Tofino's Contemporary
Art Gallery
We invite you to experience our intimate gallery space and its thoughtfully curated artworks by emerging and established local and regional artists in painting, sculpture & photography.
Upcoming Exhibit
West Coast Visions
TGCA, in partnership with the Tofino Arts Council, is delighted to host the first annual juried exhibit October 6 to 19th, 2023 of visual artists living in Tofino and Ucluelet.
NEW ARTIST
Patty Ripley
Featured Artist Exhibit
Nikki Baxendale
Tofino: The Magic Beneath
Aug 25 — Sept 11, 2023
Featured Artist Exhibit
Tiffany Blaise
Water & Wind
July 21 - Aug 4, 2023
New Artist
Miles Lowry
We're excited to introduce Miles Lowry to the Tofino Gallery of Contemporary Art.
New Artist
Renato Berlanda
We're excited to introduce Renato Berlanda to the Tofino Gallery of Contemporary Art.
New Artwork
Celebrating both local and regional contemporary art
The Tofino Gallery of Contemporary Art is a place to engage with meaningful artworks from both individual and collective artists. We have aspirations of creating a cultural hub for both locals and tourists.
Testimonials
The Gallery
The Campbell House, 105 - 430 Campbell St., Tofino
Our Artists
Anne-Sophie Falconer is a figurative sculptor with the human soul as her main focus. She draws inspiration from our fragility as human beings, starting with her own. Highlighting what we try so hard to hide from one another is what she is interested in revealing in her works. Winterstone (cement) is her medium of choice, and she is self-taught.
Landscape and figurative artist Arden Rose is a colourist at heart. Inspired by nature and the simple things that give joy, Rose’s works inject space with colour and a little sass, evoking a certain joie de vie, wonder and delight. With an economics degree from the University of Vicrtoria and an MBA from McMaster University, Rose is mostly self-taught as an artist. Inspired by Expressionism, Fauvism and Modigliani in particular, her paintings are sure to delight with her colour, whimsy and gentle humour.
Ben Fox’s work is inspired by the wild and expansive British Columbia locations that Ben has spent extensive periods immersed in – sketching, painting and making photographs. Ben has lived in a remote cabin in Haida Gwaii and spent months of his life on sailboats exploring the Great Bear Rainforest, creating art and gathering material for future work.
Sculptor Birgit Piskor’s work in modified concrete is largely about transformation. She sees the potential for great beauty in change, where she captures that edge of transformation and the liminal space between. Piskor channels the essence of concrete into shapes and textures that defy its inherent rigidity, resulting in sensual, organic forms. Her works shift between arching female forms to striking geometric totems. Piskor’s works are held in private collections locally and internationally.
International award-winning Canadian painter, Chin Yuen, was born in Malaysia. She studied in Singapore and England before moving to Canada for further education. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honors from Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a Master of Arts from the University of Victoria, Canada. After graduation, she moved to Japan and Italy, where she taught English and Fine Arts for several years before returning home to Canada. Yuen continues to travel extensively for work and pleasure. She sees her diverse cultural exposures as an artistic asset that, combined with her love of imaginative inventions, inspires and shapes her creations. For over 20 years, she has exhibited internationally. Her dynamic abstract paintings are on the covers of international textbooks and the walls of residential homes, hotels, health care centres, and corporate buildings.
David A. Haughton was born in Philadelphia in 1956 and moved to Canada in 1991. A self-taught artist, Haughton has been exhibiting his work for forty-six years. For 30+ years, he supplemented his art income as a Pediatric Emergency doctor. As was his plan all along, he is now a full-time painter.
Realist landscape oil-painter Felice Mazzoni lives in Victoria, British Columbia and has spent his entire life on Vancouver Island. West coast beaches, sunsets, ocean and forest landscapes are brought to life though Felice’s use of intricate detail and manipulation of light. With contrasting and harmonious colours, bold compositions or monochrome, Felice captures the essence of the West Coast in every painting.
Traditional weaver and textile artist Fran Solar applies orthodox techniques to industrial materials, such as copper wire. Available in many colours, it is flexible, manipulatable and can be patinated. With freedom to design and improvise on the loom, Solar creates sculptural forms that do not have function but, rather, are beautiful objects with rich colours and texture. Transcending materials often associated with weight and rigidity, Solar creates forms that are tactile and flowing.
