The Persistence of Postering: Cathy Busby in Conversation with Tatiana Mellema

For the launch of Neighbourhood Posters: An artist project by Cathy Busby, Vancouver 2025–26 at the Vancouver Art Book Fair, Cathy Busby will be joined by curator and art historian Tatiana Mellema for a conversation about her latest publication. 

Neighbourhood Poster documents Vancouver’s vibrant, non-commercial neighborhood poster scene from 2025 to 2026: a site of ever-changing, colourful, unregulated information flow, announcing art and music events, parties, rallies, calls to action, and political messages. The posters cover utility poles, electrical boxes, bus shelters, and empty storefronts; a consistent presence in this urban landscape. They are often marred by the weather or defaced and transformed with the addition of scrape marks and scribbles. Collecting this analogue activity, which inherently protests late-capitalism’s push for digital communication, allows for an offline and inter-generational flow of information to be recorded, creating an archive of cultural action that otherwise wouldn’t survive. Collectively, this poster activity is a testament to a diverse, persistent, and lively Vancouver. 

Cathy Busby has been making conceptually-based and politically-minded installations, wall-text paintings, performances, and artist books for over four decades. She has long been intervening in the conventions of pain and care in personal, institutional, and medical settings. Her work amplifies subject matter and voices through recontextualization and scale, often creating collections such as public apologies, self-help books, and vehicle names. She graduated from NSCAD (BFA 1984), going on to direct the College’s Anna Leonowens Gallery, and later earning an MA in Media Studies and a PhD in Communication (Concordia, 1999). Her bold and witty work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, Beijing, Melbourne, and Berlin. In 2025, she launched I WONDER: Art + Care + Dementia, published by Art Metropole, Toronto. She is grateful to live on the unceded territories known as Vancouver. 

Tatiana Mellema has a longstanding practice working in public art, academic research and curating, and is the Curator of Outdoor Art at the Belkin and an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia. Previously she has worked at the City of Vancouver in Public Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Banff Centre, and the National Gallery of Canada. Her recent curatorial projects include: Fragments and Forms: Attending to the Monumental (2026) at the Belkin;Traces and Intervals (2022) at the Cinematheque; Spill Radio (2019) at the Belkin; and Notes on the Nude (2016) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Mellema has contributions in edited volumes published by Routledge (2025) and b_books (2026) and is currently developing a book on the practices of North American artists in the 1970s and their engagement with socially reproductive labour.