Zack Gallery

Artists explore, soar, create

Theresa Kinahan’s “The Fallery Garden That I Love Like My Friends” is part of the Roots and Wings exhibit at the Zack Gallery until March 2. (photo from Zack Gallery)

The eighth annual Inclusion Art Show returns to the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver in celebration of Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance and Inclusion Month (JDAIM). The exhibit’s theme, “Roots and Wings,” reflects the grounding strength of heritage and community alongside the freedom to explore, soar and create. The displayed works highlight inclusion, diversity and the creative talents of artists at every stage of their artistic journey.

This year’s Roots and Wings exhibit features Theresa Kinahan, Kevin Lee (Kevo), Mark Li, Gabriel López Demarco, Mariane Stifelmann and Matthew Tom-Wing.

Art has always been a part of Kinahan’s life. She started to draw when she was just a little girl, and her media have included photography, acrylic, fabric art, enamel, wood-cut printing, charcoal, pastel, watercolour, metalwork, welding and pottery. She taught art in Vancouver high schools for many years, but epilepsy and an ensuing brain injury forced her to retire early. She turned to painting for therapy, drawing inspiration primarily from nature, notably for her acrylic fern series. She signs her paintings with her initials and a heart, which is reflective of the love she feels all around her.

Kevo was born with Trisomy No.18 and was unable to make a sound until he was 6 years old. Art became a way to communicate and express his creativity and emotions; a way to share his delight with the world. Today, Kevo channels his creativity and love of art into painting, music, dance and clay work. He loves colour and the physical act of painting. Every one of his pieces has a thoughtful story or a kind wish.

Li, who creates at the Art Hive, is a visual artist whose narrative-focused work creates a whimsical world filled with colour and imagination. Every one of his paintings is a tale of friendship and depicts acts of kindness: a bear might be best friends with a cat; a T-Rex smiles with shy humour and sweetness at the viewer; a ladybug and a cat might go dancing in the sunlight; a walk in the park with a friend and his dog is a delightful adventure.

photo - Gabriel Fernando López DeMarco’s “I Am Born from Desire” — Gabriel Fernando López DeMarco’s “I Am Born from Desire.” *(photo from Zack Gallery)*

López Demarco, who was born in Buenos Aires, joined his first art workshop at the age of 5. At the age of 13, he entered the Villa Mecenas art school and, at 18, the National University of Art.

During university, López Demarco continued attending painting, sculpture, engraving and printed art workshops, making artistic and conceptual trips through Argentina. In 2013, he traveled through South America and, in 2015, he went to Mexico, where he studied fresco painting. At the same time, he expanded his studies of engraving and printed art.

Since then, he has traveled around Central America, the United States and Europe, carrying out murals and other artistic activities. In 2023 and 2024, he worked as a muralist on the public art team of the municipality of Morón, Argentina. In 2025, he went to China to study calligraphy and Chinese painting. He currently works as a freelance muralist around the word.

Stifelmann was born in Brazil and moved to Vancouver in 2000. She is a former kindergarten and Grade 1 teacher, and studied at the Pan-American School of Arts in São Paulo.

photo - Mariane Stifelmann’s “The Couple” — Mariane Stifelmann’s “The Couple.” *(photo from Zack Gallery)*

On display at the Zack is Stifelmann’s “The Couple,” one of her first paintings. It is created in a caricature style with acrylic paint, and expresses her deep love for her family – the work depicts her grandparents, Eda and Jacob Koin, who emigrated from Poland.

Over the years, Stifelmann has evolved her technique and style and has worked with artist Nati Saidi for more than a decade. Her art embraces vibrant colours and evokes feelings of joy, freedom and nostalgia. Through her work, she invites viewers into a world where light and happiness are always in season.

Tom-Wing is an active member of the Bagel Club and part of the JCC Art Hive. “I am an artist and have sold paintings and ceramic pieces,” he said. “I love music. I play the drums and am also the drummer in the Vancouver BFF band.”

Tom-Wing also enjoys acting and being involved in the theatre world. His roles have included the character Magwitch in the play King Arthur’s Night.

Roots and Wings is on display until March 2. One hundred percent of the proceeds from artwork sales goes directly to each artist.

– Courtesy Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery

Different concepts of home

The current show at the Zack Gallery – Finding Home – unites three very different artists: Jeannette Bittman, Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere and Eri Ishii. Sarah Dobbs, the gallery curator, told the Independent how the show came together.

“All three artists submitted independent proposals for solo exhibitions,” said Dobbs, adding that, in their own unique way, all three artists “engaged the ideas of place, displacement, immigration and the evolving notion of home.… Their works differ significantly in style and approach, but their practices intersect conceptually. Andrea’s work is rooted in a specific geographic place. Eri’s practice explores internal and emotional landscapes. Jeannette’s work centres on the table as a focal point of Jewish life and tradition, and as a site that reflects the dynamics, rituals and emotional complexities of gathering. Together, their works expand and complicate the idea of home, from the physical to the psychological and to the communal.”

photo - “At Work” by Jeannette Bittman — “At Work” by Jeannette Bittman. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Bittman’s images are all domestic scenes. People, young and old, gather around a table, eating and chatting. The colours are muted, the faces indistinct, less important. The table and the food are the points of connection, the common joy and purpose.

“A table is of great significance in everyone’s life,” Bittman told the JI. “It is the place where we eat, but, maybe more importantly, where we meet others and ourselves. The table and gathering around it are critical to Jewish life and culture. Family meals are crucial for family and child growth. Gathering with friends often occurs around a table. Self-reflection, recollection and reminiscence, as well as dreams, occur around a table.” For her, a table is the essence of home.

photo - Jeannette Bittman — Jeannette Bittman (photo courtesy)

“As an artist, I’m intrigued by human emotions and want to represent them through my art,” she said. “Initially, I focus on the realistic expressions of the models. Then, I explore, using colour, shade and form to go deeper. I try to capture the feeling rather than reality … I search for the mood. I rarely have a finished product in mind and become fascinated with the multitude of possibilities. It’s often challenging for me to stop at one.”

Ishii, meanwhile, ponders the outdoors in her paintings. A girl is running along a forest trail in “Runner.” Three girls are gazing across a river in “Three.” A young woman contemplates a peaceful pond in “Bridge,” while dappled sunlight plays all around her, and water ripples beneath the pilings of a little bridge.

All of Ishii’s images are quiet and introspective, uplifting in their tranquil greenery. One could almost hear the breeze whispering in the boughs and the wavelets muttering at the shore. “I am essentially a figurative painter,” said the artist. “My main interest is the inner world of my figures. I want to create works that have emotional resonance.”

