A surprising number of exhibitions this season honour local art and artists, many of whom have developed big international cred. The other side of the forthcoming visual arts story is the presentation of international artists whose work promises to stir up the local scene. Gender-bending self-representation, hybrid art forms, portraits of people and places, and the creative deconstruction and reconfiguration of images and media all play across the vernal landscape.

Jeremy Shaw: Medium-Based Time

(February 27 to April 19 at the Contemporary Art Gallery)

This solo exhibition includes a black-and-white 16mm film featuring transgender voguer Leiomy Maldonado, an HD video installation that creates a new sci-fi story out of cut-up and rearranged footage from an archival ethnographic film of Pentecostal snake handlers (whew!), and a series of light-activated prints that call up references to the star and planet stickers of childhood bedroom ceilings.

The Draw: An internationally exhibited Vancouverite based in Berlin, Shaw intrigues us with his interests in youth culture, altered states, transcendence-seeking experiences, and the vexed nature of truth-telling.

Christos Dikeakos: Trouble In Paradise

(March 25 to June 13 at the West Vancouver Museum)

The acclaimed Vancouver photographer, best known for his explorations of the buried histories of the places we inhabit, has created a beautiful series of colour prints of apples, apple trees, and apple orchards. All bear a rich load of mythical, cultural, economic, and environmental references. Dikeakos’s poetic images, shot in the central Okanagan Valley where he and his wife own an orchard, range from apples capped in snow and glistening with rain to a truckload of the fruit dumped in a ravine, not worth the grower’s while to transport it to market.

The Draw: Dikeakos’s photographs are highly evocative, musing on the apple’s symbolic place in art through the ages while also addressing the contemporary decline of apple orcharding in the B.C. Interior.

Images That Speak

(April 3 to May 16 at the Satellite Gallery)

A collaboration between PHG and the Capture Photography Festival, this exciting show seeks to challenge conventional photographic image-making. The 10 participating artists examine how photographs may “speak to us”, employing a range of innovative means and unconventional techniques, from the use of a kaleidoscope lens to scratching abstract images with steel wool. Guest-curated by New York–based Christopher Eamon, the stellar lineup of local and international artists includes Michele Abeles, Shannon Ebner, Eileen Quinlan, and the renowned British film and video artist Steve McQueen.

The Draw: That’s right—the same Steve McQueen who directed the Academy Award–winning film 12 Years a Slave. It’s difficult to imagine a more impressive array of international artists who mess around with our understanding of what photographs are.

Views From The Southbank Ii: Moments, Reflections, Intervals

(April 11 to June 14 at the Surrey Art Gallery)

The second of three group exhibitions celebrating the SAG’s 40th anniversary riffs on the idea of “portraiture” as it seeks to describe both people and place. Woven into these diverse works are ideas about how we shape and are shaped by the places we inhabit. The show brings together some 30 artists, young and emerging to old and established, to catch a sense of the rapidly expanding municipalities that lie south of the Fraser River—Surrey, Langley, Delta, and White Rock. Among those represented are Claude Breeze, Ed Burtynsky, Barbara Cole, Ken Lum, and James Nizam.

The Draw: Folded into these “portraits” are time and change, past and present, urban and rural, and an ever-shifting idea of place.

How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth? An exhibition by Geoffrey Farmer

(May 30 to September 7at the Vancouver Art Gallery)

Advertised as “the most extensive mid-career survey of Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer’s work to date”, this show includes large-scale, mixed-media installations produced by the internationally acclaimed artist over the last 15 years. Through both low-tech assemblages and high-tech sound and movement, Farmer re-examines and rearranges a number of pop-culture and high-culture tropes. References to literature, film, theatre, modernist art, and the uncanny jostle our understanding of the ways in which meaning is produced.

The Draw: It’s fascinating to chart the development of this artist from impish youth to thoughtful middle age.

Christie Lim And Shamina Senaratne: Here And Through And Back And Through

(May 23 to July 11 at the Art Gallery at Evergreen)

An unexpected show of fibre art highlights both connections and differences between these two Lower Mainland artists. Whether crazily and colourfully embroidered by Lim or subtly quilted and layered by Senaratne, fabric is invested with potent meaning. The work of the hand—the piercing and suturing movements of needle and thread—is married to preoccupations of the mind, as words and images emerge and recede, stitching themselves together and apart.

The Draw: In this digitally mediated age, look to Lim and Senaratne’s work for a real sense of tactility and materiality—and communication that does not involve a keypad or a screen.