New & Emerging
July 2 – August 8, 2026
New & Emerging, juried by multidisciplinary artist Keerat Kaur and Seymour Art Gallery’s curator/director Vanessa Black, is an exhibition that provides exposure to emerging artists.
This fresh and eclectic show presents work by each of the nine exhibiting artists in a range of media including painting, ceramics, collage, mixed media installation, and photography.
Artists: Emily De Boer, Ice Fredericks, Lauren James-Davies, Marina Levit, Michelle Msami, Paul Silveria, Holly Truchan, Parumveer Waliam, and Liang Wang
Exhibition Reception: Tuesday, July 14, 2026 from 5 – 7 p.m.
Emily De Boer
Emily De Boer is a disabled interdisciplinary artist, athlete, and activist from Richmond, BC. Through her art, she creates imagined worlds that explore accessibility, inclusion, and belonging. Her work is inspired by research, chance, queer theory, disability justice, and her own lived experiences. Dedicated to her community, Emily uses her practice to highlight the challenges disabled people face in navigating inaccessible spaces. Her work explores feelings of exclusion while also imagining new possibilities for connection and inclusion. By embracing mistakes, disruptions, and unexpected outcomes, she transforms barriers into creative strengths, building spaces where difference is valued rather than overlooked.
ice fredericks
Ice fredericks is a Vancouver-based multidisciplinary artist who works with painting, ceramics, and experimental film. Her art is inspired by the natural world and explores themes of rhythm, growth, change, and renewal. The ceramic works in Cicada Swarm reflect the life cycle of cicadas. Created over more than three years, each piece was made using different types of clay and glazes and fired in kilns across British Columbia and Alberta. While every cicada is unique, together they create a strong and connected community, showing the power of individuality and belonging.
Lauren James-Davies
Lauren James-Davies is a visual artist based in North Vancouver, BC. She works mainly with watercolour and is inspired by the natural world and the plants and animals around her. Through her art, she explores our connection to nature and the species we share our environment with. She believes art can help people better understand and appreciate the world. Her large-scale works use collage, detailed observation, and playful use of colour and shape. Interlock looks at how human activity affects the land while also showing the strength of urban forests. The work highlights how nature can survive and grow, even in places shaped by people.
Marina Levit
Marina Levit creates oil paintings that blend abstraction and representation. Inspired by observation, memory, and imagination, their work explores new ways of seeing and understanding the world. Through painting, Marina challenges expectations and invites viewers to look beyond what is familiar. Their work is influenced by queer and non-binary experiences, celebrating ways of being that are fluid, complex, imaginative, and full of possibility. Using bold colours, expressive brushstrokes, and unique perspectives, Marina reimagines everyday scenes and moments. Their paintings find beauty and meaning in ordinary experiences, encouraging us to see the familiar in new and unexpected ways.
Michelle Msami
Michelle Msami is a visual artist who was born and raised in Botswana and now lives in British Columbia. Her work explores themes including personal growth, self-discovery, and the challenges we face throughout life. While her ideas are rooted in the present day, her artwork is inspired by historical art and storytelling traditions. She is especially interested in the meaning and symbolism of fabric, using it to reflect our desires for freedom, comfort, protection, and self-expression. Through her art, Michelle reflects on the human experience—our struggles, our resilience, and our ability to grow and find beauty along life’s journey.
Paul Silveria
Paul Silveria is a musician who is also developing his visual arts practice. Using reclaimed materials, he creates detailed collage artworks from pages taken from a series of do-it-yourself home repair books from the 1980s. For this series, he challenged himself to use only images and materials found in those books. He approached each collage like a puzzle, first exploring how the different pieces could work together and then figuring out how they could fit together to create a new image. The artworks are made entirely by hand, with no digital editing. The careful cutting, precise placement, and surprising combinations of images create works that are both playful and thought-provoking.
Holly Truchan
Holly Truchan began her career in respiratory science before making a bold change 15 years ago and becoming a professional photographer. In 2019, everything changed when she opened a photography studio and created a dedicated space for painting. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, that studio became an unexpected artist residency, giving her the time and focus to develop a regular painting practice. Guided by intuition rather than strict rules, Holly transforms ordinary, everyday subjects into playful and unexpected scenes. Her work brings a sense of humour and wonder to the familiar, reminding us that even during difficult times, it is possible to find joy, resilience, and a little bit of magic.
Parumveer Walia
Parumveer Walia is a visual artist working across photography and film, examining queerness as subject, aesthetic, and culture. Working between India and Canada, Parumveer ‘s projects interweave archival research, socio-political episodes, and his lived experience to generate unstable, hybrid narratives. Working through re-photography, archival intervention, and visual fragmentation, this series revisits images that already carry historical and political charge, shifting their conditions of looking to reconsider how intimacy, tenderness, and memory remain embedded within. The works move between two distinct but historically connected image fields: the erotic imagery of queer self-representation and the hostile visual environments through which queer bodies have often been publicly rendered.
Liang Wang
Liang Wang is a Taiwanese Canadian artist based in Vancouver. His work explores cultural identity, city life, and the meaning of symbols in everyday spaces. Growing up between cultures, Liang draws on his personal experiences to look at how traditions, beliefs, and visual symbols change and adapt when they move across places. Neon Superstitions is a series of paintings inspired by Vancouver’s Chinatown. The works show neon signs, lucky cat figures, statues of Guan Gong, and shop displays. These familiar objects mix business, faith, and folklore. In these paintings, everyday symbols become signs of protection, luck, and justice, especially for diasporic communities. The series highlights how meaning and belief can live within ordinary city spaces.