Rafik Greiss’s photography installation Public Image, now on display at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, captures a fluidity of reality, playing with concepts of distance and time. The exhibit is on display both at the CAG and offsite at the Yaletown-Roundhouse station in Vancouver, running from April 17 to September 13, 2026. This exhibition, like previous works of his, considers notions of possession and perspective that present themselves in photography, representing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Reduced Inequalities and Responsible Consumption and Production.
Greiss’s work is installed in areas viewers can access from outside. They are public images not only in their content but in their display. The cover image of this article, for example, is one of Greiss’ photos on display at the Yaletown-Roundhouse SkyTrain station. These are photographs of glass vitrines or display cases at the Agricultural Museum in Giza, Egypt. These images evoke an impenetrable feeling, as their composition and colouring make it difficult to identify what exactly is going on in these images. It is perhaps even difficult to identify the objects in the photographs as they are displayed–the grey of these images feels unfocused, and viewers have to navigate visual barriers like a shifting reflection on the glass and the lines of window panes cutting across the work.
Public Image’s other photographs include those on display on the gallery’s façade, which are from the series By the Highway, a collaborative project between Greiss and Ser Serpas, another artist whose work is currently on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery. These images also play with setting, reality and perspective, bringing a dream-like quality to viewers at this Nelson Street display. One of these images has a similar greyscale, depicting cabinets and shelves taken apart in the middle of a dense forest of small and slender trees.
Rafik Greiss’s work captures the positioning of objects in unnatural ways that collectively create a dream-like quality. It is in this work that he rethinks our relationship to space, to things, and to how we perceive things visually, as his photography blurs lines.