Artists Represented

Selected works, exhibitions and publications on the gallery's represented artists.

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations) has been recognized for his mashups of Indigenous iconography and popular culture. Through a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, prints, large-scale installations and interventions Assu’s work maintains a profound connection to past traditions while speaking to pertinent issues of our time.
Assu’s work is included in numerous major public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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Dempsey Bob

Dempsey Bob

Dempsey Bob is a distinguished Tahltan and Tlingit artist of the Wolf Clan. Born in 1948, he began carving in 1969 under the tutelage of Freda Diesing who was his earliest mentor and teacher. At once a traditionalist and vanguard, Dempsey Bob’s sculptures blend traditional narratives and iconography with contemporary influences. His dynamic sculptures re-imagine convention with highly animated sculptures that acknowledge the lineage to which they are indebted while incorporating an expansive view and understanding of sculpture.

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Bobbie Burgers

Bobbie Burgers

Bobbie Burgers is interested in the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis in nature. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.

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Maggee Day

Maggee Day

Maggee Day’s works are notable for a sense of freedom, cultivated by the space outside of the canvas as much as what is in and on the paintings’ surfaces. Compelled by the architecture, streetscape, and views observed from her studio and home, the ingresses to Day’s spaces—windows and doorways—are the foundation of her recent bodies of work. Her choice of the familiar as the fundamental site of her study allows for a more experimental yet detailed exploration of materials and processes, and while her paintings appear as abstractions, they are in fact drawn from her surroundings.

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Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland

Kim Dorland’s practice reflects a fascination with the enigmatic Canadian landscape as it comes into contact with contemporary urban experience. The psychological atmosphere represented by Dorland is confrontational and hallucinatory, disrupting conventional ideas that the natural world is a place of solace and contemplation. Using a dense matrix of intense colours, delirious textures, and passionate painterly touch, Dorland brings a paradoxical sense of displacement in which the artist’s relationship with nature is simultaneously one of awe and fear. In parallel with this, fragments of contemporary urban life materialize themselves in the form of ghostly figures and graffiti remnants. It is through these dueling representations of the landscape that Kim Dorland has created a body of work endowed with an emotional charge whose potential far exceeds the formal confines of the canvas.

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Marten Elder

Marten Elder

Marten Elder’s photographs offer a reconsideration of the way that images are captured in light of digital and technological developments. Through careful interpretation of the raw data, Elder produces photographs that disrupt spatial hierarchy and that are intensely vibrant in their tonal range. The colours may seem synthetic at first, but they all exist in the world in the same relative relationship to one another, and it is this representation of the world that is of great interest to Elder.

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Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk

Gathie Falk’s practice meticulously transforms objects of everyday experience into extraordinary things. Working in a variety of media that includes performance art, sculpture, ceramics, painting and drawing, Falk has produced works that feel surreal and dreamlike, reinventing clothing, fruit, plants, shoes, or baseball caps into objects of much greater significance. Although these objects are relatable in their familiarity, it is the personal symbols they carry – not the universal – that are of interest to Falk. Her practice has been aligned with the traditions of Surrealism, Funk, Fluxus, and Pop Art, but the influences are rarely direct. Indeed, Falk is most comfortable when poised on the edge of contradictions.

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Angela Grossmann

Angela Grossmann

For nearly four decades, Angela Grossmann has been recognized for her relentless probe into the complexities of identity, gender politics, and displacement. The subjects of her paintings, photo-based collages, and mixed-media works largely reference the female form, culled from a vast archive of images collected by the artist that includes art-historical references, postcards, and found snapshots.
Angela Grossmann lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.

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Adad Hannah

Adad Hannah

Adad Hannah explores historically trenchant themes through elaborate bodies of work that include installation, video, and photography. Inspired by the historical practice of tableaux vivants (translated as “living pictures”), Hannah’s overall practice invokes the durational form of early cinema, while also making reference to early photography by mimicking paintings at a time when it was the very goal of photography to do so. Time occupies a prominent place in Hannah’s production, forged by a lasting interest in temporality and its complex relationship with photography and video. Hannah adds to this history by bridging, or blurring, the divide between the tableau in photography and its originating form as living, i.e., live picture. 

