Gallery history research project • S'eliyemetaxwtexw Art Gallery, University of the Fraser Valley • 2024–2025

Project description
Frozen Moments of Timeless Travel was a grant-funded research initiative that reconstructed and preserved the largely undocumented early history of the S'eliyemetaxwtexw Art Gallery. Through archival research, digitization of historical photographs and VHS recordings, interviews with past faculty, artists and contributors, and the production of an oral history podcast, the project uncovered forgotten stories spanning several decades of exhibitions and community engagement. The research culminated in a curated archival exhibition, a series of illustrated postcards highlighting key moments from the gallery's first decade, a publication, curated archival displays integrated into contemporary exhibitions, and a significant expansion of the gallery's digital archives.

Process
Beginning with a handful of newspaper clippings and fragmented archival records, the project gradually reconstructed the gallery's first decade through photographs, VHS recordings, institutional archives and conversations with former faculty, artists and staff. Rather than presenting history as a fixed timeline, the exhibition invited visitors to encounter the archive through stories, objects and visual fragments that connected past exhibitions with the gallery's present.

Research Notes

This exhibition was built from what remains.
The School of Creative Arts only began consistently cataloguing gallery exhibitions in the early 2000s. Before then, records are scattered. The selection shown here is drawn almost entirely from newspaper clippings of the first 10 years of the Gallery. When opening, it was the first gallery in a vocational school in BC. A new newspaper archive was created as the foundation of this project.
The process has been both meticulous and murky—like archival work itself. This isn’t a comprehensive history, nor a chronological one. It’s a selection built from intuition and curiosity, with no fixed order or hierarchy. The base materials: clippings from the first decade of what was then the Fraser Valley Art Gallery.
What does it mean to revisit, to restore, to reimagine a history that was nearly lost?
Some shows received multiple write-ups and photo features. Others, like Images of the Inuit or Kwagiutl Graphics: Tradition in a New Medium—exhibitions of national significance—were barely mentioned, sometimes only in passing. This disparity asks us to look closer. What was recorded, and what was left out? Who shaped these early stories of the gallery, and what was deemed worthy of remembering?
Images in this exhibit repeat and resurface—cropped, pixelated, ghostly. They stand in for entire exhibitions, evoking what can no longer be fully known. In doing so, they become icons of something larger than themselves. Not fixed memories, but entry points—for reflection, speculation, and curiosity. //L,W.