Deer Lake Artist Residencies 2026 Annual Exhibition
Exhibition: September 14–November 16, 2026
Opening Celebration: Thursday, September 17, 6–8 pm
Location: Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, 6450 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby
The Deer Lake Artist Residencies 2026 Annual Exhibition brings together new work by five artists working across photography, painting, mineral pigments, repurposed materials and mixed media.
Exploring cultural memory, migration, ecological grief, identity and belonging, the artists consider what we carry with us, how familiar images and materials acquire new meanings, and how art can help us navigate a changing world.
The exhibition opens to the public on Monday, September 14, at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Join us for the Opening Celebration on Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 pm. Meet the artists, experience their work and celebrate another year of artistic exploration and creation at Deer Lake. Light refreshments will be served.
Participating artists:
Claire is an artist, writer, and analog photographer based in Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ (Ucluelet). Her embroidered 35mm images are entanglement meditations, conceptualizing connection and loss with natural fibres and dental floss. Claire’s poetry is embedded with contemporary blue collar feminism, and has been anthologized with The Land and Labour Poetry Collective (Roseway Publishing), longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, and printed in various magazines. Her latest scholarly research, published with Queen City Writers, offers social commentary on tarot, pop-culture, and consumption. Claire is a founding member of The Cumberland Film Club, a film photography art collective. She holds a BA in English and a Certificate in Proficiency in Language and Culture.
Ketty Haolin Zhang, born in Chaoyang, China, is a visual artist working primarily in painting and sculpture. Informed by her diasporic experience as a 1.5 generation immigrant, her practice navigates her relationship with placelessness, self-construction and (non)belonging — the simultaneous desire to belong and to resist being defined, and how desires and memories take material form in the in-between spaces. Zhang's work has been featured by Dazed, CBC Arts, SAD Mag and Prism International, and exhibited at White Columns, Field Projects, Beijing Design Week, Centre for International Contemporary Art, Centre A, Canton-Sardine, The Bows, The Reach Gallery Museum and Surrey Art Gallery. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of British Columbia.
Lauraine Mak is a Vancouver-based artist whose practice investigates visual cultures produced by late capitalism through the use of repetition and paradoxical sentiments, culminating in painting, sculpture, moving image and installation. In 2019, she joined the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf as a guest student under Rita McBride, and she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2024. She recently exhibited at Centre A in Vancouver, as well as in Austria and Hong Kong, and is currently preparing for her first international solo exhibit in Egypt, scheduled for May 2026. Learn more.
Taaye is a process-driven artist whose work explores materiality alongside diasporic subjectivity and the poetics of estrangement. Working primarily with East Asian mineral pigments (岩絵具 iwaenogu; 岩彩 yán cǎi), her practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (2024, 2025), the BC Arts Council (2025), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Emerging Artist Grant (2025).
She has upcoming residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Vancouver’s Centre A. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre of International Contemporary Art in Vancouver and Art Next Expo in Hong Kong. Taaye holds a Bachelor of Fine Aarts from Rhode Island School of Design. Learn more.
Taryn Walker is an award-winning queer, interdisciplinary mixed-Indigenous artist of Nlaka'pamux, Syilx and European ancestry based on the unceded territories of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their practice incorporates drawing, printmaking, installation, video and sound, exploring futurity, queerness, non-linear time, playfulness and healing. Walker holds a Master of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, with work shown across Canada, the United States and beyond. Learn more.