Libris

Christine Walde

September 4 to October 3, 2026

Opening Friday, September 4, 7pm

Christine Walde’s first solo exhibition, Libris, explores the library as a site of collection, power, resistance and possibility. Working across digital collage, photo‑montage, painting, sculpture, printed matter, ephemera and artists’ books, Walde considers the library not only as a physical space, but as a conceptual structure through which knowledge is organized, withheld, preserved and imagined. Informed by Walde’s experience as an academic librarian, the exhibition reflects on systems that govern how information circulates and accrues value—classification, access, authority. The library appears here as both enabling structure and limit, shaped by histories of religious, colonial and cultural power. Libris situates the artist within these inherited frameworks while pointing toward their instability and uncertain futures. The book—particularly the codex—emerges as a resonant form. Beyond its role as a carrier of text, it functions as a container: holding sequence, pause and silence. Its folds and margins echo the architecture of the library itself, marking spaces where meaning is suspended or withheld. Texts, obsolescent technologies and altered systems of organization disrupt the idea of the library as neutral or complete. Rather than focusing on what is collected, Libris attends to what is absent: the gaps between entries, the distance between understanding and what has yet to be named. The library is reimagined not as a closed archive, but as a site of tension and potential—a collection of collections that opens onto the unknown.

Christine A. Walde is an interdisciplinary artist, poet and librarian whose practice combines archival and library science with research in artists’ books and multiples, experimental prose, poetry, visual poetry, performance, book arts and the visual arts. Her scholarly and creative writing has been published in print and online journals in Canada, USA, UK and Germany. Her artistic works are held in the public collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Banff Centre, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Buffalo and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Walde is the Fine Arts Librarian at University of Victoria Libraries and Art Collections and a guest on the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən in the Cascadia bioregion of the Pacific Northwest.

Home page photo credit: Leanne Olson.

The artist acknowledges the support of the University of Victoria.