EXHIBITION
November 7 - November 28, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION
Saturday, November 7, 2026, 2–5pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Friday, 10 am–5 pm
Saturday, noon–5 pm.
Also by appointment and special events.
What Clouds Remember
Paul Roorda
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am interested in the fragile interval between seeing and remembering - the brief moment when experience has not yet settled into memory, or is already beginning to fade. The memory of sky is universal and individual, weighted with the anxiety of intensifying climate change yet buoyant in the lightness of a white cloud against blue. In my cyanotype print series, Twilight Vision, photos of weathered walls appear as abstract landscapes where confining barriers become open vistas. In my collage works, I bring together my own photos and pinhole Polaroids with found vintage imagery and aging paper, materials already marked by time. In some pieces fragments of fiction are presented as incomplete pages of an unwritten novel. Text and images suggest transitional moments of observation and self-reflection rather than narrative closure.
This exhibition creates connections within a constellation of moments, exploring how perception and imagination emerge and shift. Skies recur as spaces of suspension and change in these works, and like clouds, meaning and memory are transient. Resolution is evasive.
ARTIST BIO
Paul Roorda’s art practice includes cyanotype and Polaroid photography, mixed media collage, painting, kinetic sculptures, mail art, and outdoor site-specific installations. His work examines belief systems, perception, memory, and the passage of time.
Paul Roorda has exhibited extensively with solo exhibitions in Canada, the United States, and Germany and has been awarded grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. He has been the subject of an episode of “The Artist’s Life” which aired on Bravo TV in 2005 and was a finalist for the 2016 K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Ontario. Paul was Artist in Residence for the City of Kitchener, Ontario, in 2007 and at GlogauAIR in Berlin, in 2012 and 2015. His public interventions have been displayed in neighbourhoods in Waterloo, Toronto, and Ottawa. Paul Roorda recently moved from Ontario to Victoria, BC.
SPONSORS
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.
ABOUT PRINTMAKER STUDIO
PrintMaker Studio is a boutique, full-service fine art printing and custom picture framing studio in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. As the only Canson Infinity Certified Print Lab on Canada’s West Coast, we work closely with artists, photographers, galleries and institutions on archival pigment printing, artwork reproduction, mounting and exhibition-ready framing, with careful attention to colour, materials and long-term presentation. PrintMaker Studio is also the principal sponsor of Gallery 881, helping sustain the gallery’s free exhibitions and public programming.