Sylvan Hamburger Exhibition Brochure 2025 by Vernon Public Art Gallery

SYLVAN HAMBURGER SOFT ARCHITECTURES

SYLVAN HAMBURGER: SOFT ARCHITECTUES

When I visited Sylvan Hamburger’s studio at the City Centre Artist Lodge in Vancouver, BC, the space itself felt like an extension of his practice. Once an iconic motel, now a temporary artist enclave awaiting redevelopment, the building bore all the telltale signs of lived experience and architectural aging; peeling paint, patched-over surfaces, mismatched hardware, and rooms carved into odd geometries over time. It was there, in the converted suite, surrounded by printed bedsheets and stacks of fabric, that our conversation turned toward the ways we come to know our homes—not simply as shelters, but as companions: idiosyncratic, flawed, and deeply familiar.

This sensibility, of lived-in intimacy and material memory, is central to Hamburger’s exhibition Soft Architectures. Through large-scale installations composed of relief prints on found textiles, he explores how domestic materials absorb and transmit histories of place, attachment, and change. Salvaging surfaces from old homes and architectural foundations, he pulls impressions from doors, siding, and paneling, transferring their textures onto fabric in a process that is part printmaking, part translation. What emerges are delicate, ghostly forms that resist easy categorization: they are documents, monuments, and offerings all at once.

The works in Soft Architectures span several years of Hamburger’s practice and speak to his consistent exploration of place, memory, and material. That interplay between surface and history is central to Open House Press (2020) and Vancouver Twilight (2020), works that emerged directly from the artist’s lived experience in East Vancouver, a neighbourhood that has undergone radical change in recent decades due to speculative real estate development and gentrification. In these pieces, Hamburger prints the textures of aging and salvaged homes, board by board, plank by plank, onto used bedsheets—the fabric, light and personal, becomes a fragile register of heavy histories. Accompanying some of these prints are jars of sawdust, material Hamburger preserved from the process of carving into some of the salvaged floorboards. In Open House Press, one bedsheet holds the impression of the original woodgrain, while another reveals the altered pattern carved into the same boards, foregrounding acts of transformation and layered memories. These installations do not reconstruct lost spaces; rather, they highlight the tactile essence of habitation, surfaces once leaned on, walked across, or quietly ignored are now rendered visible as soft, lingering impressions.

Adventurer (2023), first created for an installation in Dawson City, Yukon, extends this inquiry into the aesthetics of mobility, shelter, and impermanence. It features the printed impression of a camper van, rendered in gold ink on blue fabric. Originally mounted on scaffolding with the sheets tethered to the ground using rope and large stones, the piece assumes a new spatial configuration in the Vernon Public Art Gallery, with its panels now suspended from the ceiling. This reconfiguration heightens the works ephemeral quality, as if the camper floats midair, untethered from the ground. The camper, a structure emblematic of freedom, transience, and necessity, stands in for broader questions of extraction, tourism, and housing in a northern town still shaped by the legacy of the Gold Rush. In its new form, Adventurer continues to ask what it means to inhabit spaces that are always on the verge of movement or collapse.

At the conceptual core of Hamburger’s practice is an engagement with surface, not simply as visual texture, but as a site of accumulation and memory. In this context, his work resonates with poet and theorist Lisa Robertson, whose Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture provided the seed for the exhibition’s title. Robertson writes, “I tried to recall spaces and what I remembered was surfaces,” a line that reverberates through

Hamburger’s work. His prints do not recreate buildings, but rather distill the intimacy of their skins, the accumulated dents, scratches, and repairs that record lives lived in proximity.

This sensitivity to surface reaches a compelling climax in Patchwork (2024), a new site-specific installation created for the exterior of the Vernon Public Art Gallery. The work spans the façade of the four-storey parkade above the gallery, using found floral bedsheets as both material and message. Tethered across the raw concrete exterior, the sheets have circular apertures cut into them, forming a constellation of porthole-like openings that allow glimpses of the brutalist structure beneath. In softening the building’s hard contours, Patchwork disrupts the binary between public and private, inserting the iconography of the domestic into civic space.