For Ishii, home is a complex concept, an inner rapport rather than a particular geographic region. “To me, home means belonging, community and a sense of identity. As an immigrant, I have experienced that these things are fluid and shifting. I have two homes: the place where I spent my formative years – Japan – and the place where I chose to build my life – Canada.”

photo - “Runner” by Eri Ishii — “Runner” by Eri Ishii. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

About her pieces in the Zack show, she said, “I made them at different points of my life. ‘Bridge’ and ‘Three’ are parts of a series that explores storytelling in paintings. They were inspired by film stills from a British mystery. ‘Runner’ and ‘Picnic’ are made more recently. ‘Runner’ revisits the running series from 20 years ago. The series investigated the transient nature of life and posed questions concerning where we are running to, as well as what we are running from. ‘Picnic’ is the most recent of my works. It explores family relationships. It was inspired by a photo I saw in a recipe book that showed a family enjoying a feast.”

photo - Eri Ishii — Eri Ishii *(photo courtesy)*

Like many artists, Ishii is fond of mentoring others. “Teaching is rewarding in more external ways, as opposed to painting,” she said. “I love being part of people’s journeys, as they tackle challenges of making paintings. It is my way of giving back what I learnt, whereas painting is more internal, as I try to explore what is going on inside of me.”

Ishii’s creative explorations could happen anywhere in the world. “I deliberately made them non-specific,” she said. “I wanted to keep them open to viewers’ imagination.”

Dillingham-Lacoursiere, on the other hand, dedicates her landscapes to one very specific location: Lasqueti Island in the Strait of Georgia, an off-grid, ecologically conscious community, and her home. Her panoramic vistas are bright and intense. The sharp colours of land, ocean and sky echo the lines of nature and emphasize the artist’s fierce emotional link to the place. While Ishii’s paintings are murmurs of lyrical fulfilment and Bittman’s delve into the kernel of her Jewishness, Dillingham-Lacoursiere’s paintings are screams of defiance, a rebellious statement of the artist’s soul.

“I used to equate home with a soft place to land, with treasured collections and memories that serve as reminders of our lives, our ancestors,” she said. “When I moved from Alberta, I left a five-bedroom house, my family, most of my friends, a community that had taken me a lifetime to build, but it wasn’t easy [there]. Reconciling the beauty of the prairies with a mindset and values that never fit meant it was an uphill battle. I was tired of trying to make myself fit into the place I called home but had never felt like it.”

photo - “Home” by Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere — “Home” by Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Here, in British Columbia, she said, “Now, home for me exists in small ways. It’s my favourite tree. It’s reading poetry on a Sunday morning, with coffee in my favourite mug…. I’ve worked with First Nations communities for over a decade, and it was in those circles, around those fires and in those sweat lodges, that I learned women are the keepers of the home. In that sense, I am my home, and I can offer refuge, perhaps especially to myself.”

photo - Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere — Andrea Dillingham-Lacoursiere *(photo courtesy)*

Dillingham-Lacoursiere has been painting landscapes for about 10 years. “I had avoided painting landscapes my whole life, until 2016. At the time, I was in the throes of a crisis of conscience, at the confluence of my job and my community,” she shared. “I had spent a year at the helm of a project that was deeply honouring the unfinished lives of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls of this country. The next project I was asked to lead at the museum and art gallery where I worked was the Canada 125 celebrations. The cognitive dissonance I felt pulled me in ways I could not have expected.”

Her response was artistic.

“It led me to an exhibit focused on landscapes of our national parks system. It is a system constructed to outwardly give a sense of national pride, but, at the same time, to commodify some of the most beautiful natural spaces … as escapes for those that could afford it,” she said. “That exhibit was called Reflections on My Reconciliation. People really connected with my art and my message. And it began the unravelling of what I thought it meant to be Canadian for me.”

Finding Home opened Jan. 7 and runs until Feb. 2. Every visitor will be confronted with the question, “What does home mean to you?”

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Explorations of light

Into the Light – featuring the art of Gillian Richards, left, and Pilar Mehlis – is at the Zack Gallery until Jan. 5. (photo by Olga Livshin)

The current show at the Zack Gallery, Into the Light, introduces two artists: Pilar Mehlis and Gillian Richards. Both explore light and air in their paintings – though with very different approaches.

Mehlis was born in Bolivia. Her family moved to Canada when she was 12. Since then, she regularly travels between the two countries: for study or work. “I’ve lived in Vancouver since 2001, but I still visit Bolivia every year,” she told the Independent. She feels that she belongs to both cultures, the same way she belongs to art.

“I didn’t choose art as a profession,” she said. “It chose me. I always liked doing art, but, in Bolivia, art is not considered a serious profession. Not stable enough. In the beginning, I tried to deny it, found various jobs in other fields, but I couldn’t stay away from art. When I was young, I had a romantic view of the artistic life – you know, an artist in her studio. I know better now, but it is too late for me.” She smiled.

Richards is local. She studied fine art in British Columbia and Alberta, starting in high school. “After I graduated from a fine arts program, I worked for years in the film industry here, in Vancouver,” she said. “I was a scenic artist. It was a good job, with a steady income, and I learned a lot, but it wasn’t creative enough for me. I was always working on someone else’s concept. About 10 years ago, I decided to step back from film and pursue my own artistic ideas. I wanted to express myself, my vision.”

Both artists have known each other slightly for a long time, as their studios are in Parker Street Studios and both have participated in the Eastside Culture Crawl for years, but the shared exhibit is due to the efforts of Zack manager and curator Sarah Dobbs.

“Sarah brought us together,” Mehlis explained. “I applied for the show at the JCC, but I didn’t have enough new works to fill the gallery. Sarah visited several other studios in our building to find the second artist.” Richards picked up the story: “Sarah approached me with the idea of a two-artist show, and here we are.”

For Mehlis, her Latin American roots inform her paintings and sculptures. “Magic Realism is very popular in Latin America,” she said. “It fascinates me: the idea of mystical and mysterious in everyday life. My grandmother’s stories were full of magic embedded in the ordinary. And we have many street festivals in Bolivia. The performers wear colourful costumes of fantastic beasts, with only their human legs showing.”

Similarly, the birds in Mehlis’s paintings all have human legs and bright plumage. They are flying in the same direction, through the luminous light, towards goals only they know. The artist calls this series the Ornithrope Collection.

“The idea of migration of humans and animals intrigues me,” she said. “For fish and birds, there are no borders, they follow a pattern in the world. But humans – we have borders. Borders complicate things, and still people migrate. My birds are modeled on a swallow, a migratory creature. Swallows fly between North and South America every year, like me. They are my travel companions.”

image - “Riding on the Wings” by Pilar Mehlis — “Riding on the Wings” by Pilar Mehlis.

Most of her pieces were inspired by Caroline Shaw’s music, set to the words of psalms, and the titles reflect those inspirational, poetic phrases: “The sparrow found a house…” or “They pass through the valley…” or “Riding on the wings…” All the pieces are focused on fantastic, anthropomorphic birds: at rest or in flight. They are the protagonists of Mehlis’s stories.

Meanwhile, Richards’ paintings are of scenery, with succinct titles: “Commute,” “Ferry Deck,” “Tree Fort.”

“Urban spaces always interested me,” she said. “We pass them. We touch them. We change them. I take lots of photos when I walk around, and my photos often serve as a base for my paintings, something I want to explore, a starting point. Light and shadows create a mood, an atmosphere. That’s why there are no people in my paintings. People change the mood, but I don’t know who they are. As it is, the viewers are the participants. They can walk into my paintings and make up their own stories.”

