The Polygon Gallery is honoured to organise the largest solo exhibition to date of artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard. 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 (pit house) 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.

About Tania Willard
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 online,  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); 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); and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology co-curated with Dr. Kóan Jeff Baysa, Satomi Igarashi, Erin Vink, and Manuela Well-Off-Man at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (2022-ongoing). Her previous solo exhibitions have been presented at Kamloops Art Gallery in 2009, Burnaby Art Gallery (with the New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society) in 2018, Pale Fire in 2023 and Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2024.  Willard’s artworks are included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. She is the 2025 winner of the Sobey Art Award – Canada’s highest honour for contemporary artists – and, beginning in 2026, she is the Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia. In March 2026, she will also take part in rememory, the 25th Edition of the Biennale of Sydney under the artistic directorship of Hoor al Qasimi.

Events
Public Celebration on Sunday, March 29 at 4:00pm

Learn More
Tania Willard wants to take you beyond the art gallery - Q with Tom Power

Curated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator, with Serena Steel, Assistant Curator.

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

Banner Image: Tania Willard, Only Available Light (detail), 2016. Photo: Toni Hakfenscheid, courtesy The Blackwood, University of Toronto, Mississauga.