Exhibition talking about hauntings from resource extraction to be shown at Nanaimo Art Gallery
Published 12:16 pm Thursday, October 29, 2026
An exhibition dedicated to talking about the metaphorical ghosts of resource extraction will be opening at Nanaimo Art Gallery at the end of this month.
Haunting the Undermined Zone will be shown at the gallery, starting on Saturday, Oct. 31, with an opening reception on Friday. Oct. 30 at 7 p.m.
Jesse Birch, art gallery curator and artistic director, said that the new exhibition is thinking about the way humans extracted from the land, and the evidence that the extraction would come back to haunt them.
“When you’re driving, you look up the side of a mountain, and it just snowed, suddenly you see these patches of white that are the clearcuts of the mountain side,” Birch described.
Birch said that he and local artist bailey macabre wanted to do a show about these themes, but also set to open the night prior to Halloween.
“We wanted to do something that is corresponding with that time in a certain way … we started thinking about what artists would be interesting to work with around this theme,” Birch recalled. “We just slowly selected artists and the show developed from there.”
One of the art pieces that will be on display is Caitlin ffrench’s Threshold, which is created out of Scotch broom roots, ochre, clay, cherry tree sap and tea, according to art write-ups sent to the News Bulletin.
ffrench said that the artwork is about the “haunting of the land from plants that are taking over wild areas.”
“I’ve gathered the Scotch broom both from Vancouver Island and around Vancouver, and Scotch broom is a plant that really likes to grow in disturbed areas,” ffrench explained. “It is from Europe, and so when it was brought over here, as kind of like a display plant, it was then able to just takeoff.”
In addition to the broom, ffrench also did some painting.
“The portal in the ground is painted with ochre, or iron-rich mineral pigment, mixed with cherry tree sap, in place of gum arabic, and a tea, and it was painted with these ochres because they are from forest fire-affected areas, and from dying glaciers … and from places, sites where mines exist and other human disturbed areas.”
Birch said the show speaks to some themes that they’ve responded to before, but in a different way.
This is also the last exhibition which is being presented to try to answer the themed question of, “How can we live together?”
“It allows us to look at this important question from lots of different points of view,” Birch said.
The exhibition will be running at the art gallery until Jan. 10. The opening reception is for free, with no RSVP required.
misha.mustaqeem@nanaimobulletin.com