Les Ramsay: Hardly Anywhere

November 7 – December 23, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 7, 1-4 PM

Marion Scott Gallery is pleased to present Hardly Anywhere, a multi-media exhibition of works by Vancouver’s Les Ramsay. Opening November 7 and continuing until December 23, Ramsay’s third solo exhibition with MSG will feature paintings, framed needlepoints, sculpture and drawings. The exhibition will highlight aspects of Ramsay’s process, in particular his practice of recreating compositions across different media and in different formats. There will be an opening reception in the gallery on Saturday, November 7 from 1 to 4 PM. The artist will be present.

For more than two decades, Vancouver painter Les Ramsay has been exploring an idiosyncratic artistic vision. It is a viewpoint which brings together formal elements derived from early modern European painting, with contemporary issues having to do with waste, climate change, and the unstable nature of our times. By combining thrifting—both to do with imagery, and more literally—with various tropes associated with folk art, a West Coast sensibility, and a style of abstraction that often courts Surrealism, Ramsay’s unique mixing of high and low cultural references brings renewed vitality to Canadian painting.

The exhibition brings into focus Ramsay’s method of producing duplicates and triplicates of his compositions. Viewers will note that the same image recurs at various points within our exhibition. This process is echoed outside the confines of the gallery, too: some of the works in our show at MSG have been reproduced within the concurrent presentation at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Elsewhere, Else. While Ramsay never reproduces a painting as an exact copy of the original, the resemblances are often striking, not unlike a pair of identical twins whom you inevitably come to know as individuals after spending an afternoon with them. While there might be an underlying conceptual point to this iterative aspect of his practice, Ramsay sees it more as a way of engaging with the absurd, becoming, in essence, a copyist of his own work.

In the artist’s own words: “I think I’ve always worked this way, at least to some extent. Repetition, revisiting, and moving between scales and media have long been part of my practice. What’s perhaps more interesting is the timing of these recent doubles and the fact that they’re appearing around two exhibitions so close together.”

Les Ramsay in Conversation with Landon Mackenzie | Saturday, Nov 14, 2:00 PM

Exhibition Walkthrough with Les Ramsay and Alex Tedlie-Stursberg | Saturday, Nov 28, 2:00 PM