“Hello, my name is”
The Hearth Gallery - June 3rd to 15th, 2026
Honouring 2SLGBTQIA+ identities
Please join us for our Artist pARTy:
Saturday June 6th from 6 to 8 pm
EVENTS:
Chalk Festival: June 6th at the Sp’ak’was Gathering Stage
All day long & all ages! Draw It. Write It. Be It. Chalk supplied - just bring yourself!
Bowen Island Pride Parade - Saturday June 6th, 11.30 am
All-Ages Dance Party : Bowen Pier - 12 to 3 pm
After Party at the Bowen Pub - 8 pm+ (19+ event)
For more info: bowenislandpride.com
Participating Artists:
Jeremy and Joshua Keyser - Ladies Who Branch
Mads Woodfield
Winter Woodfield
Nic Peerson
Willi O
Lynne Hubert
Lilla Mihalik
Hannah Michelle
Jasper Berehulke
Shel Stefan
The Hearth Gallery (Bowen Island Arts Council), partnering with Bowen Pride Society, is planning Bowen Pride Festival (2026), a community-based and multidisciplinary festival featuring a dynamic mix of art exhibitions and cultural events to celebrate LGBTQIA+ identities and lives as well as the coming-together of the community that we all belong to.
The title of this queer arts show at the Hearth gallery is “Hello, My Name is…,” an open-ended introduction that is meant to raise critical questions about the relationship among identity, art, and community.
If name-calling and coded names historically suggest acts of exclusion or even violence for 2SLBGTQIA+ people, we want to reclaim the myriad meanings of names, just as how we have reclaimed the very meaning of the word “queer”. Through this process of renaming and reclamation, we transform ways of othering into possibilities of belonging— convergent moments and processes of self-acknowledgement by the very simple phrase, “Hello, my name is…”
This group show includes visual, the performative, the literary, and the installational. All works are curated and exhibited within the Hearth gallery and outside in the common space by the gallery entrance in June 2026 during the Bowen Island Pride Festival.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
Fei Shi
Fei Shi, writer, scholar, artist, and educator, is full time faculty at LLPA (Language, Literature & Performing Arts) at Douglas College, where he teaches English Literature as well as Gender, Sexualities and Women's Studies. Dr. Shi also currently serves as the president of the Board of Directors at Playwright Theatre Centre.
Dr. Shi grew up in Shanghai where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature in Fudan University. There, as an undergraduate student, he co-created a theatre company that still actively produces plays today. He then finished his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis with designated emphases in Women and Gender Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Critical Theory. Before joining Douglas College in 2024, he taught for over a decade (2010-2023) at Quest University in Squamish as Professor of Arts and Humanities and directed numerous plays and arts initiatives. He has been mentoring a new generation of young artists (creative writers, filmmakers, performance artists, and visual artists) with their inspiring creative projects.
Dr. Shi is extremely grateful to live and work on Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen island) – the land of the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and enjoys hectic and beautiful family life with his partner and two baby girls in this place of rich history and wonder. As a queer immigrant person of colour, he actively participates in local arts activities and initiatives as a volunteer, including serving on the Bowen Island Arts Council (Hearth, 2021-2024). His critical reflection on belonging and theorization of queer art as a form of self-transformation appears in his recently published article: “Embodying Islands: Ecosomatics and the Transnational Queer” in Geographies of Us (Routledge, 2024). It is a meditation on the transnational linkages between Nex̱wlélex̱m (Bowen island) and Chongming Island from the unique perspective of a queer immigrant
Liz Nankin
Liz Nankin is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and community activist. She has been a costume designer from 1984 to the present in film, theater and dance. She also trained as a puppeteer with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles. She is an arts educator with the Los Angeles Unified School District as well as private schools creating art curriculum as an adjunct teacher from 1994 to 2015.
Liz grew up in Los Angeles and immigrated to British Columbia with her husband in 2018 and became a Canadian citizen in 2022. Bowen Island Nex̱wlélex̱m became her home upon landing.
Community participation is a joyful life force for Liz. She has been the Co-Chair of Here's Bowen Arts Tour 2024-present as well as the Chair of Tourism Bowen Island 2023-present. She is an art committee Member at the Hearth Arts Gallery. As an artist she participated in the Art Activism project Diving In: Divers for Cleaner Lakes and Oceans as well as a workshop leader for the Youth Environmental Conference at UBC. She was the Co-creator of Bowen Fables, a series of shadow puppet films telling the stories of the history of Bowen Island.
“Making Art creates culture and culture is our legacy to our humanity. I am a mother of three people who are artists -- a film maker, a ceramic artist and a choreographer. Two of them identified as queer in their early teens and though I cannot speak for them, I support them with love and understanding. Mentorship is paramount to pass the knowledge to emerging people who deserve a chance to be elevated and heard. The Queer Arts Festival opens a door to those who have not been able to walk through and to be seen.”