We’re starting something new … each Wednesday* throughout the summer the VAC will be hosting salons at our
Project Space @ 670 Fort Street.
These sessions will be led by one artist at a time, with a focus on their work-in-progress. This is an informal atmosphere where we can chat about what is on our mind, what we’re working with in the studio, or any ideas that are percolating in the dog dayz of summer.
Every Wednesday, 5PM-7PM this summer.
*excluding holidays*
Seating in our Project Space is limited.
SUMMER SALON SERIES 2026 SPEAKERS:
Featuring local artists discussing their recent / upcoming projects throughout the summer:
8 July Todd Lambeth
15 July Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck
22 July Maurina Joaquin
29 July Jason Young
5 August Sonja Ahlers
12 August Chantey Dayal
19 August Chrystal Phan
26 August Simone Littledale
2 September Graham Kolbeins and Jonathan Andre Culliton
SALON DETAILS:
8 July
Todd Lambeth | McWitch
Todd Lambeth lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia within the traditional lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt) and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples. Lambeth studied Visual Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Victoria where he currently teaches drawing and painting. He is a serial-based painter who combines manual and digital techniques in his work and is influenced by optical illusion illustrations, graphic design, popular culture and monster theory. His work has been exhibited across Canada in both commercial galleries and artist-run centres.
McWitch is a site-specific installation that expands an ongoing painting series by Victoria artist Todd Lambeth into architectural and urban space. By combining the witch motif with imagery drawn from contemporary consumer culture and employing repetition borrowed from advertising and design, this work reflects on how mass media shapes perception and belief.
15 July
Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck | Co-Creating the City: A Mixed Media Collage Collaboration
Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck are multidisciplinary artists who work in photography, painting, collage and publishing. They collaborate on publishing, curatorial and art-making project. They typically investigate issues which bring the community together. They have been artists in residence at the Wallace Stegner House in Eastend, Saskatchewan exploring life in a small, Canadian prairie agricultural community set on a vast landscape; the Tidal Art Centre in Lund, BC making art in response to a remote community where the road ends and Desolation Sound begins. Most recently, they were in Berlin working with thirteen collage artists co-creating the city and exhibiting their work.
Co-Creating the City is the work-in-progress that began before Berlinage3, took shape in Berlin and continues as a working practice that Phyllis Schwartz and Edward Peck share. Both artists share and exchange materials that come to life in their artwork. Often one begins the work that is completed by the other. Sometimes they work together during the composition process. Other times, one deconstructs an artwork and recomposes the elements into another composition.
22 July
Maurina Joaquin | Remembering Through Fragments
Hello! My name is Maurina Joaquin, I’m a Filipina-Canadian mixed-media artist, an advocate of the healing power of the arts. A descendant from a long line of Filipino activists, journalists and authors, I carry forward a legacy of storytelling – translating it into visual form through paper marbling, collage and textile-based work.
After an on-the-job accident which resulted in traumatic head injury and a personal journey as a cancer survivor, I’ve reconnected back to my creative voice following over a decade of recovery. This period reshaped my artistic direction, grounding my practice in the transformative and restorative power of art.
With the support from the Victoria Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, I presented my first solo exhibition in 2021, centered on brain injury recovery through artistic expression. In the same year, I received an invitation by ArtsBC to speak at a major provincial arts conference, amplifying my advocacy for arts-based healing. CBC Radio featured the exhibition and Nexus exhibition news article made the top 10 most read articles in 2022.
In 2022, I received Canada Council for the Arts funding to research Baybayin, the pre-colonial writing system in the Philippines. I continue to independently advance this work, examining the intersections of language, identity, and connection – inviting audiences into deeper conversations about heritage, communication and belonging.
29 July
Jason Young | Fugitive Fragments: Studies for a Portrait of a Practice
Jason Young (he/him) is a queer, neurodivergent, and disabled interdisciplinary artist working across sound, image, and performance. After a decade focused primarily on painting and drawing, his practice has expanded beyond these foundations into a more experimental and embodied approach to art-making.
This shift emerges from an ongoing engagement with psychology and selfhood, within a convergent field where handmade processes, digital technologies, and hybrid environments collide.
This expanded practice has produced new audio-visual, process-based works that explore language, identity, memory, and perception while questioning the frameworks through which these experiences are understood.
For this summer salon, the artist will present works-in-progress versions of song-poem-stims and video-performance experiments. This work intuitively draws upon the artist’s lived neurodivergent and disabled experience, finding voice and body through echolalia and stimming as creative and cathartic processes rather than symptoms or states to be explained.
Over the past year, Jason Young has developed a conceptual framework he calls autrock™️—a personal disabled and neurodivergent philosophy of art-making and self-definition across identity, sound, image, rhythm, repetition, and sensory form. Framed as a genre-like open system for experimentation, autrock™️ generates the conditions in which language, memory, identity, and time can be stretched, layered, and reassembled. In this, language, memory, identity, and time become fluid processes rather than fixed structures.
