Exhibitions

Sheri Bakes | Aurora
October 5 - 17, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday October 5, 2-4pm | Artist in Attendance

Reflecting Bakes' recent viewing of the Northern Lights from her Vancouver Island home, these atmospheric paintings were inspired in part by elements of the science behind the auroras; from there, Bakes aimed to reach beyond the technical rendering of this natural phenomenon to focus on the feeling and emotion that the Lights convey. Bakes’ signature evocation of movement, energy and life-force connects all her paintings.


Artist Statement:

This new body of work explores the Northern Lights from a large Vancouver Island farm. There are a couple of cougar dens in the area where I live so I tend to avoid walking outside at night and in the early morning, but I wanted to see the auroras. 

To see the Northern Lights on the farm means walking through a forested area down a long gravel driveway in complete darkness to a clearing which offers an opening to the night sky. I missed the first night of lights because I was too afraid to take the long dark walk to the clearing. The following nights I mustered the courage and carried a portable high powered industrial light and made it out to the clearing to see the incredibly vibrant colours and dynamic movement of the Northern Lights over the farm. 

Back in the studio, I wondered how I could paint the Northern Lights from the internal feeling of having seen them. In reading about how the lights are created (the sun ejecting charged particles from its upper atmosphere creating the solar wind, and then that wind slamming into the earth’s upper atmosphere), I wanted to explore the colourful movement of charged particles, solar wind and atmosphere in motion.

-Sheri Bakes, 2024

VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION

Jamie Evrard | Time's Garden
September 14-28, 2024
Main Level | 3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday September 14, 2-4pm
Artist in Attendance
Artist Talk & Tour Saturday September 14, 2:15 - 2:30pm



Bau-Xi Gallery is proud to present atmospheric and immersive new paintings on both canvas and paper by established Vancouver-based artist Jamie Evrard. In addition to Evrard's signature floral imagery, her exhibition also features five paintings of the enigmatic dresses from the garden art installation “Four Seasons” by BC based textile artist Deirdre Phillips.

 
Evrard’s floral fascination has spanned virtually her entire career, continually driven by flowers’ contrasting qualities of unapologetic boldness, fragility and ephemerality. Whether focusing on a single blossom or celebrating a chaotic profusion of garden blooms, Evrard adeptly captures their shapes, lines and personalities with light and soft yet decisive strokes. Embracing a slightly deeper and richer palette for her sensitive observances of Vancouver's gardens and ponds and the quiet curiosities they harbour, the artist imbues her lush subjects with an air of late summer – still in full and glorious bloom, with a hint of the autumnal change to come.

Jamie Evrard has had over 75 solo exhibitions across the US and Canada and has been featured in over 65 group exhibitions since 1970.


Artist Statement:


It’s a Tuesday morning in mid August and I’m supposed to be writing the dread Artist’s Statement. Instead, I’m out on the deck watching bees busy randomly attacking my sunflowers, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. They’re in a hurry, and they have no game plan other than to gather as much nectar and pollen as possible.

I can relate. All winter when the bees were asleep, I might as well have been too. I painted but the light was too dim, and I had trouble making decisions and believing in my choices. A few starts, lots of destruction and restarts.

Eventually spring arrived, then summer, bringing with them the light. Almost delirious with joy and, finally, energy, I culled most of the remaining winter paintings and returned to my studio. I started a big painting of artichoke plants, then painted over them in peonies, then roses, then abandoned the unconcluded work and started over. Though ideas grew as rapidly as my new garden plants, they often became unwieldy and obstinate.

As summer progressed and my deadline approached, I began to do the bee thing, buzzing around to seven or eight new canvases more or less at random, working on each one in turn. I felt I could now make the decisions I needed to coax the paintings in the right direction. The studio looked like a house of cards, or maybe the way an overly abundant garden must look to a bee. Where to go first and what to do next!

When the days are bright I work this way - everything at once, very intuitive, and with one painting feeding the next. Many of these paintings have long stories behind them, layers upon layers of ideas that once veered off track or onto tangents before I finally righted them. Cannibalizing a big painting with large brushes is, in fact, one of the great joys of painting.

Delphiniums continue to fascinate me, the way they bend and drape in beautiful rhythms when they are at their ripest. Excuses for layers and layers of blues and purples. And I love the way a painting of water can take off in a completely unexpected way.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I need to stop writing and go paint.

