Featured artists include Tania Willard, James Harry, Greg Girard, and more

The Polygon Gallery is thrilled to announce exhibitions and programming for the upcoming calendar year. In 2026, the gallery will present three major solo exhibitions by acclaimed Vancouver-based artists, a new commission in collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation, two group exhibitions highlighting Indigenous artists, and the return of the Lind Biennial — finalists for which will be announced on Feb. 17.

“Our 2026 program is a testament to the power of place and the urgent, evolving voices of artists working within and beyond our region,” says Director Reid Shier. “From Greg Girard’s first-ever career retrospective to Tania Willard’s boundary-pushing exploration of photography, this year’s programming celebrates artists with deep local roots making an impact on the global art scene. We are also honoured to continue our collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation through James Harry’s monumental new commission, and to champion the next generation of talent through the return of the Lind Biennial and Response.”

The Gallery’s exhibitions for the year are:

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

Tania Willard: Photolithics
March 7–May 24
Freybe Family Gallery

The largest solo exhibition to date of artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard highlights her ongoing experiments with photography as a technology of both colonization and decolonization. The exhibition materializes the artist’s paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research, showcasing a broad and inventive array of photographic printing and presentation techniques. 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 changes.

Opening celebration of the Response program at The Polygon Gallery in 2025. Photo by Alison Boulier.

Response: Where Rivers Meet
March 11–April 12
Seaspan Pavilion
Featuring: Jade Baxter, Dahlila Charlie, Dawn Marie Duncan, Ashleigh Giffen, Melissa Gosselin, Kwiis Hamilton, Marion Jacobs, Inez Londono, and Brenda Prince

Response is an annual program comprised of workshops led by and for Indigenous People, culminating in an exhibition of participants’ work at The Polygon Gallery. The program invites ways of responding artistically to historical and contemporary images of Indigenous cultures. This year’s participants had the opportunity to work with several inspiring artists and Knowledge Holders including: Tracey Kim Bonneau, Nova Weipert, Lindsay McIntyre, and Jake Kimble.

James Harry, in-progress view of Eye of the Ancestor, 2026. Photo courtesy of the artist.

James Harry: Eye of the Ancestor
April 10–Oct. 18
Ground Floor Gallery

A new sculpture by James Harry marks The Polygon Gallery’s seventh collaboration and co-commission with Burrard Arts Foundation. Eye of the Ancestor is a striking yellow cedar wooden sphere, carved with Coast Salish designs on the surface and holding a mirror-polished stainless steel sphere inside. The composition creates layered reflections and viewpoints that shift with the viewer’s movements around the sculpture. The title of the work draws from Coast Salish visual language, where the eye is a form associated with awareness, presence, and continuity beyond the individual. Harry’s sculpture translates that form into a multiscalar design that enacts a subtle intergenerational choreography, reflecting Indigenous pedagogies wherein knowledge is relational, accumulative, and often revealed incrementally across the arc of one’s life.

Simranpreet Anand, Softness in the Sikh Home, 2024. Photo: Erin Kirkland, Michigan Photography, UM

Simranpreet Anand: Living with the Eternal
April 18–Aug. 23
Ground Floor Gallery

Simranpreet Anand’s latest body of work weighs the spiritual significance of sacred materials against the costs and modes of their mass production. Working from a Sikh perspective, her installation of ceremonial fabrics, lenticular prints, and embroidered photographs considers the notion of the “eternal” in terms of religious significance, as well as the synthetic nature of products manufactured to last forever. Collapsing commercial and domestic spaces, her exhibition at The Polygon Gallery will feature a living room — with custom wallpaper, a couch, and a television — beside the Gallery’s gift shop, probing multivalent ideas of worship, value, and sustainability in the 21st century. Anand was the winner of the 2023 Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize.

Greg Girard, Camaro in Alley, 1981

Greg Girard
July 10–Oct. 25
Freybe Family Gallery

Acclaimed Canadian photographer Greg Girard receives his first-ever career retrospective this summer. Girard began his career as a photojournalist before developing an artistic focus on the social and physical transformations of urban centres, especially in Asia. He was based in Shanghai between 1998 and 2011, and is renowned for his images of that city’s rapid, and at times violent, metamorphosis through the beginning of the 21st century. Girard has also produced a number of award winning photobooks, including Phantom Shanghai (2007), which The Independent newspaper cited as one the top 10 photographic books ever produced, as well as Under Vancouver, 1972–82 (2017), which is now in its fourth printing. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Sunday Times Magazine (UK), and many more.

Left: Jeneen Frei Njootli, condor, 2024. Right: Catherine Blackburn, Scooped (detail), 2017. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Jeneen Frei Njootli and Catherine Blackburn
Sept. 11, 2026–March 14, 2027
Ground Floor Gallery

This exhibition brings focus to how we capture the absence of a subject rather than the subject itself. The work of Catherine Blackburn and Jeneen Frei Njootli exemplify how these traces and impressions exist, particularly in relation to the body. Each artwork references beadwork — a laborious and careful process that is made for and by bodies — and considers how these stitches can honour and serve as physical memory of that which is unseen.

The opening celebration of the 2024 Lind Biennial. Photo by Alison Boulier.

The Lind Biennial
Dec. 4, 2026–Feb. 7, 2027
Freybe Family Gallery

The Lind Biennial returns this winter to present new works from the 2026 finalists — to be announced on Feb. 17, 2026. The Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize is the country’s largest accolade for emerging visual artists, and was established in 2015 after philanthropist Phil Lind. Winners are awarded $25,000 and provided with an opportunity to produce a project with The Polygon Gallery. The winner of the 2026 prize will be announced in an award ceremony on Jan. 21, 2027.

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 contact
Ines Min
+1 604 440 0791
ines@inesmin.com

Banner image: Ema Peter.