Light suffuses Richards’ cityscapes, be it the pink sunlight on a ferry deck, the lamplight at night on a street corner, or the yellow sunlight peeking through a tangle of boards of an abandoned tree fort. In Richards’ paintings, we are the people driving in the cars or traveling on the ferry through the lights of ocean and sky. We might have built the fort.

image - “Tree Fort” by Gillian Richards — “Tree Fort” by Gillian Richards.

“That tree fort is such an expressive structure,” she said. “I have several paintings of it. It is in that liminal space between a residential area and a forest. There is a mystery there: who built it? What for? It’s human architecture, fragile but enduring.”

Like Mehlis, Richards finds mystery.

Another similarity between the artists is that both are cautious about commissions.

“I have only one client – a poet,” Mehlis said.

“I have done some commissions,” Richards said, “but it wasn’t really for me. It resembled too much my work in film: executing someone else’s ideas.”

Mehlis and Richards represent a generation of creative people finding their way, one step at a time, between the old brick-and-mortar gallery system and the new internet marketing world.

“I don’t know how to promote myself anymore,” said Mehlis. “It used to be all galleries, but now it is all online, and I don’t understand those algorithms.”

Richards agreed: “The gallery system is in trouble now, competing with the online sales. But Eastside Culture Crawl is still going strong. Most of us make our yearly income during Culture Crawl. Hundreds of visitors come every year to our studios. It is a huge artistic event, the most democratic art sales in Vancouver. Nobody curates it. People buy what they like.… I remember in 2021, just after COVID, there were still restrictions in place of how many people could visit at a time. I looked out the window and there was a lineup of people in front of the door to our studios. It stretched out for blocks. They all wanted our art. It was very heartening.”

Into the Light opened Nov. 13 and will be up until Jan. 5. For more information, visit the artists’ websites, pilarmehlis.ca and gillianrichardsartist.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

A journey beyond self

“The Valley of the Shadow” by Michal Tkachenko.

Songs of Deliverance, a solo exhibit by Michal Tkachenko, opened last month at the Zack Gallery and is on display until Nov. 10. While its title is inspired by the lyrics of a Bethel Music song – “You unravel me, with a melody / You surround me with a song / Of deliverance, from my enemies / Till all my fears are gone” – its focus derives from three psalms.

“I really wanted to have a subject for the exhibition that would bind communities together and so I came to rest on the psalms, which span both Judaism and Christianity, but are also used in secular society as a means to reach out to a greater being beyond ourselves,” Tkachenko told the Independent. “For me, this is a huge departure from previous work in both subject and vulnerability. It is my most honest work so far and, as the exhibition falls on the two-year anniversary of everything I saw with my spirit, I feel myself rising from the anguish and am ready to speak about my experience now, to move towards creating what I saw was possible.”

Lacking the exact words to describe it, Tkachenko said she had a near-death, or mystical, experience two years ago, and she was in that state for more than a week.

“It instantly changed my entire outlook on life and death and it completely changed me,” she said. “I was so excited about it until I began to realize how isolated it made me and how those I reached out to didn’t always have a helpful response. I quickly spiraled into the dark night of the soul and have been traveling that road…. Two very deep things came to rest in me during this time. The first was a deep longing in my spirit for something greater than myself, to draw and stay extremely close to God. The second was a deep grief that all that I had seen with my spirit, particularly an unseen solid force of love that is everywhere and how we are meant to love and be vulnerable with each other as our primary purpose in life, were things I could not make happen however hard I tried.”

Psalm 23 – “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” – was with Tkachenko throughout this two-year period. “For me,” she said, “it was a psalm about my journey and how, in the midst of the darkness, God was always with me and more vivid than I had ever experienced outside of that extraordinary week.”

photo - Michal Tkachenko’s solo exhibit, Songs of Deliverance, is at the Zack Gallery until Nov. 10 — Michal Tkachenko’s solo exhibit, Songs of Deliverance, is at the Zack Gallery until Nov. 10. *(photo by Andrea Lee)*

As she approached the one-year anniversary of that week, Tkachenko asked two people to write her a blessing, as she made a vow to God and shaved her head. “One of the blessings,” she said, “included Psalm 63 and it reflected my own deep longing for God, ‘I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry parched land where there is no water.’… My hair that I shaved off is part of the exhibition in an aged box that is meant to suggest a holy relic of the past, when people had more vivid experiences with God.

“Psalm 139 is such a beautiful expression of God’s love and absolutely full of beautiful imagery as an artist,” she continued. “It is a psalm that has also kept me company on my two-year journey and moves me every time I read it.

“For this psalm,” she said, “I made a pile of sketches of different verses and the images that came to me. Of those, I chose seven to do larger pieces on mylar. In many of the pieces, the spirit of God is represented by the white negative space. In ‘You Hem Me in Behind and Before, You Lay Your Hand Upon Me,’ the image of a human is abstracted in a long, dark column down the centre of the page, but the figure is not the focus. Instead, the white empty space is the representation of God hemming that figure in from ‘behind and before.’”

Songs of Deliverance marks Tkachenko’s return to drawing and painting after this two-year period, during which she spent a lot of time writing. “My goal is to make short, layered videos using these writings,” she said.

She also took a break from painting during COVID, making art out of dollhouses that people were getting rid of in the decluttering that took place then. In these dollhouses, she created COVID lockdown scenes in miniature.

“My interest is not held by one medium or one style alone, although I do have a style that often emerges naturally,” she said. “The older I get, the less interested I am in creating what I think others will like or want to buy and more about what I want to say and what I am excited about making and expressing through the medium that seems best suited to that particular message.”

Tkachenko was born in Victoria but grew up in Vancouver. Her dad, an architectural technician, builder and musician, was a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada after the Second World War, while her mom, a teacher, music teacher and musician, was a second-generation Canadian with a Scottish/British background.

“My parents were part of the hippy movement in the ’60s and ’70s and, when I was young, we lived in communal housing,” said Tkachenko, who is the oldest of four sisters.

“Growing up in a big creative household, there were always guests and cooking parties (Ukrainian food), live music and all sorts of art projects going on,” she said. “My parents didn’t push the academics as much because they wanted to make sure we found what gave us excitement and joy and they invested in building our self-esteem instead.”

That said, Tkachenko has a bachelor’s and a master’s in fine arts. For her schooling, she has lived in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Toronto, Florence and London (England). She has lived and volunteered in Haiti, Kenya, Malawi and Liberia, among other places. She has studios in both Vancouver and Manchester, as she, her husband and kids travel between Canada and the United Kingdom.

Despite knowing from a young age that she was going to be an artist, it took time for Tkachenko to recognize her skill and justify making art – “I considered it a luxury item, when the poor existed in the world,” she said.

“My hippy parents had driven us down to Mexico a number of times when my sister and I were young children (we are the oldest two) and we had been taken to the slums to understand how most of the world lived and how, despite our modest life in Canada, we were rich compared to rest of the world. It had made a huge and lasting impression on me as a child.”