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The Estate of Fred Herzog

The Estate of Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog was born in Germany in 1930, and immigrated to Vancouver, BC in 1953. Throughout his career he worked almost exclusively with Kodachrome slide film, and only in the past decade did technology allow him to make archival pigment prints that match the exceptional colour and intensity of the Kodachrome slide. Herzog’s use of colour was unusual in the 1950s and 60s, a time when art photography was almost exclusively associated with black and white imagery. In this respect, his photographs can be seen as a pre-figuration of the “New Colour” photographers of the 1970s.
CLICK HERE to see Fred Herzog featured in The New York Times.

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Shawn Hunt

Shawn Hunt

Shawn Hunt is a Heiltsuk artist born in Waglisla (Bella Bella), British Columbia. Hunt’s practice is directly informed by his Scottish, French and First Nations background and the visual culture and traditions that accompany it. He works with the traditional Northwest Coast design principle, known as formline, to create abstract, surreal, and sculptural artworks based on ancestral Heiltsuk Cosmology that often reference contemporary aboriginal life. Hunt is always seeking to push the boundaries of the art form, often combining non-traditional ideas with innovative uses of materials and motifs in his work. 

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Geoffrey James

Geoffrey James

For over thirty years, Geoffrey James has been investigating Western society through two opposing themes: the ideal spaces – formal gardens and sylvan parks, and the sites that record the impact of culture on nature- the wastelands of mining sites, and the economic systems of a problematic international border. James’s photographs reverberate with a sense of history yet are solidly rooted in the present. His ability to locate human aspirations within built environments, coupled with a keen sense of pictorial structure, have allowed him to discover poetry and irony in both the planned landscapes from the past and in the visual complexities of our contemporary urban environments.

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Jack Kenna

Jack Kenna

Jack Kenna’s artistic practice extends fluidly across painting and sculpture, often incorporating found images, objects, and text. Drawing partially from his material surroundings, his compositions are highly considered and incorporate unconventional juxtapositions, uncanny backgrounds and close-up cropping of objects of subjective and sentimental value. Kenna also makes great use of the extensive cache of online imagery to develop a vocabulary of motifs that are constantly appearing, morphing, and reappearing in his practice. Kenna’s works incorporate a broad range of techniques allowing him to use varied methods of representation. As a young artist, he is comfortable merging imagery from the history of still life painting with the archive of cell phone photography, allowing him to create works that convey the paradoxes inherent in the contemporary experience.

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Devon Knowles

Devon Knowles

Devon Knowles investigates the histories, economies and social meanings of diverse materials – from denim fabric and aluminum to coloured glass and concrete. In moving such substances from their everyday context to a new environment, our appreciation of their properties and capacities becomes heightened. In working and reworking material, using traditional and contemporary fabrication methods, a rich language of the interplay of material and method emerges. As she engages with theories of perception, optical effects and tactility, alongside the direct act of making, Knowles encourages the viewer to access her work from a shared intimacy and sympathetic attentiveness.

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Gwenessa Lam

Gwenessa Lam

Gwenessa Lam is a visual artist and educator. Her artwork stems from interests in perception and the compression of time and memory within images. Gwenessa received her BFA from the University of British Columbia and MFA from New York University. She has taught at New York University, the University of British Columbia, and the Alberta University of the Arts. She has attended residencies at Skowhegan, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Banff Centre.   Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art and the Queens Museum of Art in New York.  Gwenessa lives and works in Vancouver, BC and is currently Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

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Khan Lee

Khan Lee

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea. He studied architecture at Hong-Ik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design. He works in performance, media, sculpture and drawing. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lee lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

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Erin McSavaney

Erin McSavaney

Erin McSavaney focus’ on spaces of everyday life and demonstrates how under close examination our perception of reality can be changed. Inspired by the practices of the 1960s Photorealist painters, McSavaney’s paintings are drawn from observations of his subjective urban landscape. McSavaney begins by walking or biking through urban spaces and carefully documents various interactions between nature and architecture. He then renders hyper-realistic spaces in acrylic paint on canvas. From afar, these paintings appear as a photograph or film still; but upon close inspection subtle details bring attention to the physical object of painting itself.

