Offsite exhibitions are organized by the Gallery’s Preparator/Exhibition Coordinator and generally draw from works from the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection. Offsite exhibitions also present opportunities for emerging and local artists to present their work to a wide audience.
Two Burnaby library locations, Bob Prittie Metrotown Library and McGill Library, host these exhibitions.
Rain Cabana-Boucher: Proximities
March 24–July 6, 2026
Bob Prittie Library
6100 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby
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Proximities navigates the spaces that exist between everyday connection and disconnection. Through bodily mark making, repetition and obscuration, Rain Cabana-Boucher creates forms that seem to emerge through static. The drawings in this series were created alongside one another before being split apart. Through this exhibition, Cabana-Boucher explores the space between our relationships, questioning how we experience isolation while still being fundamentally connected to one another. Like these drawings, we can exist apart, yet we cannot exist entirely without each other. Cabana-Boucher’s work also gestures toward the liminal spaces of urban commons, such as libraries, that function both as places of gathering and of individual solitude. Proximities reflects on how we interact with these feelings of in-betweenness. What brings us together? As people gather both together and apart, the exhibition seeks to define the often quiet, contemplative space between—one that surrounds us in our daily lives yet often goes unnoticed.
Sharyn Yuen: Suspended in Time
March 25-July 7, 2026
McGill Library
4595 Albert Street, Burnaby
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Sharyn Yuen’s series Jook Kaak documents the artist’s trip to her ancestral village of Namcheng, China in 1986 to gain insight into her family history. Each work documents a different stage of the journey, mirroring her parent’s own movement between Canada and China, before and after World War II. Referencing a bamboo knot and the idea of existing between two cultures, Jook Kaak investigates joy, overwhelming emotion and the importance of family in spite of distance, reading almost as a short novel—an apt sensibility for an artist who has worked extensively with papermaking.
Though grounded in personal history, Yuen’s work reflects a diasporic experience that may resonate with many Canadians, including separation impacted by historical events, the complexity of family dynamics and a kind of cultural suspension that provides no clear, taut answers. The historical distance from this series’ creation in 1980’s Vancouver only seems to amplify these concerns in a contemporary context.