At 18, she moved to Haiti to volunteer for a year, she said, “but before the year was out, I was in a life-altering car accident in which a friend died, my skull was shattered and my face smashed in on one side. I was flown back to Canada for reconstructive surgery and to recover.”

She volunteered for a spell in Kenya a few years later, but then finally decided to follow her calling in art.

Tkachenko works out of Parker Studios in Vancouver. She is also on the advisory committee for the DTES Small Arts Grant. “Being on this committee and working out of Carnegie [Community Centre] in the Downtown Eastside joins two things I value – the arts and working among the less fortunate,” she said.

Tkachenko’s husband is Jewish on his mother’s side – “her parents fled Czechoslovakia and Germany for the UK during WWII,” Tkachenko shared.

“Although they purposefully lost a lot of their Jewish heritage during the shift for safety reasons, my kids and I have become interested in it,” she said. “I came from a very open faith background because my parents were hippies that were part of the Jesus People Movement. They always encouraged us to find our own way to God and faith and, as a result, the people I am drawn to with my spirit are varied, from Jewish to Muslim, from Buddhist to Eastern Awakenings. The value of community does go beyond a single group [an idea she explores in one of The Journey series videos she is currently working on] and the more open and loving we become with each other, the more we can appreciate the differences that we each were gifted. And the more we see the bigger picture and what we all have in common.”

Both personal & cosmic

Eric Goldstein and Jenny Judge are different in their backgrounds and creative philosophies, in their media and techniques, but they have two characteristics in common: their images are abstract, and strings drive their artistic perceptions. (photo by Jenny Judge)

A string is a simple, utilitarian object. Usually, it connects things, but rarely is it associated with beauty. However, String Theory, the current two-artist exhibition at the Zack Gallery, definitely brings beauty to gallery patrons.

The artists participating in the show – Jenny Judge and Eric Goldstein – are different in their backgrounds and creative philosophies, in their media and techniques, but they have two characteristics in common: their images are abstract, and strings drive their artistic perceptions.

Judge has been an installation artist for decades.

“I received a BFA in sculpture and printmaking in 1983 and completed an MFA in sculpture in 1991,” she told the Independent. “I often integrate a variety of craft-based material and processes in my installations, and I have exhibited them in Canada and abroad, but I have never exhibited my drawings before this show. I’ve been drawing for a long time, but my drawings were never the focus of my art. They were for clearing my head, as was my writing, which is also essential to my practice. Both helped me understand my own concepts better. I guess it is time for my drawings to be in the foreground of a show.”

photo - Jenny Judge — Jenny Judge (photo by Mads Colvin)

Like her installations, Judge’s drawings have depth, displaying multiple layers of texture and meaning.

“The heart of these drawings is transition, the two different sides coming together, connected by lines or strings,” she explained. “Light versus dark. Old age versus youth. Northern hemisphere versus southern. Sky versus water. My family lives in Canada and New Zealand, and I’m often traveling from there to here and back. My drawings help me to make sense of these transitions.”

All her pieces in the show are a wash of muted paint in the background overlaid by a network of strings and nodes in faintly contrasting colours. The web of strings and their junctions is complex and delicate, the lines gossamer-thin, reflecting the artist’s contemplation of belonging to the emotional and physical landscape of both Canada and New Zealand.

“My drawing are like landscapes,” she said. “There is even a horizon line in most of them, the line where two different worlds meet, the areas of constant shifting and negotiations. But there is much more to the story I want to tell. That’s why I paint in the abstract style. A simple landscape is just that – a landscape, a forest or a mountain. But an abstract picture always leaves room for interpretation. Everyone can come up with their own story.”

Like her images, Judge’s titles are also open to interpretation: “Crossing,” “Striations,” “Pass Through,” for example.

“They underscore my feelings of not always knowing where I am in time and space, of always seeking connections,” she said.

Inspired by the concepts of meeting points, of confluence and repetition, Judge also sees parallels between her compositions and knitting.

“I learned to knit from my mother when I was 10. I remember sitting with her as we talked, knitted and counted stitches. I still enjoy knitting. When you knit, you have one string of yarn and you repeat the same pattern over and over again. And, suddenly, you have something else: a scarf or a sweater. That’s what I do when I draw. I repeat endless variations of the same pattern until something meaningful emerges,” she said.

Another link between her drawings and her knitting is the tool she employs. She draws with a bamboo skewer (very like a knitting needle), dipped in acrylic ink. “It is a very domestic item,” she said. “But it has a sharp point, sharper than any brush. It allows me to draw very thin lines. I build those webs of lines over one another, rows and layers, until I’m satisfied with the result. Sometimes, it takes several layers until the whole starts making sense. Of course, it takes a long time to draw all the lines I visualize for even one painting.”

Perhaps the length of time it takes her to create her pieces contributes to the fact that she doesn’t take commissions. “I tried,” she said. “But I didn’t like the clients’ constant demands. I don’t create art for the money.”

Goldstein, however, does take commissions and he relishes seeing his pieces in people’s homes.

“I create mixed media collages,” he said. “I use coloured fibres, gold foil, glass, paint, plaster.”

While Judge’s web-like pictures imply multiple dimensions, Goldstein’s fibre string collages tend to one-directional geometries, either horizontal or vertical, their colour patterns cheerful and dazzlingly bright. The gold foil and the glass fragments provide even more pizzazz to his deceptively simple compositions. “I build my canvasses like an architect builds a building,” he said.

Goldstein came to the visual art from the movie industry. Over the past three decades, he has been the director of photography for more than 75 film projects, from Hollywood features to documentaries. Creating gorgeous, highly decorative fibre collages for the last 15 years has provided him with a different outlet for his artistic vision.

“I’m inspired by nature, by the West Coast landscape,” he said. “Not as it appears on the surface. Instead, I want to capture how it feels to experience it – often chaotic, often incomprehensible. I try to convey feelings. As a mixed-media artist, I delve into the intricate, visual storytelling of people and the world around us.”

The pieces Goldstein presents in this show have rather mundane titles, in contrast to the elaborate poetry of the images themselves. “I call my paintings ‘Poetic narratives with kinetic energy,’” he said.

One of the paintings, “View of the Bay,” is a symphony of blue, where glass tiles twinkle among the strings like windows on the far shore. “No Curtains Needed,” on the other hand, is a subtler image, hinting at an open window and a playful light. The artist offers a short description for every canvas, and this one reads: “The absence of curtains allows for unfiltered light to dance freely upon the walls. It creates a sense of freedom and awe. Reminding us to let go of our barriers, both physical and cerebral, so we can.”

One of his most notable pieces in the exhibit – the white and blue “What Remains” – feels like a scream of the artist’s soul.

“The colours are the deconstructed Israeli flag,” he said. And his description of the image reads like a part of a poem: “This is my way of bearing witness to the horror unfolding in Israel and Gaza. It expresses my profound sense of conflict and loss of a meaningful identity. This piece isn’t about right or wrong or even resolution; it’s about holding space for complexity, for grief and empathy, and hope that something sacred remains.”

Goldstein exhibits a lot, and his works are in demand. “Next month, I’ll have a show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre,” he said. “I’ll have 12 paintings there.”

