September 26–October 18, 2024

The Oppenheimer Park Community Art Show features artwork and insight of artists and community leaders connected to or displaced from Oppenheimer Park, the green space known as Lek'lekí, the Powell Street Grounds, Paureu gai, the backyard of the Downtown Eastside; the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. For some artists, participating in the show is an annual tradition, while others are contributing for the first time.⁠

Project Running July 27 to August 31, 2024 / Wed–Sat / 12–6⁠

As Gallery Gachet anticipates its upcoming renovation, we invite you to a project drawing from our archives. The works presented range from mediums including photography, silk screen printing, painting, and drawing. Each work exemplifies the creative agency, risk and seamless integration of personal narratives with the political matters of the times that have remained paramount to Gachet’s programming and operational praxis since its inception.

Programming: ⁠

Special Writers Group Featuring Cecily Nicholson
August 16, 2–4pm followed by a mixer from 4–5pm

Echoes & Encounters: A Gachet Reunion 
Public Reception and Reunion for Past Members, Staff, and Exhibited Artists
August 30, 4–6pm

Activating Pigeon Park is a community curation project that is rooted in the composite history of Pigeon Park. A month of art workshops will invite the community to interact with Pigeon Park’s history and foster imaginings of new stories through mixed media pathways. Workshops will be engaged with the park’s history of restraining access to green spaces, hostile architecture, and the perennial colonial powers of the CPR Railway tracks which cut through the heart of Pigeon Park. The project questions urban planning: How can citizens interrogate who the city is for through taking up space with our bodies and manipulating environments?

To Map Alongside Belonging is a film programme developed by a cohort of emerging BIPOC filmmakers whose work will launch Gallery Gachet’s community screen. For 8 months filmmakers, Kaila Bhullar, Monica Cheema, Ogheneofegor Obuwoma, and Luis Andrés Serrano, have united in collective imagining to engage in an exploration of new approaches to cinema and construct films that respond to Gallery Gachets positionality within the Downtown Eastside and the filmmakers inquiries on where the personal intersects with the communal.

Screening on the community screen at Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings St.

The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU)

April 4 to June 22, 2024 / Tue–Sat / 12–6

To Be Belligerent//To Commit To Memory//To Live Without Fear is an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), featuring images and ephemera from the organization’s archive. Since its inception, VANDU has acted as one of the pillars of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) community and has fastidiously advocated for the rights and freedoms of all drug users, especially those situated in the DTES area.

Lydia Brown, Simon Grefiel, davi de jesus do nascimento, Valérie d. Walker, and Speplól Tanya Zilinski

Closing Event with performance by Grefiel and song by Zilinski, March 22, 4-6pm

February 2–March 22, 2024 / Tue–Sat / 12–6

A Canoe is an Island is a group exhibition of photographs, tapestries, cotton scrolls, sculptures, and a canoe that explores the multifaceted concept of “Vessel". Defined as a craft for traveling on water, a container for holding something, and a person into whom some quality is infused, “the vessel” is utilized as a unifying idiom to describe the multiplicity of experiences, realities and relationships that bodies of colour situated in a post-colonial world have with bodies of water and formation of place.

November 24–January 20 / Tue–Sat / 12–6

Opening November 24, 7pm–9pm, with artist talk at 7:30pm

Since 2014, Smith-Dokkie has embarked on a personal and critical investigation of the resource extraction industries in northeastern British Columbia (NEBC) and their impalpable impacts on the area's landscape and residents. The exhibition is a physical manifestation of research, ideas and themes concerning neo-colonial expansive terraformation and gestures that mark Indigenous autonomy and presence in the face of continuing settler colonial dispossession.

The 16th Annual Oppenheimer Community Art Show
Running September 29, 2023 to November 10, 2023
Opening Event September 29, 7pm-9pm

The Oppenheimer Park Community Art Show features artwork and insight of artists and community leaders connected to or displaced from Oppenheimer Park, the green space known as Lek'lekí, the Powell Street Grounds, Paureu gai, the backyard of the Downtown Eastside; the unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. For some artists, participating in the show is an annual tradition, while others are contributing for the first time.

