Symbiotic Echoes

Symbiotic Echoes brings together four distinct exhibitions by Ilze Bebris and Robin Ripley, Dave Mutnjakovic, James Pocock, and Artem Struyanskiy. Across different gallery spaces, each artist explores the crucial balance between humanity and the environment, the need for interconnectedness, resilience, and active engagement in response to the crises of our time. From challenging societal systems to envisioning ecological harmony, the artists invite viewers to reflect on a path towards a future of symbiosis and restoration.

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Dave Mutnjakovic – No More Hiding

Canadian Pacific Gallery

This exhibition traces a decade-long artistic journey of personal healing, set against the backdrop of ecological crisis, social collapse, and spiritual fragmentation. In No More Hiding, Dave Mutnjakovic’s illustrations confront grief, trauma, and the resilience of the human spirit, exploring healing as a symbiotic process and how tending to one’s inner self directly influences the outer environment.

About the Artist:

Dave Mutnjakovic, originally from Windsor, Ontario, matured in Montreal and now resides with his family in Port Moody, BC. He is a multidisciplinary artist and educator known for his intricate pen and ink renderings that explore themes of resilience, healing, and the profound connection to nature.

Drawing inspiration from the rich heritage of Canadian artistic expression, Dave's personal journey through significant health challenges has become a canvas for narratives of transformation and empathy. His work has been showcased in art exhibitions worldwide, transcending borders and connecting with global audiences.

In addition tohis artistic practice, Dave runs an outsider art program out of an independent school in New Westminster, fostering creativity and empowerment through art for students marginalized by the public school system. His current exhibition explores the connection between one’s inner health and the connection to the outward environment.

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Ilze Bebris and Robin Ripley – A Conversation

Beedie Living Gallery

In this collaborative bricolage-based installation, Ilze Bebris and Robin Ripley engage in a visual call and response through collage and assemblage. Unfolding as a shared language within the gallery, A Conversation forms a symbiotic dialogue, inviting viewers to reflect on our relationship with everyday objects, where the physical discards of contemporary urban life reveal both conflict with the natural world and the potential for renewed connection and meaning.

About the Artists:

Ilze Bebris

Ilze Bebris is a West Coast artist, educator, and occasional curator working in installation, sculpture, and collage. Born in Toronto, Ilze moved to Vancouver in the 1970s. After graduating from Simon Fraser University with a degree in education, she received an LLB from University of British Columbia.  After a short-lived practice as a lawyer, she attended Emily Carr University and University of Victoria (UVIC).

Ilze has worn many hats: public school teacher, lawyer, education coordinator in Vancouver galleries, and university instructor at UVIC and University of the Fraser Valley. Interested in public art education and the intersection of art and every day, Ilze has created installations in store front spaces and points of intersection with pedestrians.

Her work includes temporary installations in public spaces and galleries, directly addressing the site, allowing it to inform the work. She is interested in the narratives that shape the culture of contemporary everyday life and how a culture of mass consumption shapes our perceptions and understandings of the natural world.

Working with bricolage and collage, she works with the vocabulary of every day mass-produced materials to create sculptural works and installations that explore the tensions around ideas of the natural and the artificial. Ilze also incorporates drawing, printmaking, and painting into her collages. She has shown both nationally and internationally and is the recipient of several awards.

‍Robin Ripley

A peripatetic childhood initiated Robin Ripley’s interest in the language of objects and the variety of ways people connect with the ordinary materials that surround them.

Robin’s work often incorporates found materials as a means to explore the blurry boundaries between art and life and how our consumer goods evoke not only knowledge and memory but reflect culture too. Since receiving a BFA from Emily Carr, Robin has exhibited regularly and participated in a variety of collaborative and community art projects. Her work is found in both private and public collections.

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James Pocock - No One Ever Asked

Ann Kitching Gallery

In a series of street photographs, James Pocock documents everyday encounters, revealing the dissonance between human systems and the natural world.  No One Ever Asked captures fleeting moments with elements of irony, juxtaposing signs of privilege and control with glimpses of nature and human vulnerability. By confronting these imbalances, Pocock invites reflection on how we can move towards the Symbiocene, a future era defined by interconnectedness with the environments we inhabit.

About the Artist:

James Pocock currently lives on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the kʷikʷəƛə̓ m (Kwikwetlem First Nation), and thanks the kʷikʷəƛə̓ m who continue to live on these lands and care for them, along with the waters and all that is above and below.

Photography found James at the age of 14, during high school at Heritage Woods. Using a Yashica Mat 124 G, James was mesmerized instantly and to date, is still unable to replicate the quality of those first images. James is currently attending Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

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Artem Struyanskiy – Fuzzy Identities

Appleyard Parlour

Fuzzy Identities presents paintings by Artem Struyanskiy exploring symbiosis as a condition of contemporary vision, where human perception, memory, and representation are becoming increasingly inseparable from machines.

Overlaying mystic symbolism with portraits of figures whose visual identities are contested, Struyanskiy uses AI image-diffusion and facial recognition aesthetics to further blur, crop, and abstract the images. The resulting depictions reflect on identity in an era shaped by reciprocal influence between humans and machines.

About the Artist:

Artem Struyanskiy is a multimedia artist specializing in drawing and painting, exploring intersections of contemporary imagery, technology, and mysticism. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Libby Leshgold Gallery, MOEC + RBC Media Gallery, the International Astronautical Congress (Netherlands), the International Space Station as part of the Moon Gallery and galleries in Russia and the United States. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia, a BFA from California College of the Arts, and an AA in Graphic Design from Stroganov Moscow State University. His residencies include Leaning Out of Windows, Vermont Studio Center, SPAR, and the AICAD New York Studio Residency Program.