Judge and Goldstein didn’t know each other before Sarah Dobbs, the gallery curator, decided that their works were complementary. “Together,” she said, “Judge and Goldstein show that both our lives and the universe are shaped by invisible threads – of memory, matter and meaning. String Theory is … about the poetic links between the personal and the cosmic, reminding us that everything is connected.” Both artists agree.

String Theory is at the Zack Gallery until Sept. 22. To learn more, check the artists’ websites: ericgoldsteinart.com and jennyjudge.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Two visions that complement

Kim Rosin, left, and Alejandra Morales’s shared exhibit, Parallel Visions, is at the Zack Gallery until July 21. (photo from the artists)

The double exhibit Parallel Visions opened at the Zack Gallery on June 25. It introduces two artists – Kim Rosin and Alejandra Morales – who have different backgrounds, are different ages and had never met before. But their art is amazingly compatible.

“When Alejandra submitted the photos of her pieces, they were mostly of fruit, along with a fruit stand. I thought that it would be interesting to pair her with Kim’s allotments,” said gallery curator Sarah Dobbs about why she combined both artists in one show. “However, when I saw Alejandra’s work at her studio, there was so much more, so I had to rethink.

“Upon reflection, I realized that both Kim and Alejandra turn to the natural world as more than just subjects of beauty. For Kim, painting from a community garden in West Vancouver becomes a way to reflect on growth, nourishment and the fragility of food systems in times of scarcity. Alejandra, working from northern Mexico, uses natural imagery as well, but in a dreamier way – exploring how Latin America is romanticized by outsiders. Though grounded in different geographies and experiences, both artists explore how abundance can hold layers of tension between beauty and critique, comfort and resistance. Hence the title, Parallel Visions.”

Rosin’s paintings are of her plot in a community garden. “I have always been interested in growing food,” she said. “From nothing, just a little seed, wonderful, nourishing plants grow. It feels almost magical. It makes me happy but also a little sad, because not everybody can grow their own food. Some people have to go without, when they don’t have a garden and can’t buy their vegetables because of high prices. When I look at my plot, I think of the food chain on our planet.”

Her paintings are full of edible green things: kale and lettuce, beets and carrots. One can imagine the labour that went into growing such a lush garden and the tasty dishes after the harvest. The images reflect the artist’s love for the plants she grows, as well as her longing to share her cornucopia with everyone. Her painting of red poppies is a worthy companion to the vegetable plots, adding beauty to the nutritional component. “Many people grow poppies in our plots,” she said.

photo - “Plot 5: Poppies and Pollinators” by Kim Rosin — “Plot 5: Poppies and Pollinators” by Kim Rosin. *(photo from the artist)*

Rosin also enjoys painting still life. “It is like a recording of a moment in time,” she said. “And the decorative element is there, too. People often appreciate such paintings, especially if they could ask me to include their favourite objects in the image.”

She likes working on commissions, which she describes as “collaborations with the clients.”

“Commissions take a different mindset from making art of my own, less creative freedom,” she acknowledged. “Some clients have a certain vision, and my job is to bring that vision to life. One example is dog portraits. Dog owners want them realistic, almost photographic. I don’t have to interpret anything, as I do in my own paintings. It is easier in some way, like a mechanical exercise. My creativity is not as important as my skills as a painter. Of course, it is not that simple. When I paint, the image occasionally changes on its own, it has its own demands. Then I worry. What if the client doesn’t like the end result? What if they won’t buy this painting? Fortunately, that has never happened to me.”

People’s stories have always served as an inspiration for her art. “I’m curious about everything – traveling, music, nature. Before I moved to Vancouver, I lived in Seattle,” she said. “I worked on theatre sets for several fringe theatres there…. After I moved here, I created a set for a musical on Granville Island. Teaming up with theatre companies was always a fabulous experience, despite the low budgets.”

Like Rosin, Morales also likes working on commissions. “Some people are very relaxed. ‘You’re the artist. You know what to do.’ Other people are very involved. They want exactly what they envision and you, the artist, need to give them what they want,” she said.

On the other hand, unlike the serene greenery in Rosin’s paintings, Morales’s paintings emphasize her unease with society’s contradictions and paradoxes. Her flowers are colourful and gorgeous, but unrealistic. “I wanted them too beautiful for this world, almost uncomfortable,” she said. “And the animals in my paintings – they fight, like humans do. There are conflicts there.”

In her self-portrait, which is on display, the dichotomy between the pastel tones, the elaborate, narcissistic flowers, the birds in the middle of an angry confrontation and the pensive woman facing the painting echoes the artist’s contemplation on the incongruities of life.

The self-portrait is titled “Will Happiness Find Me?” Many of Morales’s other paintings also sport titles that add a verbal facet to the art’s visual impact. “My titles come from books or songs. Or, I remember someone saying something, and it is relevant for this painting. Or a title could be a quote from an old show,” she said. Her tranquil landscape of a Vancouver shoreline is called “Nothing Mattered More Than Anything Else.”

photo - “Will Happiness Find Me?” by Alejandra Morales — “Will Happiness Find Me?” by Alejandra Morales. (photo from the artist)

Morales moved to Vancouver four years ago from Mexico. “I received my BA from McGill University in 2016 and studied for my master’s degree in visual arts at UBC.”

Besides Canada, she studied art in Spain and in her native Mexico. “When I took art classes in Mexico, many students were housewives,” she recalled. “North Mexican culture is different than here. Women are supposed to follow a traditional path of a wife and a mother. The women that took art classes were anxious because they deviated from that path. I wanted to show their anxiety, their inner struggle in my paintings.”

According to Morales, women are freer here in Canada, the entire society more relaxed, and her art reflects the difference. “I painted a jungle in Mexico – and it was very bright and colourful. But when I painted a jungle here, the colours became less vivid, more muted. Maybe because it was raining outside,” she said.

Morales taught fine art as a teacher’s assistant, while she studied at UBC. “I liked teaching. I would like to do more of that,” she said.

Her latest artistic project is rather unusual. She painted a series of cityscapes featuring dumpsters around Vancouver. “Some of them have amazing graffiti. It was such fun,” she said.

Parallel Visions is on until July 21. Rosin’s website is kimthings.com; Morales’s is moralesalejandra.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Chim’s photos at the Zack

A photograph by David Seymour (Chim) of children in Normandy, in 1947. Part of the exhibit Chim’s Photojournalism: From War to Hope, at the Zack Gallery until June 15. (photo from Ben Shneiderman)

The new show at the Zack Gallery, Chim’s Photojournalism: From War to Hope, features one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century – David Seymour (known as Chim). Chim was killed in 1956, a few days before his 45th birthday, while photographing the Suez Crisis in Egypt, but his legacy lives on even now, almost 70 years after his tragic death.

Gallery manager Sarah Dobbs told the Independent that Ben Shneiderman, Chim’s nephew and the manager of his estate, approached her about the show.

“I was immediately intrigued,” she said. “I met with him and asked if we could host the exhibition. I recognized its importance to the community at the JCC and also to the city of Vancouver. It is a rare opportunity to showcase such an amazing photojournalist. It made sense to host it during the Festival of Jewish Culture in May. I met with the art committee here, and they agreed.… This is the first time these works will be shown together in Canada.”

