Alex Gibson and Dion Smith-Dokkie at Wil Aballe, Vancouver

ALEX GIBSON (b. 1994, Barbados) is a queer artist and writer, who filters digital and material processes to generate imagery, and archive ephemera through image making, video, and installation. They work with and through images as sites to examine queer space, temporality, and geopolitical environments, often using found photographs, objects, and appropriated media to reference existing networks. Gibson’s work has been exhibited in Barbados, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States of America. Their writing has been published in Canada, Germany, and Italy. They hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and are based on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC).

With the global rise of fascism, this body of photographic objects examines dynamics of power and submission through puppy play to subvert ongoing systems of oppression. A hound marks its spot disrupts a capitalist framework of labour, production, and intellect, through a queer lens of play and territory.

In his text A dog worries a bone, and other thoughts, artist and writer Matthew Lax notes that human pups “have freed themselves of the bounds of body, gender, and most importantly, work. Pups often speak of pupspace, the psychology and state of being pup, a place free of external pressures, deadlines, trauma, societal expectations and the demands of capitalism.”

By interrogating how the subversion of power dynamics found in “pupspace” emerges in various film, contemporary art, and pop cultural sources, the works in this exhibition present themselves as fragmented photographs embedded within resin. Mounted on traditional hardware materials such as plywood, steel, drywall (some found and repurposed from construction sites), the forms reflect modes of construction and labour, while the images toy at questions of play, control, desire, and destruction within an image.

Like the way a dog marks its territory, the images in A hound marks its spot absorb resin which is poured upon them, taking on a wet and fluid quality. The photographs position a dialogue between human/ non-human participants who engage in activities of work/play, to rupture capitalist narratives of dominance/submission.

This exhibition is part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibitions Program.

DION SMITH-DOKKIE (he, they) is a painter by trade and is interested in location and place, infrastructure, communication, materiality and erotics. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Dion was one of five finalists for the 2024 Phillip B. Lind Prize for Emerging Artists at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, participating in The Inaugural Lind Biennial. Other recent exhibitions include Mirrors, a duo exhibition with Michael Morris, at SUM Gallery; it hides in the light at The Bows in Calgary; Land Breaths at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie; and This Will Be the First of a Thousand Worlds We Give Life To at Gallery Gachet. His work has been supported by the BC Arts Council and Canada Arts Council and he has participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, New Media Gallery, and Griffin Art Projects. Dion has received awards like the Kwi Am Choi Scholarship Prize and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Master’s Program Scholarship for research on landscape painting, along with numerous other scholarships. He has published writing in Galleries West, SAD Magazine, ReIssue, and other venues. Dion is a shy gay man and a member of West Moberly First Nations.

Taking the window as a point of departure—at once a structure for seeing and an old trope in painting—the works in Wind-Eye invoke painting as a technology of location. They document summertime meanderings, queer moments reflected in a pane of glass, rain on the skin and rivulets of cloud and light, cascading out from waves.

Bringing together works in acrylic, oil and mixed-media, the variety of techniques demonstrate an ongoing inquiry into the juncture of the sensual, formal, and environmental. Multiple works incorporate sand and other materials, in the quest for a vibrant surface. The use of internal subdivision and abutting passages refracts multiple places into the frame of each work while the palette, predominantly pastel with sections of deep blue and violet, conjures the uncertainty of dusk, when the world beckons through the window. Throughout Wind-Eye, wind-swept gestures caress and flow like garlands or fingers.