With a degree in urban planning, Graeme Masterton’s watercolour paintings convey his love of cities, places and architecture. Influenced by Realism and Gustave Courbet, the Impressionists Manet and Pissaro, and 18th c. landscape painter Canaletto, Masterton’s works capture light, movement and texture. Through travel, he seeks unique perspectives that have aspects of a building, but with life and light. Masterton is drawn to natural materials, such as brick, which provide a sense of time and history.
German-Canadian artist Ira Hoffecker is an urban explorer who employs ideas of rebuilding, decay, covering and revealing in her painting practice. Hoffecker’s process of ‘covering’ is a metaphor for forgetting and suppressing the past, while her ‘revealing’ points to remembering and reconciling historic events. Adapting geometric shapes inherent in architecture, Hoffecker translates city atmospheres through shape, line and colour, marks that articulate the physicality of her work.
Using the simplest of line and shape, the subtlest shift of colour, abstract landscape artist Irma Soltonovich’s works evoke emotion, feeling and memory – a landscape of the imagination. Her distinct horizon line offers comfort and grounding, as well as a sense of belonging. Soltonovich grew up on a Saskatchewan farm, where the prairie is never just a background – it dominates. Blizzards, lightening storms and the overarching sky instil a feeling of freedom, limitless space and room to explore.
Jack Wilkinson was born in Windsor, ON. He lived in Britain from 1937-1955, during which time he studied architecture, painting and sculpture, as well as served in the R.A.F.
As an artist and administrator, Wilkinson was an influential force in the city of Victoria, BC during the 1960s and 1970s. He served as staff artist and senior architectural draftsman for Victoria’s Department of Public Works, and in 1973 he wrote the department’s art policy. Wilkinson was also the chairman for the Provincial Committee on Art and supervised the procurement of 600 artworks to be added to the provincial collection. His role allowed for him to organize art commissions for new provincial buildings, supporting the growth and appreciation of modern art in Victoria.
Janis Gosbee is an emerging painter who lives and creates in Deep Bay and Vancouver, British Columbia. Born and raised in Vancouver, surrounded by art as a child, Janis has had a passion and a reverence for art her entire life. She feels her colourful palette and ethereal images are inspired from her father’s art and the natural world around her.
Lucy Schappy’s wildly optimistic paintings are a form of visual poetry that express her love of life. Symbols and colour resonate together to form a dreamy playground for the heart and mind. Her process is spontaneous and improvisational. Starting each new piece is an adventure that has no known end in sight. The process leads the journey and the outcome is unknown, a conversation evolves on the canvas of question and answer, each mark leading the next in a dance of brush and paint. The resolution of each piece comes at the end of a struggle to find balance and harmony amongst all of the aspects of the visual field.
Figurative and abstract artist Marion Evamy strives for a sense of history and mystery, of things revealed and concealed. Her tropically-coloured abstracts are often inspired by music, while her “fictional” portraits and figures consist of anything from a face with strong shadows to quirky figures. Evamy uses her initials as her signature – ME! – with the exclamation mark representing her philosophy that life should be lived as an exclamation, not an explanation.
Award-winning international artist and distinguished instructor Michelle Miller considers herself an abstract painter, but she effortlessly crosses boundaries and works just as confidently in other genres. Ultimately, there is a connection to nature and organic forms in all of her work, but also a depth that only comes with experience of the craft, and with life.
Miller earned a BFA in visual arts with a triple major in painting, drawing and printmaking, as well as a BA in art history. However, her art education began long before her university years. Michelle’s mother was a Sunday painter who taught her daughter to trust and follow her creative instincts.
Miles Lowry is a visual and sound artist, writer and director. He has been exhibiting paintings and sculptures since 1981. In his early work, Miles explored ceramics but successfully changed mediums to the light-weight yet durable cast cotton fibre. His exhibitions ‘Two Tribes, Rites and Passages’, and his ongoing series of cast figures ‘Crucial Fragments’, established him as one of Western Canada’s most versatile contemporary artists.
Monica’s energy and passion are expressed in her unique mixed media paintings. Her semi-abstract, highly textured, luminous mixed-media paintings draw primarily upon the natural environment and symbolism from ancient civilizations.
She applies paint with brush and palette knives to produce a 3-D effect suggesting organic energy flow and movement. The complex surface and depth in her paintings are created using layers of opaque and translucent acrylic gels, inks and natural materials such as sand, paper, fabric, glass, silver dust, and stone.
Following a successful career as an Art Director with experience working for some of the biggest brands in London, New York & L.A, Nikki is now focusing on her long-term love of fine art.
