EXHIBITION
August 6 - 29, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, August 6, 2026, 6 – 9pm
Closing Ceremony
Saturday, August 29, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION + ARCHIVAL PRINT SALES
Join us for the opening reception of Michael de Courcy: One in a Million on Thursday, August 6, from 6–9 PM at Gallery 881. Conceived as a kind of summer reunion, One in a Million marks the 40th anniversary of Expo 86 and looks back at a pivotal moment in Vancouver’s history: a city on display, full of optimism, spectacle, and public energy, just before monumental changes reshaped the landscape of the Lower Mainland.
The exhibition features approximately 860 4×6 photographs from Expo 86, installed across the gallery walls as an accessible archive of images. The exhibition features a larger body of images as a digital archive. During the exhibition, visitors may purchase individual 4×6 prints directly from the wall. As prints are sold and removed, additional images may be added to the installation, allowing the exhibition to shift over time.
Larger fine art prints are also available through Gallery 881. These works will be offered as archival pigment prints, with framing options available. Fine art prints are produced by PrintMaker Studio and may be ordered through the gallery or on the Gallery 881 website.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
An anonymous documentary of visitors to Expo 86, Vancouver BC
Expo 86, a World’s Fair, millions of visitors expected — within walking distance of my own backyard. As a photographer I was captivated by the promise of an inexhaustible showcase of parading humanity and I resolved to make the most of it.
A Japanese friend reminded me that in parts of downtown Tokyo it was like this 24/7. How wonderful, a photographer’s dream: having a favourite subject which you found compelling to photograph and which was always accessible to you. Whatever you might have missed yesterday you could capture today.
Over the following months I would enter the fairgrounds through the turnstile and allow myself to be swept along the thoroughfares, becoming part of an ever-changing concentration of faces. Everyone seemed to have a camera, no one would notice mine.
BIO
Artist, educator, curator. Michael de Courcy was born in Montréal in 1944. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts in Montréal and the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). In the late 1960s, during his formative years as an artist, de Courcy was a core member of the Vancouver artists collective known as the Intermedia Society. While there, he produced an extensive Intermedia photo documentary project which he has since developed into a web installation entitled The Intermedia Catalogue (2009).
In the past 45 years, de Courcy, has produced over 40 photography and print making projects, many of which have been long-term. These projects include: Background/Vancouver (1974), Greetings from the Urban Wilderness (1976), The Vancouver T-Shirt Open (1978-1982) and The Wedding Picture Project (1994). While many of his works have been presented as interventions in public places, he has also been exhibited widely in galleries including The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Surrey Art Gallery, and The Museum of Modern Art , NYC. He co-curated two group photographic exhibitions/publications The BC Almanac(h)-CB, 1970 (with Jack Dale), produced for the National Film Board of Canada and 13 Cameras, 1979, (with Roy Kiyooka) produced by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary photography (now a part of the National Gallery of Canada).
de Courcy has lectured and given workshops at cultural institutions including: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, York University, The University of Windsor, The University of British Columbia and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design).
For the past decade de Courcy has characterized himself as a multi-disciplinary artist and community activist. He considers his work to be closely related to public art. In 2012 along with Fumiko Kiyooka he founded and is on the Board of Directors of the Roy Kenzie Kiyooka Foundation. Recent de Courcy projects include: The Intermedia Catalogue (a 2009 web-installation documenting the Intermedia Society's experiments, experiences and ideas from the point of view of its member-artists) ; and the exhibition/public art project Dead and Buried: The Remapping of the Cemetery at Woodlands, 2010-2012 (a process of redress for the three thousand persons who are at present buried in unmarked graves in the former British Columbia Provincial Asylum site). These projects are at once contemporary and historical in nature. They have been gallery exhibitions and/or are also published in the form of archives, articles and installations on Michael de Courcy: projects website.
Since 1989 de Courcy has lived and maintained a studio in New Westminster, British Columbia.
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.