In Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’s exhibition An Animated Assembly, new hand-painted murals, short animations, and sculptural assemblages vie for our attention. These works invite us to take up contemporary economic and environmental challenges fearlessly, and to reimagine community to include myriad life forms.

Combining documentary footage, drawn animation, and sound, the animations introduce us to a chorus of beings with diverse stakes in the contested notion of a green energy transition. Enlisting situational humour, they beckon us to consider this transition from the viewpoints of both humans and more-than-humans. We meet the CEO of an international mining company who introduces himself by pushing Argentine lithium as a “great investment opportunity.” Fairy dust and magical thinking pepper his corporate pitch until his head, untethered by his claims of environmental responsibility, leaves his body and floats away. Scotch Broom beckons us to join its explosive propagation along lands stripped for the installation of hydroelectric transmission lines on Vancouver Island. A Canadian elected official, a brook, a vicuña, a guardhouse, the proud North American owners of a hybrid car, and BC oysters all chime in, their voices carrying equal weight.

Nearby, murals from the series Everything that Moves (2025–26) inflect the formal language of graphs, diagrams, and charts with handwritten captions to produce visual puns, poetic glitches, and deviant logic. These playfully irreverent moves betray the violence of infographics, riffing on the absurdity of their “rational” assertions, and exposing the deadly logic of economic cycles, global resource strategies, and other abstract constructs.

Holding the floor with us, or clinging to walls, the sculptures from the series The Conjurors (2026) combine text, wood, metal, thread, and various other materials. Their presence conveys tactility, weight, and resistance at a bodily scale while their titles and short texts underscore the perverse reliance of our global political economy on extractivist approaches to nature.

Extolling life-centred value over and against financial valuation, An Animated Assembly holds space for embodied and critical exploration. It bids us to consider the tensions between economic logic and the ecological imperatives of care and resurgence. It also leaves us with a simple yet profound question: What, and how, do we value? 

An Animated Assembly is the second exhibition through which Nanaimo Art Gallery asks the question: How can we live together?

An Animated Assembly was initiated and supported by Transitive Properties, a long-term curatorial research platform ideated and developed by Sylvie Fortin to consider economics and finance’s debt to hospitality. 

It was realized in collaboration with Móvil, Hay Lugar, and URRA Cerrito, and with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Nanaimo Art Gallery, the Nordic Artists Centre Dale (NKD), Est-Nord-Est, and the More or Less Art Foundation for the Arts.