Morgan Possberg

Running August 4, 2023 to September 16, 2023

In Morgan Possberg's "Kiskisiwin," the artist constructs conceptual parallelisms between paskwâw mostos (buffalo) and the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The parallels drawn between the buffalos and Indigenous bodies move beyond the disappearance of the buffalo from the prairies as a convolution of ongoing colonization and exploitation of the land by settlers, and ties to the spoor, sound and blood of the buffalo, strongly linked to memories of the land and Indigenous blood knowledge.

Juli Majer & Vladimir Majer

Opening Friday June 16th, 7pm - 9pm

Running June 17, 2023 to July 22, 2023

Drawing from the pedagogy of sand play therapy and the embodied means by which familial histories influence individual art practices, Juli Majer invokes themes of grief, longing, remembrance and tradition by constructing intimate artifacts that act as tributes in a posthumous collaboration with her late father, Vladimir Majer.

Dialectics of Fugitivity

Running April 7, 2023 to May 20, 2023.

Emerging from a conceptual framework that centres bell hook's postulations of the oppositional gaze and Tina Campt's hypothesis on the registers of refusal in the image, artists Abdulwasiu Salimat and Simone Chnarakis invoke dialogue on the current and future state of Blackness from the perspectives of bodies living in a world haunted by the effects of colonization. 

A Bag Full of Acorns, A Bag Full of Ashes

Running April 7, 2023 to May 20, 2023.

In an increasingly public social milieu, photographs realize the voyeuristic possibility of being seen having a private moment in a public world. Suspending both fleeting strangers and near acquaintances in jarring light and colour, Vlessing's photographs depict abrupt subjects in revelatory moments— in the throes of primal fear, contending with social upheaval, or perhaps in mere moments of contemplation, awkwardness, or acorn-collecting. 

Running March 15, 2023 to March 24, 2023.

Justice for Jared Presents Honour Their Names & International Day Against Police Bruality. Show opens Wed. March 15 at 11 AM. Gallery Gachet, 9 W Hastings. Exhibit Hours: Tues-Sat 12-16 PM. Show closes Friday March 24. Opening & Closing Feast. Workshops. Speakers. Soundscape.

Sunday / March 12 / 5pm - 7pm

At Vivo Media Arts / 2625 Kaslo Street

All proceeds support #JusticeForJared & @independentblackmedia.

Running February 11, 2023 to March 11, 2023.

Saltwater Cures All is a compilation of video works featuring Racquel Rowe in her native island of Barbados. Rowe explores ideas of the formation of the Black Atlantic, personal and familial connections to the sea, relationships between Black people and water and the idea of rebirth.

January 24 and 27 / 11am to 1pm / Free with Registration

In partnership with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Gachet is excited to host 2 sessions of Rebel Fayola Rose's Disability Justice Dreaming Sessions.

In conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery’s exhibition, NEXT: Provisional Structures | Carmen Papalia with Co-Conspirators, Rebel Fayola Rose (he/him) will host and facilitate five public Disability Justice Dreaming Sessions (DJ Dreaming Sessions). DJ Dreaming sessions provide participants with an opportunity to imagine an optimistic and visionary world while questioning narrow definitions for those who may experience ableism.

Running December 10, 2022 to January 27, 2023.

Exhibiting artists Aileen Bahmanipour and Geneviève Marois-Lefebvre explore the nuances of image construction and critically address themes of feminism, diasporic identities, the surveillance society, and the politics of location and identity. Bahmanipour and Marois-Lefebvre explore the multifaceted and intangible nature of our shared reality rooted in individual perspectives by questioning the role of representational images that act as symbols of a dictated reality.

Running October 22, 2022 to November 25, 2023.

Translated from Cree as the act of being contemptible, Aiyana Joe Wood’s multidisciplinary exhibition visualizes the nuances of her identity as an Indigenous trans femme woman and sheds light on her childhood spent in institutions that were established to subvert her autonomy and humanity.

Running September 3, 2022 to October 7, 2022.

A community partnership between Oppenheimer Park/Carnegie Community Centre Association and Gallery Gachet, this annual show began in 2008 in anticipation of changes, challenges, and losses in a pre-Olympic city. Although the world looks very different in 2022, we are proud to carry on the tradition of the Oppenheimer Show for its 15th consecutive year. For some artists, participating in the show is an annual tradition, while others are contributing for the first time. This year's iteration of the Oppenheimer exhibition revolves around futurity and questioning what ‘opening up’ means.