Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 26, 6–8 p.m.

Meet the Artists: Saturday, April 29, 2–3 p.m.

Special gallery hours for this show: Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m

Leslie Gould’s Next Door to Nobility series explores how we often cast our minds to distant lands in search of inspiring nobility. She looked closer to home and found the magisterial right next door. The authority that comes from staring life's suffering in the eye is embodied in the faces of her neighbours. 

These are portraits of people she considers the kings and queens of North Vancouver's Kings and Queens Roads and its environs.  Living just across the street, they are the everyday royals who sit on the throne of hardship and joy.  Protagonists in our universal drama, they defy the iron grip of fate with lives lived as intensely as mythic heroes.  Searching for immortal nobility, she only had to look at her neighbours' determined expressions to find audacity set against the storm.
 
To render both their defining endurance and aching vulnerability, she chose the high contrast medium of graphite pencil, a finely sharpened tool that enabled her to evoke the whispered delicacy of a single hair and the stone-hard resilience of a jaw, cheek, and brow.
 
Elizabeth May has limited verbal skills but a highly cognitive and electrifyingly creative mind.  She has been painting since the age of five and uses it as a medium for therapy.  She is primarily an abstract painter who is influenced by the natural world around her. She paints with acrylics, watercolours, and canvas, using various colours to express herself.  She is inspired by everything in this life and expresses herself through art because it frees her from her body.
 
In her paintings, Elizabeth uses love to guide her work. She channels her concepts and content through love. She is a being of love who becomes her artwork. Love to her is a constant force in life that reflects everything.  It is omnipresent in all things on Earth. Love is the lifelong guiding presence that betters you and your earthly experience.  Love is the universe.

Thank you to exhibition sponsor Amica West Vancouver