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Al McWilliams

Al McWilliams

Al McWilliams’ sculptural forms are developed through observation and drawing with associations that drift between figuration and abstraction but are anchored in neither. His sculptures offer a narrative that is relational and open with no clear beginning or end, but rather an abundance of meeting points between form and material. The white Carrera marble is a familiar material, calling to mind the long, rich history of western sculpture and architecture. The polished surface of the red granite makes it difficult to see detail from afar, drawing the viewer in towards the works to discover its vibrant internal activity.

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Rob Nicholls

Rob Nicholls

Rob Nicholls’ landscapes embody the transcendental effect of the natural world on the human psyche. Through textured brushstrokes, illuminated colours, and loose washes, his paintings are a synthesis of flora, fauna and geological forms that are charged with atmospheric conditions. These images emerge from his imagination and memories of a childhood surrounded by the lush vegetation of Vancouver Island.
His ethereal landscapes evoke visions of worlds that are beyond the physical and enter the realm of the subjective imagination. Expansive and kaleidoscopic, Nicholls’ works do not present a single spatial or temporal perspective; rather each of his environments offers multiple qualities of light, from the vibrant colours of dawn to the muted tones of dusk.

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Philippe Raphanel

Philippe Raphanel

For over 30 years, Philippe Raphanel’s painting practice has been marked by an awareness and sensitivity to the natural landscape. Most recently, he approaches the idea of landscape from an atmospheric perspective, using line and colour to evoke imagery related to oceanic and celestial maps. Iridescent pigments coupled with hundreds of layers of alternatingly opaque and translucent colours shift with the viewer’s position and in response to light. The process Raphanel uses to create his paintings is extremely labour-intensive, taking years to complete individual pieces.

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Hamed Rashtian

Hamed Rashtian

Hamed Rashtian is a Vancouver-based visual artist who focuses on creating a dialogue between various colonial histories through his art. Through his practice, Rashtian delves into a thought-provoking exploration of Iran’s rich cultural heritage, evoking contemplation on the ever-evolving interplay between history, collective identity, and the built environment.
Hamed Rashtian completed his MFA at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver and holds a Swiss Federal Diploma in Higher Education from the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich. Active as a visual artist since 2006, Rashtian has had solo exhibitions in Iran, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates as well as participated in many international group exhibitions.

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Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves

Ben Reeves is known for his sumptuous use of paint in compositions that deftly explore the relationship between abstraction and depiction. His work is actively engaged with the theory of painting, raising questions about the authenticity of imagery, while remaining deceptively traditional. At first glance, many of his works appear to borrow generously from 19th-century realism, yet they are often meticulously conceptual. Reeves’ work continually asserts that the painted image is a vocabulary of brushstrokes, a culturally understood visual language. Dominated by thick daubs of oil paint, Reeves’ paintings command a physical presence with their relief-like impasto surfaces.

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The Estate of Jack Shadbolt

The Estate of Jack Shadbolt

Jack Shadbolt (1909 – 1998) is one of Canada’s most important artists. He is known for his paintings and murals that draw from his personal experiences and from the social and political conflicts that have taken place in British Columbia and world history, such as the struggles of First Nations, the Second World War, and the environmental movement.
Jack Shadbolt was born in England in 1909 and with his family, came to Victoria, British Columbia in 1921. He lived and taught in Victoria, Duncan, Vancouver and Burnaby. His work is represented in all the major galleries across Canada as well as in corporate and private collections. Shadbolt’s numerous awards include the Order of Canada in 1972, an Honorary Degree from the University of British Columbia, and in 1987 he and his wife, art historian and curator Doris Shadbolt, established VIVA, the Vancouver Institute for Visual Arts, which supports and recognizes the achievement of artists in British Columbia.

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The Estate of Gordon Smith

The Estate of Gordon Smith

Gordon Smith (1919-2020) was a key figure in contemporary Canadian art. Since the 1950s, he worked continuously to expand the dialogue between abstraction and representation. In his tangled paintings, there is the insinuation of entire fields of colour below the surface. Over the course of his 75-year long career he has made paintings employing that procedure of looping and overlapping, the movement of line to line, texture into texture and colour into colour. His work has been an evolving search for balance between abstraction and his love of the land, which has given us insight into both the act of painting and the essence of the West Coast.

