Ser Serpas

Douglas Watt

Rafik Greiss

Please join us to celebrate the opening of CAG's spring 2026 exhibitions: [*Ser Serpas: rent*](/exhibition/ser-serpas), [*Douglas Watt: Mayor of the Village*](/exhibition/douglas-watt) and [*Rafik Greiss: Public Image*](/exhibition/rafik-greiss).

All ages welcome. Cash bar.

### RSVP
No advance registration required.

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Spring 2026

Opening Reception

English Audio Guide | Ser Serpas.m4a

Across painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and poetry, Ser Serpas engages with the transient and residual. Performance is central to her wide-ranging practice, with her works manifesting the energy of their creation in unstable and improvised forms. Her paintings, in particular, both depict and are formed by physical distress, their surfaces characterized by a sense of generative deterioration and a deteriorating generation.
 
At the Contemporary Art Gallery, Serpas exhibits a suite of new large-scale paintings: sets of mirroring images made by imprinting or “kissing” one canvas to another while still wet. In contrast to the fleshy portraits in painterly fields for which she is known, these paintings feature a more greyscale palette, dissolving their figures into voids of stained canvas. Flirting in the exhibition’s title with “rent boys” or sex workers, Serpas contends here with the movement of bodies within the narrowing spaces – both public and private – of the contemporary city. 

### Biography
Ser Serpas (b. 1995, Boyle Heights, California) lives and works in New York City and received degrees from Columbia University, New York, and HEAD, Genève. Notable institutional solo exhibitions include presentations at the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; the Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, Paris; and Swiss Institute, New York. Serpas has also participated in group exhibitions at the Rubell Museum, Miami; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; MoMA PS1, New York; the 2024 Whitney Biennial, New York; the 2024 El Museo del Barrio Triennial, New York; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Genève; Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Istituto Svizzero, Rome; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Punta della Dogana, Venice; and Kunsthalle Fribourg, Switzerland. Serpas has a solo exhibition upcoming at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Germany.

Ser Serpas - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print

Ser Serpas - Exhibition Guide - Large Print

rent

Known for his meticulously rendered sculptures of social architectures — from bars and bookstores to clinics and changerooms — Douglas Watt’s work takes up the complex relationship between public space and the construction of self. Building on legacies of appropriation, assemblage and the readymade, Watt’s practice draws on quotidian materials and forms, producing model, set and prop-like works that engage questions about the performance of everyday life.

In *Mayor of the Village*, Watt brings together a series of new and recent works that find their point of departure in Vancouver’s Davie Village, a historically significant centre of queer life in the city. Loosely staging the gallery as a café, Watt hangs within this environment a “survey” of his miniaturized model works from the past several years. Referencing tropes of the café art display, the resulting show-within-a-show at once evinces the ways that community is imagined and constructed in the public sphere — aesthetically, politically and otherwise — while nodding to the inevitable failures, fragilities and exclusions of these same structures.

### Biography
Douglas Watt (b. 1990, St. Catharines) is an artist living and working in Vancouver's Davie Village on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. He holds a BA (Art History) from Carleton University, Ottawa; an MFA from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver; and was a visiting student in Criticism & Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, Toronto. He has presented solo exhibitions at Unit 17, Vancouver (2019), Tara Downs, New York (2021), and Pumice Raft, Toronto (2024). His work has been featured in *Artforum* and *BlackFlash Magazine*. Watt co-edits the publication *Porthole* with Hamish Hardie.

### Acknowledgements
*Douglas Watt: Mayor of the Village* is generously supported by the Deux Mille Foundation.

Douglas Watt - Exhibition Guide - Regular Print

Douglas Watt - Exhibition Guide - Large Print

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Mayor of the Village

In Rafik Greiss’ work, we encounter a state between wakefulness and dreaming. Driven by the artist’s itinerant drifting within and across disparate urban landscapes, Greiss’ photographs, installations and videos reflect deeply on the complexities of movement and time, pursuing an impression of simultaneous distance and proximity.
 
In *Public Image*, Greiss presents a pair of photographic projects across CAG’s public sites. On the gallery’s façade is an arrangement of images from *By the Highway*, a series made in collaboration with Ser Serpas, depicting her creation of impromptu, temporary sculptures. At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station, Greiss has installed photographs of glass vitrines taken in the Agricultural Museum in Giza. Responding to the function of the display case to make its contents visible yet physically inaccessible, these deliberately ambiguous photographs double the station’s windows, taking glass itself – as opposed to what it reveals and encloses – as their subject. 

### Biography
Rafik Greiss (b. 1997) is an Egyptian artist based in Paris working across photography, installation and time-based media. His practice reflects on transformation, memory and the shifting states of images and objects through a formally and technically diverse approach that moves between digital and analogue processes. Often described as atmospheric, provocative and sensual, his work is driven by what Mitchell Anderson calls a “commitment to sensation rather than theme or medium.” His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Balice Hertling, Paris (2024, 2021), as well as in group exhibitions at the Istanbul Biennial (2025); Simian, Copenhagen (2025); Kunsthalle Zürich (2024); and the Swiss Institute, New York, with Ser Serpas (2023). His work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pinault Collection, Paris; Louis Vuitton Collection, Paris; and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.

Opening Reception

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