateboard “slam” videos contrasts with Christian ideas of fallenness: where faith traditions often frame falling as failure or sin, skate culture celebrates the fall as its own achievement, a visible marker of risk and commitment.
Repetition lies at the heart of the work. The woven cloth is shaped by repeated motions at the loom, yet it is also altered again through repeated acts of falling that mark and remake its surface. The handmade can never be perfect, and through this ongoing cycle of making and unmaking, the fabric becomes a record of both persistence and loss. Falling remains an inescapable part of living, just as imperfection remains inescapable in craft.
By positioning my own falls alongside my weaving, I invite viewers to witness effort without resolution. Experiencing this work becomes a shared encounter with striving, an acknowledgment that holiness, like perfection, can never truly be attained.
Sophia Boutsakis
Sophia Boutsakis is an emerging visual artist of Greek and British descent. Born and raised in North Vancouver, she is privileged to live, work, and create as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Sophia’s practice investigates themes of girlhood, intimacy, identity, and care through symbolic imagery and repeated motifs. Within her work, symbols evolve into glyphs, compositions read like sentences, and patterns form a personal visual language. Boutsakis often expands upon drawing and painting through sculptural applications of stained glass, wire, and soldering. Across these mediums, she creates works that transform as symbols recur, ideas evolve, and concepts distill, while considering form, material, and surface.
Sophia earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) in 2022. Her recent exhibitions include a window artist-in-residence display with Paige Elton at the Zebraclub in 2025; Mirrored Hearts, a solo show at The Art Shop in 2024; and group exhibitions such as Interplay (2024) and Familiar Faces (2023), also at The Art Shop. Her work was included in Intermediate States (2022) on Granville Island as part of Capture Photography Festival, and Take The Egg (2022) at ECUAD’s Neighborhood Gallery.
Gate is a sculpture consisting of two stained glass fence posts joined by a gate constructed from galvanized steel wire, displayed directly on the floor at the height of a conventional garden gate. The gate, made from bent and soldered wire, resembles a physical line drawing, delicately hovering in space between the multicoloured stained glass posts. Both fence posts are lit from within, so their coloured glass is illuminated.
Motifs such as hearts, diamonds, butterflies, and spirals are repeated throughout the stained glass and wire compositions, reflecting on personal and collective relationships to symbols associated with care, nurturance, transformation and resilience. As a whole, this work explores emotional and material thresholds: spaces that are liminal, decorative, and symbolic.
Referencing architectural elements, Gate contemplates the boundaries we create, maintain, and repair, both physically and psychologically. The uncanny placement of a gate within a gallery space, disconnected from any enclosing fence, invites reflection on its symbolic function. Is it meant to mark an entrance, control an exit, or protect a threshold? Drawing on personal narratives, the work becomes an allegory for domestic space, with the gate acting as a portal into emotions surrounding family, tradition, and memory.
Yuji Lee
Yuji Lee is a visual artist based in Treaty 4 territory, working across mediums with a focus on drawing. Often featuring chimerical characters, Yuji’s artworks explore alternative ways of being, the complexities of inhabiting physical form, and the unconventional beauty of the so-called “other”. Yuji is interested in challenging gender conventions through personal, cultural, and reclaimed religious symbolism. Yuji holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts with Great Distinction from the University of Regina. Yuji’s work has been exhibited and published across Turtle Island (Regina, SK; Saskatoon, SK; Vancouver, BC; Montreal, QC; Port Hope, ON; Oakland, CA). Through residencies, mentorships, and a recent grant, Yuji’s practice has been supported by SK Arts, University of Saskatchewan, the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Now Program, CARFAC Saskatchewan, Neutral Ground Artist-Run Centre, and University of Regina. Yuji’s work is held in the SK Arts Permanent Collection.
“Born Again” is a drawing on mylar and paper that highlights medical treatment and gender expression as means of practicing bodily autonomy and pursuing self- authenticity. On the layer of mylar, two figures sit close with their hands loosely bound together by a cord that ties into a Chinese butterfly knot. Their wings are spread, tails lifted in curiosity, surrounded by a host of stars in a cautious yet tender interaction. Underneath, peeking through the translucent mylar, are hints of the characters’ past forms. It can be tempting to try to detach oneself from a version of themself that no longer feels familiar, whether due to growth, shame, etc. However, in “Born Again”, the faint presence of these past forms serves not as a haunting memory, but as an acknowledgement of crucial beginnings.