Arts and culture are integral to a city’s distinct personality and flair, which is why we're committed to connecting locals with their civic spaces through programming, events and partnerships.
Vancouver Civic Theatres looks to use its venues as gallery space to provide an opportunity for local visual artists and arts organizations to exhibit their work. These artists are selected through a call and jury process which occurs annually. The artists range from emerging and mid-career to more established artists. Our intention is for both artists and visitors to experience and share in the work, using art as a catalyst for individual and community engagement. Exhibitions will be available for viewing during show times for ticket holders.
Arts and culture are integral to Vancouver’s identity, and Vancouver Civic Theatres remains committed to creating opportunities for artists and communities to connect through our civic spaces.
The Visual Arts Program is currently on hiatus while we undertake a comprehensive review of the program. As a result, there will be no Artist Call issued for 2027 at this time.
The review will help ensure the program continues to support artists, arts organizations, audiences, and the evolving needs of our venues. Further information on the future of the program, including any potential Artist Call opportunities beyond 2027, will be released early in the new year.
We thank our artists, partners, and community members for their continued interest, patience, and support.
Summer Exhibition in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Lobbies
July 2026 to September 2026
Trevor Van den Eijnden - salves for grief
trevorvandeneijnden.com
This exhibition brings together two connected bodies of work: super saturates and a salve for grief. Both begin with beauty, but stay with more difficult feelings: awe, uncertainty, loss, and the strange pull of the Sublime.
In super saturates, Trevor Van den Eijnden transforms photographs of landscapes affected by smoke and atmospheric change. He does not invent new skies, but intensifies the colours already present, creating hypothetical future landscapes. Drawing on scattering events at sunset, and 500 years of landscape painting made after major volcanic events, the images imagine skies altered by fire, heat, and climate change. At first, they feel vivid, seductive, and almost candy-like, drawing the viewer in through colour and beauty. But the longer we look, the more uneasy they become. These glowing skies point to a future where such sights may become increasingly familiar.
In a salve for grief, language becomes something physical and shifting. Words appear through vantablack-painted 3D forms, or through light, reflection, and dichroic colour that changes as the viewer moves. These works approach grief as personal, relational, and ecological. They suggest that loss is never fixed; it changes with memory, distance, and time.
Together, the two series use beauty as a lure. Colour, light, and shifting surfaces draw viewers in before revealing more difficult questions about grief, environmental change, memory, and loss. The Sublime appears here as both attraction and unease: something beautiful enough to hold our attention, and troubling enough to make us confront what we might otherwise turn away from.
Sara Faridamin - The Erosion of Spectacle
sarafaridamin.com
Sara Faridamin is a visual artist based in Vancouver, Canada, working primarily with photography and extending her practice through artist books and multimedia installation. Her practice focuses on the ways everyday spaces are encountered, overlooked, and understood through prolonged observation. Interested in the shifting relationships between industrial, urban, and natural environments, she examines how repetition and familiarity shape perception, revealing how certain structures and conditions gradually become part of everyday life.
Through site-specific photographic projects, she explores the temporality of everyday landscapes, engaging with urban ecologies, social geography, and the psychological experience of contemporary public space. Her work examines how places are shaped by processes of use, maintenance, repair, protection, and transformation, and how these conditions influence patterns of movement, inhabitation, and relation to surroundings.
The Erosion of Spectacle traces the transformation of an accidental monument: a 1.5-million-kilogram industrial barge that came ashore at Vancouver’s Sunset Beach following a storm in November 2021. Remaining on the shore for nearly a year before its dismantling, the barge shifted from a spectacle into a familiar presence within the landscape.
Through black-and-white photography, the series is an inquiry into time, public space, and the shifting nature of attention. Following the barge’s presence from its arrival to its disappearance, the photographs observe how a temporary intervention gradually becomes absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life. What first appeared as an extraordinary event slowly receded into the background. The work reflects on the relationship between visibility, collective memory, and urban transformation. The barge became a temporary marker of shared experience, altering how people moved through, gathered within, and remembered Sunset Beach.
Summer Exhibition in the ANNEX
May 2026 to August 2026
Makito Inomata - The Signal and The Noise
makito.ca | @makitoes1
My work explores the state of self-reflection after a time of distraction and over stimulation. Our attention is constantly being hijacked by the demands of the 21st century and its effects are making it difficult to distinguish between signal and noise. The body and mind are being overloaded, leaving us tired, irritable, and anxious. These works are an attempt to transmute and process inner signals which often get lost in a sea of hyper-connectivity.
Makito was born in the temperate rainforests of Vancouver Island where he grew up surrounded not only by the lush biodiversity of nature but also by the rich cultural diversity that is significant to Canada.
He has been working as a photographer for over 15 years. During the outbreak of COVID, he decided to shift his aesthetic sensibilities to his fine art practice. His work is about exploring the complex nature of emotions and capturing the hidden beauty surrounding our everyday spaces. He works in both mixed media collage and photography.
Select works can be found at Art Rental and Sales operated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Duct Tape Gallery, and North Van Arts.
Vancouver Community College - Jewellery Art and Design Graduates exhibit
Queen Elizabeth Theatre - Balcony Lobby
VCT’s creative spaces showcase and empower local artists and artist collectives by providing accessible and high impact gallery spaces. VCT’s partnership with the Vancouver Community College allows graduates of the Jewellery Art and Design program to display their award-winning work on the balcony level of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre lobby.
The current exhibition features work from Justina Alves, Taylor Dougall, Michaela Schaly, and Andrew Wade.
Arts Umbrella - Gallery for Young Artists
Vancouver Playhouse Lobby
VCT’s near decade-long partnership with Arts Umbrella brings local young artists to the forefront of the artistic community by displaying the students’ pieces in the lively lobbies of the Vancouver Playhouse.
Current Exhibition
November 2025 to May 2026
5-6 Years – Explorers (Drawing & Painting)
Instructor: Oksana Slonevskaya
Assistant: Leea Contractor
Inspired by the 5000–4000 BC Sefar mural “The Small Mufflons,” students explored sketching techniques, composition, and texture to create animal forms on a stone-wall background. The project uses mixed media, collage, chalk pastels, and brush washes to explore a monochromatic aesthetic that echoes ancient imagery while emphasizing texture and form.
6-8 Years – Drawing & Painting
Instructor: Golnar Sepahi
Assistant: Homa Khosravijelodar
Students created their own landscape composition inspired by tattoo and digital artist Refael Idan Suissa. Experimenting with watercolour, inks, tempera, black ink, and colour pencils, the project explores elements of design including pattern, shape, and use of vibrant colours.
9-12 Years – Drawing & Painting
Instructor: Lusine Sahakyan
Assistant: Artem Struyanskiy
Inspired by Japanese Notan art, this project explores the harmony of light and dark through thoughtful composition. Using brush and ink, students focused on balancing positive and negative space while studying value relationships. The work emphasizes simplicity, contrast, and visual equilibrium, creating designs that highlight the interplay between shadow and form.
Arts Umbrella School of Art and Design: Program Website
Platforms
Over the course of two years, Platforms: The Teachers Among Us will be showcased on multiple public platforms throughout the city and will present new works regularly.
It will feature newly commissioned works by 20 local xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and urban Indigenous artists.
We are proud to host three of the artists, Olivia George on the Queen Elizabeth Theatre windows, Atheana Picha on the Vancouver Playhouse windows and Dana Claxton's Sitting Bull in Vancouver on the šxʷƛ̓exən Xwtl’a7shn lightbox.
For more info go to: Platforms: The Teachers Among Us