April 4-10, 2025
Reception: April 10, 3-6pm
A Note from the Researcher / Artist
This exhibition was built from what remains.
To piece together the gallery’s beginnings, a new newspaper archive was created. The process has been both meticulous and murky—like archival work itself. This isn’t a comprehensive or chronological history. It’s a selection built from intuition and curiosity, drawn from clippings documenting the first decade of what was then the Fraser Valley Art Gallery.
The title, Frozen Moments of Timeless Travel, is borrowed from a single lithograph by Vince Hilborn featured in a 1979 group show. The phrase evokes both the stillness of the archive and the movement of memory—how fragments of the past continue to travel forward in time.
What does it mean to revisit, restore, and reimagine a history nearly lost?
Some exhibitions were noted only in passing, many left out and forgotten altogether. What is left reveals what was noticed, what was valued, and how art and culture were framed at the time.
The clippings in this exhibit reflect the lens of a particular place and era. Their omissions and language—sometimes dated or incomplete—ask us to read with context and consider whose stories were preserved, and whose were left out.
Images in this exhibit repeat and resurface—cropped, pixelated, ghostly. They stand in for entire exhibitions, evoking what can no longer be fully known. In doing so, they become icons of something larger than themselves. Not fixed memories, but entry points—for reflection, speculation, and curiosity.
This project also honours the many artists, students, faculty, and community members who shaped the gallery’s evolving identity. From its earliest iteration in a hallway at Fraser Valley College’s Marshall Road campus, to the establishment of a permanent gallery space in the early 1980s, to its current home as the S’eliyemetaxwtexw Art Gallery on UFV’s King Road campus—the gallery has always been more than a place to display art.
Interdisciplinary and cross-media practices were present from the start—through installations, performance, textiles, and community-based work—and remain central to the gallery’s vision as a space for creative learning, experimentation, and cultural dialogue.