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The exhibition False Horizons brings to light a previously unknown chapter in the cartographic and geopolitical history of the Southern Gulf Islands. In 2023, researchers and amateur historians on Gabriola and nearby Mudge Island uncovered documents and subterranean infrastructure pointing to a covert Cold War operation: from 1940 to 1959, the British Columbia Cartographic Commission (BCCC) maintained a classified underground facility on Gabriola, dedicated to the fabrication of false maps for the region. The goal, it appears, was both strategic and psychological—to scramble enemy navigation systems, mislead aerial reconnaissance, and subtly reshape the geopolitical imaginary of the coast.

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This discovery not only reveals a fascinating piece of regional history, but raises urgent questions about the status of maps as instruments of truth, ideology, and control. The cartographic archive has long held a paradoxical role: it promises objective knowledge—grids, coordinates, and measured elevation—yet it is always an artefact of power. As this exhibition demonstrates, the BCCC’s work during the early Cold War years was less about representation and more about misdirection, producing deliberate distortions of coastlines, settlement locations, shipping channels, and topographic features. Maps were drawn with slight errors, fictitious islands were added or relocated, and known landmarks were renamed or erased altogether.

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In presenting archival facsimiles, reconstructed map-room dioramas, oral history recordings, and contemporary artistic responses, False Horizons explores the aesthetics of cartographic deception and the psychological dimensions of Cold War paranoia. The underground nature of the BCCC’s Gabriola office—literally buried beneath the landscape it sought to reimagine—speaks to a deeper tension between surface and secrecy, presence and erasure, accuracy and illusion.

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Several artists in the exhibition respond directly to this legacy, treating the map not as a neutral tool but as a medium of fiction and latency. Their works—installations, speculative atlases, and performance scores—mirror the logic of decoy and substitution. One re-creates a navigational map of the Strait of Georgia using magnetic filings and iron-rich Gabriola soil, another renders the fictive islands of the BCCC documents as digital terra incognita. Through these responses, the exhibition links the Cold War cartographic project to contemporary practices of counter-mapping and spatial resistance.

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But beyond the historical intrigue lies a more disquieting proposition: that the very ground we inhabit may be unstable, not geologically but epistemologically. What if the maps we trust were never intended to guide us, but to keep others lost? What if the history of place is inseparable from a history of misrepresentation?

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False Horizons invites viewers to navigate this shifting terrain. It offers not a stable narrative, but a set of coordinates through which to think about territory, secrecy, and the enduring political power of the map. In recovering this obscure and covert initiative, the exhibition proposes that even the most familiar landscapes may still contain buried intentions, and that every line drawn on a map is also, in some sense, a line drawn through memory, imagination, and control.