THE B1
GALLERY

Second Nature

Second Nature was informed by Cassidy Waring's experience of learning to feel safe in her body through time spent in the forest and a return to a primal, instinctual form of creating.

Painted primarily by hand with acrylic and water on raw canvas, the works gathered organic textures into patchworks and mosaics. Moving between cellular systems and shifting terrain, the collection reflected how experience settles into the body and how separate fragments can become coherent over time.

Cassidy Waring is a Vancouver-based abstract artist and multidisciplinary creator who has spent much of her creative career as a musician and mental health advocate.

Mind Matter

Mind Matter brought together multimedia paintings that used colour, scale, and abstraction to defuse cycles of anxiety and overthinking.

A sister exhibition to "no one's holding a gun to your head", the exhibition focused on the ways thoughts, dreams, and everyday experiences linger in the mind and return in unexpected ways. Manahan used expressive gestures, abstract drawing, layering, and scale to explore the feeling of becoming caught in cycles of thought.

Ryan Manahan is a multimedia abstract painter based in Vancouver. His work explores the visualization of internal thought and dreamscapes as they relate to everyday experiences.

Liang Wang

Liang Wang is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist based in Vancouver whose work explores themes of cultural identity, urban space, and symbolism. Raised between cultures, Wang draws on his personal background and lived experiences to examine how belief systems, traditions, and visual languages are adapted across geographies.

Wang holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University in Toronto. He has exhibited widely across Canada and Taiwan, with selected exhibitions including Art With Heart Auction at Casey House, Toronto; Fragments of Passage at the Centre of International Contemporary Art, Vancouver; and Akin x MOCA: An Index at MOCA Toronto.

ENIGMA

Vancouver painter Doreen Finnegan presents ENIGMA, a collection of works born from an unconscious exploration of our fractured, volatile reality. Working in oils and mixed media through an intuitive process of applying, layering, and stripping back, vibrant colour and floating forms emerge and dissolve. Nothing stays static.

Endure Everything

An immersive exploration of resilience through art and music. The exhibition captured the emotional turmoil of life's breakdowns, those moments when everything falls apart, and you feel lost and searching. Through her paintings, Beau delved into the painful journey of enduring hardship, while ultimately finding hope on the other side.

Ciele's paintings are informed by a neurological condition called Synesthesia, where the brain misfires sensory information and stimulation of one sense triggers an automatic response in another. When she hears music, she sees colour and shape. Each painting was a visual representation of the colors she perceived when listening to the accompanying songs.

Between The Lines

Finding Connections through Reimagination. Multidisciplinary artist Tehya MacKenzie used vintage photographs and tactile mediums like textile collage and freeform hand stitching to explore the raw, joyful, and often overwhelming realities of motherhood. Her pieces invited viewers into deeply personal moments that reflected universal truths about caregiving and resilience.

Nishant Jain, aka The Sneaky Artist, offered a contrasting yet harmonious perspective, focusing on the quiet poetry of people within their environments. His mostly monochrome sketches captured fleeting, unguarded moments, where individuals became part of a broader tapestry of place and time.

A Love Letter to East Van

Like the beauty of finding flowers in a ditch, East Van is unexpected, resilient and full of character. These flowers defy their surroundings, bringing a splash of colour and life to an often overlooked space. "Ditch Flowers" was a love letter to East Van and its dingy, delightfully vibrant nature.

The exhibition explored this dynamic juxtaposition through selected portraiture, chaotic abstracts and rough illustrations, reflecting the diverse community and showcasing individual stories and identities that contribute to the glory that is East Van.

13 Feet Forward

A collective reunion art exhibition by 13 Feet Off The Ground at the B1 Gallery. The collective of established women artists based in Vancouver came together in 2017 to travel to Sicily for a residency programme in the ancient village of Graniti, creating eleven individual murals, one installation, and one collaborative mural among the mountains and stone walls.

This rewarding and fulfilling experience created a lifelong bond between the artists. While some members moved on from the collective, the core group joined forces for this reunion exhibition, spanning diverse artistic subjects from figurative to realist to abstract.

Meet Me at the Playground

An exploration of the bitter setting where the innocence of "then" confronts the stark reality of "now." The exhibition redefined the understanding of time, mortality, and the essence of adulthood, delving into the impact of transformative events such as war, violence, or abuse, which radically shift the perception of growing up.

These experiences sever the continuity of time, making the carefree days of the past unattainable. The act of meeting on the playground means standing face to face with a version of yourself that no longer exists.

Face Off

A summer art exhibition showcasing a collection of 10 cutting-edge portrait artists: Matthew Bowen, Madison Higginbotham, Alex Beadle, Jay Cabalu, Laura Selevos, Aaron White, Mike di Pietro, Emily Wong, Krista Thomas, and Reggie Kim.

The opening featured live Post-It portrait drawing by Reggie Kim, alongside shopping at the boutique and cocktails at the bar.