The use of floral fabric, often coded as feminine, nostalgic, or suburban, becomes a quietly subversive gesture. These sheets are neither pristine nor mass produced; they are worn, creased, and marked by previous use. Suspended in air, they act as veils and membranes, inviting touch, obscuring vision, and reorienting the viewer’s relationship to the architecture they cover. Through Patchwork, Hamburger stages a poetic confrontation between softness and infrastructure, asking what it means to dwell, to adorn, and to resist in public.

There is an educational dimension to Hamburger’s work as well, one that emerges through its interdisciplinary methods and community-based origins. Many of the works in Soft Architectures were initially developed in outdoor settings or through collaborations with neighbourhood residents. Printing salvaged wood on site, performing public installations, or simply gathering stories of place, Hamburger blurs the line between art object and social practice. His process is research-driven, informed by urban history, material culture, and the poetics of memory. In this way, the exhibition offers not only aesthetic experiences, but also entry points for broader conversations about housing, displacement, and how cities remember themselves.

What makes Soft Architectures so resonant is not only its thematic urgency but also its formal restraint. Hamburger does not overwhelm the viewer with narrative; instead, he invites attention, slowness, and close looking. The works operate through echo and trace, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps, to project their own associations onto the fabric of the city. In an age of accelerated erasure and newness, Hamburger’s practice becomes a form of witnessing: gentle, persistent, and profoundly human.

As we continue to grapple with the forces that reshape our cities, from speculative development to ecological instability, Hamburger’s work offers a model for how to remember differently. By listening to the surfaces of our dwellings, by holding onto the quirks and flaws of the spaces we inhabit, we might begin to see home not as a fixed location, but as a mutable archive of care, attention, and presence.

Victoria Verge Curator

Vernon Public Art Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice is grounded in corresponding acts of public intervention and personal recollection. I employ printmaking, textiles, architecture and colour to reimagine experiences of place and self within changing contemporary landscapes. To look outside is to look inside, and vice versa. The surface of architecture, the contours of landscapes, the patterns of everyday life offer a textured impression of the city and its inhabitants—our fears, desires and tenuous states of belonging. This creative process is often collaborative and site-specific, resulting in theatrical installations that exist in reciprocity with their surroundings.

Soft Architectures presents the mono-printed impressions of salvaged architectural surfaces. These prints emerged from the rapid upheaval of real estate within contemporary built environments. Over the last five years, I have worked to collect, carve and print the debris of demolished homes onto bedsheets and other found textiles. The resulting impressions trace shifting notions of place, memory and belonging to create monumental installations that reimagine residential debris as unconventional printmaking matrixes. Much of the work was initially created and presented in outdoor public spaces with participation from local residents. In representing these soft impressions at the Vernon Public Art Gallery, I look to reconsider their composition and installation within a new gallery and regional context.

Much of the work was made in response to the rapid gentrification and redevelopment of my childhood community on Vancouver’s east side. As a point of conception, Soft Architectures references writer Lisa Robertson’s Office for Soft Architecture; a literary project which, in her words, “came into being as I watched the city of Vancouver dissolve in the fluid called money. Buildings disappeared into newness. I tried to recall spaces and what I remembered was surfaces.” Like Robertson, I feel a perturbed curiosity by the rate of development throughout the city. Equally, I’m fascinated by the ways in which the marks and traces of surfaces can conceal, hold and reveal histories while also reflecting absence—a phenomenon that extends far beyond the particular vernaculars of Vancouver.

