LIVERY is pleased to present its inaugural solo exhibition by Jennifer Stillwell from September 18th to November 1st, 2026 in our main gallery space. Ramps and Rotations emphasizes ongoing considerations that run through Stillwell’s practice, including time, materiality and labour. The exhibition brings her recent studio work into dialogue with new site-responsive work that she will create in the gallery space leading up to the opening. Works on paper, video art and sculpture are included.
The exhibition is anchored around Stillwell’s peripheral exploration of the automotive shop activities taking place next door to her studio where used tires pile up and engines rev. Accumulations, degradations and abrupt endings occur in her work. Things ramp up then restart. What’s immediate extends into global concerns. The visible weight of it all is felt while also being absurd. In each piece, Stillwell works to reach beyond the physical as she points back to our material limitations.
Project gallery: Leanne Olson, Shuffle
Window gallery: David Gifford
Opening reception: Friday, September 18th, 2026, 7pm
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm, or by appointment
719 Johnson Street
Victoria, BC
Jennifer Stillwell primarily works with sculpture, video and installation art.
Jennifer Stillwell studied at the University of Manitoba and graduated with a BFA Honors degree in 1995. In 2000 she received an MFA in Studio Art with highest distinction from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she has since shown her work across Canada and internationally. She has produced large-scale installations at the Darling Foundry (Montreal) and at Triple Candie (New York). Other solo exhibitions include YYZ Artists’ Outlet (Toronto), Empty Gallery (Victoria) and a survey show at Plug In ICA (Winnipeg). Her work has also been part of numerous group exhibitions across Canada, the United States and Europe. Stillwell has attended residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff), Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Kunst & Complex (Rotterdam), Fondation Derouin (Quebec), the Morra Foundation (Naples) and Quartier Éphémère (Montreal). She has a permanent public sculpture installed in Winnipeg on Waterfront Drive.
Stillwell’s work was twice long-listed for the preeminent Sobey Art Award (inaugural 2002 and in 2006). She has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Victoria.
Her recent work is site-responsive. Found objects and manufactured materials are physically transformed in order to provide imaginary possibilities. Scale shifts, spaces collapse and meanings slip. Considering ‘place’ and materiality she works to deconstruct and layer meaning with reductive approaches to form.
The artist is grateful to work, live and exhibit on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples of the Songhees Nation and Xwsepsəm Nation, and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.
https://jenniferstillwell.com