EXHIBITIONS
Pop Up Prints: UBCO
UBC Okanagan Art Students - Rachelle Furney, Ivo Guidi, Shayne Hitchens, and Maya Neale
August 29 – October 24, 2026
Penticton Art Gallery | 199 Marina Way
Small space. Big ideas. Nestled just inside the Gallery entrance, The Landing is Penticton Art Gallery's new pop up mini-gallery - a place to pause, discover and connect.
This intimate space features rotating short term exhibitions by emerging, experimenting, and community artists working across all artistic practices, from painting, printmaking, ceramics, fibre arts, and photography to sculpture, mixed media, installation, and more. With shows changing regularly, The Landing offers something new to discover with every visit. sustain us.
CreateAbility - The Art of Being Seen
CreateAbility
September 1 – October 24, 2026
Penticton Art Gallery | 199 Marina Way
Penticton Art Gallery is proud to present the inaugural CreateAbility: The Art of Being Seen, a powerful new exhibition celebrating creativity, self-expression, and the importance of creating spaces where every artist can be seen, valued, and celebrated.
CreateAbility: The Art of Being Seen brings together artwork by 23 adult artists living with a range of disabilities and life experiences. Some disabilities are visible, while others are not, affecting physical abilities, mental health, cognitive functioning, communication, or how individuals experience the world. Some artists have lived with disability throughout their lives, while others have experienced significant changes through illness, injury, mental health challenges, or recovery from substance use. While these artists are very much part of our communities, many have shared the experience of feeling unseen. CreateAbility: The Art of Being Seen offers a different experience, one in which their creativity, perspectives, stories, and artistic accomplishments take centre stage. This exhibition invites you to slow down and look closely, not only at the artwork, but at the people behind it.
CreateAbility, the program: The artists participate in CreateAbility, a free monthly art program held in Oliver. Established in 2017, the program receives support from the Oliver Community Arts Council and the BC Arts Council, allowing artists of all abilities to explore art making in a welcoming and inclusive environment. Each month instructors introduce new projects using prompts and reference images. Support is tailored to individual needs so everyone can participate comfortably and confidently. Many artists interpret the prompts in their own distinctive and imaginative ways, resulting in work as diverse as those who create it.
Solo Exhibition by Briar Craig: Conversations
Penticton Art Gallery
Showing in the Okanagan & Skaha Galleries
Dates: Opening Saturday, October 3, 2026. Reception 5 - 8 pm.
Opening with Helena Wadsley’s exhibition Words Matter
Closing Friday, January 8, 2027
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Read between the lines.
What happens when words don’t say quite what we think they do?
In Conversations, Briar Craig invites viewers to look closer, read between the lines and consider how language shapes what we believe. Bringing together works from across his practice, the exhibition explores Craig’s longstanding fascination with words, images and the increasingly complex ways information reaches us.
Text is central to Craig’s multi-layered screen prints. Words and letters are scrambled, fragmented, overlapped and rearranged, inviting viewers to untangle what they are seeing and reconsider what is actually being said. Against a backdrop of political polarization, social unrest, systemic racism and an increasingly fractured information landscape, Craig uses language as both subject and material. His works reflect on the ways information can be shaped by politics, power and bias, and on the responsibility each of us carries to interpret what we encounter.
Throughout Conversations, words collide with images, texts compete for attention and familiar phrases are disrupted. Rather than offering answers, Craig invites us to recognize our own assumptions.
Richly tactile imagery draws viewers in for closer inspection, while Craig’s use of ultra-violet cured screen-printing inks combines remarkable detail with the boldness and immediacy of traditional propaganda poster-making.
The tension is fitting: mass communication transformed into something that demands individual interpretation.
Spanning a broad history of Craig’s text-based work, Conversations asks us to do something increasingly important in a world overflowing with information: Slow down. Look again. Question what you’re being told. Read between the lines.
BIO
Briar Craig received a BFA in printmaking from Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada in 1984 and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada in 1987.
Starting in 2009, he initiated and co-organized the Okanagan Print Triennial in conjunction with the Vernon Public Art Gallery and the Kelowna Art Gallery. From OPT 2015 onward the exhibition has been fully international.
