Tom Burrows | Clam

Tom Burrows | Clam
Solo Exhibition | Main Level Gallery
May 10-24, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday May 10, 2-4pm | Artist In Attendance

Tom Burrows' latest exhibition at Bau-Xi Gallery is a meditation on environmental change, shaped by decades of living and harvesting clams and other shellfish along the shores of the Salish Sea. In his new series, Clam, Burrows reflects on the quiet disappearance of the clam beds he once relied on, drawing a connection between personal loss and the broader impact of ocean acidification. The series of cast polymer resin sculptures produced for the exhibition stand as both elegy and witness—artifacts of a vanishing intertidal world.


Artist Statement: 

“There’s an adage on the Northwest Coast: “When the tide is out, the table is set.”

I had been harvesting clams from the same intertidal gravel beach within walking distance of my island studio for over five decades. The area remained productive through various harvesting intensities from myself and other islanders until three years ago, when I found it was taking me twice the amount of time to gather the same number of clams. Two years ago, the clam raking took longer still.  Last year, I tried once and realized soon there would be nothing to return to.

The increasing acidification of the Salish Sea resulting from historically high levels of atmospheric CO2 is dissolving the shells of juvenile clams. 

Even in the lean times, I could depend on a meal of linguine alle vongole in which a pot of clams is steamed in their shells drizzled with oil and garlic. Once the clams open, their briny sweetness spills from their shells and the pot is emptied over a bowl of warm pasta. Within moments, that small salty goddess is on the tongue.
 
I now make do with the wondrous plains of light as the tide slides over the gravel beach. Waiting. Watching.” – Tom Burrows, 2025


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Robert Marchessault | Windswept

Robert Marchessault | Windswept
Solo Exhibition | Upper Level Gallery
May 10-24, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday May 10, 2-4pm


In his new solo exhibition Windswept, acclaimed Canadian artist Robert Marchessault deepens his long-standing exploration of tree imagery, presenting a powerful new series that evokes both universal emotion and intimate reflection. These dynamic, wind-bent trees, most often pictured on colour field backgrounds with minimal or no additional landscape features, become expressive vessels through shape, texture and colour. Marchessault’s work invites viewers to contemplate the natural world not only as landscape, but as a profound emotional language. Drawing on the symbolic resonance trees hold across cultures and causes, Windswept captures a stirring sense of motion, resilience, and connection.


Artist statement:

Since the early 2000s tree images have been prominent in my work.  I have found that their forms embody much of what I want to express on my canvases.  The development of my imagery has been a long process.  In this exhibition viewers will see more steps in my investigation.  As always colour, light and space are of great interest to me. My compositions try to express aspects of our human conditions.  I paint a lot of trees; they present a big range of emotions. It is from the likes of Morandi and other modern painters who use a repeating motif that I understand it is possible to find endless riches by exploring within a constrained set. 

Trees are a major theme throughout visual art.  Artists can express a large range of sentiments using trees as a subject.  Organizations devoted to the environment frequently use tree images to grab our attention and harness our feelings.  Most people understand the sentiments tree shapes can imply. Like the human form, trees are able to express a profound range of emotions.  This is why I use their shapes, colours and textures to suggest to a viewer things that are universal but also might be intensely personal.  For me making and experiencing art begins non-verbally.  The way the energy flows up and through a tree is like music.  Growing conditions and climate shape a tree’s form. I see parallels with our own life journeys. As such, trees provide me with an endless variation that sustains my passions as a painter.

The title of this exhibition, Windswept, is taken from one of the paintings.  It’s a theme I return to because the dynamics of wind and tree shapes provides exciting compositions.  I love to feel the energies at play when making these.  Movement, resilience, resistance, joy…  
-Robert Marchessault, 2025


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David T. Alexander | The Northern Coast: The Second Time Around

David T. Alexander | The Northern Coast: The Second Time Around
Solo Exhibition
April 12 - 26, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday April 12, 2-4pm | Artist In Attendance
Artist Talk: Saturday April 12, 2:15pm

Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents The Northern Coast: The Second Time Around, the highly anticipated new solo exhibition from established, award-winning Canadian painter David T. Alexander. After moving back to the West Coast of Canada from the interior of BC after many years, Alexander sees it with fresh eyes, presenting rich and painterly additions to his wet and dry series in a lively, heightened colour palette. This solo exhibition marks Alexander's first in four years in Vancouver.

The April 12 opening reception of The Northern Coast: The Second Time Around will feature an artist talk beginning at 2:15pm.

Artist statement:

Moving back to British Columbia makes me very aware that I have been issued a learner’s license for what I thought I knew about what this ocean and land really are. The density of the land and the richer colours are different in my mind now. It has also required me to make frequent trips up the coastline over the last four years to take it all in. This time, I’m not working in a large tugboat but concentrating on how I am living here once again, the second time around: I am living on the edge of land, facing the vast expanse of change and familiar sameness on the coast.