5 August
Sonja Ahlers | Growing Pains
Sonja Ahlers is a visual artist and poet based in Victoria, on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen) speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Since the early ’90s, Ahlers has worked primarily in zines, book and book-adjacent formats, in a medium that she calls visual poetry. She is the author of Temper, Temper and Fatal Distraction (Insomniac Press, 1998 and 2004), The Selves (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010), Swan Song (Conundrum Press, 2021), Classification Crisis (Richmond Art Gallery and Conundrum Press, 2023) and Growing Pains (flask, 2026).
Sonja Ahlers is currently working with Lynda Gammon of flask publishing. Working together they have selected pages from Ahlers’s 1000-page archive of collaged images and text that she has accumulated over a 12 year period. Staying true to Ahlers’ collage process, these 8 1/2” X 11” pages are now in the process of being reimagined and reassembled into a limited edition 16” X 20” artbook multiple.
12 August
Chantey Dayal | Threads Of Resistance
Chantey is a painter and a Palestine solidarity activist. The work in progress that she will be sharing weaves together ideas about space and boundaries; current affairs, and the power of mark making. Sohad is an engineer and a lifetime land defender. She brings story, care, and wisdom through her words, and her stitches.
Statement about the work-in-progress: Chantey will share a piece that is a living and evolving testimony of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The piece attempts to face the dehumanizing statistics that become abstracted and undigestible. Sohad will be offering a brief history of the art of tatreez (traditional Palestinian cross stitch). Attendees will have the opportunity to stitch a small pattern as well as add marks to the work in progress. Together, they hope to invoke dialogue and connection, through the power of mark making and hand work.
19 August
Chrystal Phan | The Art of Feeling Bad: Making paintings about feelings without being too weird about it
Chrystal Phan (b. 1982) works primarily in oil on canvas, bringing viewers into her experiences growing up in Canada in a family of Vietnamese refugees. Her paintings often show scenes of ‘everyday’ family activities that represent how Canadian cultural traditions are experienced by first and second-generation Vietnamese Canadian families who are constantly adjusting how they perform their multiple identities as their sense of connection to their new homeland recalibrates over time.
Statement about work-in-progress: I’m currently working on a 61” x 104” painting of a line-up of people giving gifts to a horse. It is quite a silly painting but has posed considerable practical, conceptual and technical challenges. This painting is part of a series called “I’m Very Sorry”, which includes works that represent the crippling shame of inaction in the face of a climate crisis.
26 August
Simone Littledale | Burn Notice: witnessing wildfire, processing ecological grief
Simone Littledale Escobar is a multidisciplinary artist, naturalist, and educator. Her practice uses foraged and naturally derived mediums to explore concepts of ecological grief, ties to place, life/death cycles, and personal geography. Simone’s experience is strongly shaped by her mixed Colombian heritage and her upbringing by the ever-changing waters of the Pacific coast.
The body of work in progress investigates the impact of fire on human and nonhuman spaces. Each piece is made from mediums foraged from wildfire sites; charcoal ink, scorched branches, burned soil. By processing these materials the artist processes grief and anger, alchemizing destruction into a method of creation and communication.
2 September
Graham Kolbeins and Jonathan Andre Culliton | Creating Your Own Opportunities
Jonathan Andre Culliton (he/him) is an American trans filmmaker and comedy writer. Culliton is best known for “Spookable,” a horror comedy short starring Alexandra Grey and produced by Zackary Drucker. His film “Willa Justice: Drag Queen Private Eye” received the Out on Film Filmmaker Fund Grant. Graham Kolbeins (they/them) is a Canadian/American queer filmmaker, writer, designer, and manga editor living on Vancouver Island. Kolbeins’ latest film project is Cracked Eggs, a feature documentary currently in post-production that tells the story of 73-year-old Linda Sibio, a schizophrenic artist whose mission is to empower people with mental challenges through art education. The two are married, and their documentary “Minister Chucky,” the story of their Vegas wedding and immigration to Canada, recently screened at Frameline.
Cracked Eggs:
A schizophrenic desert artist, struggling with trauma, searches for connection through Cracked Eggs, the groundbreaking arts collective she founded for people with mental differences. Spanning from Joshua Tree to Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and her childhood home in West Virginia, the film traces Linda Sibio’s turbulent life through intimate interviews, confrontational public performances, and a fractured self-portrait in which three versions of Linda traverse an increasingly fragmented America.
The VAC acknowledges the community partnership of The Bay Centre, and is grateful for the financial assistance from the Province of BC (Community Gaming), BC Arts Council (Community Arts), and CRD Arts Services, the Victoria Foundation, and the City of Victoria’s My Great Neighbourhoods Grant, as well as our members and donors.