-Jamie Evrard, 2024

VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION

Sheila Kernan | Interplay: Memory and Connection
August 17-31, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception Saturday August 17, 2-4pm
Artist in Attendance
Artist Talk & Tour August 17 2:15-2:30pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Interplay: Memory and Connection, the new solo exhibition from Calgary-based artist Sheila Kernan. In this series, Kernan continues to explore her fascination with coastal vistas in her signature multi-technique style. New landscapes depict a reverence for British Columbia’s forests, rocky shores and islands, coloured and emphasized through memory and eliciting connection with the viewer through shared experience and emotion. The immersive, textural scenes are replete with the energy of the wild landscape. 


Artist's statement:

Memory is a fluid and subjective phenomenon that is continually shaped by our experiences and emotions. Through my practice, I consistently explore this malleable nature of past recollections and how they evolve over time. I am interested in how the power of perspective can shape and sometimes change our current understanding of what once was.

I value evolution and am always searching for new ways to combine materials and to construct and deconstruct my paintings. This uncertainty of outcome is what keeps things fresh, exciting, and challenging. I seek to reconnect with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery, chasing the rush that accompanies each brushstroke and each new artistic revelation.

My paintings act as a bridge between my personal experiences and memories with nature and the collective human experience with nature. It is this moment of connection that the paintings take on a life of their own, becoming an opportunity for viewers to recall and process their own memories, emotions, and experiences. I am thankful every day for this exchange.

-Sheila Kernan, 2024


VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION

Cori Creed | The Story and The Telling
June 8-22, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception Saturday, June 8, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents a new solo exhibition by established BC landscape painter Cori Creed. In her signature energetic style, the artist continues to pay tribute to the untamed beauty of the landscape of British Columbia, capturing its richness and diversity. Creed aims to encapsulate the literal and metaphorical non-linear journey of traversing both these landscapes and life. 


Artist's Statement:

This body of work, more than any, has made it evident just how looping the path can be. Retracing and pushing out in different directions, moving forward and then retreating - sometimes a jubilant exploration and sometimes a battle. My work continues to be a translation of an experience, in this case of our landscape - forests, mountains and coastlines. A balance between representation and mark making, the story and the telling. I have always considered how our own filters show us each a unique perspective of the world, but while painting this show I have also been very aware of how much outside events and forces impact and alter our own outpourings. The wind fills and empties our sails and we find a way to keep moving. With many of these pieces I found it necessary to ease off my search for more abstraction, and instead of chasing the essential forms, pick up my smaller brushes and pull details out of the washes and staining in the underpainting. Questing for the mediation found in the memories made while moving through our ancient places. 

- Cori Creed 2024

VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION

Andre Petterson | Halcyon
April 20-May 4, 2024
Main Level
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday April 20, 2-4pm
Artist In Attendance

Andre Petterson turns his lens onto floral motifs for his new solo exhibition, Halcyon, proudly presented by Bau-Xi Vancouver. This series contrasts riotous, layered superblooms of flowers with the calm and focused refinement of singular blooms in architectural settings. Adding a further sense of calm, the collection includes several coastal landscapes with long pieces of driftwood to emphasize the linearity of the horizon meeting the water’s edge.

In these new works, Petterson embraces chance occurrence, letting paint organically land in unexpected places on the panel and intermingle with the photographed floral elements. The effect both disrupts and harmonizes with these elements, giving Petterson’s signature mixed media style a new sense of looseness as he creates varied and novel ways to experience florals.

Artist statement:

My new work is largely floral, still life and landscape, and is much more painterly than anything I've done in the recent past. It is an exploration and contrast of real and abstract, hard edges and softness, natural and man-made. I have been dabbling with floral and nature works throughout the decades; If I were to make floral works again, I felt I had to bring something new to the subject that I hadn't yet explored. Incorporating architectural elements added a sense of play and, to some degree, a sense of revisiting some of the early collages that I made years ago. I get to build things again.   - Andre Petterson 2024

VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION

Casey McGlynn | Ballet of the Pickup Trucks
April 6-18, 2024
Main Level
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday April 6, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Ballet of the Pickup Trucks, the new solo exhibition by Ontario-based artist Casey McGlynn. As he approaches thirty years of exhibiting in galleries and museums, McGlynn returns to the horse, one of his earliest metaphors of the self. Grazing and at rest, the horses appear in herds and as individual silhouettes, their interiors filled with a cacophony of symbols and colour that bristle with a fervent, raw energy.

Artist statement:

Ballet of the pickup trucks is about becoming a northerner and searching for beauty and meaning in the north. it’s become about finding that beauty and meaning in the most unlikely of places up here

-Casey McGlynn, 2024

VIEW THE FULL COLLECTION