Although it may feel like hygge season is upon us, there are still plenty of reasons to get out, explore and see some art this month. Expressed across a broad range of mediums – from painting, to video, to 3D-printing, to printmaking, and installation – the following six selected exhibitions tell stories of personal journeys and journeys through time and history.

Scott Sueme at Gallery Jones
Vital Signs | EXTENDED UNTIL NOV. 16

For his second solo exhibition at Gallery Jones, Vancouver-based artist, Scott Sueme, presents a new body of work. Vital Signs takes viewers on a journey through the body – from head to torso and feet…down to the earth. Using what feels like a new and exciting visual language, incorporating symbols, Chinese characters and figurative elements, Sueme explores themes of life, transformation, connection to nature, and human identity. The exhibition includes paintings that are monumental in scale, like White Flags and Flowers and Nurse Log, alongside painted red cedar carvings, and a series of works on paper. A collection of 53 small numbered pieces, titled Vital Signs, are hung together to form a massive tapestry of colours, patterns, and pictures. Join the artist in conversation with Pennylane Shen (artist consultant, curator, and educator) on Saturday, November 9th, at 1pm at Gallery Jones.

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 11am-6pm, Saturday, 12-5pm

Jinhan Ko at OHCE-ECHO
Tell me what you wanna hear | EVERY SATURDAY UNTIL NOV.30

For the month of November, OHCE-ECHO presents an exhibition of video work by Jinhan Ko, Tell me what you wanna hear. The piece was created by Ko during a residency at the Banff Centre in 1996, under the name and project, Jin’s Banana House. The artist describes the project as: “my personal art practice, which deals with disappointment, and thus attempts to undermine one’s expectations.” Ko is an artist currently living in South Korea, but has strong connections to Vancouver’s arts community. He is a founding member of Instant Coffee, a service-oriented artist collective formed in 2000, based in both Vancouver and Toronto. (Sign up for their free weekly listserv to stay on top of arts events.) A closing celebration will take place on Friday, November 29th, from 6-8pm.

OHCE-ECHO (pronounced “echo echo”) is a new project space organized by Francesca Bennett “as a commitment to artists, and an extension of research into independent, parallel, and artist-run spaces.” It occupies an intimate, 55-square-foot space within an East Van building shared with artist studios. Bennett is a writer who, since 2003, has supported artists’ practices through her work in collections, archives, and administration. She also co-hosts the monthly screening series sleep and her brother death, with Ratna Dhaliwal, a film programmer and librarian currently living in Halifax. The inaugural exhibition at OHCE-ECHO opened in September and featured two new works by painter and educator, Neil Campbell.

Gallery hours: Open Saturdays, 2-6pm, and by appointment.

Geoffrey Farmer at West Vancouver Art Museum
The Sound of Footsteps as Summer Walks Away | UNTIL DEC. 14

Internationally acclaimed artist, Geoffrey Farmer, has an exhibition of new works at the West Vancouver Art Museum, featuring cardboard box dioramas with paper cutouts that reflect on experiences and memories from growing up in the Dundarave area of West Vancouver. Known for his immersive collage installations investigating history and culture, for The Sound of Footsteps as Summer Walks Away Farmer incorporates cutouts from deaccessioned books from the West Vancouver Memorial Library, transforming discarded materials into three-dimensional narratives.

A unique space, the West Vancouver Art Museum is located in the historic Gertrude Lawson house, at 17th Street and Esquimalt Avenue, which was built in 1939 and inspired by Scottish stone castles. Visit the WVAM’s website for upcoming events, such as curatorial tours and kids’ art workshops inspired by Farmer’s exhibition.

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm

Group Show at Richmond Art Gallery
FOODWAYS | NOW THROUGH DEC. 31

Richmond Art Gallery’s recently-launched fall exhibition, FOODWAYS, delves into food and food culture, exploring how food affects our relationships and cultural identities. The group exhibition features new and recent work by 11 artists — Derya Akay, Sara Angelucci, Jesse Birch, Patrick Cruz, Ellie Kyungran Heo, Kosisochukwu Nnebe, Karen Tam, Tania Willard, Paul Wong, Marlene Yuen, and Shellie Zhang. The exhibition includes photography, video, printmaking, ceramics, and installations.

