Location: Municipal Hall, 750 17th Street, West Vancouver
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Artist Statement

I've always been drawn to the push and pull between planning and letting go—that moment when a carefully placed line suddenly wants to become something else entirely.

I work with layered gesso, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite, building up surfaces slowly and intuitively. My background is in theatrical backdrop painting and film design, so I tend to think big in terms of scale, atmosphere, and how a space feels when you're standing inside it. That sensibility carries into my studio practice, even when the work is about something much quieter.

For me, every piece starts as a conversation between control and surrender. I'll lay down structure, then respond to it. I'll make a mark I didn't expect, and suddenly that becomes the most honest thing on the canvas. I'm not trying to illustrate an idea so much as discover one—and sometimes that means following a smudge of graphite somewhere I didn't plan to go.

Between the Lines grew out of that ongoing back-and-forth. I wanted to bring together works that sit at different points on that spectrum—some architectural, some instinctual—and let them talk to each other. My hope is that, when you move through the exhibition, you feel something of that same tension: the order and the unraveling, the thought and the feeling underneath it.

I think most of us know what it's like to live between those two things.

Artist Bio

Angela Rae is a mixed-media painter who knows something about living between two worlds. After years riding the chaotic conveyor belt of Vancouver city life, she traded it for a self-designed mountainside home on the Sunshine Coast—where the pace is slower, the air is cleaner, and the yard is shared with mellow goats, a few ducks, and a flock of famously unruly chickens. The city shaped her. The country freed her. And somewhere in the tension between the two, her paintings found their voice.

Built from layered gesso, acrylic, oil stick, and graphite, Angela's work is informed by a career designing and art directing theatrical film sets, bringing cinematic scale and atmospheric depth to raw, expressive abstraction. But it's that push and pull between worlds—urban and rural, structured and instinctual, planned and surrendered—that runs like a current through everything she makes.

Her paintings can be found in galleries and public spaces in Vancouver and beyond, though she's happiest when the work is out in front of people, starting conversations she didn't plan for.

Her debut solo exhibition, Between the Lines, is a body of work that lives in exactly that in-between space—where chaos meets calm, city meets country, and structure quietly gives way to something more honest.