- David T. Alexander, 2025


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Bratsa Bonifacho: The Language of Art

Bratsa Bonifacho | The Language of Art
Memorial Retrospective Exhibition
March 8-16, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday March 8, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Gallery proudly presents The Language of Art, a special memorial retrospective exhibition honouring Bratsa Bonifacho, the renowned Belgrade-born, Vancouver-based artist, who passed away on December 12, 2024 at the age of 87. Internationally recognized for his deeply layered abstract paintings, Bonifacho held intense interest in technology, communication and the effects of war as the forefront of his artistic practice. He was an important and integral part of Bau-Xi Gallery for almost 30 years.

This incredible exhibition includes a curated selection of works representing key series in the artist's long career. These works serve as critical reflections on war, propaganda and the evolution - and devolution - of communication. Bonifacho's body of work continues to challenge us to consider what art stands for in an age of nuclear warfare, digital communities and alternative truth.


"...colour, line and geometry have been made to reflect tranquility, health and balance, and it is within this spectrum of hot and cool that my day-to-day mood dictates each fresh observation or expression… colour perception is highly subjective, and I know that psychological responses may differ; but what I am presenting in these recent works is the closest thing to an intimate diary that I can create." - Bratsa Bonifacho, 1937 - 2024

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Janna Watson | Elementals


Janna Watson | Elementals

February 15 - 27, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday January 15, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Elementals, the highly anticipated new solo exhibition from Toronto-based abstract artist Janna Watson.

Ever inspired by nature and literature in its many forms, the artist focuses her new collection specifically on the elements of stone, water and wind, finding a muse in the 20th century Irish poet and author John O’Donoghue (1956-2008) and his moving talk “The Inner Landscape”. Her signature dynamic gestures, captured in paint, suggest the significance of a moment, both in our own lives and in the perpetual life cycle of these elements.


Artist statement:

“The interplay between farmers and the elements is a poem without words.  The air could hold the breeze of the rain or the wind of warmth to the discerning nose. The stone carried its memory deep into the hands that chiseled it. Fire was life in the hearth which was the centre of home. Water introduced itself to us from its most natural source in streams and wells. I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”   -John O’ Donoghue 

John O’Donoghue perfectly paints the sentiment of being immersed in nature and the reciprocity of its spiritual elements, which he eloquently describes as “poems without words”. These paintings express the unspoken language of nature, seemingly spontaneous and inherently connecting our outer and inner landscapes.  

For me, it’s in the silence where nature’s generous unfolding invokes an awe of the numinous sentience of the elements.

- Janna Watson, 2025


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Isabelle Menin | We Are Floating Worlds

Isabelle Menin | We Are Floating Worlds
January 11 - 25, 2025
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday January 11, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver is thrilled to open 2025 with We Are Floating Worlds, a new solo exhibition by Brussels, Belgium based photographic artist Isabelle Menin. This lush collection features works selected from Menin's three most recent series - Living Underground, Changing Moods, and Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene. Equally adept at photography and digital manipulation, Menin creates her iconic 'disordered landscapes' with layers of her original photographs and the desire to construct emotive alternate worlds, simultaneously vast and intimate.


Artist statement:

In creation there is something underground, mysterious, difficult to explain. Why does someone suddenly start creating something that no one asked them to do? This kind of free freedom is intriguing. We all, more or less consciously, choose our "mount" to travel through life. It is a bit like shamanism - we are stretched between the mysterious parts of ourselves and those of the universe.

Before showing one's work to others, there is first an intimate conversation with oneself; this inner dialogue is not linear or made of any straight lines. My images reflect this meandering path, this inner landscape, which is why I gave them all a general title: Disordered Landscapes. The landscape is often a vast thing and it seems interesting to me to associate it with something very intimate; a bit like an inversion of meaning.

All artists are passers-by, intercessors between the visible and invisible worlds. Art is the best mirror of what is not seen, said or shown. The Living Underground series is also that: what is hidden, underground, the dark, where life germinates. It is hiding to let things come to life in silence. Often there is another image below the final image that is shown, which I have covered with a layer that masks it. I like this idea of a life hidden under a life shown.

Regarding the series Be Careful with That Axe, Eugene, I gave it that title because of a song by Pink Floyd. My series titles generally come after the images, but I was working on the first image of this series when I heard this song by Pink Floyd from the album In a World Full of Flowers. I liked this telescoping between the words ‘pink’, ‘Eugene’ (a name dear to my heart), and ‘flowers’ at the moment when I added pink to an image. It is a series in which I approach things differently, where prolixity and abundance are defined more by lines and traces, like the geographical map of a world so beautiful in which we are so brutal and violent when we should be approaching it with much more care and love. We create to discover what we were looking for without knowing it yet - sometimes we receive answers before we even know the questions. It is beyond thought.

The series Changing Moods came to me while I was looking at Monet's series of cathedrals - the repetition of the pattern that differs according to the hours of the day, like the variations of our moods. Colours are emotions, emotions have colours. Our emotions are floating worlds. I worked on it at the same time as Be Careful with That Axe, Eugene - one series on a white background, the other on multi-colored backgrounds. They respond to each other; they are the two sides of the same apprehension of what surrounds us.

