Exhibitions

Barbara Cole | Painting with a Camera
Solo Exhibition
March 7-21, 2026
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7, 2-4pm
Artist In Attendance | Artist Talk & Tour 2:15pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Painting with a Camera, the new solo exhibition by award-winning Canadian photographic artist Barbara Cole and her first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 2017. Painting with a Camera features a special selection of works from Impermanence, Shadow Dancing and Somewhere, three of Cole's recent series and two of which were shot underwater, which together build a compelling and striking narrative of the fluid and ever-changing nature of identity. 

As an innovator in her field, Cole uses both traditional and inventive techniques as part of her ongoing search for timelessness. She has held numerous exhibitions across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Her work has also been extensively commissioned internationally for corporate collections. She has exhibited in the Canadian Embassy in both Tokyo and Washington D.C. The acclaimed documentary series Snapshot: The Art of Photography II, features an episode devoted exclusively to Cole’s photographic practice. She published her book, Between Worlds, with teNeues publishing house in 2023. 

We are thrilled to have Barbara Cole in attendance for her opening reception on Saturday March 7. The artist will present a talk & tour beginning at 2:15pm.

Artist statement:

In these three series, Impermanence, Shadow Dancing, and Somewhere, I use the camera as a paintbrush, creating photographic studies that explore identity, transformation, and the spaces between what is seen and felt.

In Impermanence, the body slips beneath the surface of water and begins to disappear. What remains — fabric, movement, light — becomes the figure. Dresses drift and breathe as if alive, turning fashion into a shifting stand-in for identity itself. Suspended in water, form dissolves and reforms, suggesting that who we are is fluid, something we can inhabit, remix, and release.

Shadow Dancing moves inward. Using the historic wet collodion tintype process layered with subtle color, Cole creates handmade images that feel suspended between centuries. Fragmented figures, partial wardrobes, and headless bodies interact with their own shadows, exploring the quiet tension between our public selves and our private histories. Light and shadow become both metaphor and material, acknowledging that without darkness there is no illumination — and without the past, no becoming.

In Somewhere, play takes center stage. Women drift through dreamlike interiors — chandeliers, marble staircases, gilded mirrors — merging underwater weightlessness with grand architectural space. Time bends, eras collide, and imagination transforms the figure into something unbound. These images inhabit a space between reality and fantasy, where wonder, memory, and possibility coexist.

Together, these series are studies in seeing differently: experiments in light, movement, and perception that blur the line between photography and painting.

-Barbara Cole, 2026


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Anda Kubis | The Path
March 5 - 30, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening reception: Thursday, March 5th from 5:30 - 7:30 pm | Artist in Attendance

This March, Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin is pleased to present The Path, a body of work inspired by the rhythms of rural Ontario, featuring paintings created through a slow process of layering oil paint to evoke presence and patience. The vibrancy of Kubis’ palette is guided by nature, with minerals, flowers, and shifting light all contributing their influence on the canvas. Kubis utilizes branch-like lines and circular forms to create an immersive experience, balancing intentionality with spontaneity to explore the landscape. 

Artist Statement:

The Path is a new body of work drawn from the rhythms of daily life in rural Ontario, where my studio is now situated. Shaped by seasonal cycles of walking, observing, and a focused studio practice, the paintings emerge as vivid acts of presence and patience.

Inspired by the surrounding trees and the debris left by ice storms, branch-like lines serve as the starting point for each painting. These lines function as pathways, guiding movement across the composition. Gradually buried within the painted surface, line gives way to circular forms that push, pull, and animate the field. Through the slow layering of oil paint, colour becomes increasingly saturated while simultaneously taking on a sense of ephemerality. This intuitive process requires an ongoing relinquishing and regaining of control.

Colour both reflects and absorbs the viewer’s gaze, drawing the eye into an immersive experience. Derived from sources such as minerals, flowers, and shifting natural and artificial light, my objective is to achieve a complexity of colour that rewards sustained viewing. A parallel approach informs my digital image-making, where layers are repeatedly added, shifted, and rearranged until a composition emerges that balances tension and vibrancy.

Patience is central to my practice. In rural life, I seek calm, yet anxieties often surface, reminding me that presence must be actively pursued and continually rediscovered through painting. Each work unfolds as a dialogue between intention and spontaneity, through which I learn by making and attune myself more deeply to the world around me. – Anda Kubis

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Anda Kubis is a recognized Canadian abstract painter working in expanded digital, material, and traditional oil painting processes. Due to the prominence of colour in her artwork, Kubis consciously considers how the engagement with aesthetics and creativity positively affects human flourishing and quality of life. With degrees from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and York University, Kubis crosses her artistic practice with design and architecture, material exploration, and her significant teaching career.

