Upcoming Exhibition
A MANUAL FOR
ORDINARY THINGS
Amelia Butcher
Mahsa Farzi
February 26 to March 14, 2026
Noon to 5 pm Tuesday to Saturday
Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 28th 2 to 4 pm.
A Manual for Ordinary Things brings together two artists exploring material storytelling across sculpture, drawing, and object-based practices.
Farzi’s work engages transformation, myth, and the feminine body through humor, while Butcher’s ink drawings on mineral paper and illustrated ceramic vessels tug at ideas of perception, femininity and vesselness.
Amelia Butcher
Artist Statement
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that to an infant in her mother’s arms, an object like a coffee cup is a meteorite from outer space. Slowly the body comes to understand the world, and the cup has in its form and surface an understanding of the body too. I’m curious about the gifts and limits of perception. We badly want to think in dichotomy: subject and object, form and line, unconscious and conscious, individual and group, the touching and the touched, inside and outside. I’m making pots and drawings and watching women’s rugby and trying to see through to a more holistic and entangled truth.
Bio
Amelia Butcher is a British Columbia-based visual artist with a sculptural and drawing practice centered in clay. She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2013 and is a founding member of the Dusty Babes Collective. From 2015-2021 she lived and worked out of their communal space in the former studio of the late great Don Hutchinson. Now based in Vancouver, she is a maker, instructor, technician, parent and dedicated volunteer with the Potters Guild of BC community kiln.
Studio #255 in the Mergatroid Building, 975 Vernon Drive
Mahsa Farzi
Artist Statement
This body of work emerges from living across distance, rupture, and ongoing events that continue to shape life elsewhere. It comes from a diasporic condition where daily life and distant realities unfold at the same time, creating a sense of divided continuity and grief as an ongoing state.
Language often proves insufficient to hold this experience, which settles in the body. Breath, posture, and simple presence carry what does not resolve. Living is reduced to continuing. At a distance, repetition becomes a way of orientation, and returning to the act keeps the body in motion when words do not.
The works form through sustained acts of making. This labour persists as a form of response and a quiet refusal to withdraw. Forms return, shift, gather, and disperse. Figures appear in unstable states, moving between visibility and disappearance, carrying traces of shared histories shaped by pressure and endurance.
The repeated return to material places making close to the movement associated with Sisyphus, where the turn back toward the task becomes part of the structure of continuing. What makes Sisyphus a contemporary figure is the moment he turns back toward the stone, when no new hope appears, yet movement does not stop.
Bio
Mahsa Farzi (b. 1992, Tehran, Iran) works across painting, drawing, and sculpture. Her practice examines how censorship, migration, and patriarchy fracture continuity, forming a visual language of disruption in which humour is inseparable from survival. Within this language, grief and resilience coexist, emerging through the act of making.
Farzi’s work has been shown at THIS Gallery, Vancouver (2025); Pale fire Gallery, Vancouver (2025) Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2025); and A+, Beirut (2018). She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2025).