In many cultural traditions, colour carries symbolic meaning—often linked to celebration, community identity, and power. But colour can also subvert dominant narratives. It can reclaim lost histories, express marginalized perspectives, or simply assert a vibrant presence in a world that often feels monochrome or muted. This exhibition explores colour as an act of resilience. Through bold palettes and expressive forms, each artist makes a statement about personal and collective identity, offering viewers an invitation to see colour as a language of defiance and empowerment.

Colour as resistance feels particularly urgent in today’s cultural landscape, where artists, communities, and individuals are actively reclaiming and redefining narratives around identity, belonging, and history.

A Bright Mark Left is a collaboration between three Vancouver-based visual artists—Shannon Pawliw, Charlene Vickers, and Jean Paul Langlois. While each artist works across various media, their practices centre on large-scale, colour-saturated painting. The title refers to the afterimage effect: the visual echo of a complementary colour that lingers in your perception—a flash, a burn, a bright silhouette that stays with you.

Colour tells stories, conveys emotion, and shapes perception. Each artist’s approach—whether grounded in ancestral connections, pop culture motifs, or quiet forms of protest—demonstrates how colour can embody histories, identities, and complex emotional landscapes. The resulting exhibition becomes a chromatic language that transcends words, inviting viewers to interpret and connect in deeply personal ways.

Through imaginative, surreal uses of bright colour and references to cultural artifacts like science fiction, cartoons, and mythic landscapes, the works in A Bright Mark Left position colour as a portal to alternative realities, spaces of belonging, and transformation. Each artist explores colour as a way to transcend boundaries—be they cultural, historical, or conceptual.

MEDIUM(S)

acrylic, felt, gouache, paper, buttons

ARTIST BIOS

Charlene Vickers

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver. Vickers’ works lucidly manifest ancestral connections, cultural reclamations and her territorial presence as Anishinaabe Kwe while responding formally to the Coast Salish land she has resided upon for the past thirty years. Vickers is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage, and performance. In her paintings, Vickers’ infuses layers of vivid gestures and forms to illuminate life underneath shadows and textures, imagining emergent landscapes and birthing creatures amid mythic transformation. 

Shannon Pawliw

Shannon Pawliw (she/her) is a Canadian artist working in abstract painting and conceptual installation. Her work is colourful, immersive, bold and rooted in organic forms and gestures. Pawliw undertakes exploratory series with the explicit intent of creating fantasy-based objects built around ideas, practices, and concepts that fascinate her. These ideas and concepts are as diverse as time, memory, artistic labour and the microbial world. At its root, all of the work shares a tendency to observe, romanticize, and fantasize about different aspects of our shared humanity and experience.

Jean Paul Langlois

Jean Paul Langlois is a Métis artist from Vancouver Island, currently painting in East Vancouver. His work is informed by television and cinema, particularly Westerns, 70s sci-fi and Saturday morning cartoons. Using ultra-saturated colours, references to art history and well-worn cinema tropes, he seeks to understand the alienation to his own cultural backgrounds, both indigenous and settler. His work is an examination of his own life, through the reinterpretation of family stories using characters and motifs from the pop culture he was weaned on. The result is a very recognizable style of familiar figures in their own world of bright colours and flattened space.