Happiness is cruel. Art consoles. We leave traces in the landscapes we cross and in those that cross us.   

- Isabelle Menin, January 2025

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HOLIDAY | GALLERY ARTISTS

Holiday | Gallery Artists
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
December 7-31, 2024
Opening Reception Saturday, December 7 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver is pleased to present our annual holiday group exhibition, featuring stunning new paintings and photography in the spirit of the season. Please join us for refreshments at the opening reception on Saturday, December 7 from 2-4pm.

The exhibition includes works by artists including Bratsa Bonifacho, Tom Burrows, Cori Creed, Jamie Evrard, Kim Keever, Nicole Katsuras, Kathryn MacNaughton, Casey McGlynn, Robert Marchessault, Michelle Nguyen and more.

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Steven Nederveen | Heart Centre

Steven Nederveen | Heart Centre
November 16 - 30, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Main Level
Opening Reception: Saturday November 16, 2-4pm

Bau-Xi Gallery is thrilled to present Heart Centre, the new solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist Steven Nederveen. In this new series, Nederveen's signature combination of painting and photography is heightened by soft colour fields to fashion a dreamlike world of peaceful clarity. Expansive coastal vistas harmonized with these colour fields serve to symbolize connections between our natural environment and aspects of spirituality.

Artist Statement

This new collection brings the viewer into a soft expanse where the universe becomes a kind and gentle extension of ourselves. Surrender to the timeless power of the ocean while being transported to an ephemeral dreaminess through glowing fields of saturated colour.

My work is heavily influenced by meditation practices, serving as a guide for internal reflection and harmony with the external world. In yoga and meditation, the Heart Centre refers to the central body chakra, or energy point on the body. This spot is our centre of love for oneself and others, compassion, empathy and forgiveness. In Sanskrit this chakra is called Anahata, meaning 'infinite', 'unhurt' or 'boundless’. I bring these ideas into my landscape images to marry both our inner and outer worlds.

I intentionally draw from the Abstract Expressionists in these works to use similar signifiers like Mark Rothko’s framing of colour blocks and Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’ lines. Both artists were interested in the transcendent experience as well.

-Steven Nederveen, 2024

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Vicky Christou | Soft Gravity

Vicky Christou | Soft Gravity
November 16 - 30, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Upper Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday November 16, 2-4pm
Artist In Attendance


Bau-Xi Vancouver proudly presents Soft Gravity, the new solo exhibition from Vancouver based abstract painter Vicky Christou. Meditation and breathwork are an intrinsic aspect of her signature extruded-paint technique, with every extruded line of paint being executed in a single exhaled breath. Her works are inspired by quiet observations of nature and suggest a sublime, universal order.

Artist Statement:

My processes are the driving content of my work; my continued exploration of paint materiality is encoded with personal narratives and the awareness of gendered histories. My paintings simultaneously reference craft and abstraction.

For my new exhibition entitled “Soft Gravity” I was inspired by the solace found in walks along local shorelines and forest trails. During these walks I felt a deep connection with and appreciation of nature, benefiting from the restorative powers in its seasonal changes of colours and patterns. The title “Soft Gravity” refers to a feeling of buoyancy, which I interpret as an impermanent and atmospheric quality of rising. I observed the early morning fog lifting over the ocean and pollen particles being swept up by the wind - I was inspired to capture the sensations of whirling, floating and the denial of gravity that the fog and wind made appear so effortless.

Though I still begin with the foundational bones of the structured grid, these new works allow for the grid to become organic, no longer an enclosed structure – it opens up to weightlessness, free movement, and new possibilities.

-Vicky Christou, 2024

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Vicki Smith | Larger Than Life

Vicki Smith | Larger Than Life
November 2 - 14, 2024
3045 Granville Street, Vancouver
Opening Reception: Saturday November 2, 2-4pm


Bau-Xi Vancouver presents Larger Than Life, the highly anticipated solo exhibition from Toronto based artist Vicki Smith. Continuing with her years-long fascination with depicting female swimmers in intimate pool and lake settings, Smith gains inspiration from more expansive natural surroundings, placing her swimmers amongst rockier shores with more distant horizons. Smith's own meditation practice informs the energy of each image, imbuing the swimmers with a serene power and a gentle ease of thought and movement. Each image features the artist's adept skill with the brush in capturing the look and movement of water. 

Artist statement:

My adult life has been spent in a dense urban centre where nature presented itself in small ways: a front yard garden, a grassy boulevard, a city park, trees lining a busy street. The view was myopic. An occasional foray out of the city to a cottage or a drive in the country seemed pleasant but disconnected and slightly surreal.

That changed last year when I set up a studio beside a great body of water. I suddenly have a horizon line and an expansive sky. This vast new perspective is inviting its ever-changing colours and reflected light into my paintings, allowing my swimmers to engage in a respectful exchange with nature. 

-Vicki Smith, 2024

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Sheri Bakes | Aurora

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

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Jamie Evrard | Time's Garden


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

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