Though the smoky skies now synonymous with B.C. summers may seem distant at the start of a new year, the intensifying threat of wildfires across the province is never truly out of mind. In its first exhibition of 2026, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery puts these threats to canvas, code and film with The Structure of Smoke. Open Jan. 9 through April 12, the exhibition features work exploring the physical and conceptual dimensions of smoke and fire through a variety of forms and media.
These works range from starkly impressionistic to highly interpretive. On one end, Evan Lee’s Forest Fires series is deceptive with the extent of its direct representation of B.C.’s wildfires. Though expressive brush strokes may lead viewers to mistake the two pieces for paintings, they might be more accurately described as physically altered photographs.
In a talk at the exhibition’s opening reception on Jan. 8, Lee explained that he made the pieces by printing aerial photos from the BC Forest Service archive on the back of Kodak photography paper. He then used a brush to manipulate the still-wet ink that pooled on the absorbent paper. The result is something in between, Lee said, “a painting or photograph, or both, or neither” — hyperrealistic in composition, but abstract in detail and slightly surreal. Heavy-edged blots of orange ink make up the centre of roaring blazes and, in the un-inked white of the smoke plumes, the Kodak watermark is visible.
Lee said the process was experimental and sometimes accidental, a product of the uncharted early days of digital photography. Remembering it makes him nostalgic now, “about a time when [he] wasn't made anxious about fires every summer … a time when photography frustrated [him], but in a good way.”
Other interpretations featured in The Structure of Smoke are more conceptual. Samuel Roy-Bois’s Balloons, a set of three wooden framework sculptures, each balanced on a bucket or a jar, might evoke the temporary and precarious volume of fire, but the thematic link is tenuous beyond that.
Two pieces from Musqueam artist Susan Point, Wildfire and Rising Waters, point out the interconnectedness of fire and water. Both works are silkscreen prints produced from identical stencils. They depict patterns of large, birdlike heads rising like waves or flames. The colouring — reds and yellows in Wildfire and blues in Rising Waters — recontextualizes the pattern in each piece and highlights the details of the patterns.
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s New Fire Landscape is an iteration on several of the artist’s previous works — Fire Landscape, Native Land Fire Landscape — and, like Point’s Wildfire, sees spirits in the natural forces of the blaze. This time, patterns of birds, bears and blackfish overlap in the smoke above a burning forest, whose trees are also made up of animal designs.
In a post discussing New Fire Landscape on the Faculty of Forestry website, Yuxweluptun critiques the “utopian capitalist wilderness” of early Canadian naturalist painters, specifically the Group of Seven. It’s easy to see the critical inspiration in New Fire Landscape, particularly in the broad planes, distinct figures and flat textures of Lawren Harris. But where the Group of Seven turned a blind eye to the repercussions of colonial exploitation, depicting the land as empty and pristine, Yuxweluptun fills the frame with faces and fire.
Other works included Brian Jungen’s Triangle Repeater and Heraa Khan’s Havoc, Loss of Land and Okanagan. Jungen’s piece is a blue plastic 20-litre water canister carved with a repeating Métis triangular pattern that perforates the material. Khan contributes three richly-detailed miniature paintings depicting burning hills, branches and villages. The miniatures, surrounded by fields of coloured vasli paper, transpose the distinctive style of Persian miniature onto the Canadian context, complete with pine trees and flaming A-frame roofs.
Passing by the Belkin in the next few months, you might notice small puffs of smoke rising from the roof. No, the gallery hasn’t installed a coal-burning boiler. This is the outward-facing side of Germaine Koh’s Prayers, probably the most technically elaborate piece in The Structure of Smoke. It explores smoke as a medium for communication rather than a natural force. A smoke machine mounted on the roof connects to a computer inside the gallery. Viewers can type into an interface, and the characters are translated into Morse code, sent to the smoke machine and emitted, slow and steady, as dots and dashes — short and long puffs of smoke.
At the exhibition opening, Koh said she was intrigued by the external, “indexical” — meaning, basically, contextual — signs of work being done inside buildings: lights seen through windows, chimneys and exhaust ports breathing smoke or steam. These signs are traditionally byproducts, not end goals, but Prayers makes the relationship intentional — the gallery’s front desk computer is also hooked up to the machine, so the link between the work going on inside Belkin and the smoke signals is a direct one.
Prayers also points to the link between modern digital communications technology and the physical mediums of the past. Digital computing and smoke signals, after all, are both based on binary code. Recipients of the newsletters being drafted on the Belkin’s terminals can now just as well receive their updates by sitting on the benches across Main Mall with a Morse code guide and a notebook — though they may want to set aside a couple hours.