According to Dobbs, the exhibit was initiated by Cynthia Young, a curator at the New York International Centre of Photography, using vintage prints in their collection.

“Then, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Centre produced the 51 modern prints for their showing,” Dobbs said. “Later, they were presented in Portland, Ore., at their Jewish museum and Holocaust education centre. I flew down to Portland to see the exhibition while it was there and chatted with the curators.”

To package and ship the display to Vancouver, Dobbs needed funds. “I applied for grants and approached individuals,” she said. “In addition to the shipping cost, we also had a special wall built inside the gallery. It will serve us for other exhibitions, moving forward.”

The show preview on April 22 was a joyful event, presided by Shneiderman, who shared with guests his intimate knowledge of his uncle’s work and life.

David Seymour was born in 1911 in Warsaw. His father, Benjamin Szymin, was a respected publisher of Yiddish and Hebrew books. As a young man, Seymour studied printing in Leipzig and, later, chemistry and science in Paris. He wanted to become a scientist. Meanwhile, photography fascinated him. He started taking photographs and selling them to support himself financially, and unexpectedly found a passion for humanitarian photojournalism. His first credited photographs appeared in the French magazine Regards in 1934.

Interested in social issues, Seymour photographed labourers and political rallies, famous actors and street scenes. At that time, he adopted his professional name, Chim, a simplification of his last name, Szymin.

Between 1936 and 1938, as a photojournalist, Chim documented the Spanish Civil War and other international political events. Twenty-five of his Spanish stories were published in Regards. Several of those photos are included in the Zack show. One of them, a close-up of a nursing mother looking up, obviously troubled (1936), is well known. Shneiderman said several history scholars studied this photograph and concluded that it was one of the inspirations of Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, “Guernica.” Chim’s photo of Picasso in front of “Guernica” positions the painting’s detail of a woman looking up at the falling bombs, right behind the artist.

In 1939, Chim escaped the unfolding war in Europe for Mexico and, later, the United States. As a multilingual and Sorbonne-educated journalist, he served in the US military intelligence as a photo-interpreter. After the war, he resumed his photojournalism career.

In 1947, he and a group of his friends, like-minded photographers, founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative run by photographers. Chim served as Magnum president from 1954 until his death.

Chim’s postwar photographic stories are a blend of anguish and hope. Many of the images are on display at the Zack, divided into several distinct sections. The biggest section is “The Children of Europe.”

In 1948, Chim took a UNESCO assignment to report on the plight of the 11 million European children displaced by the war. He visited Italy, Greece, Hungary, Austria and other European countries. He photographed children who were maimed and orphaned, children playing beside ruins or working in print shops or begging in the streets.

“When LIFE magazine published a spread of those pictures,” Shneiderman said, “together with a list of organizations that accepted donations on behalf of those children, the pouring in of donations was unprecedented.”

Another series of photographs focused on postwar Germany. One of the most poignant ones in this series shows a section of a beach divided by barbed wire – the border between West and East Germany. A couple of boys lounge on the sand. A young woman in a swimming suit runs towards the water. In the foreground, a border guard in uniform stands grim and watchful with his guard dog and his rifle. Tension thrums through the image, underlined by questions and uncertainties.

On the other hand, Chim’s Israeli photographs of the early 1950s are infused with hope. A man lifts his baby to the sky in elation – the first baby born in his village. A wedding is celebrated under the chuppah, its makeshift poles including a gun and a pitchfork. An Independence Day parade rolls through Tel Aviv. A team of fishers proudly display their catch of the day to the photographer.

photo - A photograph by David Seymour (Chim) of a wedding in Israel, in 1952 — A photograph by David Seymour (Chim) of a wedding in Israel, in 1952. *(photo from Ben Shneiderman)*

In all his visual stories, Chim is always there with his subjects. They are his co-authors.

“It is that emotional connection that made many celebrities willing to pose for him,” said Shneiderman.

Chim photographed Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren and Picasso, and many others. These photographs are not included in the show, but, together with those that are included, they portray their creator as a man of courage, integrity and vision, one of the best photographic artists of the 20th century.

“Is photojournalism art?” Dobbs mused. “Yes, I think so. Photojournalists capture a moment, an interaction at a specific time. Contemporary art is a mirror of our times. It reflects the societal changes, cultural shifts and significant events that shape our world. It is what the best photojournalists, like Chim, do.”

Dobbs is certain that Chim’s work is still relevant.

“It continues to inspire and draw attention. It teaches photographers to get close to their subjects,” she said. “His images remind us of the past, of the destruction of war, but also of the humanity that transcends it, and of peoples’ resilience.”

Chim’s Photojournalism: From War to Hope is on display until June 15. It is sponsored by the Averbach Foundation, Esther Chetner, the Yosef Wosk Family Foundation and the Government of Canada, in partnership with Shneiderman, Magnum Photos, the International Centre of Photography in New York, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

For more information and to see a selection of photos, visit davidseymour.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Dickinson poem reflects art

The new exhibit at the Zack Gallery, “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers, derives its name from the eponymous poem by Emily Dickinson. Gallery manager Sarah Dobbs, who curated the show, was instrumental in coming up with the name, as well as in bringing together the two artists whose works are on display: Ilze Bebris and Barbara Heller.

“I’ve known Ilze Bebris for many years,” said Dobbs. “I saw the works she produced during COVID and said she should submit a proposal for an exhibition at the Zack Gallery. When she did, the art committee and I met and decided she should definitely have a show. But there wasn’t enough work for a solo show.”

Bebris’s submission included a series of 19 drawings, called Ballad of Hope and Despair, and a journal with her sketches of feathers. “That journal is a record of found things; of feathers shed by the gulls in my neighbourhood,” Bebris explained. “Each morning, at least one feather landed on my daily walking route.… I collected them and drew them over a period of a month.”

When Dobbs contemplated Bebris’s feathers, another artist who uses feathers extensively came to mind.

“I remembered Barbara Heller instantly,” said Dobbs. “Heller had created many tapestries with birds and feathers, and I thought their art might work well together. However, once I reflected and looked deeper, it occurred to me that they were both talking about isolation and resilience. And the poem by Dickinson, which I used for the title of the show, also speaks of resilience, hope and feathers, even though Dickinson wrote it more than 100 years earlier.”

For the current exhibit, both Bebris and Heller are presenting art that they created during the pandemic.

photo - Ilze Bebris — Ilze Bebris *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

“We have a small property on Gabriola Island, a house” Bebris told the Independent. “My husband and I were driving there one day in 2020 when the news of the COVID lockup hit. We became stuck on the island, couldn’t go home or anywhere for months.”

Bebris and several artists she knew who lived or vacationed on Gabriola got in touch with one another and decided to exchange drawings that they would create daily.

“We needed something to do,” she said. “We were all trapped. The news was horrible. My father and stepmother both died from COVID in their care home in Ontario, and I couldn’t go there, could do nothing but wait and hope for a cure or a vaccine.

