Kyle Scheurmann | We Could Have Been a Mountain
Kyle Scheurmann | We Could Have Been a Mountain
Solo Exhibition
April 11-28, 2026
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening reception: Saturday April 11th, 2-4 pm
Artist In Attendance | Artist Talk & Tour 2:15pm
Watch Kyle Scheurmann's artist talk for We Could Have Been a Mountain
Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents We Could Have Been a Mountain, the new solo exhibition by Canadian artist and activist Kyle Scheurmann.
Based on frontline action, three months of field research in British Columbia assisted by conservationists from the Nature-Based Solutions Foundation (NBSF) and an artist's residency at Island Mountain Arts (IMA) in Wells BC, this new series centers on wildfire, industrial resource extraction, and anthropogenic climate change as its core imagery. Visceral organic additions carefully blended into the artist's oil paints further augment the weight and urgency of the works and the artist's call to awareness.
Kyle Scheurmann will be in attendance at the opening reception of We Could Have Been a Mountain at Bau-Xi Vancouver on Saturday, April 11 from 2-4pm. An artist-led talk & tour will begin at 2:15pm with an introduction by Emilie Carrière of Nature Based Solutions Foundation.
Kyle Scheurmann gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
Artist statement:
This exhibition comes at the most crucial time for our environment and my practice in face of the climate crisis. I see my responsibility as an artist, environmentalist, and cultural practitioner as being an accurate and empathetic translator of the realities on the ground in the places most acutely affected by climate change. My practice champions the protection of endangered ecosystems primarily by supporting indigenous-led conservation plans.
Materially, I have collected samples of distressed landscapes to use as painting mediums, such as charred tree and animal remains from wildfires, dried fireweed, sand and crushed stone pigments. Learning to employ diverse organic material into my paint yielded new ways of making lustre, texture and opacity while creating a physical link between the painting on the wall and the lived experience of the land.
-Kyle Scheurmann, 2026
Further insight into Kyle Scheurmann's new work and practice, as observed by art critic, author and activist against systemic violence, Karen Moe:
The paintings of Kyle Scheurmann’s latest collection, We Could Have Been a Mountain, could have been just beautiful. They could have been landscape paintings celebrating the spirit of the Canadian wilderness in the tradition of the Group of Seven or the West Coast glory a-swirl in the old growth epics of Emily Carr. We Could Have Been a Mountain could have been aesthetic articulations of a love-affair with the land, alive with the natural environment that is distinctively Canadian. And they are. However, unlike Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, these paintings are of a far different time. This is a love affair conflated with a broken heart, painted articulations of what could have been before greed has almost finished its job. Scheurmann paints ecological trauma; however, even as the natural world is obliterated around us, his love and connection to the land is what animates these exquisite reportages of the stories told by the scourge of capital—and the beauty and resistance that persists.
As an activist, journalist, conservationist and artist who has been a forest defender in old growth forest logging blockades like the Fairy Creek Blockades in 2020-2021, and now, with this new work, investigated sites of the endemic forest fires that have accelerated in his home province of BC and across Canada, Scheurmann’s artwork is passion and subjectivity built upon the bedrock of the painstakingly objective. He analyzes and monitors clearcuts, forest fire burns and the threatened patches of what still stands with the precision of a scientist, photographing, recording GPS coordinates and taking physical samples to his studio as a biologist takes specimens back to their lab. The artist’s site-specific sketches are as subjective samplings and, perhaps most importantly, Scheurmann immerses himself physically and emotively into his subject matter and, as witness and as living creature, the artist becomes a part of his analysis and art.
“My hands and feet became sticky and ashened,” he reports after investigating the site of a recent forest fire, “as I felt the caramelized sap of freshly burnt branches crumble against my skin.” Along with an endless cycle of intensified love and renewed heartbreak, the artist embodies his earth-muse as his subjectivity becomes a specimen of emotion that he accesses as he paints. Materiality from the sites of the devastation does not only manifest itself on the artist’s skin and within his psyche, however, it literally becomes a part of the artwork. “Slash Pile,” located from the site of what was Sassin Forest on southwest Vancouver Island, contains ashes from the fires that raged and bones of the animals that weren’t able to flee; there is reclaimed iron oxide and oil as evidence of those responsible.
And, in almost all of the paintings, there is sand, earth fire-leeched of the nutrients that once supported millions of living creatures. Like a kid in a chemistry class, the artist whips his paint into meringue-y peaks and adds his ground-up ingredients that he then layers upon heavy linen with the finest possible brushes. Even the dents in the canvas become a part of conversation as these stories are painstakingly inscribed to materialize the pulse of love and outrage.
Mimetic to the land that Scheurmann strives to save through art, these paintings are bodies telling stories of what is still living, at this moment dying, and struggling to be reborn.
-Karen Moe, 2026
Kyle Scheurmann is a contributor to Karen Moe's second book, Listening, Once Again, to Our Great Mother: The Fairy Creek Blockades and the Life Story of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones.
Watch Kyle Scheurmann's artist talk for We Could Have Been a Mountain
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