Pender Islands Art Guide 2026
The Art Guide is distributed locally at hotels, marinas, businesses, and the Pender Chamber of Commerce info centre, as well as on BC Ferries Gulf Islands routes, Victoria to Vancouver route, and Tsawwassen Quay market.
NOW AVAILABLE
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT. NO REPRODUCTION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF ARTIST.
Art In the Library
The Pender Island Public Library has revived the Art in the Library program, and we are proud to be partnering with them. The 2026 schedule is available on their website with a different artist featured every 10 weeks.
The library is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 10-3.
Art in the Library is sponsored by Ptarmigan Arts
Searching for ‘Authenticity’ by Joe Kashi
Showing SEPTember 16 to NOVEMBER 11
This exhibit is a subset of a larger 2021 exhibit that explored a long-standing personal question: Why do some photographs and other visual images linger in memory, continuing to engage us and resonate emotionally, while others fade away? What differentiates simple documentation from a work of artistic merit? I believe it’s a sense of emotional “authenticity”.
Conceptually, this exhibit originated well before generative AI radically upended art and image-making by easily producing synthetic images broadly derivative of work found on the Internet. AI images create further issues of artistic authenticity, adding questions about whether an image actually conveys a true experience of someone then present.
In a generalized sense, the crux of emotional and artistic authenticity might be simply stated as being true to the actual situation and to one’s self and candid emotional reactions, rather than affectation or striving for whatever is currently popular.
To be broadly perceived as “authentic”, it’s commonly held that an image should record an actual personal experience and resonate emotionally with the maker and with at least some viewers. Ideally, it stimulates tangible emotion and evokes in the viewer a projective sense of perceiving and re-experiencing “real” events and emotions reflective of the viewer’s own experiences, perhaps even aspects that were not overtly evident nor intended when the photo was taken. Such projection may be facilitated by images open to multiple interpretations, by some degree of subject abstraction or incompleteness, and by avoiding overly concrete images devoid of ambiguity
Intellectualized theories of an essentially intuitive, subjective, and emotional artistic experience seem neither fully satisfactory nor of much practical value in actually creating, curating, and viewing visual imagery. At the end, I’ve set out some personal thoughts about a practical approach and would appreciate your thoughts and comments.
I have included here only photographs made at least a year ago that still speak to me and which have been selected by others for juried shows or curated exhibits. I have not titled these photos to avoid implicitly suggesting your personal reactions.
Joe Kashi, 2026, Pender Island, BC
About: Joe Kashi is a trial attorney living on South Pender Island. He received his BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1973. While at MIT, he casually studied photography with prominent fine art photographer and Aperture founder Minor White. He received his JD degree from Georgetown University Law School in 1976. Since 2007, he has been broadly exhibited in various art venues.
First Saturdays Open Studios
First Saturday Open Studios is an artist-run open studio event. It is an opportunity to visit artists at work in their studios, ask questions, learn about techniques and build relationships with the artists. Artists can register with First Saturday Studios online in order to be featured as an open studio. Several Pender artists have already registered and we hope to encourage many more! Learn all about it and how to register at firstsaturday.ca