The Language of Tender Things | Exhibition Opening and Guided Tour

Join us for the opening of The Language of Tender Things, a captivating exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Alejandra Morales.
About this Event

Join us for the opening of The Language of Tender Things, a captivating exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Alejandra Morales. Through lush paintings populated by flowers, animals, and imagined landscapes, Morales explores themes of femininity, affection, humour, and belonging. The evening includes a guided tour led by artist Alejandra Morales and curator Miret Rodríguez, offering unique insights into the artworks and the ideas behind them. Discover how beauty, memory, and imagination intertwine in works that invite curiosity, reflection, and wonder.

Date: Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Time: 6 pm to 7:30 pm

Location: Hycroft Gallery (1489 McRae Ave, Vancouver, BC, V6H 1V1)

This is a FREE event, but registration is required.

Alejandra Morales constructs worlds that are at once inviting and elusive. Populated by flowers, animals, and imagined landscapes, her paintings present familiar forms that seem to offer easy entry, yet resist complete understanding. Their narratives remain partially concealed, unfolding through subtle tensions between tenderness and irony, beauty and distortion, ornament and ambiguity.

Although the imagery may appear whimsical or decorative at first glance, Morales employs excess and embellishment with intention. Her compositions reveal a sophisticated sensitivity to colour, rhythm, and detail, even as certain passages embrace awkwardness or deliberate imperfection. This oscillation between refinement and artifice creates spaces that are simultaneously comforting and quietly unsettling. Titles play a vital role within the artworks. Far from merely describing what is seen, they act as points of departure, suggesting stories, emotions, and contradictions that complicate the images themselves. Together, word and image invite reflection rather than resolution, encouraging viewers to linger in states of uncertainty and wonder.

Rooted in themes of femininity, fragility, affection, and humour, Morales's paintings propose an alternative visual language, one in which softness becomes a vehicle for subversion, and beauty itself becomes a place from which to question inherited expectations. The works gathered here do not seek to deliver answers. Instead, they offer moments of contemplation, allowing meaning to emerge slowly, layer by layer, through the intimate encounter between viewer and painting.

Artist Statement

"I paint scenes typically associated with femininity, tenderness, and fragility. I create fantastical worlds that are distorted and baroque while remaining comforting and aesthetic. The humorous and ironic undertones of many of my works have led some to refer to it as being kitsch. However, I believe the excessive use of ornamentation can be seen as reflective of life’s negations: clichés that have lost their innocence without spreading wisdom.

In my artwork, I typically contemplate themes related to feminism, social expectations and classism through the use of metaphor – principally birds, flowers and fruit. I aim to use warmth, tonality and humour as a means of ideological expression. I don’t seek to patronize or propagandize. Rather, I aim to confront the viewers with their own underlying desires and lusts, in pieces that never fail to be as subversive as they are comforting.

In my recent work, I’ve been thinking about how Latin America is perceived by the Global North, which is often through a lens of escapism. This part of the world tends to be seen as a sort of ‘paradise’ where financial security can be easily attained, and work culture is more relaxed. This, however, glosses over the economic instability in which the vast majority of Latinos live in. By painting fruit laid against floral drapery, I am celebrating the colours and folk of my native Mexico, while also exposing the precariousness of informal commerce. My goal is to explore alternative forms of value and to question if the exoticizing glance is constructed based on how we look at the past and how we visually construct places we haven’t been to. — Alejandra Morales."

About the Artist

Alejandra Morales is a visual artist based in Vancouver. She received her BA from McGill University in 2016 and completed her MFA in Visual Arts at the University of British Columbia in 2023. She works mostly on large-scale paintings made with oil and acrylics, which she sees as distorted and baroque other-worlds through which she explores traditional female ideals as well as the social practices of Monterrey, her natal city. Her artwork has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, Mexico and Spain. Alejandra is represented by PxP Contemporary in the US and by Trove Fine Arts in Canada.

About the Curator

Miret Rodriguez is the creative director of Curated Tastes and is the former VP of VLACC. She holds an MBA in art and culture management from the Superior School of Commerce in Paris and a BA Major in Art History from UBC. Miret relies on art and the artists who make it to navigate through cultural dislocation and hybridity. Since 2020, Miret has been interviewing Latinx artists in Canada about their immigration stories and their ways of expressing their experiences through art. This led her to curate Volver (to return, to become) in 2022 at Cityscape Community Artspace in North Vancouver.

Website: curatedtastes.art Instagram: @curatedtastes

Accessibility Note: Please note that the Hycroft Gallery is located on the second floor of the building and is unfortunately not wheelchair accessible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please note that this event will be photographed and filmed for internal documentation and promotional purposes. If you do not wish to appear in any photos or recordings, kindly inform us upon arrival.

In Partnership with Curated Tastes.