In time for spring, The Polygon Gallery sprouts a major new exhibition by acclaimed artist, curator, and scholar Tania Willard, Photolithics, on view from March 7th to May 24th.
A decade-long survey bringing together new and existing works that showcase Willard’s inventive approach to photography, Photolithics, presents an array of printing and presentation techniques. The gallery space itself will be transformed into a “lens” for the artworks and objects inside. The exhibition is Willard’s first since winning the Sobey Art Award in November 2025 — Canada’s biggest contemporary art prize — and is her largest solo show to date.
“This exhibition has been years in the making,” says Audain Chief Curator Monika Szewczyk, who co-curated Photolithics with Assistant Curator Serena Steel. “Already during a 2016 exhibition she co-curated at The Presentation House Gallery (as The Polygon Gallery was then known), Tania Willard redefined photography as a medium and material that dates back millennia, not centuries. The essay she wrote for the catalogue, Witnessing the Persistence of Light, is the most insightful overview of photography I have ever read — not just historical photography, not just concerning BC, not even photography in the colonial context (though this is an important part of the story), but photography in the most expanded sense of the term. We are incredibly grateful to be bringing Willard back to The Polygon Gallery to showcase her paradigm-shifting historical scholarship and artistic research.”
Willard adds: “I wrote the essay as I was researching historical B.C. photography from the Uno Langmann collection. It was a difficult project because so many images depicted the cultural genocide of Indigenous Peoples in B.C. — it was enraging. And so many of the photographs were of, but not by, Indigenous People. Photography has historically been used in largely harmful ways, with documentary impulses steeped in the salvage anthropology of the time. So I had to find new ways to look at these images and consider them. As I began to study them as documents of light, I began to think about geological time and the idea of exposure. If the effect of light in a moment is to capture a photograph, then isn’t the ecological process of light equal to a stone? Documents of text and light were used across Canada to dispossess Indigenous people of land and life; I wanted to assert the validity of stones and earth as documentary sources that speak about the deep relationships with our lands since time immemorial.”
Photolithics, a portmanteau of ancient words for “light” and “stone,” highlights Willard’s evolving photographic practice, in which the sun and the land play a vital role beyond the surveillance or spectacle of nature. Passing through patterns of cedar root, the sun’s rays cast a warm protective glow on all the works in the gallery and the people coming to witness. As the days lengthen and the weather filters the available light, the exhibition will transform, not just the physical view, but hopefully, the audience will find their views and attitudes transformed, as well.
Tania Willard’s Photolithics is on display from March 7 to May 24, 2026 at The Polygon Gallery, 101 Carrie Cates Court, North Vancouver.
Special public programming includes:
- Join Tania Willard and co-curators Monika Szewczyk and Serena Steel for the public opening of Photolithics on Sunday, March 29 at 3pm
- The Polygon Gallery, in partnership with the 2026 Capture Photography Festival, presents a conversation between artists and curators Tania Willard and Dana Claxton on Thursday, April 23 at 7pm
For more details and information, visit thepolygon.ca/exhibition/tania-willard-photolithics.