​Curators talk: Saturday September 5, 2pm. Free

Reception: Thursday September 17, 6pm – 8pm. Free

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In Jacob’s dream, a ladder stretches between earth and heaven, with angels ascending and descending between the two realms. Jacob’s Ladder takes this ancient story as a point of departure for an exhibition of paintings by Canadian artist Peter Barelkowski, whose distinctive figures and personal symbolic language create deceptively simple images that unfold into complex emotional and psychological narratives.

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The ladder is a recurring motif throughout Barelkowski’s decades-long career, appearing in many of his paintings. Often functioning as a mysterious connector between worlds, his ladders suggest escape, transition, or passage from the everyday, or the tragic, toward an uncertain realm of possibility.

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Jacob’s Ladder features recent paintings from Barelkowski’s Angel Series, presenting portraits of angels that resist conventional spiritual interpretations. Rather than appearing as idealized or otherworldly beings, Barelkowski’s angels possess distinctly human qualities: humorous, awkward, vulnerable, curious, or quietly contemplative. Their expressions and postures suggest personalities and inner lives, bringing these traditionally celestial figures down to earth.

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By grounding the spiritual within the material and emotional realities of human experience, Barelkowski invites us to reconsider what an angel might represent. His angels are less distant messengers of divine authority than reflections of ourselves, figures that embody our hopes, uncertainties, limitations, and desire for connection. In this sense, the ladder becomes more than a biblical symbol: it is a passage between the ordinary and the extraordinary, suggesting that moments of transcendence may be found within the complexities of everyday life.

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Peter Barelkowski's artist page.