Hannah Rickards: I am the infant and I am the bird
Gibson Art Museum, Burnaby, BC - To June 14
Without knowing it, art-inclined Instagrammers might already be familiar with the work of North Okanagan resident Hannah Rickards. The work in question began with the artist installing an infrared trail camera in their pasture. Unlike the salt licks ranchers deposit on their fields to balance their animals’ sodium levels, this motion-activated camera does not so much draw animals to it but, in a clever inversion, is activated by their presence. The appropriately titled Figure Ground (2025) is a large-scale video, one of three new works currently on display at the Gibson.
Rickards has had a long and abiding interest in the relationship between perception and experience. In exploring this relationship, the artist brings together conceptual frameworks and media technology to produce video installations and prints that, in the words of the museum, “measure the limits of language and map conditions of uncertainty in our attempts to discern and describe the world.” As in past works, these new works are spare in both their pictured content and in the gallery environments where they are displayed. How they differ today is based in part on Rickards’ relocation from urban London to rural BC.
Rickards was the recipient of the Nigel Greenwood Art Prize in 2018, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Visual and Performing Arts in 2015 and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2008/9. Her work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and at the South London Gallery. She has had solo exhibitions at the Polygon Gallery and Artspeak, Vancouver; Fogo Island Arts, NL; and Modern Art Oxford, Whitechapel Gallery and The Showroom, London.
This exhibition is part of the 2026 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