His work has been exhibited around the world in over twenty-five solo and over two-hundred and fifty group exhibitions. Works are held in the permanent collections of the International Print Triennial Association in Krakow, Poland; the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts, Istanbul, Turkey; Purdue University Galleries, West Lafayette, Indiana; the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada; the Japan Print Association, Yokohama, Japan; Guanlan International Print biennial, Guanlan, China; Penang State Art Gallery, Penang, Malaysia; among others.
His prints have been awarded a number of prizes: the Stand Out Prize at Stand Out Prints 2016 at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking (Minneapolis, MN); Merit Award Winner, America’s 2014 all media exhibition (Minot, ND); the Juror’s Selected prize at the 2013 North American Print Biennial (Boston MA); Honorable Mention at the Pacific Rim International print Exhibition 2013 (Christchurch, New Zealand); 2nd Prize at Imprima 2012 (Sobral, Brazil); 2nd Prize Winner (one of his students achieved first prize) at the Open Studio Canadian Printmaking Awards (Toronto, Canada) and Special Prize Winner at the 1st International Print and Painting Biennial 2008 (Istanbul, Turkey).
He has held positions as Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota, Morris campus (1987 – 1991); Assistant and Associate Professor at Okanagan University College (1991 – 2005); he is currently a Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus (2005 – present) in Kelowna, BC, Canada.
Words Matter transforms books into tactile sculptural forms that invite us to consider the histories, assumptions and biases embedded in language. Recognizing that what is written, and whose voices are given space, shapes our understanding of history. The Artist alters each book in response to its content, often incorporating textile techniques to reveal a new narrative.
In Elinborg Larusdottir’s Two Hours, the work reflects the Icelandic author’s struggle to balance caregiving, survival and writing; her literary career did not fully emerge until after her children were grown. In Klondike, approximately 300 stones are placed over racist and misogynistic words in Pierre Berton’s account of the Yukon gold rush, physically weighing down the book with the language it contains.
A rain cloud floods the words of Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads in Gunga Din, while Poetic Justice transforms 620 pages of poetry by some 60 male poets into a woven, nest-like basket holding the four women poets whose work occupies just 20 pages.
La Maison de Claudine turns Colette’s novel into a house, referencing an author who was initially forced to publish under her husband’s name and whose literary reputation flourished after their separation. He Said She Said places quotations from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft on facing pages, bringing their opposing views on the education of girls into direct conversation.
Other works explore contradiction and reclamation. A Knot of Confessions draws from Rousseau’s memoirs to reveal a more sensitive attitude toward the women in his life, while Millett/Miller celebrates Kate Millett’s feminist critique of Henry Miller’s writing.
In Learning Language, a weathered book discovered at an abandoned camp in the Yukon appears to contain the study of an Indigenous language. Its original identity has been lost, but lichen now grows across its pages - a small but powerful sign of life.
Each book tells a story. Words Matter asks us to look again at the words we inherit, the voices they preserve, the voices they diminish, and the histories they leave behind.
BIO
Helena Wadsley lives on the unceded territory of xwesam of Skwxwú7mesh and shíshálh nations (Roberts Creek, BC) and works with textiles, drawing, and video, incorporating craft techniques into the vernacular of visual art.
She has participated in residencies in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Yukon. Her work has been exhibited in France, Latvia, Greece, UK, US, Australia, and across Canada.
So far in 2026, her work has been exhibited in Gibsons, Sechelt, Parksville, Vancouver, Smithers, and Liverpool, UK. Her work will be featured in the upcoming World of Threads exhibition, Oakville, ON. She has received Canada Council and BC Arts Council grants. Her artwork has appeared in the following recent publications: Quo Vadis, Tradition and Innovation, 7th Riga International Textile and Fibre Art Triennial catalogue, 2023, and Mother Art Prize, 4th edition, by Procreate Project, London, UK, 2025, and Yarn in Contemporary Art, Charlotte Vannier, Pyramyd Editions, 2025. She has a BFA in Art History (Concordia University), Diploma in Studio (ECUAD), and an MFA in Painting (University of Saskatchewan).
Opening Concurrently at Penticton Art Gallery
Solo Exhibition by Helena Wadsley: Words Matter
Penticton Art Gallery, in the Creekside Gallery
Dates: Opening Saturday, October 3, 2026. Reception 5 - 8 pm.
Opening with Briar Craig’s exhibition Conversations
Closing Friday, January 15, 2027