Starting with a degree at the University for Creative Arts in London, Nikki graduated with distinction in illustration, photography, marketing, and fashion journalism. She went on to study several disciplines in photography, notably the documentary style, and how to really capture the heart of a story at The International Centre for Photography in New York. In addition, Nikki has continued private studies with several award-winning photographers as a passionate pursuit and constant desire to evolve.
“Nature is an innate part of life. Movement, rhythms, light, life patterns, reflections – all inspire my work. It’s a communion that spills out through creative expression. But there’s more to it than copying what I see in front of me.
The paintings are inner contemplations, stories and landscapes of life. They’re each unique expressions containing vitality and essence within their layers and convey my felt experiences. Like life, paths may lead the viewer to bold beauty, quiet passages and beautiful imperfections. I admire nature’s gorgeous example of being wildly chaotic and peacefully ordered at the same time.”
Paula Callahan’s primal, sensual abstract works in acrylic and mixed media convey rhythm, movement and narrative in monochrome or earthy, rich palettes.
Her time spent as a field nurse in war zones in the Middle East and Africa in the 1990s with MSF is subtly embedded in some of her paintings. There, Callahan witnessed trauma, human suffering and environmental destruction. Her works reveal themselves as a movement from pain to reconciliation, or as a disassociated observer of place or events.
Born in culture-rich Alert Bay BC, Rande Cook was surrounded by the beauty of the land and groomed by the strong teachings of his grandparents. While growing up, Cook and his grandfather observed and discussed the traditional art forms of their Kwakwaka’wakw heritage. As Cook got older, his love for culture never faded and his desire to be artistically creative continually evolved. With many years of apprenticing with well-known master carvers and traveling the world, Cook developed and perfected his craft gaining 25 years as a professional artist.
Bosnian-born, Croatian-Canadian artist Renato Berlanda started creating art after the war, and emigrated to Canada in 1996. As a newcomer to Canada who did not speak English, art was the language of communication. While not being formally trained, Berlanda has always been involved in designing, creating and building things. “I have been mentored or apprenticed by others in the construction industry, and from this skill set I am self-taught in working with the materials used in my art.”
Richelle Osborne, based in Victoria, British Columbia, has been making three dimensional fine art since 2013. What began as a way to adorn her longstanding neighbourhood bistro grew into a full-time creative passion, with more than 150 paintings sold.
At once graphic and sculptural, Richelle’s work plays with shape, colour, texture,light and shadow to create engaging, one-of-a-kind art pieces. Inspired by colour-blocking and geometric design, it thrives on the use of everyday materials, from hardwoods and copper rings to rubber and plastic tubing.
Sarah Platenius’ visual and literary art traverses the wild; it is a collection of field notes, tributes, and signposts interpreting weather patterns of heart, politics, religion and geography. Her visual art has been exhibited at Federation Gallery in Vancouver and other galleries around British Columbia. In 2022, Sarah’s work was accepted into the juried Sooke Fine Arts Show. Her artwork has been published in The Hopper Magazine, Camas Magazine and other publications. Sarah’s literary work has been published in California Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Sage Magazine and other literary publications. Sarah lives in Tofino on Vancouver Island with her husband, son and daughter.
Encaustic means to burn. The Greeks used to use it to caulk the hulls of their ships. The Egyptians resurrected the craft to render exquisite portraits and decorate mummies. Shelley Wuitchik uses it to tell a story…an early morning dog walk may transpire into layers of Japanese maple leaves, coffee beans, and arbutus bark onto a canvas of pigment infused beeswax.
Shelley believes her art mirrors her life. Rich, colorful, layered. Shelley loves encaustic it for its’ immediacy and deliberateness. Yet it remains malleable and forgiving, just like the people (and dog) in her life.
Balancing creativity between elemental layers and visual concepts, artist and fine arts photographer Stacey Bodnaruk communicates a story which leaves the viewer directed but not limited to the freedom of interpretation. She creates unique and meaningful photography that evokes emotion, blending multiple layers and original photos harmoniously intertwined to create a dreamlike narrative. Inspired by wildlife, surf breaks and old-growth forest, Bodnaruk’s works convey power and beauty.
Vancouver-based artist Tiffany Blaise makes contemporary landscape paintings. In her practice, Tiffany explores the themes of movement and transformation through reinterpreting subjects such as dramatic coastlines and swirling skies.
Her artwork unites the physical landscape with the world of the mind. “My art practice is a journey rooted in the exploration of thoughts and nature. I want to portray the connection between our inner nature and the landscape that surrounds us.”