Numerous public and private collections have acquired Kubis’ work, including RBC, TD Bank, BMO, Cenovus Energy, Aimia, The Westaim Corporation, and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. Kubis is currently a faculty member at OCADU.

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Ian Stone | A Seat at the Table
Inaugural Solo Vancouver Exhibition
February 7-21, 2026
Upper Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 7, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents A Seat at the Table, the inaugural solo exhibition in Vancouver by Canadian high realist painter and Bau-Xi Gallery's newest artist roster addition Ian Stone.

Stone is a Montreal-based painter whose work explores still life and figuration through the lenses of queer memory, camp, and the aesthetics of collection. Drawing from personal and inherited objects - ornamental, kitsch, and decorative - Stone treats painting as a site of archival reimagining, where objects stand in for histories shaped by desire, longing, and exclusion. His practice is deeply informed by art history, often referencing historical examples and visual strategies, which he reinterprets to speak to contemporary queer experience.

Artist statement:

In A Seat at the Table, I use the language of still life to reconstruct historical spaces - domestic, feminine, and contemplative places where queerness might have quietly persisted. These arrangements of vessels, flowers, butterflies, and flames are not mere objects; they are sites of memory and silence, of what endures and what disappears.

A 16th-century Spanish friar once wrote, “Sodomites are like butterflies, drawn to their own burning.” That image, intended as condemnation, becomes in my work an act of remembrance. The butterflies stand for those who were burned: men whose desire marked them for destruction and whose tenderness was turned against them. Fire, in turn, held a sacred role in early modern thought - it was seen as the purest symbol of divine masculinity. In burning queer bodies, that “divine” fire became a tool of correction, as if to reclaim a masculinity imagined as lost.

In reclaiming the flame, I seek to reverse that violence. The fire in these paintings no longer purifies or condemns - it reveals and transforms. These works exist within the tension between the violence of a world that punishes difference and the passionate self-knowledge that comes from surviving it. Each still life is a meditation on what queerness has brought to the table of history, to our legacy, and our sense of belonging. An insistence that fragility is not weakness.

I draw on archival fragments: trial records that punished effeminacy, poems that celebrated forbidden love, words once spoken only in whispers, and the geographies of persecution themselves. Visiting these sites revealed how memory clings to the ground - how violence leaves its own kind of archive.

A Seat at the Table is not a plea for inclusion, but an assertion of authorship. The work suggests that queerness persists not only in what is preserved, but also in what has been censored, damaged, or half-forgotten. These still lifes are offerings to that persistence - an attempt to hold beauty and loss in the same frame. It asks what happens when those once burned return to the table, carrying with them both the light that tried to destroy them, and the radiance that survived it. 

-Ian Stone, 2025


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Janna Watson | Undercurrent
February 7-21, 2026
Main Level Gallery
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 7, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Undercurrent, the new solo exhibition by Canadian abstract artist Janna Watson. Bold, energetic compositions and suspended forms in the artist's iconic style reflect a focus on the interior landscape of the subconscious, making use of shifting tonal contrasts and undulating strokes to create a sense of contemplative movement. Emphasis on a central form or gesture acts as a metaphor for the genesis of emotion and the heart of the self.


Artist statement:

To drag something over from dark to light is a spiritual, psychological and aesthetic operation. The work in this series is an autobiographical project of integration: my artistic practice is invested in self recognition, honesty and the reconciliation of private history with public form.

Undercurrent examines the subconscious as a site of transformation and poetic force. The paintings configure an exchange between dark and light, surface and sediment and what is not seen but felt.    

Solar and lunar motifs in centred compositions propose that the heart can generate and modulate radiance - that interiority is itself a kind of sky and what is contained below the surface is an active agent of transformation.

-Janna Watson, 2026


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Gallery Artists | Chroma II
February 5 - March 2, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto | Upper Gallery
Opening reception: Saturday, February 7th from 2 - 4 pm

This February, Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin is proud to present Chroma II, a group exhibition featuring works by Alex Cameron, Mel Gausden, Celia Lees, and Eric Louie.

In artistic parlance, chroma refers to the purity and depth of a colour. An artist will employ chroma in a myriad of ways, whether it be a vibrant pop, pulling your eye towards certain elements of the composition – or a dark richness, creating a sense of contrast and depth. Each of these artists uses high chroma in their respective practices. As a result, their work is bold and energetic, often applying paint directly from the tube, only adding tints, tones, and shades by necessity.

These artists can utilize these techniques to create uniquely stunning work, catching your eye, and drawing you in to absorb one colour after another.

To learn more about the practices of these artists, we suggest you check out our YouTube channel - click here.

