What does it imply to work properly? Is it about productiveness, paycheques, or function? A brand new exhibition opening Sept. 18 at 828 East Hastings in Strathcona asks this query of exhibitors and guests alike.

Titled

Is This Working?

This present focuses much less on the grind and extra on the gaps — the pauses, the sudden moments and the inventive methods we measure worth.

This exhibition runs for per week and is the brainchild of three longtime contributors to Vancouver’s design and tradition scene: Laura Melling, Renske Werner and Jody Phillips. Collectively they’ve assembled a multidisciplinary lineup that covers design, artwork, music, efficiency and wellness. The result’s an off-site counterpoint to

IDS Vancouver

Curators with lived expertise

For Phillips, who previously ran IDS Vancouver and now works in arts and tradition with the Naut’sa mawt Sources Group, this undertaking has private resonance.

She has definitely reached moments in her demanding profession when she realized “this isn’t working.” Her power felt depleted moderately than renewed and a reset was wanted.

That reset got here by a shift towards neighborhood, arts and tradition. She found actual fulfilment working alongside Coast Salish communities to construct an Indigenous artwork assortment and lending program.

Bringing that spirit of collaboration into

Is This Working?

has been important, says Phillips.

A warehouse turns into a playground

The present takes place in a hovering warehouse owned by Low Tide Properties in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. Lately renovated, it now presents a clean slate with vaulted ceilings, ripe for reinvention, says Phillips.

On this area,

Is This Working?

introduces a collection of pods and activations. Anticipate a central coworking set up, long-table meals, workshops and a gap evening social gathering with proceeds supporting the Eastside Neighbourhood Home.

“It simply felt tone-deaf not to try this,” Phillips mentioned.

An set up of sunshine and care

Among the many standout contributions to this exhibit is

Tender Threshold

, a joint set up by artists Minahil Bukhari and Mustaali Raj. Collectively they reimagine the up to date workspace not as a website of relentless productiveness however as what they describe as “a responsive ecosystem.”

Drawing inspiration from thinker Gernot Böhme’s writings on ambiance, the pair use dappled mild as each metaphor and materials. The softened glow and transient shadows act as quiet prompts to decelerate, to breathe, and to narrate extra attentively to the area and people inside it. Of their imaginative and prescient, mild turns into an moral encounter, remodeling the office right into a website of care moderately than management.

Bukhari, a Pakistani-Canadian artist whose work grapples with displacement and loss, typically by what she calls “political minimalism,” brings an emotional and textural depth.

Raj, an award-winning designer and visible artist, brings a worldwide lens formed by his “third tradition child” upbringing. “I’m a circle, dwelling in a sq., drawing triangles,” he explains. His observe reinterprets conventional motifs in up to date types, at all times with a watch to social good and neighborhood constructing.

Past productiveness

The exhibition’s title nods to Dolly Parton’s line: “By no means get so busy making a dwelling that you just overlook to make a life.”

That sentiment runs all through the present, whether or not in structure corporations rethinking area, artists weaving private histories into materials kind, or illustrators layering narratives into murals. Some works will take the immediate actually. Others will method it obliquely, exploring themes of time, worth, and care.

For Phillips, a Dutch Design Week undertaking she noticed some years in the past stays a touchstone for her — a room full of shredded paper, a clock operating backwards, and an enormous pencil scribbling nonsense throughout the ground.

“It struck a chord with me. It was anxiety-inducing, however it additionally made me suppose deeply about our obsession with productiveness,” she mentioned.

A unique type of social gathering

Phillips admits she’s cautious of the shiny, intellectual openings that design exhibits can typically default to. This one might be totally different, she says.

Tickets are $20, with half the proceeds going on to the neighbourhood home subsequent door.

“It is a neighborhood effort. No one’s right here to become profitable. We’re right here to replicate, to collect, to ask the query collectively,” says Phillips.

In a metropolis the place the price of dwelling typically dictates the tempo of life,

Is This Working?

presents a uncommon invitation to pause. Whether or not you arrive as a designer, an artist, or just somebody questioning about your personal work-life stability, the hope is that you just’ll go away not with solutions, however with higher questions.

Exhibition data:

Sept. 18 to 24, 2025

828 East Hastings Avenue, Strathcona, Vancouver, BC

The exhibition is free, and open to the general public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with further occasions and activations all through