2026 Exhibition Program

Albany Town Hall GallerIES

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

A DECADE OF PRIDE  

21 Feb - 25 Mar | Albany Town Hall 

A Decade of Pride marks the tenth anniversary of the Albany Pride Festival, one of Australia’s most significant regional Pride celebrations. Curated by James BL Hollands, this retrospective exhibition brings together festival posters, artworks, personal stories and creative contributions that document a decade of visibility, advocacy and community connection in the Great Southern. Together, these works reflect the growth of Albany Pride and honour the people, creativity and resilience that have shaped the festival over its first ten years.

Abettors of the Zeewijk - James BL Hollands

In 1727, two marooned teenagers, Adriaan Spoor and Pieter Engelse, were isolated on separate islands and left off the coast of WA, because of accused crimes of homosexuality. In this exhibition, Hollands displays imagined images of 81 of the faces of the corpses of the men who sailed away, leaving the two to die alone.

Hollands takes stills from his last film, Trill Death Cult -– a film about queer vision, and the invisibility of the queer dead, and inverts it to ask - what happens to the people who watch oppression, what happens to the viewers of atrocities, what happens to those who are complicit within the process of death, what happens to people who kill because of ideology at the moment of their death. Rather than the queer dead being objectified, Hollands reverses the polarities and turns the camera on people who seek political and religious persecution, and we observe their nameless corpse faces.

Hollands creates a visual portmanteau, inverting and redrawing his last film’s stills, and printing them on tracing paper with UV ink and luminous spray paint, placing them on walls, evoking cave painting, Three Six Mafia’s skull T-shirts and the Kryptonian interdimensional super prison of Superman’s Phantom Zone.

Expertly and collaboratively lit by Luke Simpson, Simpson reanimates Hollands’ work within the space, creating a room of the living undead. Hollands and Simpson take these stills and turn them into breathing corpse shadows of a seminal moment in WA history.


Artist Talk: Saturday 21 Feb, 11am 
Albany Town Hall
217 York Street, Albany
Open: Tue-Sat 10-5pm

Dates open to public Exhibition
23 Jan -14 Feb The Mirror | Jarrad Martyn 
21 Feb - 25 Mar A Decade of Pride  

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.

Vancouver Arts Centre 
Mon - Fri 10-4pm
Sat 10-2pm 

DELVE DEEPER | HEATHER BROWN   

5 Feb - 5 Mar 2026 | Vancouver Arts Centre 

Delve Deeper is a photographic exhibition with the aim to stimulate and promote an appreciation of our surroundings and wildlife. Heather aims to hopefully foster discussions about the local ecosystem and our actions, which can have either a positive or negative influence.

Heather grows a native garden that provides a habitat for rare and endangered wildlife. The garden delivers joy to humans and animals. By promoting and encouraging the greening of suburbia, we can support our wildlife and the environment.

Vancouver Arts Centre 
Mon - Fri 10-4pm
Sat 10-2pm 

LOST LOUNGE | LAURA NEWBURY  

27 Feb - 25 Mar 2026 | Vancouver Arts Centre 

These works on paper in collagraphs and mixed media, offer glimpses into the evolved social fabrics of Albany. With a focus on interior domestic spaces, this show highlights the personal histories and narrates everyday moments that have shaped our community over the last two centuries.

Vancouver Arts Centre 
Mon - Fri 10-4pm
Sat 10-2pm 

Dates open to public Exhibition
22 Jan - 12 Feb 
A Warm Foreign Land | Young Choi
5 Feb - 5 Mar  Delve Deeper | Heather Brown 
27 Feb - 25 Mar  Lost Lounge | Laura Newbury