EXHIBITIONS
Living Within the Image by Eli Horn
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 repetition. 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.
Asterism Exhibition
EXHIBITION
December 6, 2025 - January 15, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION WITH A MUSICAL PERFORMANCE BY OLENA KOLIBABA
Saturday, December 6, 2025 · 2–5pm
This December, our Asterism Exhibition invites returning Gallery 881 artists back into alignment for a vibrant Winter Salon. This special exhibition gathers familiar voices in fresh configurations to celebrate the evolving practices that continue to shape 881’s lens-based community.
Please join us on Saturday, December 6, from 2–5pm for the opening reception—an afternoon of art, perception, and reconnection as we welcome returning artists back into one shared sky.
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
“We are all star-stuff contemplating the stars.”
— Carl Sagan
In the night sky, there are 88 official constellations, each fixed by astronomical boundaries. Asterisms fall outside these definitions. They are visual structures shaped by perception — patterns we create by connecting points of light through imagination, memory, and perspective.
So too with this exhibition: each artist stands independently, but the pattern formed by their gathering is open, unfixed, and continually reinterpreted. Like the Teapot, the Winter Circle, or the Winter Triangle, Asterism invites viewers to trace their own alignments — to find meaning not in a single form, but in the shifting connections between images, materials, ideas, and the artists themselves.
At its core, Asterism considers how meaning is constructed through acts of perception. Just as an asterism emerges when scattered points of light are linked across the sky, viewers create their own patterns within this exhibition. The conceptual gesture lies not in a fixed narrative, but in the way each visitor draws relationships, tensions, and resonances between works — assembling a personal constellation shaped by memory, intuition, and attention.
Asterism gathers artists who have previously exhibited at Gallery 881 in our solo and smaller group exhibitions, forming a renewed constellation of practices that reflect the gallery’s evolving community. While Gallery 881 is grounded in lens-based practice, artists were invited to share work that reflects their current artistic direction. The exhibition brings together new and recent pieces that expand the possibilities of photographic thinking, both materially and conceptually.
Asterism celebrates this moment of reunion and renewal: a temporary gathering of voices that illuminates the breadth, depth, and possibility of lens-based art at Gallery 881.
ARTISTS
Alexa Black, Andrew Latreille, Anne Sargent, Barbara Strigel, Bill Pusztai, Chad Wong, Chris Jordan, Danielle Bobier, Gerri York, Goran Basaric, Hank Bull, Jennifer Lim, Karen Zalamea, Kate Hennessy, Kristin Man, Lam Wong, Launie Wong Fairbairn, Michelle Sound, Monika Wiartrowska, Monique Fouquet, Paula Nishikawara, Pia Massie, Randy Lee, Cutler, Richard Sandler, Roger Larry, Sarah Fuller, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Valerie d. Walker.
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.
PERFORMING LIVE AT THE ASTERISM OPENING RECEPTION IS OLENA KOLIBABAO
We’re thrilled to welcome a live musical performance at the opening reception of Asterism by Ukrainian-born violinist and composer Olena Kolibaba (@olena_kolibaba). Join us!
Ukrainian-born violinist and composer Olena Kolibaba creates music that blends neo-classical, folk, and cinematic influences into heartfelt soundscapes inspired by memory and nature. Classically trained but always exploring beyond tradition, she searches for a sense of creative and cultural identity through her work. Her latest EP, Perennial, reflects on roots, renewal, and the connections that shape who we are.
Follow Olena on Instagram at @olena_kolibaba and on Bandcamp and Spotify.