The Vancouver Art Gallery Launches Vancouver Now

The Vancouver Art Gallery Launches Vancouver Now

The Vancouver Art Gallery Launches Vancouver Now!, an Exhibition Series Designed to Take the Pulse of the Vancouver Art Scene

The Inaugural Exhibition Features Emily Hermant in the Artist’s First Solo Museum Presentation

JULY 29, 2026, VANCOUVER, BC // Traditional Coast Salish Lands including the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) and Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) Nations.

The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to announce Vancouver Now!, a new rotating exhibition series celebrating the artists shaping Vancouver. Dedicated to emerging and mid-career artists whose practices are timely, distinctive and deeply connected to the city, the series reflects the Gallery’s commitment to championing local artistic voices and keeping its finger on the pulse of Vancouver’s evolving cultural landscape. Today, the Gallery announces the first five Vancouver Now! exhibitions, showcasing the exceptional diversity and ambition of Vancouver’s contemporary artists.

“The first five Vancouver Now! exhibitions speak to the incredible depth of artistic talent in Vancouver,” says Eva Respini, Interim Co-CEO & Curator at Large. “Across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, these artists are producing some of the most exciting work in Canada today. This series is our commitment to making local artists’ work a regular and visible part of the Gallery experience.”

Launching on August 7, 2026, the inaugural Vancouver Now! exhibition features interdisciplinary artist Emily Hermant, whose intricate weavings transform recycled electrical wires and data cables into richly textured compositions through a meticulous making process. The exhibition coincides with the Vancouver Art Gallery’s acquisition of Hermant’s suspended sculpture Talk Through Me (2024), an important addition to the Gallery’s growing collection of contemporary Canadian art and a reflection of its commitment to supporting artists living and working in B.C.

Since moving to Vancouver in 2016, Emily Hermant has steadily established herself as one of the city’s most exciting emerging artists. Her laboriously crafted, hand-woven works repurpose the wires and data cables that underpin our increasingly digital lives, transforming technologies designed for speed into remarkably detailed objects of contemplation. From a distance, the works resemble abstract paintings or finely woven textiles. Upon closer inspection, they reveal themselves as intricate structures of coloured insulated wire and network cables, inviting viewers to slow down and reconsider the material basis of the digital world.

“Emily Hermant’s work is highly photogenic, but don’t let that fool you,” says Richard Hill, the Gallery’s Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art. “You really need to see them in person. When you are in their presence, they remain aesthetically seductive, but the sense of their tactile materiality comes through forcefully. It is that experience that draws us into contemplating their deeper significance.”

Vancouver Now! will continue with a rotating program of solo exhibitions by Vancouver artists. Following Emily Hermant, the series will feature Annie Briard, whose immersive installations combine video, light and sound to explore perception and the ways we experience the world, and Manjot Kaur, whose richly detailed paintings and multichannel sound installation draw on the traditions of Indian miniature painting to imagine hybrid human-bird beings inspired by Hindu female deities.

The series continues through 2028 with Lauren Crazybull, who creates portrait-based paintings that consider Indigenous presence, self-representation and multiplicity while asserting the humanity and resilience of Indigenous peoples, followed by Karice Mitchell, who transforms found images through analogue and digital processes to explore Black femme visibility, protection and alternative ways of being.