Sylvan Hamburger

ARTIST BIO

Sylvan Hamburger has completed residencies, exhibitions and public installations across North America, including projects with the Vermont Studio Centre (VT), Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre (NL), Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (YT), The Rooms Museum (NL), Malaspina Printmakers (BC), Vancouver Maritime Museum (BC), and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (AB). Alongside these projects, he has facilitated various community-based art initiatives with the Vancouver Parks Board and the City of Vancouver. Sylvan is the recipient of the BMO First Art Award, the BC Arts Council’s Individual Arts Award, and numerous Canada Council Explore and Create grants as well as a public art commission for Vancouver’s forthcoming Mount Pleasant Subway Station. He is an MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

site-specific installation

in Dawson City, Yukon. Adventurer plays with the impressions of an old camper van printed in gold amidst the boomtown facades, tourism, and housing crisis of the former gold rush town.

Adventurer (detail), 2023, relief prints of camper on fabric, scaffolding, wood, rope, rocks, 131”x 108”x 72”

Open House Press (detail), 2020, relief prints on bedsheets, wooden dowels, jars of sawdust, shiplap boards

Printed impressions of boards from demolished Vancouver home.

Open House Press (detail), 2020, relief prints on bedsheets, wooden dowels, jars of sawdust, shiplap boards

Open House Press (detail), 2020, relief prints on bedsheets, wooden dowels, jars of sawdust, shiplap boards

Vancouver Twilight, 2020, relief print on bedsheet, wooden dowels, 92”x 96”

SYLVAN HAMBURGER CURRICULUM VITAE

EDUCATION

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Printmaking Studio Practicum, 2018-19

Mount Allison University, BA (Fine Arts major, English & Geography minors), 2014-18

McGill University, Foundation Year, 2013-14

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Songs to a Mountain’s Disruption, New Leaf Editions, Vancouver BC, 2025

Clinging, Massy Arts Society, Vancouver BC, 2024

Aural Bodies, Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Vancouver BC, 2023

Exit Strategies, SNAP Gallery, Edmonton AB, 2021

Open House Press, Port Moody Arts Centre, Port Moody BC, 2020

Shrouds, Project Space, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff AB, 2019

Prize Heater, Thunder & Lightning Gallery, Sackville NB, 2018

A Foundry Town, Struts Gallery, Sackville NB, 2017

A Barn on the Marsh, Waterfowl Park, Sackville NB, 2017

PUBLIC WORKS

True Divided Light, Vermont Studio Centre, Johnson VT, 2024

Cut Your Timbers on a New Moon, HOLD FAST Festival & Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre, St. John’s NF, 2024

Every Day Is New in the City, Lafarge Quarry, Texada Island BC, 2024

Ghosts Don’t Always Know They’ve Disappeared, various locations throughout Vancouver BC, 2023

Lot at 112 E 6th Ave, Vancouver BC, 2023

Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House, Vancouver BC, 2023

Lot at 2446 Main St, Vancouver, BC, 2023

Adventurer & August, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Dawson City YT, 2023

Flotsam, Vancouver Maritime Museum, Vancouver BC, 2023

Cranky, Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre, St. John’s NL, 2022

Union House Arts, Port Union NL, 2022

Terra Nova National Park, NL, 2022

Old Mill, Glovertown, NL, 2022

Mudflats, False Creek Community Centre, Vancouver BC, 2022

Art in the Park, Andy Livingstone Park, Vancouver BC, 2022

Carnegie Community Centre, Vancouver BC, 2022

Roundhouse Community Centre, Vancouver BC, 2023

Moberly Arts & Cultural Centre, Vancouver BC, 2023

Dear Beloved, Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver BC, 2022

St. Michael’s Printshop, St. John’s NL, 2022

The Our Park Project, Andy Livingstone Park, Vancouver BC, 2021

Carnegie Community Centre, Vancouver BC 2021

Roundhouse Community Centre, Vancouver BC, 2021

A Barn on the Marsh, Waterfowl Park, Sackville NB, 2017

Landmarks, Fundy National Park NB, 2017

SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Okanagan Print Triennial, Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna BC, 2024

House of 9 Dragons, Massy Arts Society, Vancouver BC, 2024

Lim Benevolent Association, VALU Co-op, Vancouver BC, 2022

I Met the Merman at the Banff Trading Post, Project Space, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, 2023

