“The Rooming House” by Michael Kluckner launches Thursday, June 2nd, 2022, at the Petley Jones Gallery. Kluckner’s new solo exhibition at the gallery brings in paintings from his recent publication and studio practice. “The West Coast in the Seventies” exhibition includes new paintings by the artist, some of which swirl the boundary between representationalism and surrealism. Kluckner approaches familiar unanswered questions people asked in the Seventies. Questions around impending ecological disaster, urbanism, and a vanishing Vancouver. 

In the 1960s and early ’70s, thousands of youths were on the road, hitchhiking across Canada, living in rooming houses in cities like Vancouver and in communes in the country.

In his book illustrations, Michael Kluckner follows several of these young men and women sharing an old home in Vancouver’s Kitsilano district, tracking their loves, losses and wanderings through the diary entries of two of them. It is both a coming-of-age novel and an exploration of the events of those years.

Kluckner’s solo exhibition invites viewers deeper into the illustrations, watercolours and oil paintings that capture Vancouver’s past and present.

In the words of one of his characters, the youth were
“just drifting, looking for something to believe in.”

Please join us for the book launch and solo exhibition, featuring paintings from Kluckner’s newest illustrated book, “The Rooming House”, at the Petley Jones Gallery on Thursday, June 2nd between 5 – 8 PM.  Listen to a soundtrack of rock classics at the opening, meet the artist, and mingle with fellow appreciators of Vancouver’s history.