There’s a “looking forward through looking back” theme in the visual arts this spring—partly because two long-standing arts institutions are preparing for big changes this fall. Presentation House Gallery, which has occupied the third floor of an old wooden building in North Vancouver for 40 years, will be moving into splendid new digs on the waterfront under the name of the Polygon Gallery. And the Charles H. Scott Gallery will be relocating (with its academic home, Emily Carr University of Art + Design) to a new building on Great Northern Way. It, too, will be assuming a new name: the Libby Leshgold Gallery. Elsewhere, artists weave together past and present, tradition and innovation, in explorations of shifting cultural and political realities and investigations of cross-cultural understanding.

“What You Looking At?!”

(At Plaza Projects from February 25 to March 20)

The inspiration for this exhibition is Pizza, “the world’s saddest polar bear”, imprisoned for the entertainment of gawking shoppers in a 430-square-foot glass cage in the Grandview Mall in Guangzhou, China. Invited artists from both Guangzhou and Vancouver question human-animal relations and ask us to consider capitalism’s seemingly unending ability to encage, brutalize, exploit, and commodify the sentient creatures with whom we share this planet.

The Draw: The third show to take place in the Plaza Projects nonprofit art space, located in Richmond’s Aberdeen Square mall, continues this collective’s admirable undertaking, which is “to shift a site of consumption to a site of dialogue”.

Goodbye Charles

(At the Charles H. Scott Gallery from February 29 to April 23)

This tribute to the influential artist and educator Charles Hepburn Scott, after whom the gallery was named, includes—appropriately enough—art old and new. Scott’s paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks will be exhibited alongside works by artists who have previously exhibited in the gallery. London-based duo Cullinan Richards will create a theatrical installation alluding to the student Beaux Arts balls that Scott oversaw in the 1920s and ’30s. Vancouver’s Ron Tran is presenting a sound installation referencing summer art camps Scott led on Savary Island. Also included in this tribute exhibition is a bookwork with a diverse range of portraits of Scott created by contemporary artists.

The Draw: The slightly ironic attraction in this tribute to Charles H. Scott is that we will learn more about the man just before his name is removed from view than we did in all the years it adorned the gallery’s entrance.

Deborah Koenker: The Mexican Night

(Online at the Burnaby Art Gallery, www.burnabyartgallery.ca/)

This online exhibition bridges two series of works by local artist Deborah Koenker, based on her extensive travels in Mexico and enhanced by her marriage into a large Mexican family. The first is a suite of prints she created in the early 1980s, in an attempt to express her intense sensory experiences travelling in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. The second set of prints, produced in 2007 after 30 years of return visits, is based on an installation she created in collaboration with villagers in Tapalpa, Jalisco. Like the installation, these serigraphs focus on missing and murdered Mexican women and girls, mostly poor workers drawn to the assembly plants of Ciudad Juárez.

The Draw: Old and new works reflect profound changes in Mexican life and culture, including the impact of something much in the news right now: the North American Free Trade Agreement.