“I lived in a tumult of emotions: grief, hope, anxiety, boredom,” she shared. “So, I drew. I drew flowers and twigs and rocks I saw on my daily walks; I drew feathers. But, one day, I ran out of things to draw. I had this small wooden mannequin, and I thought: what if I put it into different poses and draw it. Then the black boxes appeared in the images, reflecting our collective feelings of being trapped, isolated. I called the series ‘Ballad of Hope and Despair.’ They were all done during the first summer and fall of the pandemic.”

The 18 images, set in two rows, one above the other, are all the same size and shape. In each frame, there is the grey background, a black box of a window in the middle, and a wooden mannequin inside the window. Every pose is different, like every person is different – different experiences, ages, ethnicities – but the series unites us as human beings. We have the same general body structure and we move in similar ways as the mannequins in those windows. We all went through the pandemic.

There is one additional image beside the original 18.

photo - One of the images in Ilze Bebris’s “Ballad of Hope and Despair” series, now on display at the Zack Gallery — One of the images in Ilze Bebris’s “Ballad of Hope and Despair” series, now on display at the Zack Gallery. *(photo courtesy)*

“I did it a few months later,” Bebris said. “In the first 18, all the mannequins are trapped inside. But, in the last one, the mannequin is outside the window, finally looking in, reflecting beside the viewers.”

“Hope” is Bebris’s first show at the Zack, while Heller has exhibited in the gallery before. Her contribution to this show includes a series of small tapestries called “We Are All the Same….” Each tapestry shows a couple of bird bones with a feather above or below them. We don’t know what species of birds the bones belong to, and neither do we know from which birds came the feathers – they are bright and colourful but mysterious.

“The entire series includes 16 small tapestries I wove when I stayed home due to COVID,” said Heller. “They are small, because my studio on Granville Island was closed and I only had a small loom at home. The tapestries were a response to the killing of George Floyd and the chaos in the world at the time. Not that it is better now!”

photo - Barbara Heller — Barbara Heller *(photo courtesy)*

She elaborated in her artist’s statement: “We are all the same under our skin, but by focusing on our differences, we have lost our sense of who we are and how we fit into our shared world. This series shows that … beneath the many colours of our skins and feathers, our bones, our organs and our blood are the same. They are what make us human, while the outward differences, no matter what kind, are invisible and irrelevant beneath our skins.”

In addition to the small tapestries, there are two other works by Heller that catch viewers’ interest. One is a big tapestry of a dead gull, called “The Shaman.” It is a skeleton and residual feathers. About 10 times larger than the small ones, the tapestry is bright with colour and infinitely sad – the memory of a bird rather than a living one.

“It is from a series of three tapestries I wove after I found a desiccated body of a seagull with its feathers almost intact, while walking to my studio on Granville Island,” Heller explained. “To me, there was such pathos in the creature that I took it home to photograph. And I wove a tapestry to honour its spirit. ‘The Shaman’ dances to warn of our earth in peril. It has included bits of wire and plastic in its nest, and a vessel for life becomes a warning of death.”

photo - “Chance” by Barbara Heller, part of her “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers exhibit with Ilze Bebris — “Chance” by Barbara Heller. *(photo courtesy)*

Dead birds and feathers have been parts of Heller’s expressive pallete for several decades. They represent the artist’s appeal for change and, to Heller’s chagrin, they are still relevant today, maybe more than ever. But she keeps trying to inspire people to become less destructive, more considerate of one another.

Heller’s other offering is a real nest abandoned by its avian makers. It is full of feathers she found during her walks. Like Bebris’s journal filled with feather sketches, the nest is a memory. They both tell the same story: the birds were here, but they are not anymore. Should we take such a message as a warning or as an inspiration – each one of us must decide for ourselves.

“I was amazed and very pleased to see how well Ilze Bebris’s art and mine looked together,” said Heller. “We met for the first time on March 4, when we brought our works in to hang, but we explored the same themes. And the fact that we both have depicted boxes within boxes is fantastic. Both her works and mine deal with COVID and isolation and our relationship with the world. They complement each other and amplify our messages.”

“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers opened at the Zack Gallery on March 5 and will be on display until April 11.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Exhibit inspired by roots and wings

Roots and Wings at Zack Gallery features a wide range of artwork, including the painting “Princess Love” by Grace Tang. (photo by Olga Livshin)

Roots and Wings, the seventh annual exhibition of JCC inclusion services, opened at Zack Gallery on Jan. 30. The show marks February as Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. Most participating artists are either members of Art Hive, JCC inclusion services’ art branch, or members of similar programs in other localities. Such programs offer people with developmental disabilities art classes and workshops, and help emerging artists with instructions and materials.

The show’s theme is Roots and Wings. On the one hand, roots represent a deep connection to our origins: biological, ethnic and geographic. On the other hand, wings denote our striving to fly towards new beginnings and new understandings.

photo - “Shoes” by Jasmine Winkler Stobbe — “Shoes” by Jasmine Winkler Stobbe. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Many artists responded to the challenging theme. The exhibition includes paintings, ceramics and 3D installations. The images vary from detailed beaded jewelry by Mikaela Zitron to the flowery landscape “Walking through the Meadow Land” by Theresa Kinahan. Small raku ceramics of birds and hamsa (hands) by different Art Hive potters stand beside the colourful and whimsical acrylic “Paisley Cat” by Calvin Ho.

Trees and roots also served as the inspiration for a few pieces. Among them, the most unusual is “Shoes” by Jasmine Winkler Stobbe. Roots painted in a quiet blue palette enhance the standard black fabric shoes’ tops, inviting everybody to try them on.

But most artists went with the subject of birds, so fitting to the theme of wings. Small, everyday birds decorate Jerry Zhou’s charming totes. Strange, fantastic birds look haughtily at the viewer from Hadeeb Hamidi’s painting “Mystical Birds.” A regal peacock with its gorgeous tail struts across a simple landscape in Grace Tang’s “Princess Love.” And, while owls in several paintings are instantly recognizable, the driftwood bird sculpture “Fusion of Nature” by Melody Edgars feels like an embodiment of a proud sea bird with a powerful beak and a curious nature.

photo - “Fusion of Nature” by Melody Lorna Edgars — “Fusion of Nature” by Melody Lorna Edgars. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Many artists depicted chickens: small and large, yellow and multicoloured, familiar and exotic. Matthew Tom-Wing’s humorous “Nobody Here but Chicken” seems to represent this flock of chicken fairly well.

Some artists have participated in these annual shows before. For others, this is their first time at the Zack. One of the newcomers is Shiri Barak Gonen, the new inclusion services coordinator.

“My career went in a kind of crooked line,” said Gonen in an email interview. “I started working in the Israeli tech industry when I was 23, freshly discharged from military service. I worked with computers in both technical and managerial roles while I completed my bachelor’s degree in psychology, followed by a music therapy program, on evenings and weekends. Afterwards, I worked for a few years as a music therapist with kids of all ages and with a range of challenges. Some years later, I found my way back to the tech industry, until we decided to relocate to Vancouver. We arrived in Canada in 2024.”

