This program brings together two artists who blur the boundaries between the visual and the textual, inviting us to see story as something that lives in images, words, and materials alike.
Cole Pauls’ comics transform northern homelands into worlds of adventure and satire, while Whess Harman’s textiles and text-based works hold both humour and resistance in every stitch and phrase.
In conversation, they will explore how place, culture, and identity shape creative practice, and how art can be both a vessel for memory and a tool for imagining new futures. Expect an hour of laughter, insight, and inspiration from two of the most inventive Indigenous artists working today.
Location: Room C400, UBC Robson Square
Programmed by our Guest Indigenous Curator Kayla MacInnis
Moderator: Whess Harman
Readers: Cole Pauls, We see stars only at night (Conundrum Press)
About The Moderator
Whess Harman
Whess Harman is a member of the Carrier Wit’at Nation, a nation amalgamated by the federal government under the Lake Babine Nation and currently resides on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He doesn’t like cops and believes in land sovereignty for Indigenous peoples all across the globe, including Palestine. In his arts practice he works primarily in drawing, text and textiles. As an independent curator and occasional editor and contributor to a variety of small publications, he prioritizes emerging queer and BIPOC cultural workers and artists.
About The Readers
Cole Pauls
Cole Pauls is a Champagne and Aishihik Citizen and Tahltan comic artist, illustrator, and printmaker hailing from Haines Junction (Yukon Territory). He holds a BFA in Illustration from Emily Carr University. Residing in Vancouver, Pauls has created four graphic novels: Dakwäkãda Warriors (2019), Pizza Punks (2021), Kwändür (2022) and We See Stars Only At Night (2025). In 2017, Pauls won Broken Pencil Magazine’s Best Comic and Best Zine of the Year Award for Dakwäkãda Warriors II. In 2020, Dakwäkãda Warriors won Best Work in an Indigenous Language from the Indigenous Voices Awards and was nominated for the Doug Wright Award categories The Egghead & The Nipper. In 2022, Artspeak Gallery, in Vancouver BC, held the first solo exhibition of Pauls’ work, “Dazhän Kwändür Ch’e (This is a Story)”. In 2023, Kwändür won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize from the BC & Yukon Book Prize.
