Speaker Series 2: Tania Willard in Conversation with Dana Claxton

ADMISSION
Gallery entrance by donation

In person at The Polygon Gallery
Registration required

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Join artist and 2025 Sobey Art Award winner Tania Willard and critically acclaimed artist and filmmaker – and winner of the 2023 Audain Prize for Visual Arts –  Dana Claxton for a conversation occasioned by the Featured Exhibition Tania Willard: Photolithics, at The Polygon Gallery. With an introduction by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator at The Polygon Gallery and moderated by The Polygon Gallery’s Assistant Curator, Serena Steel, Willard and Claxton will discuss how lens-based art complements land-based practice, its use as a technology for colonization and decolonization, and experiments on inventive ways of photographic printing, materiality, and presentation techniques.

This exhibition is Willard’s largest solo exhibition to date. The title Photolithics (combining ancient words for light and stone) calls up Willard’s expansive notion of working directly with the sun’s changing rays, and with varied formations of soil, crystal, metal, and sediment. Throughout, Willard poses key questions about the social contexts of galleries and museums, juxtaposing these spaces with the forms of Salish basketry and kekuli (winter home) architecture – simultaneously ancient and current. For The Polygon, she devises a distinctive treatment for the gallery’s windows, recasting the building as a “lens” and turning the sun’s rays into a “safelight” for future encounters with sensitive historical records. Committed to a practice rather than a fixed appearance, the exhibition will transform as the days lengthen and the weather filters available light.

The discussion will run from 7:00PM to around 8:30PM, after which guests are welcomed to view the exhibition. Cash bar.

This event is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Speaker Series and is presented in partnership with The Polygon Gallery and Critical Image Forum, UBC.  Capture’s 2026 Speaker Series is generously supported by The Michael and Inna O’Brian Family Foundation.

If you would like to make a donation to support Capture Photography Festival, please donate via Charitable Impact here. Amounts greater than $20.00 will receive a tax receipt.

Tania Willard’s practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centring art as an Indigenous resurgent act though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalisation in Secwépemc communities. Her independent curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Hip Hop and Indigenous Culture, co-curated with Skeena Reece at grunt gallery online,  which became the major touring exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, co-curated with Kathleen Ritter at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012–2014); Nanitch: Early Photographs of British Columbia from the Langmann Collection, co-curated with Heather Caverhill and Helga Pakasaar at Presentation House Gallery (now The Polygon Gallery); and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology co-curated with Dr. Kóan Jeff Baysa, Satomi Igarashi, Erin Vink, and Manuela Well-Off-Man at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (2022-ongoing). Her previous solo exhibitions have been presented at Kamloops Art Gallery in 2009, Burnaby Art Gallery (with the New BC Indian Art and Welfare Society) in 2018, Pale Fire in 2023 and Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2024.  Willard’s artworks are included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. She is the 2025 winner of the Sobey Art Award – Canada’s highest honour for contemporary artists – and, beginning in 2026, she is the Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, University of British Columbia. In March 2026, she will also take part in rememory, the 25th Edition of the Biennale of Sydney under the artistic directorship of Hoor al Qasimi.

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi-channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political, and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in public, private, and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Getty Museum, Modern Museum of Art, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. She is a professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and resides in Vancouver, Canada. Dana comments, “I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings—mni ki wakan—water is sacred.”