Surrey Art Gallery marks 50 years with 10 and 10: Story of Stories exhibit
The show features works from the gallery’s first and latest decade, highlighting themes like landscape and movement
The exhibit, which celebrates a milestone anniversary for the gallery, channels the themes of landscape, architecture, portraiture, and movement. (Submitted/Michael Love)
The Surrey Art Gallery is presenting the 10 and 10: Story of Stories exhibition until Aug. 9 to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The exhibit includes works acquired from 1975-85, the gallery’s first decade of collecting, and those from 2014-24, the last decade.
The highlighted stories between back then to the present channel narratives of Surrey’s social histories through themes of landscape, architecture, portraiture, and movement. Works paired under the landscape theme showcase the transformation of Surrey’s cityscape through urbanization, industrialization, and resource extraction.
“This was my first exhibition with the Surrey Art Gallery,” Assistant Curator Jas Lally says. “Since the gallery is celebrating their 50th anniversary, I decided to look at the permanent collection because I feel like [it] is where a lot of the stories and histories of the gallery come from.”
Lally says that every anniversary year, the gallery would revisit and celebrate the previous collections, making sure that community members and artists it has “long-time friendships with” were included to share their story.
“It was like let’s go back to the first 10 years of collecting and then let’s see what happened in the last 10 years and see how those two decades can share stories between each other,” she says. “I made two lists and I started doing a comparative study of the works.”
Lally says she narrowed it down to four themes that kept popping up in her visual comparison of the works from the two decades — and those were the four themes highlighted in the exhibit: landscape, architecture, portraiture, and movement.
“It’s really wonderful to hear the community artists’ voices and the stories that come up between the two artworks,” Lally says.
“It’s important [to take] these milestone anniversary years to pause and reflect, to see where we’ve come from and how we can carry forward with good gestures and the spirit of the first permanent collection show from 1975, while also embracing a more expansive and layered approach to storytelling.”
Lally hopes 10 and 10: Story of Stories connects people and helps them share their stories, adding that the collection “continues to be shaped by the communities that the gallery serves” and that the works are “held in trust for the citizens of Surrey.”
For more information, visit www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/exhibitions/10-and-10-story-of-stories.