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Takao Tanabe

Takao Tanabe

Takao Tanabe (b. 1926) is an important figure in Canadian painting and printmaking. Tanabe creates landscape paintings of the British Columbia coast, eliminating non-essential details, creating serene compositions which reward long contemplation. He is well known for his transcendent light and atmosphere, which fluctuates from delicate and misty to stormy and brooding. Dominated by strong horizons and large swaths of water and sky, his works are devoid of man-made elements such as cars, telephone poles, and architectural structures.

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Angela Teng

Angela Teng

Angela Teng’s work reconsiders what is traditionally required to make a painting, and then suggests otherwise by renegotiating how a picture can be made. Her painting practice utilizes a laboured dedication to the process of craft through abstraction and studio-based exploration of materials. Her crocheted acrylic ‘paint-paintings’ manipulate ways of paint handling, while her works on hand-made crocheted cotton/linen surfaces celebrate the application of thick oil paint with a brush. Her patterns generate an optical buzz created from the marbling of paint, wobbly form, and through experimenting and observing the optical interaction of colours one upon another.

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The Estate of Harold Town

The Estate of Harold Town

Harold Town was a founding member of Painters Eleven, group of artists based in Toronto that helped introduce Canadians to modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Town developed a style of prints which he called “Single Autograph Prints”, in which he gained critical acclaim for. These monotype prints were created using vivid colours and shapes through overlaying inks, sometimes using collage to add dimension and texture to his pieces. By 1960, Town’s painting career took off as he became recognized for his compositions and unpredictable use of colour. His dedication to art was shown through his ability to work with a variety of materials and subject matter in sculpture, printmaking, drawing and painting.   

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Renée Van Halm

Renée Van Halm

Renée Van Halm has been a significant figure in Canadian art for over forty years, both as a practicing artist and as an arts educator. In the early part of her career, Van Halm was interested in creating forms that were hybrids of many media, not purely painting, sculpture, or architecture. The evolution of her subject and medium has led her to consider the many forms of visual presentation in our culture. Van Halm draws her images from a variety of sources: mainstream fashion, architecture and decor magazines, and more recently the work of 1920s Bauhaus artists and weavers, in considering the ways in which architectural space governs contemporary human experience.

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Neil Wedman

Neil Wedman

Neil Wedman takes recognizable forms aimed at achieving the appearance of photographs but fall perceptually between representation and abstraction. Wedman utilizes traditional artistic techniques to explore eccentric subjects such as exploding firework factories, dessert rainbows and flying saucers. An artist of the same era as Rodney Graham and Jeff Wall, Wedman’s work has a same penchant for humour, social commentary, and deconstructing photographic art. He shares key attributes with his hometown photo-brethren and has an inclination to question the medium of photography. Wedman has produced photographs, short films, and multi-media projects, but painting stands at the core of his studio practice.

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Isabel Wynn

Isabel Wynn

Born in São Paulo, Brazil and raised in Steveston, British Columbia, Isabel Wynn studied ceramics at Langara College and Emily Carr University where the foundations for the methodologies shaping her current sculptural practice were laid. Through the medium of clay, her practice is an exploration of lived experiences, the obscurity of emotions, and the balance between control and uncertainty.
In 2021, Wynn established Báhoo Studio, a ceramics studio and school that has evolved into a thriving artist space. Serving as the founder and director, she has transformed the studio into a community hub where artists gather to explore their craft under her mentorship.

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Etienne Zack

Etienne Zack

Etienne Zack is one of today’s artists who are truly pushing the envelope in terms of painting concept; his process is entirely based on reading and taking notes – no visual source material is used. His process of making paintings relates to notions concerning the various ways history itself is manipulated and “worked out”. Zack’s work often focuses on the context in which artworks are produced and exhibited, and the physical and conceptual tools that go into creating them: the studio, art gallery, painter’s materials, and historical and theoretical reference works. Both poetic and playful, Zack’s painting prompts us to re-examine the everyday world around us.

