Monument 83 is the name given to a peak located along the international border of Canada and the United States. Situated in a subalpine clearing of E.C. Manning Park in southwestern British Columbia, Monument 83 is notable for its location as a fire lookout site.

Offering an intimate glimpse into the nuanced identities of Mexican migrant workers that work in the farms of Interior BC, Rocio Graham shares her own experience of uprooting herself and re-negotiating her identity. Growing roots from shared dreams presents work that is deeply rooted in ritual ceremony, performance, and relationality.

Illuminated Collapse merges figure and ground to highlight human connection to the surrounding world. In these sculptures, unsettling dioramic scenes unfold on the surface of circular, wooden plinths. Anthropomorphic landscapes are engaged in dramatic acts of self-consumption and destruction, projecting a metaphorical End of Times narrative. Mirroring our own world through their miniature elements, the works reflect on contemporary consumption, industrial development, and inherent environmental degradation.

Monique Martin creates gallery installations involving thousands of intricately screen-printed and hand cut paper objects. Meticulously detailed individual pieces merge into a larger whole; the sum is greater than the individual parts. In this exhibition, thousands of paper dandelions, entitled Context is Everything, coexist with Annus Mirabilis, a newer body of work depicting paper butterflies. There is no distinct line between the two works, the butterflies spill off of the walls and throughout the field of flowers across the gallery floor.

Drawing on a career in carpentry, By This Means resituates the building trades within the constructs of gender, identity, and art history. Rachel Yoder takes the tools and her daily experience of construction to make paintings and prints, incorporating individual components, accumulation, structure, repetition, creation of space, addition, and layering into her work.

The dams and the hydroelectric power generators of the Kootenay river provide immense amounts of electricity and royalties to surrounding communities while protecting from flooding and drought. They continually flow, burst, store, block, channel, and power existing and speculative realities.

Cling considers satellite dishes installed on buildings for their formal similarities to barnacles growing on a rock; as barnacles encrust a rock, satellites encrust a building. Satellite dishes are notable for their purpose as sites of transmission between space satellites, personal electronic devices, and the sublime realm of the digital world; barnacles for their ability to colonize and grow on any available surface.

Briana Palmer gathers images, objects, and ideas from the everyday, exploring the intersections between the perception, experience, and social ideologies of her own cultural practices and upbringing. Traversing the line, with no fixed point unsettles our assumptions of place and belonging. The main component of the installation is the “Iron horse” – a railway system that runs through an installation of ephemera, nostalgic paraphernalia, and cultural artifacts.

Fern Helfand creates an observation point for viewers to contemplate how our environment, our society, and our very identity is being modified by resource use. Her work records the way we clear the land, build our homes, choose our materials, and shelter ourselves. It pushes the boundaries of photography beyond straight documentary images by merging multiple photographs and videos into composite creations.

Genevieve Robertson’s drawings involve extensive physical exploration and are materially linked to specific regions and their land and resource politics. This body of drawings uses pigments made with found carbon-based materials—coal, graphite, ash and wildfire-derived charcoal—collected in the East and West Kootenays where coal and graphite mining take place and climate-induced wildfires are increasing in severity.

Stratigraphy examines what has come before us; celebrating the beauty of the earth’s layers on which we both metaphorically and physically stand. This exhibition features paintings and prints of landscapes that are curious and seemingly unknown – on closer examination there are signs, symbols, and layers that become more recognizable.

Grand Theft Terra Firma is an unflinching redress of Canada’s colonial narrative. By combining contemporary popular culture with historical source material, artists David Campion and Sandra Shields disrupt the celebratory mythology of nation building and invite us to critically evaluate our own continued and complicated relationship to colonial practices.

In Check Check, the ubiquity of the self-doubting individual is inextricably linked to a mass culture marked by distrust of the very mass media that gives it shape. Stepping into a space intersected by four large projection screens, the viewer is surrounded on all sides by a looping series of vignettes, screened variously in fragments and in their entirety and accompanied by a four-channel score from composer Don MacDonald.

See depictions of place represented in the permanent collection of Gallery 2. From the iconic to the ironic, the way artists depict locality is both deeply personal and more widely contextual. The permanent collection contains a wide range of landscape work; featuring both regionally specific, recognizable landmarks as well as conceptually exploring the larger idea of landscape.

In Observer, Observed, Meghan Krauss documents masses of tourists condensing together within each of the panoramic photographs in the exhibition. Compressed together, these people are all equally enthusiastic to be documenting the same picturesque landscapes, regardless of the quality of images taken or on what social platforms they will ultimately be displayed.

Within the large plywood box, you look over a miniature model movie theatre constructed in hyper perspective. A western noir plays on the screen. Put on the headphones, and you become immersed in a classic theatre experience. Recorded using binaural audio, the audio gives you the sensation that you are sitting in an actual movie theatre. Beside you, there is rustling and your companion asks if you’d like popcorn.

Not Extinct presents an immersive audio experience of Sinixt stories. The exhibition invites you to step inside the pages of the book by the same name. Enlarged illustrations and original artworks provide a backdrop for recorded readings while quotes from the book give a contextual background. The heritage courthouse that houses Gallery 2 is fundamentally a symbol of colonial power whose legacy continues to underpin everything that we do.

Sanguine Through the Storm takes a hard look at the unsettling times that we live in; acknowledging the breakdown of evidence based discourse and ultimately finding inspiration and hope in human ingenuity. Robyn Moody’s ambitious installation began as an homage to clever repair for leaky pipes – strings of linked buckets drip water from the ceiling, activating lights within and music from a vintage organ.

Post Diluvian is a partnership between Gallery 2 and the Boundary Flood Recovery (BFR) team. During the Boundary Showcase, we invite the community to share experiences and reflections on the flood, adding a layer of community -aggregated content to flood data and documentation. The culture form a larger narrative along with collected watershed information, satellite images, and flood documentation in an interactive map.

River Relations is an interdisciplinary artistic research project undertaken as a reflection of the damming and development of the Columbia River in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, and the upcoming renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty. Five artists, two writers, and a geographer began by investigating and comparing historical and contemporary imagery and documentation of the river.