The 10-year survey explores the artist’s experiments with photography as a tool of both colonization and decolonization

The Polygon Gallery presents a major new exhibition by acclaimed artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard, Photolithics, on view from March 7–May 24, 2026. The decade-long survey brings together new and existing works that showcase Willard’s inventive approach to photography through an array of printing and presentation techniques. The gallery space itself will be transformed into a “lens” for the artworks and objects inside. The exhibition is Willard’s first since winning the Sobey Art Award in November 2025 — Canada’s biggest contemporary art prize — and is her largest solo show to date.

“This exhibition has been years in the making,” says Audain Chief Curator Monika Szewczyk, who co-curated Photolithics with Assistant Curator Serena Steel. “Already during a 2016 exhibition she co-curated at The Presentation House Gallery (as The Polygon Gallery was then known), Tania Willard redefined photography as a medium and material that dates back millennia, not centuries. The essay she wrote for the catalogue, Witnessing the Persistence of Light, is the most insightful overview of photography I have ever read — not just historical photography, not just concerning BC, not even photography in the colonial context (though this is an important part of the story), but photography in the most expanded sense of the term. We are incredibly grateful to be bringing Willard back to The Polygon Gallery to showcase her paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research.”

Willard adds: “I wrote the essay as I was researching historical B.C. photography from the Uno Langmann collection. It was a difficult project because so many images depicted the cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples in B.C. — it was enraging. And so many of the photographs were of, but not by, Indigenous People. Photography has historically been used in largely harmful ways, with documentary impulses steeped in the salvage anthropology of the time. So I had to find new ways to look at these images and consider them. As I began to study them as documents of light, I began to think about geological time and the idea of exposure. If the effect of light in a moment is to capture a photograph, then isn’t the ecological process of light equal to a stone? Documents of text and light were used across Canada to dispossess Indigenous people of land and life; I wanted to assert the validity of stones and earth as documentary sources that speak about the deep relationships with our lands since time immemorial.”

Photolithics, a portmanteau of ancient words for “light” and “stone,” highlights Willard’s evolving photographic practice, in which the sun and the land play a vital role beyond the surveillance or spectacle of nature. Throughout the exhibition, the artist asks critical questions about the confines of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and c7ískten̓ (kekuli or underground pit house) architecture. In Safelight (2025), Willard has created a distinctive treatment for the gallery’s windows, based on her research into Salish basketry. Passing through patterns of cedar root, the sun’s rays cast a warm protective glow on all the works in the gallery and the people coming to witness. The exhibition will transform as the days lengthen and the weather filters the available light.

Also on view will be a significantly reconfigured installation of Only Available Light (2016), in which quartz crystals are placed directly in front of a projector screening Harlan I. Smith’s 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia — a disruption that confronts the settler lens. At The Polygon Gallery, the work is being reconfigured inside a 25 by 13-foot purpose-built c7ískten̓ inside the exhibition space. In Vestige (2022), a postcard image Willard found of a Secwépemc woman astride a horse is reprinted across 160 sheets of garnet sandpaper affixed with copper nails. At 15-feet wide, this is Willard’s monumental reckoning with the exploitation, labour, injustice, and the full abrasive history of Canada in regards to Indigenous women.

Drawing on her mixed Secwépemc and settler-Scottish ancestry, Tania Willard’s practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centring art as an Indigenous resurgent act though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalisation in Secwépemc communities. Her independent curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Hip Hop and Indigenous Culture, co-curated with Skeena Reece at grunt gallery, which became the major touring exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, co-curated with Kathleen Ritter at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012–2014) and Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection, co-curated with Heather Caverhill and Helga Pakasaar at Presentation House Gallery (now The Polygon Gallery). She has exhibited extensively across BC and her works are in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. She is the Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and associate professor, University of British Columbia, and will take part in the 25th edition of the Biennale of Sydney in March 2026.

For more information, visit thepolygon.ca/exhibition/tania-willard-photolithics

Tania Willard: Photolithics is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Feature Exhibition Program.

About The Polygon Gallery
Grounded in photography, The Polygon Gallery creates space to challenge how we see the world. The Gallery moved into its Governor General’s Medal-winning building in 2017 after operating as Presentation House Gallery for 40 years. The organization has presented more than 300 exhibitions and earned a reputation as one of the country’s most adventurous public art institutions. Admission is by donation, courtesy of BMO Financial Group.

Gallery hours
Wednesday, 10am–5pm; Thursday, 10am–9pm; Friday–Sunday, 10am–5pm

Address
101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver | Unceded territories of the sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Band.

Press kit and photos
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Press contact
Ines Min
+1 604 440 0791
ines@inesmin.com

Banner Image: Tania Willard, We Are Light (detail) from the series Through and Through, 2025–ongoing. Courtesy the artist.