Tania Willard: Photolithics Public Celebration
Join us on Sunday, March 29 for the public celebration of Tania Willard: Photolithics.
Doors: 4:00pm
Remarks: 4:30pm
Event ends: 6:00pm
RSVPs are helpful
Tania Willard: Photolithics is on view March 7 to May 24
About the Exhibition
Drawing on her mixed Secwépemc and settler-Scottish ancestry, Willard has developed a collaborative, land-based practice, which attends to the history, present, and future of the land and community. The focus of this ten-year survey is her ongoing experiments with photography, as a technology of both colonisation and decolonisation. Combining new and existing works, and showcasing a broad and inventive array of photographic printing, materiality and presentation techniques, the exhibition materialises the artist’s paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research.
Willard considers photography as a medium and material that dates back millennia, not centuries. In her words, “Light has been making life, images, shadows, and reflections for billions of years. Those photographs are called stones – geological formations – the grandmothers and grandfathers embodied in the volcanic rocks used in sweat lodges.”
The title Photolithics (combining ancient words for light and stone) calls up Willard’s expansive notion of working directly with the sun’s changing rays, and with varied formations of soil, crystal, metal, and sediment. Throughout, Willard poses key questions about the confines of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and kekuli (winter home) architecture simultaneously ancient and current. For The Polygon, she devises a distinctive treatment for the gallery’s windows, recasting the building as a “lens” and turning the sun’s rays into a “safelight” for future encounters with sensitive historical records. Committed to a practice rather than a fixed appearance, the exhibition will transform as the days lengthen and the weather filters available light.
Generously supported by Andrew and Yasmeen Strang
Tania Willard: Photolithics is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Feature Exhibition Program.
Banner Image: Tania Willard, detail view from the series Through and Through, 2025–ongoing. Courtesy the artist.