The featured exhibit runs December 1 – 31, 2025 in Metro Gallery in the Garneau Theatre lobby.
Artist Reception: December 4 at 5:30 pm
Artist: Evan Robinson
Season’s Greetings brings together a series of ink paintings, prints, drawings and installation shaped by my long relationship with horror cinema. I’m drawn to films that ask you to suspend belief not for spectacle but for a deeper kind of truth. The uncanny becomes a way of looking at the self. Fear gives shape to questions that can’t be answered any other way.
One film that continues to guide my thinking is Black Christmas (1974). It holds a strange spiritual charge. It lingers in the quiet spaces where the familiar begins to slip, where memory thins, where the world feels open to things we cannot name. That sense of uncertainty sits at the heart of this work.
My works often behave like disrupted film stills. They hover in moments that are unfolding or have just passed. Figures act as vessels for dread, longing, or anticipation. Shadows move toward other states of being. I’m interested in the threshold between what is seen and what is sensed, and how an image can hold both clarity and doubt at once.
Showing this work at Metro feels fitting. I grew up watching films here that shaped the way I understand rhythm, atmosphere, and the emotional weight of a single frame. Returning now, with work rooted in the genre that shaped my imagination, feels like coming back to the source.
Season’s Greetings isn’t about holiday cheer. It looks toward the season’s undercurrent instead. The quiet. The cold. The shadows that settle as the year darkens. Horror has always been a way for me to look at those things directly. Life itself is uncertain and often frightening. It moves without reason. It stays close, the same way death does. Horror simply makes that truth visible.
These works try to rest inside that feeling. The moment before something appears, or just after it has gone. The breath you take in the dark while your eyes adjust.
Evan Robinson (b. 1999) is a Nisga’a and British artist based in Edmonton, Alberta. He works through woodcut, mezzotint, and print-based installation. His practice draws from Nisga’a cultural traditions as well as contemporary image-making. Robinson often returns to vessels, and bodies, as recurring sites of containment and release. His work often turns to cinema as a source of rhythm and atmosphere, pulling from the unsettling emotional spaces of films such as Possession (1981), Onibaba (1964), and Black Christmas (1974). These influences echo through his layered compositions, where figures and shadows appear like stills from an interrupted reel. Robinson received his BFA from the University of Alberta, with a focus on printmaking and ink painting. His work has been exhibited nationally, including his solo exhibition marrowline at SNAP Gallery and his feature in nâpêhkâsowinowâk ᓇᐯᐦᑲᓱᐃᐧᓄᐊᐧᐠ at the Art Gallery of Alberta. In 2025 he traveled to St. John’s to lead printmaking workshops and develop new work during his residency at St. Michael’s Printshop.