For interdisciplinary artist and cook, Derya Akay, cooking and food are integral and intermingled parts of their life and practice. Born in Turkey, they have been researching what is known today as Turkish cuisine and its shared histories with surrounding countries under the Ottoman Empire, from the food itself, extending to the vessels used to serve food. In Artwork Becomes Dinner Party, 2023, a wooden kitchen shelf is stacked with wooden, metal and brightly coloured, 3D-printed serving ware. In Making a Menu (Moodswing), 2024, Akay, who had cooked in New Westminster’s Moodswing as part of their Estradiol Kitchen project, presents a mood board of all the influences that go into the creation of a menu.

Storyteller and printmaker, Marlene Yuen, presents a new series of relief and screen prints on washi paper, Peace Together / Living in Harmony, commissioned especially for the exhibition. Inspired by the artist’s research into the historic Hong Wo & Co General Merchants (which served the Steveston community for nearly a century) at the City of Richmond Archives, Yuen wallpapers the gallery in graphic jars of Miracle Whip, candy bars, soda bottles, and the colourful produce and dry goods that would have lined the shelves of Hong Wo.

Be sure to visit the special exhibition, Hong Wo, at the Archives, located next to the RAG, which brings together archival documents, photographs, and original artifacts from the store.

Visit the RAG website for details on several upcoming public programs related to FOODWAYS, including an informal gathering and tea service with exhibiting artist, Tania Willard, on Thursday, November 7th, and a printmaking and collage workshop with Marlene Yuen on Saturday, November 16th (interested participants are encouraged to join the waitlist).

Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm; and Saturday-Sunday, 12-5pm

Divya Mehra at Contemporary Art Gallery
Live Laugh Love | NOW THROUGH JANUARY 12, 2025

The Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG) presents a pair of complementary new works by Divya Mehra, Equal Opportunity Statement (Port Coquitlam, British Columbia 2023), 2024, and Home from Home, 2024. As you walk into the seemingly empty gallery space, you might ask, “Where’s the art?” On closer look, though, the walls feature a monochrome painting (white text in satin paint against the white gallery walls) that references a racist advertisement circulated in a Vancouver suburb last year. The adjacent gallery holds a sculptural work, a child-sized play structure. Produced from nearly 1,000 painted white yoga blocks, the structure is modelled on the castle from Super Mario Bros. Mehra, who was born in Winnipeg and is based in Seattle, has exhibited internationally, and is known for “her meticulous attention to the interaction of form, medium and site.”

Concurrently on view in the CAG’s façade and at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is work by Jade Kablusiak Carpenter, a multidisciplinary Inuvialuk artist.

To learn more about both, join CAG curator, Matthew Hyland, for a tour of the current exhibitions on Tuesday, November 12th at 6pm.

Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 12-6pm

Six artists at the Chinese Canadian Museum
Reshaping Collections: Where History Meets Art | UNTIL SEP. 28, 2025

The Chinese Canadian Museum, located in the historic Wing Sang Building, has recently launched a new special exhibition. Reshaping Collections: Where History Meets Art brings together six diverse Chinese Canadian artists — Morris Lum, Karen Tam, Howie Tsui, Chih-Chien Wang, Janet Wang, and Stella Zheng – with the historical Chung Collection, and the innovative use of technology, resulting in new artworks that reinterpret historical and cultural objects and materials exploring Canadian identity. The artists were invited to create new works derived from their research into the Chung Collection using portable 3D scanning technology, which is used to scan historical objects, therefore “challenging the boundaries between art, object, and history.” Reshaping Collections includes photography, illustration, sculpture, animation, film, and a kid-friendly wall text along with illustrated activities.

The Chung Collection at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections (which is open to the public) contains over 25,000 items related to early British Columbia history, immigration and settlement, particularly of Chinese people in North America and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company.

Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday (and statutory Mondays), 10am-5pm | General admission: $15