RESIST!
RESIST! brings together works by Rawan Hassan روان حسن, Gord Hill, Laurence Hyde and Elizabeth MacKenzie, artists who have used their work to educate and to inspire significant social change. Since its inception, the medium of print has been employed to create and disseminate information, from early newspapers to posters, flyers, books and zines. This exhibition considers the role of artists in recording and responding to the world around them.
Rawan Hassan روان حسن is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Her works explore the complex relationship between preserving and evolving Palestinian craft traditions, such as tatreez (embroidery). She explores materials that embody the questions of what was and what could possibly be through textile-based artworks and drawings. Her hope is that her practice might open up conversations on Palestinian identity, grief, resilience, resistance against erasure, ongoing occupation, colonization and potential forms of Palestinian futurism.
Gord Hill (Kwakwaka'wakw Nation) is an artist, author, and political activist. Hill is known for his work in decolonization, anti-capitalism, and anti-fascism, and is the author and artist of the acclaimed graphic novels The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010), The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book: From the WTO to the G20 (2012), The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2021), and The Antifa Comic Book: Revised and Expanded (2025).
From the City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection, Laurence Hyde’s rare work Southern Cross (1951) is a 118-part wordless novel exploring the devastation caused by nuclear testing and warfare. Chronicling the US-led atomic testing that took place in Bikini Atoll, Pacific Islands, this poignant woodblock series is one of only two in existence.
For the past several years, Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth MacKenzie has been working to process the act of witnessing the devastation of genocide in Gaza, where over 70,000 people have been killed, more than half of whom have been children. Her work Cleave (2023-ongoing) is made up of hundreds of intimate works on paper, layered upon each other, acting as a site to acknowledge and lay bare the immense suffering of the innocent.
Image credit:
Laurence Hyde, Southern Cross, 1951, wood engraving on paper, 13.5 x 15.2 cm, City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection.