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Ashdale Gallery: Home for Every Voice: Jessica Arbour & Making of ‘Indelible Mark’

Jessica Arbour believes your surroundings should do more than just fill a room—they should inspire how you live and tell your unique story. As the founder of Ashdale Gallery in North Vancouver, she has built a space that feels less like a threshold to cross and more like a home to enter. Jessica bridges the gap for clients looking for deeper meaning, helping them trust their intuition to find exceptional Canadian art that truly resonates. At Ashdale, art-buying is transformed from a transaction into an act of impactful, lasting storytelling. This philosophy finds one of its clearest expressions in Indelible Mark, a group exhibition opening July 23 that brings six trans, queer and queer adjacent artists into Ashdale’s walls, inviting viewers to connect with art that leaves a permanent impression.

From Stage to Sea to Storefront

Arbour’s path to gallery ownership did not begin in the art world at all. Her relationship with creativity started in theatre and performance, where she first developed a fascination with storytelling and the emotional language of visual experience. From there, her career took an unexpected turn into international travel, spending nearly a decade working aboard private yachts. Visiting cities and cultures around the world gave her an informal but powerful education in art and design, wandering galleries in unfamiliar places, discovering artists in small studios, and observing how different cultures live alongside art in daily life.

That education shaped a conviction that would eventually become Ashdale Gallery, founded in 2023 when Arbour first arrived in North Vancouver as a young adult, drawn to its natural beauty and its echoes of her own mountain town origins. The gallery’s name is itself a small act of storytelling, combining Ashton, the name of Jessica and Chris‘s son, with Lonsdale, the North Shore community that continues to inspire the gallery’s work. Run today as a family partnership, Ashdale is guided by a philosophy of integrity, curiosity, and hospitality, where success is measured by the depth of connection between the work, the artist, and the collector rather than the price of a sale.

Indelible Mark: Widening The Walls

Indelible Mark gathers Nicholas Tay, whose artworks were recently featured in international luxury magazine Folio.YVR, alongside Kirk Gower, Nicole Sleeth, Benjamin/Babe Siegl, Marius Larose, and George Littlechild, for an exhibition that treats queer identity not as a modern or passing phenomenon, but as a constant that has run through history all along. Each artist approaches that idea through a different material language, from Gower’s sumptuous oil paintings to Larose’s layered acrylic installations, yet together their work becomes what Arbour describes as a record of existence, resilient and permanent. The show opens with a public reception on July 23 from six to eight in the evening and remains on view through August 14.

“I am so incredibly excited to introduce the artists of our Indelible Mark Special Feature,” Arbour has said. “While our main roster of represented artists will always be the absolute backbone of Ashdale, special features like this give us an opportunity to expand our horizons. Opening our walls to new voices allows us to push our boundaries and bring fresh, unexpected perspectives into the conversations we share with you, our amazing community.”

Meet The Artists

Nicholas Tay, a Chinese immigrant to Canada and a queer-adjacent voice within the show, whose artworks were recently featured in international luxury magazine Folio.YVR, renders the body in stark monochrome wrapped in saturated cultural pattern — a site where assimilation and cultural identity press against one another, where garment reads at times as armour, at times as skin. “I am profoundly drawn to the bravery of Nicholas Tay’s work,” Arbour says. “His brilliant focus on queer and non-binary subjects serves as a masterful exploration of identity, diasporic longing, and restrictive masculine expectations. He is an incredibly perceptive artist; by positioning tenderness as a radical act, he strips away the traditional lens of toxic masculinity to deliver something deeply beautiful, honest, and technically breathtaking.”

Kirk Gower grounds his work in human experience, exploring identity, queerness, and the emotional terrain of love, loss, and anguish. Using traditional oil painting techniques, he builds dreamlike, highly rendered compositions constructed from decades of collected reference imagery, exploring the tension between realism and artifice. “There is a fascinating push-and-pull in Kirk Gower’s style,” she notes. “Working in paired compositions, he brilliantly parallels two sides of a human experience—showing us the dreamlike beauty of a moment alongside its underlying anxieties. He builds gorgeous, highly rendered worlds and mirrors the complex, sometimes chaotic nature of love and identity.”

Nicole Sleeth examines the difference between inner emotional worlds and outer public presence, and the charged, gendered history of the muse in Western art. Working in figurative and landscape, she draws on the natural terrain of her home in Newfoundland, using solitude in the land as a way to explore her own relationship to place and emotion rather than to record location itself. “Nicole Sleeth is an artist to watch closely,” Arbour reflects. “Bringing a classical mastery to contemporary figurative painting, her work centers the female gaze with a raw, commanding honesty. Through shimmering skin tones and surreal, vibrant palettes, she elevates her subjects from the everyday into something mythic and deeply impactful.”

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Benjamin/Babe Siegl works across painting, drawing, and animation interwoven with digital image production. Their paintings address contemporary queer identity as it is complicated by historical influence, mass image culture, and digitality, finding optimism in the empowering potential of fantasy and creative play. “Babe Siegl is an exceptionally talented emerging artist, whose voice already feels remarkably mature. I am incredibly excited by the raw, visceral quality of his work paired with its cinematic atmosphere. He manages to capture a quiet, unpolished vulnerability on canvas, making each painting feel like a high-stakes film still that is both beautifully staged and deeply human.”

Marius Larose is a trans artist from the Mauricie region (Nitaskinan) in Quebec, whose practice is rooted in painting alongside two- and three-dimensional installation. Working in acrylic with techniques reminiscent of watercolour, Larose explores the symbolic relationships we hold with place, giving rise to layered, open-ended spaces that evoke both memory and imagination. “What makes Marius Larose such a vital voice right now is how masterfully they investigate the intersection of physical environments and personal mythology,” Arbour says. “Their deliberate fragmentation of space is incredibly brave; they don’t just paint a scene, they expose the hidden, raw frictions of daily life.”

George Littlechild, a Two-Spirit Plains Cree artist, brings a conviction to his work that has defined his celebrated career: art as a vessel for heart, society, and politics alike. Working in charged colour and vibrant, magical vitality, Littlechild describes himself as a storyteller and visualist first, relying on intuition, spirit, and emotion to carry his message. His practice is rooted in righting the wrongs endured by First Nations peoples, using cultural, social, and political injustice as subject matter, and in his work as an artist, educator, and cultural worker, he holds a single aim: to show the pride, strength, and beauty of First Nations people and cultures, in service of a better world.

Why Visibility Matters Now

For Arbour, this expansion is not incidental to the gallery’s mission but central to it. Every artist she brings into Ashdale’s rooms gains access to collectors and conversations they might not otherwise reach on the North Shore, a region where, as the gallery’s own history notes, art lovers have often had to travel far to find work that speaks to them. By opening her walls to new and different voices, Arbour is widening who gets to be seen, discussed, and collected, and doing so in a community she has spent decades helping to build. In a show like Indelible Mark, that visibility carries particular weight: it insists that queer and trans experience belongs not at the margins of Canadian art history, but at its centre.

A Philosophy Built on Relationship

Arbour has said, “I believe that engaging with art is an opportunity for profound transformation through connection. It’s not about simply placing paintings on walls, but uncovering a meaningful alignment between the artwork and the collector: drawing out the magic of how it makes them feel. Authenticity and genuine excitement mean I’m not afraid to go against the grain or challenge traditional gallery norms. We create a space that honours the transformative power of art, empowering collectors to trust their intuition so that every acquisition becomes a reflection of personal growth, personal stories, and cultural leadership.” That relational approach extends beyond exhibitions; the gallery is also available for private rentals, another way Arbour keeps the space in active use by the community it serves. Whether guiding a first-time buyer or a seasoned collector, her focus does not change: creating an environment where people, and the artists whose work fills it, feel welcome, supported, and genuinely seen.

Indelible Mark: Show Details

Indelible Mark

Opening Artist Reception: July 23, 6–8 PM

On view: July 23 – August 14

Ashdale Gallery, #113 – 175 West 3rd Street, North Vancouver, BC

ashdalegallery.com

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, Luxury Lifestyle Observer: Helen Siwak is the founder of EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc and publisher of Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine and PORTFOLIOY.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine. She is a prolific content creator, consultant, and marketing and media strategist within the ecoluxury and luxury lifestyle niches. Helen is the west coast correspondent to Canada’s top-read business magazine Retail-Insider, holds a vast freelance portfolio, and is an EIC for Hire. Connect with her here: [email protected].