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Gallery Artists | Year In Preview: 2026
January 8 - February 2, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto | Upper Gallery

This January, Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin is pleased to present, Year In Preview: 2026, a curated collection of exhibiting artists for the year ahead - featuring works by Cara Barer, Alex Cameron, Anne Griffiths, Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Nicole Katsuras, Anda Kubis, Joseph Plaskett, Janna Watson, among others.

We are delighted to showcase artwork from each artist which exemplifies their respective practices, styles and approaches to their medium. Please join us to view these pieces in person and celebrate this coming year!

To learn more about the practices of these artists, we suggest you check out our YouTube channel - click here.

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Martin Klimas | Flowervases
January 8 - February 2, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto

In his dynamic and visually charged series, Flowervases, Martin Klimas photographs elegantly arranged flower vases at the exact moment of their shattering, which will be on display at Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin, this January.

Intricate glass vessels explode, delicate porcelain and stoneware crucibles burst into countless fragments, contrasting the quiet still-life Klimas has created, with a singular moment of utter chaos. The artists’ fascination is one of transformation - not destruction - where the impact creates a dramatic shift in the scene, one of a new-found beauty.

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Martin Klimas (b. 1971) is a fine art photographer based in Dusseldorf, Germany. Drawing inspiration from photographers and inventors such as Eadweard Muybridge and Dr. Harold Edgerton, Klimas uses the latest technological advancements in high speed photography to capture a split-second of movement.

In his work, Klimas captures the moment of destruction as an elegant flower vase is destroyed by a projectile, the explosion of shattered porcelain as a figurine dropped from a height hits the floor, and the visually stimulating effects of soundwaves on pools of neon paint. His interest lies not in the ruin of the subject, but in the precise moment a dramatic transformation takes place.

Klimas’ work has been exhibited internationally in several solo and group exhibitions, and can be found numerous private and corporate collections. Klimas received a Bachelor Degree in the Study of Photography from the University of Applied Sciences in Dusseldorf in 1998.

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Darlene Cole | Dance in a Storm
December 4 - 22, 2025
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening reception: Saturday, December 6th from 2 - 4 pm | Artist in Attendance

This December, we are proud to present Dance in a Storm, a transcendent exhibition by acclaimed Canadian painter, Darlene Cole. With this emotive body of work, the artist explores the interconnectivity between the act of painting, the resulting imagery, and how it is guided by themes of vulnerability, resilience, and kindness.

Artist Statement:

More and more I am drawn in by the physicality of oil paint and how it moves. Each pigment has its own characteristics - warm, cool, tenderness and depth - like translucent layers of skin. When working with figures and animals, there’s an attentiveness to how the paint moves and how the body moves…like a dance.

In these paintings, I feel a hushed chatter behind the curtain of our daily lives in the form of abstraction - the drama, lights and darks, and mystery. Flowers emerge from atmospheric backgrounds or are veiled by vintage curtains, perhaps a form of escapism in a world shadowed by uncertainty.

I invite the viewer to savour the deeper meaning of the interconnectedness that we share as humans and with nature through themes of vulnerability, resilience and kindness. Each work is a reminder of beauty in a chaotic world - a dance where tension melts. - Darlene Cole

Co-Director of Bau-Xi Gallery, Kyle Matuzewiski, writes:

I have always cherished the elegant simplicity within Darlene’s practice. Hers is one of economy; but not in a way which ever comes at the expense of the resulting work.

Every brushstroke feels contemplative; every application of pigment has the distinct impression of careful consideration. At times her work can feel phantasmic – however it is always rooted within an element of reality. Her figures act as grounding forces which pull the viewer back into the present, yet not enough that it breaks the spell they are under.

The sheer vicissitude of resulting emotions I see individuals experience when taking in Darlene’s work never ceases to amaze me. Joy, sadness, love, loss, fear, excitement – they are all there – being pulled from within the viewer.

This delicate and nuanced process is on full display with Dance in a Storm.

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Darlene Cole captures a hazy, haunting world of poetry and wonder. The artist’s distinct oil painting techniques lend a watercolour effect to her subjects without compromising rich colour values and velvety textures. Cole’s canvases—dreamy expanses inhabited by spirited figures—are studies of time and memory.

These figures, both human and animal, play a pivotal role, evoking emotional responses in the viewer as Cole navigates between layers of reference and meaning. At once playful and melancholic, Cole’s work draws on themes characteristic of her established painting career: the inherent mystery of old architectural interiors, the power of painterly colour and texture to spark memory, and the exploration of childhood innocence and its loss.

Cole's work is extensively collected across Canada and internationally. Notable public collections include The Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the K.F. Preueter Collection of Canadian Art, Royal Bank of Canada, CIBC, OCAD University, Fairmont Hotels (Toronto, Montreal, Banff), and Manulife Financial.

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