Join the authors and editor of Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023 for a conversation and celebration occasioned by the launch of this richly illustrated tribute to the beloved teacher, photobook connoisseur, gallery manager and, indeed, photographer Diane Evans (1954-2023).

Doors at 6:30pm
Start at 7:00pm

Admission is by a suggested donation of $10-$20, courtesy of BMO Financial Group

Your RSVP will guarantee you a seat at the event

From the Director’s Foreword by Reid Shier
…the oft-told story (which Diane did little to correct!) was that her career as a practising photographer was sidelined in the 1980s for her twin jobs as gallery manager at Presentation House Gallery (later The Polygon Gallery) and instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She would work for more than three decades at those two institutions, until her untimely death in 2023, all the while earning a deserved reputation as a mentor, curator, and keen purveyor and collector of photobooks. Not even those closest to her grasped the breadth and consistency with which Diane continued to make and exhibit photographs herself.

About the speakers (in order of their text’s appearance in the book):

Helga Pakasaar is an independent curator and writer. She has produced many exhibitions, commissions, and publications with local and international contemporary artists since the early 1980s. From 2017 to 2022, she was chief curator at The Polygon Gallery and, previously, curator at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver; the Art Gallery of Windsor; and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. From 1994 to 2022, she worked closely with Diane Evans on realizing exhibitions and publications on contemporary photo artists, documentary projects, vernacular prints from local archives —among them The Just Past of Photography in Vancouver (1994) and News! (2013)—and photography collections. Pakasaar’s investigations into photographic and media art and their histories have often focused on under-recognized artists and art histories. Her essay in the book recalls the pleasures of working with Diane Evans at The Polygon Gallery (and its former location Presentation House Gallery)

Grant Arnold is an independent writer and curator based in Vancouver. He worked in the curatorial department of the Vancouver Art Gallery from 1993 to 2022 and was the gallery’s Audain Curator of British Columbia Art from 2005 to 2022. He was previously senior curator at the Art Gallery of Windsor and extension coordinator at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon. He holds an MA in art history from the University of British Columbia and also studied at the Banff Centre School of Fine Arts and the University of Saskatchewan. Over the past four decades, Arnold has contributed texts to exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and journals. His essay closely considers 5 photographs by Diane Evans, created over the full span her career – one kept quiet, yet always connected to the world.

Karen Love is an independent curator and writer who was director/curator of Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, from 1983 to 2001. Her curatorial and publication projects include War Zones, co-organized with Karen Henry (1999); Facing History: Portraits from Vancouver (2001); Weathervane, Oakville Galleries / Ottawa Art Gallery (2006; Ontario tour); Memory Palace: Three Artists in the Library, Vancouver Public Library (2008–11); and many solo shows with publications, including those for Marlene Creates, Wyn Geleynse, Jamelie Hassan, Geoffrey James, Arnaud Maggs, Joey Morgan, Jan Peacock, and Mark Ruwedel. Love worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 2006 to 2020, and in 2024 she co-curated, with Linda Chinfen, an exhibition of Diane Evans’s photographs for The Polygon Gallery. Beyond her role as editor, she contributes a meticulously researched and richly illustrated Chronology.

Moderated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator at The Polygon Gallery and Commissioning Editor for Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023.

Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023
Foreword by Reid Shier; texts by Grant Arnold, Helga Pakasaar, John O’Brian; edited with a chronology by Karen Love.
Design by Steedman Design.
Hardcover English 176 pages, colour and b&w illus. 26 x 20.3 cm
Published April 2026 by The Polygon Gallery
ISBN 978-0-9959026-3-3

Banner image: Diane Evans, from the series Exhibition Park Racetrack, c. 1979.