BMO 1st Art! Award Exhibition, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto ON, 2018

Swan Song, Owen’s Art Gallery, Sackville NB, 2018

Fourth-year Hall Show, Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts, Sackville NB, 2017-18

Summer in Sackville, Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts, Sackville NB, 2017

For the Birds, Cape Jourimain Nature Centre, Bayfield NB, 2016

Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau QC, 2016

Embassy of Canada, Washington DC, 2016

Canadian Wildlife Service, Sackville NB, 2016

Conflict & Reaction: Exquisite Woodcut, Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts, Sackville NB, 2016

RESIDENCIES

Fellowship, Vermont Studio Centre, Johnson VT, 2024

Artist in Residence, Eastern Edge Artist-run Centre, St. John’s NL, 2024

Print-media Residency, Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver BC, 2024-2025

Print & Publishing Festival, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Dawson City YT, 2023

Banff Artist in Residence - Emerging, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff AB, 2023

Artist in Residence, The Rooms Museum, Terra Nova National Park NF, 2022

Artists in Communities Residency, False Creek Community Centre, Vancouver BC, 2022

Visiting Artist Residency, St. Michael’s Printshop, St. John’s NL, 2021

Andy Livingstone Park Artist-in-Residence, Vancouver Park Board, Vancouver BC, 2021

Scholarship Residency, Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver BC, 2019-2020

Waterfowl Park Artist-in-Residence, Town of Sackville, Sackville NB, 2017

AWARDS & GRANTS

Commission, The WALL, Vancouver Heritage Foundation and CBC/Radio-Canada, Vancouver BC, 2024

Individual Arts Award - Visual Artist, BC Arts Council, 2023

Explore and Create Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2023

Mentor, Shumka Centre Artist Apprenticeship Network, Emily Carr University, 2023

Explore and Create Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2021

Commission, Broadway Subway Project Public Art Program, Vancouver BC, 2020

Explore and Create Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, 2020

Kwi Am Choi Scholarship, Port Moody Arts Centre, 2020

BMO 1st Art! Award, 2018

Graham Atlantic Creative Writing Prize, 2018

Crake-Sawdon Award for Outstanding Contribution to Student Journalism, 2018

J.E.A. Crake Foundation Arts Internship, Mount Allison University, 2017

Ogden Memorial Prize, Mount Allison University, 2017

Independent Student Research Grant, Mount Allison University, 2017

R.H.W. Foundation Scholarship, Mount Allison University (annual), 2014-2017

James Arthur Gairdner Scholarship, Mount Allison University, 2016

ARTIST TALKS & WORKSHOPS

Vermont Studio Centre, Johnson VT, 2024

Eastern Edge Artist-Run Centre, St. John’s NL, 2024

Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver BC, 2023-2024

Massy Arts Society, Vancouver BC, 2024

University of British Columbia, Vancouver BC, 2023

University of Fraser Valley, Abbotsford BC, 2023

St. Michael’s Printshop, St. John’s NL, 2023

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff AB, 2023

Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House, Vancouver BC, 2023

Little Mountain Neighbourhood House, Vancouver BC, 2023

Mount Allison University, Sackville NB, 2022

Holy Cross School, East Port NL, 2022

Glovertown Academy, Glovertown NL, 2022

St. Michael’s Printshop, St. John’s NL, 2021

SNAP Gallery, Edmonton AB, 2021

Port Moody Arts Centre, Port Moody BC, 2020

Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff AB, 2019

This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition: Sylvan Hamburger: Soft Architectures, July 24 - October 8, 2025

Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery

Front cover image: Vancouver Twilight (detail), 2020, relief prints on bedsheet, wooden dowels, 92” x 96”

ISBN: 978-1-927407-92-9

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Telephone: 250.545.3173 - website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, the Government of Canada, corporate donors, sponsors, general donations and memberships. Charitable Organization # 108113358RR

Vernon Public Art Gallery

3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3

250.545.3173

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