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Artists Shown

Equinox Gallery also presents a rotating selection of consigned and secondary market works. View here as well as our Online Viewing Room.

Maxwell Bates

Maxwell Bates

Maxwell Bates (1906-1980) was an architect and modernist painter known for employing altered perspectives, unusual plays of colour and multiple planes of space to depict working class people, social scenes, and still life.

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Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott

Born in Springfield, Ohio, Berenice Abbott spent the early part of her artistic career studying sculpture in New York, Berlin, and Paris. Her introduction to photography came when she made contact with the famed Surrealist Man Ray, who hired her as a darkroom assistant. Upon return to New York, Abbot began documenting the city in the manner of one of her major influences Eugène Atget. She is best known for her series Changing New York (1936–1938), which captured the architecture and shifting social landscape of New York during the Great Depression as a part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. These images were both critically and commercially successful and remains a classic text for historians of photography today.

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Shuvinai Ashoona

Shuvinai Ashoona

Celebrated for her highly detailed drawings and fantastical subject matter, Shuvinai Ashoona is a third-generation Inuit artist living in Kinngait, Nunavut. Her dream-like imagery erases the distinctions between the natural and spirit worlds, and between the real and imagined. Many of the artist’s images highlight the dramatic changes in the North; the shift from life on the land to settled communities and access to popular culture. While many of Ashoona’s drawings contain traditional Inuit motifs, she is best known for the imaginative way that she incorporates these and other cultural references to develop her own sophisticated and highly personal iconography which overturns stereotypical notions of Inuit art. Known for her aerial perspectives and cropped compositions, Ashoona’s carefully executed drawings and prints are often marked by a cinematic sensibility.

 

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Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder changed the course of modern art by developing an innovative method of manipulating wire and sheet metal to create three-dimensional drawings in space. Calder redefined sculpture by introducing the element of movement, first through performances and later with motorized works, and, finally, with hanging works called “mobiles”; a term coined by Marcel Duchamp to describe his work. His mobiles consist of abstract shapes made of industrial materials that hang in uncanny, perfect balance. In addition to his mobiles, Calder also created static sculptures called stabiles, as well as paintings, theater sets, costumes, and monumental outdoor sculptures that grace public plazas in cities throughout the world.

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Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier was an American street photographer whose body of work was only discovered after her death. Maier was a nanny and caregiver with a hidden passion for photography that resulted in over 100,000 negatives depicting moments and images of her urban surroundings in Chicago and New York. She captured each city’s pedestrian culture and architecture on a Rolleiflex camera as she walked the city on her days off. Her work has been recognized for her spontaneous shooting style and for her fascination with human behavior. Maier would further indulge in her devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

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Mary Pratt

Mary Pratt

Mary Pratt’s (1935-2018) work addresses the everyday objects of domestic life. By depicting them close-up and in detail, she suggests a larger symbolic meaning, enhanced by the way light plays upon her subjects. This celebration and re-contextualization of the ordinary has earned Pratt a national reputation.
Her work is held in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In 1996, Pratt was named Companion of the Order of Canada, and in 2013 she was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

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Greg Murdock

Greg Murdock

Greg Murdock studied ceramics, sculpture, and drawing at the University of Saskatchewan before traveling to Mexico to study bronze at the Instituto Allende. Murdock later came to Vancouver to study at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where he expanded his architectural vision and imagery, created installations, and discovered the potential of spackle as a medium and surface in his two- and three-dimensional works. Murdock’s work has continually explores processes that mediate between drawing and painting. Combining many methods such as fresco, encaustic and oil paint, the activity of drawing and mark making is always present in his work. His imagery deals with ideas of implied ritualized space in architecture and landscape, as well as the intersections between them.  

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Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge

Eadweard Muybridge, originally a landscape and architectural photographer, is primarily known for his groundbreaking images of animals and people in motion. In 1872, a racehorse owner hired Muybridge to prove that galloping horses’ hooves were never all fully off the ground at the same time, a proposition that Muybridge’s images would disprove. One of his main working methods was to rig a series of large cameras in a line to shoot images automatically as the subjects passed by. Viewed in a Zoopraxiscope machine, his images laid the foundation for motion pictures and contemporary cinematography.

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