Pleasure Bound Selected for TACTILE

TACTILE

September 25 – October 4, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 26, 2026
THIS Gallery, Vancouver

PLEASE TOUCH THE ART

THIS Gallery presents TACTILE, a group exhibition that asks visitors to break one of the most firmly established rules of the gallery: do not touch the art.

Co-curated by THIS Gallery founder Shannon Pawliw and Sophia Crompton, a fourth-year Art History student at McGill University and summer 2026 intern at THIS Gallery, TACTILE brings together seven artists selected from an open call that received submissions from 70 artists.

Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to hold, rub, turn, unzip, manipulate, lean against, embrace and play with the artworks. Rather than treating touch as a threat to the objects on display, TACTILE considers physical interaction as another way of understanding them.

The exhibition brings together works by Natasha Bakas, K8L35 (Kate MacDonald + Les Sears), Kate Metten, Anne Steves, Asma Sultana, WhiteFeather Hunter and Anna Dimoff. Working across painting, ceramics, textiles, sculpture, found objects and unconventional materials, the artists approach touch as a means of investigation, play, empathy, intimacy, memory, comfort and bodily awareness.

Some works reveal themselves through handling. Natasha Bakas’s Mutable Skin invites visitors to unzip its stitched and heavily worked surface to discover a face beneath a face. K8L35’s NO GO and GUEST SOAP use familiar objects and material deception to encourage curiosity and play. Kate Metten’s ceramic works transform the vessel into something to solve or physically press against, while Anne Steves’s Flamingo asks visitors to place their own bodies in empathetic relationship with the form of a bird.

Elsewhere, Asma Sultana uses intimate bodily materials and familiar objects to explore memory, identity and healing. WhiteFeather Hunter’s practice considers touch, care and embodied making as forms of knowledge, while Anna Dimoff’s oversized soft sculptures invite visitors to hold, lounge, wrap and find pleasure in physical interaction.

Together, these works complicate the distinction between touching an artwork and using it. They ask what happens when the carefully maintained distance between viewer and object disappears.

Touch is one of our earliest ways of understanding the world. We learn through weight, texture, resistance, softness, movement and physical contact. Yet in museums and galleries, this fundamental form of knowledge is usually removed from our encounter with art.

TACTILE restores it.

In a culture increasingly experienced through screens, the exhibition makes a case for direct physical experience and for encountering art not only with our eyes and intellect, but with our hands, our bodies and our curiosity.

Please touch the art.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Shannon Pawliw is the founder and Artistic Director of THIS Gallery, an independently owned contemporary art gallery in Vancouver. An artist, curator and graphic designer, Pawliw founded THIS in 2020 to create more opportunities for artists to exhibit their work and connect with audiences.

Sophia Crompton is a Vancouver-born, Montreal-based student curator and artist assistant. She is a fourth-year undergraduate at McGill University, pursuing a double major in Art History and Psychology with a minor in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS).

Currently serving as President of the Art History and Communication Studies Student Association (AHCSSA) and a 2026 summer intern at THIS Gallery, she has co-curated exhibitions including Fridge Door Gallery’s Rituals and assisted in producing public art projects with artists Sandeep Johal and Tristesse Seeliger. Her academic and curatorial interests centre on contemporary Canadian art, gender performativity in visual culture, and the intersections of museum practice, play and well-being.

https://thisgallery.org/project/tactile/

WhiteFeather’s work, Pleasure Bound, is available for purchase in THIS Gallery’s online shop in advance of the exhibition: https://thethisgallery.com/products/pleasure-bound