Newly hired, Gonen has given lots of thought to her new position. “The inclusion coordinator role is composed of two aspects,” she explained. “First, the managerial tasks such as staff and budget management and strategic planning. The other aspect is the direct and intensive interactions with the inclusion population, which requires sensitivity and a constant awareness of the needs of others. Both aspects are reflected in my personality and in my previous jobs.”

She added: “My current position is very different from my past jobs. In my last role, I was writing software code … and managing teams. Before, when I worked as a music therapist, I had a chance to work with my students and their families, but being a therapist puts you at a different angle than a program instructor. My focus will always be therapeutic, but I find much more pleasure in sharing hot chocolate and a chat with a group rather than analyzing their behaviour as a therapist. The essence of my new job is to establish meaningful relationships and mutual trust. We are building such a connection now.”

Another newbie at the Zack Gallery is an experienced Vancouver artist – Pierre Leichner.

“I have always been artistic,” Leichner said in a telephone interview. “Photography, ceramics, other creative outlets. But, when I graduated from high school, my family and I decided that, for better employment opportunities, I should go into science. I didn’t mind. I liked science too.”

He became a psychiatrist and worked in the profession for more than 30 years.

“In 2002, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore,” he said. “The medical system turned too entrepreneurial, too corporate and dehumanizing.” So, he revisited his first love – art. He enrolled at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and received his bachelor’s in fine arts in 2007. In 2011, he completed his master’s in fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal.

“Mostly I do visual arts,” he said. “Sculpture, photography, videos and paintings. I also do some performing arts, and I dabble in theatre,” he said. “I have my own YouTube channel, which deals with environmental issues.”

photo - Some of Pierre Leichner’s GrassRoots Project masks — Some of Pierre Leichner’s GrassRoots Project masks. *(photo from Pierre Leichner)*

A multidisciplinary artist with widespread interests, Leichner considers community involvement of utmost importance. In 2017, he founded the Vancouver Outsider Arts Festival, which provides opportunities to marginalized visual and performing artists. He still serves as its artistic director. He is also a member of the Connection Salon collective and sits on the board of the Community Arts Council of Vancouver.

“I like to explore the possibilities on the cusp of art and science,” he said. “There are similarities between the two, and both examine the foundations of human existence.”

The GrassRoots Project he presented for the current Zack show fuses science and arts and illustrates Leichner’s interdisciplinary approach.

“I saw the call for this show, and it fit my GrassRoots Project perfectly,” he said. “The project started in 2011, when Britannia Community Centre received a grant to celebrate people with the deepest grassroots contributions: teachers, artists, musicians.”

Over the years, Leichner has made about a dozen sculptural masks of those people, plus some of his friends and colleagues, employing a traditional Mediterranean technique. “I use wheatgrass,” he explained. “I make a mold of their face masks and plant wheatgrass within. The roots take the shape of the face, while the grass grows out like hair. It takes about three weeks to grow each portrait. The grass becomes part of the sculpture, the means of my artistic expression.”

Each mask is a symbol, echoing the synergy of humans and nature. “In this way,” the artist said, “nature imitated us in celebrating our community at this time of great ecological concern. We all need roots. We have them within our bodies. We also have them with our family and our community.”

Roots and Wings is on until March 2.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Campbell’s art at Zack

Artist Olga Campbell and her grandson Arlo, for whom Campbell wrote her memoir, Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson. (photo from Olga Campbell)

Recently, Olga Campbell published her third book, a memoir, Dear Arlo: Letters to My Grandson. Campbell’s new solo show with the same name opened at the Zack Gallery on Jan. 9. It features a selection of paintings and sculptures from the book, as well as a short film.

“The film starts the exhibition,” Campbell told the Independent. “It contains my photographs of Vancouver and its people. It is called Everybody Has a Story. The show and the book portray one of those stories – my story. But millions of other people have their stories, too, and, in the film, in my photos, I tried to tell some of those stories.”

Campbell said, “The book and the show are my answers to the questions my grandson asks. He is interested in our family’s past. We are very close, he and I. We just went to Nepal together. I thought I would write this book for him, as my legacy.”

The book does not concentrate exclusively on pain and tragedy, on the deaths of her family members in the Holocaust. It also celebrates the power of art and writing as a transformational and healing tool. Besides letters to her grandson, the book includes Campbell’s poetry and art, essays written by the artist, and her family’s traditional recipes. (See jewishindependent.ca/a-multidimensional-memoir.)

The Zack Gallery show is a subset of the book, a selection of paintings and sculptures the memoir highlights. The paintings are mostly collages based on the artist’s photographs. Each photo is Photoshopped into infinity, so none of the faces in the paintings have any resemblance to their origins. Campbell likes to experiment with images, looking at them from different perspectives, applying different approaches. Like her inner child who never grew up, she plays with them, making up different stories for different levels of perception.

One of the paintings, “Corridor of Memories,” has a couple of faces looking at the viewer with thoughtful, slightly anxious expressions. Behind those faces, a long corridor stretches into an unknown distance. The memories that come from that distance seem diverse and unsettling, a mix of positive and negative, but different for everyone.

image - “Corridor of Memories” by Olga Campbell — “Corridor of Memories” by Olga Campbell. (photo by Olga Livshin)

“There is bad there but there is also some good stuff there,” she said. “I played with the faces in that painting. I thought it would be interesting to make them three-dimensional. That’s how I came up with the sculptures in the show. They are the result of the images unfolding from 2D to 3D.”

Another painting that underwent a similar metamorphosis is “Shall We Dance? – self meeting Self.” Campbell explained: “I took this image from the confines of a frame and brought it to life by making it three-dimensional. The title, ‘self meeting Self,’ refers to the small self, the individual, the ego, meeting the Universal Self, and the ensuing dance of Self-discovery, joy and wonder of life.”

The 3D dancers – a thickened silhouette of the flat painted image beside it – rotate. They are accompanied by the song “Shall We Dance,” played by a tiny music box, when someone winds it up.

image - “The Sky is Falling” by Olga Campbell — “The Sky is Falling” by Olga Campbell. *(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Sometimes Campbell’s reconstruction of images results not in an additional dimension but in a deepening complexity of the original idea. In “The Sky is Falling,” she took a person’s outline from the painting beside it and embellished it with everything that she felt was relevant to our hectic lives. Unlike most of the other paintings in the gallery, there is no face in this one. The grey danger hangs over all of us, regardless of our facial features or skin colour.

“There are lots of similarities in our world today and the one that preceded WWII,” said Campbell. “That’s why I put a crow in that painting. A crow is a traditional symbol of death, but also of transformation, of change and the future.”

Like the book it is based on, the show is not linear. It reflects the artist’s response to various events in her life, both happy and sad, from her coming of age, to the current war in Ukraine. Both the memoir and the show emphasize Campbell’s personal journey through the beauty and the trauma of life, so inextricably entangled together.

At the gallery on Jan. 23, 7 p.m., Campbell will discuss her book and her art in an event co-presented by the Zack Gallery and the JCC Jewish Book Festival. Campbell’s exhibit will be on display until Jan. 27. To learn more, check out the artist’s website, olgacampbell.com.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].