EXHIBITION
January 22 - February 21, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, January 24, 2026, 2–5pm
We’re thrilled to open our 2026 exhibition program with Living Within the Image, featuring work by Salt Spring Island–based artist Eli Horn. On view from January 22 through February 21, 2026, the exhibition marks the beginning of a new year of exciting programming. The opening reception takes place on January 24, 2026, from 2–5pm. Gallery 881 is a free and accessible third space. Join us!
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
"An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties."
— Djuna Barnes
Imagination is the capacity, and the precondition, for producing and decoding symbols. Like writing, images are symbolic structures through which experience survives its immediacy and reappears, altered. Through processes of encoding and decoding, experience becomes persistent, portable, and legible, inseparable from the limits that give it form.
The works in this series explore these ideas by working at the edges of the image, through personal subject matter and in my natural surroundings. Still images are drawn toward duration, reflecting a shift in temporal register that accompanies parenthood. The path of a stream is re-encoded through the motion of the camera traversing it. The infinite novelty of ocean waves is suggested in its negation, as video approaches stillness through repition. The past enters the present through narrow slices of scanned photographs of my childhood home.
I come to lens-based work because of how closely its images seem to reflect the world around us, how much the snapshot can feel like a persistent present. At the same time, photography’s fundamental operations point not to the world itself or to an authorial gesture, but to the shared systems through which experience is mediated. I’m interested in how these imaging systems shape what we take the world to be, rather than simply reflect it. Where does the image end?
ARTIST BIO
Eli Horn is a visual artist based on Salt Spring Island. His practice works across traditional and digital media, and through processes informed by a background in graphic design and self-taught programming. His work approaches image-making as a way of examining how experience is shaped, mediated, and carried through form. elihorn.ca
SPONSOR
Gallery 881 is proudly sponsored by our in-house PrintMaker Studio, a Canson Infinity Certified Print Lab and custom picture framer dedicated to museum-quality production. When you print or frame with our sponsor, you help sustain Gallery 881’s free exhibitions, free artist talks, free and low-entry programming, and the charitable initiatives that keep our space accessible to artists and the wider community.