2026 Exhibition Program

Albany Town Hall GallerIES

RADICAL FUTURES: FERTILE GROUND   

12 Dec - 17 Jan 2025 | Albany Town Hall 

In partnership with the Regional Arts Triennial and Denmark Arts, City of Albany is proud to announce the upcoming exhibition Radical Futures: Fertile Ground.

The exhibition will invite Great Southern residents and visitors to imagine a future where fire is no longer associated with devastating loss and is instead bravely accepted as a generative presence in rural and regional life.

Curated by Kwoorabup-based emerging Curator Saira Spencer, Radical Futures: Fertile Ground will feature 5 Great Southern and 3 South West artists and creative teams working in a variety of mediums:

• Carly Le Cerf & Jean-Michel Maujean

• CYCAD

• Rachel Falls Williams

• Peter Hill

• Freya Joy Parre

• Ruth Maddren

• Helen Seiver

• Jo Wassell & Samala Ghosh

The WA Regional Arts Triennial 3: Radical Futures is proudly supported by the Government of Western Australia through CITS. It is coordinated by Southern Forest Arts with support from ART ON THE MOVE through the Regional Exhibition Touring Boost. Project partners include John Curtin Gallery, Regional Arts WA, GalleriesWest and Kimberley Arts Network.

Artworks: After Fire Still Standing, Great Western Woodlands - Carly Le Cerf. Encaustic and oil on board, 90x60cm, 2025. Photo credit: Jean-michel Maujean.

Curator & Artist talk Sat 13 Dec, 11am or 10 Jan, 11am

Albany Town Hall
217 York Street, Albany
Open: Tue-Sat 10-5pm
Open Mondays, during the school holidays.

THE MIRROR | jARRAD mARTYN  

23 Jan- 14 Feb | Albany Town Hall 

The Mirror is a series of new paintings by Melbourne-based, Australian artist Jarrad Martyn, that explore the ways that visual meaning shifts as images move across time, technology, and cultural memory.

The Mirror examines the instability of representation and considers how photographs, archives, and museum displays function not as fixed records but as materials that change in significance depending on the moment and context in which they are viewed.

The exhibition re-presents and reinterprets archival photographs connected to Albany’s whaling past, reflecting on how their meanings continue to evolve within contemporary ecological and ethical awareness. Martyn draws on these sources through a process that moves between drawing, painting, and digital collage. Gestural marks, textures, and fragments from earlier works are photographed, digitally altered, and reintroduced into the compositions. As a result, the surfaces appear layered, shifting, and suspended between representation and abstraction, and between past, present, and imagined futures.

Motifs from museum interiors, taxidermy displays, and ambiguous or idealised landscapes emphasise how institutional settings and systems shape our understanding of the natural world. These references also call attention to the tension between preservation and loss that often sits within such spaces.

The Mirror evokes not only the act of reflection but the possibility of seeing ourselves within the images. It invites viewers to recognise their own position within wider environmental and cultural narratives, encouraging a moment of self-reflection on the impacts and choices that shape our shared future.


Artist Talk: Saturday 24 Jan, 10.30am
Albany Town Hall
217 York Street, Albany
Open: Tue-Sat 10-5pm
Open Mondays, during the school holidays.

Dates open to public Exhibition
12 Dec - 17 Jan  Radical Futures: Fertile Ground 
23 Jan -14 Feb  The Mirror | Jarrad Martyn 

VANCOUVER ARTS CENTRE GALLERIES

a WARM FOREIGN LAND | Young Choi  

22 Jan - 12 Feb 2026 | Vancouver Arts Centre 

I spent thirty years living in Korea. I grew up in a place where it felt as if you had to move quickly just to avoid falling behind, where getting through each day could feel like a small competition.
It was not simply a matter of good or bad, but I found myself slowly worn out by that constant sense of competition and began to wonder what it might be like to live somewhere else.
The first place I stayed for a long time outside of Korea was Australia. As I watched strangers on the street exchange warm greetings, and saw relaxed people filling the benches along the river, I began to sense that days here flowed at an entirely different pace.

At first, everything felt unfamiliar: the language, the seasons, the colour of the light, even the trees and animals that appeared so casually along the roadside. But as I kept carrying my camera and recording my time here, I realised, only later, that I was drawn to similar scenes in both countries. Even when the location changed, the emotions I held on to and the way I looked at the world did not change very much. In the end, I was searching for the same stories, repeated in different landscapes.

In this exhibition, photographs taken in Korea and Australia hang on two facing walls. The Australian photographs are printed in a vertical format, the Korean photographs in a horizontal format, so that they stand across from one another like pairs of images. When a viewer looks at a scene from Australia on one wall, a scene from Korea appears to respond from the opposite side. I am a Korean artist who remains a foreigner in Australia, and many of the people who visit this exhibition will be Australians who, standing before the Korean photographs, become foreigners there. The gallery becomes a space where two “foreign lands” face each other.

A Warm Foreign Land gathers moments in which these two different places reflect one another and begin to look alike. Moving back and forth between images of Korea and Australia, I hope viewers will sense, at least once, an unexpected familiarity and warmth between the place where their own daily life unfolds and a distant elsewhere.


Mon - Fri 10-4pm 
Sat 10-2pm 

Dates open to public Exhibition
22 Jan - 12 Feb 
A Warm Foreign Land | Young Choi