Dates: May 7th – July 25th, 2026
Gallery Hours: Tuesdays – Fridays: 10am – 5pm & Saturdays: 12 – 4pm
Location: ODD Gallery, Dënäkär Zho | KIAC
Indigenous Territory: Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territory, Dawson City, Yukon
OPENING RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK: Thursday, May 7th at 7PM – 10PM, Artist talk 7:30PM – 8:30PM
WE SEE STARS ONLY AT NIGHT
A surrealist comic installation by Cole Pauls exploring Tahltan culture, storytelling, and connection to land through image, pattern, and form.
We See Stars Only At Night presents the full visual narrative of Cole Pauls’ fourth graphic novel as an immersive gallery installation. Comprised of 40 original two-page spreads, the exhibition brings together 80 pages of hand-drawn comics, displayed in their entirety alongside expanded collage elements drawn from the book itself.
Created intuitively without a predetermined script, the work unfolds as a surrealist dreamscape. Pauls builds the story through response and improvisation—each drawing emerging from the last—resulting in a nonlinear exploration of Tahltan forms, symbols, and ways of seeing. The imagery moves between the personal and the collective, drawing connections between land, animals, regalia, and cultural practices.
Harvest season serves as a central thread within the work, grounding the dreamlike sequences in lived relationships to place. Through repetition, abstraction, and visual storytelling, We See Stars Only At Night reflects on the interconnectedness of Tahltan culture—where land, knowledge, and identity are inseparable and continuously in dialogue.
By presenting the graphic novel as both book and installation, Pauls invites viewers to move through the story physically as well as visually, encountering each page as part of a larger, immersive whole.
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.