Offsite Exhibitions present opportunities for local and emerging artists to display their work to a wide audience, as well as share works from the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection and Art Education Collection. Explore Offsite Exhibitions throughout the city in public libraries, community centres, City Hall and more.
Lauraine Mak: 42 folds
October 21, 2026-January 10, 2027
Bob Prittie Library
6100 Willingdon Ave, Burnaby
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42 folds emerges from a collection of around 600 handwritten notes rediscovered in a tin box in the belongings of Lauraine Mak’s childhood friend. Opening the creased papers reveal the words, drawings, smiley faces and scribbles that have remained enclosed since the moment they were first read and folded neatly back. Penned and passed back and forth between the two over the course of high school and first year art school, the notes serve as a temporal passage through adolescence, teenage emotions and the universal experience of juvenile naivety. All these years later, the notes stand as relics that capture the tension between the repressed melancholia and cherished nostalgia that comes from having a friendship that lives on only in memory.
Lauraine Mak (b. 1991) is an artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her practice investigates philosophical notions, culminating in painting, sculpture, moving image and installation, with an interest in visual cultures produced by late capitalism. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, an MFA from Simon Fraser University, and was a guest student at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Rita McBride. Most recently she presented a solo exhibition at Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo), with an upcoming solo exhibition at Wil Aballe (Vancouver) in October 2026. Her work has been shown in Austria, Germany, Korea and Hong Kong.
This exhibition is curated by Asia Jong, Curatorial Aide.
Persistence of Water
October 22, 2026-January 11, 2027
McGill Library
4595 Albert Street, Burnaby
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This exhibition focusses on the most fundamental of elements: water and its various forms. As a founding block of life on earth, water can be ubiquitous, scarce, overwhelming and calming. It forms the backdrop for leisure time, work activities, natural growth and survival. In an era of unsettling climate change, water—and how it does and doesn’t move, where it is and isn’t located—has grown increasingly unpredictable, following its own path, perhaps grounded in the Taoist characterization embodying strength and persistence. While the works presented here share the unifying element of water, they also reveal a diverse array of artistic strategies, animated by qualities of mystery, uncertainty and, viewed through a contemporary lens, an inscrutable tension.
Persistence of Water includes works by Gwen Curry, Sherry Grauer, Leslie Fawkes, Ken Pattern, Terry Snider, Joan Bell-Irving, Sheila Maki, Viviane Wong and Roy Henry Vickers.
This exhibition is curated by Cameron McLellan, Registrar.