A member of Curve Lake First Nation and citizen of the Nishnaabeg Nation, artist Olivia Whetung draws upon her experience working on and with the land to create artworks that speak of the interdependence and relationality within our ecosystem.
Researching land-based and food de-commodifying movements, Anishinaabe knowledge, and the ecology of her home territory, Whetung has produced a series of sculptural installations, digital prints, and three-dimensional beadworks that articulate the vital connectivity between woodland, wetland, and garden environments. The artist’s first-hand observations are nourished by a critical understanding of Western agricultural models and natural science methodologies as detrimental to the ecologies of Southern Ontario, where they have caused massive environmental destruction. Western worldviews, brought over by European settlers, treat only cleared farmland as “productive” while deeming woodland and wetland unmanageable and useless. These outlooks centre human needs and desires at the expense of the ecosystem’s survival.
Whetung’s poignant works solicit our attention and reconsideration of spaces and species that are crucial to biodiversity and to sustainable food production. Tenderly foregrounding our more-than-human neighbours, they remind us that we are not the only ones to benefit from the land’s gifts, nor to suffer from ecological ruin. The exhibition’s Anishinaabemowin title, inawendiwok, loosely translates as “they are related to each other,” emphasizing the ways in which coexistence within the ecosystem is mutually linked. With human yearning for endlessly available resources and sanitized nature comes devastating loss. Only through a renewed understanding of kinship and gratitude may we restore an ecology based on responsibility and reciprocity that can sustain the future.
Olivia Whetung is anishinaabekwe and a member of Curve Lake First Nation. She completed her BFA with a minor in anishinaabemowin at Algoma University in 2013, and her MFA at the University of British Columbia in 2016. Whetung works in various media including beadwork, printmaking, and digital media. Her work explores acts of/active native presence, as well as the challenges of working with/in/through Indigenous languages in an art world dominated by the English language. Her work is informed in part by her experiences as an anishinaabemowin learner. Whetung is from the area now called the Kawarthas, and presently resides on Chemong Lake.
Mona Filip is a contemporary art curator and writer based in Toronto. Displacement and adaptation are core concerns of her curatorial investigations, informed by personal experiences of immigration and diasporic living. Bringing together a range of perspectives on collective memory, place and belonging, her projects examine the relationship between the personal and the political, ways of rewriting and redressing histories, museum restitution and repair, storytelling as world-building.
Building Black Civilizations: Journey of 2,000 Ships continues artist Ekow Nimako’s afrofuturistic reimagining of ancient African kingdoms. Using LEGO bricks as his medium, Nimako explores the mysterious fourteenth century sea voyage of Mansa Abu Bakr II, predecessor of Mansa Musa, ruler of the ancient Mali Empire. According to legends, Abu Bakr II was an intrepid explorer, who abdicated his throne and took 2,000 ships on an expedition into the Atlantic, but was never to return or heard from again. Some accounts suggest the massive fleet reached as far as the Americas, but where they went beyond this is still unknown. Combining architecture, historical accounts, and fantastical possibilities, Nimako transcends the geometric form of LEGO to recreate the epic voyage. And in doing so, Nimako presents an uninterrupted and unco-opted narrative of Black civilizations and imagines liberated futures.
Ekow Nimako, Wawa Aba, The Sunrise Dancer (circa 1358), 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Ekow Nimako is a Toronto-based, internationally exhibiting LEGO artist who crafts futuristic and whimsical sculptures from the iconic medium. Rooted in his childhood hobby and intrinsic creativity, Nimako’s formal arts education and background as a lifelong multidisciplinary artist inform his process and signature aesthetic. His fluid building style, coupled with the Afrofuturistic themes of his work, beautifully transcend the geometric medium to embody organic and fantastical silhouettes.
We are pleased to present the annual Durham College Thesis Exhibition! Like all visionary explorers, the students in Durham College’s Fine Arts Advanced program are involved in a continual process of identifying and studying meaningful subjects that pertain to their own evolving bodies of work. They first research then develop strategies unique to their practice through experimentation, all the while learning to define and focus their personal interests. This exhibition includes a wide range of subjects, interests, and mediums.
Celebrate EMERGING VISIONS with the staff and students of Durham College! The opening reception will be hosted during RMG Friday on May 2, 2025. Then, stop by the gallery at 1pm on May 14th for an artist-led tour of the exhibition. This is your chance to learn more about specific projects and hear about the journey from conception to fabrication to presentation.
This group exhibition brings together artists who rely on the embodied “language of textiles” to communicate what cannot be expressed in words. The artists in We are ten thousand hands that plant seeds respond to their lived and inherited experiences of colonialism, displacement, and genocide through their creative practices. They use materials with symbolic resonance which carry stories of the land, its people, and their labour. In doing so, they point to the bloody footprint of extractive capitalism across the globe. Their artworks are alive and an integral part of cultural, social, and political movements for reclaiming and remembering buried histories, resisting displacement and disappearance, and building towards liberation. The everyday familiarity of textiles articulates the weight of holding injustice and grief, and the undeniable power of collective resilience and hope.
Megan Feheley is an ililiw (Cree) interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. They are currently working towards their BFA in Indigenous Visual Culture at OCAD University, and work predominantly in experimental sculpture/installation, beadwork, textiles, painting, and video.
Feheley’s work has been exhibited internationally in Aotearoa (New Zealand), and nationally in Toronto, Regina, North Bay, Picton and in online presentations. Feheley has had a recent solo exhibition with Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto, 2020), and was the recipient of the 2022 Virtual Residency with Open Studio (Toronto). They also participated in an award-winning collaboration with the Royal Ontario Museum (Uncover/Recover project, 2019), for which Feheley was the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award (2019).
Maureen Gruben’s multi-media practice incorporates diverse organic and industrial materials that are often salvaged from her local Arctic environment. She was born and raised in Tuktoyaktuk where her parents were traditional Inuvialuit knowledge keepers and founders of E. Gruben’s Transport. Gruben holds a BFA from the University of Victoria as well as diplomas in Fine Art, Creative Writing, and Indigenous Leadership from the En’owkin Centre, Penticton. Recent exhibitions include Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Rovaniemi Art Museum Korundi, Rovaniemi (2024); Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle (2024); Bodenrader, Chicago (2023); Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo; Fogo Island Gallery, Fogo Island (2023); Women’s Gallery & Darkroom, New York (2022); Cade Centre for Fine Arts, Baltimore (2022); Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Los Vegas (2022); Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Montreal (2022); public art installations for The Bentway Skate Trail & Canoe Landing, Toronto (2021); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca (2021); The Rooms, St. John’s (2021); Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2019). She was long listed for the 2019 Aesthetica Art Prize and the 2021 Sobey Art Prize, and her work is held in public and private collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Indigenous Art Centre, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.
Sharmistha Kar is an artist from India, currently living in Montreal, Quebec. She obtained her MFA from Western University and is currently a doctoral student at Concordia University. Kar’s early education began in West Bengal, India, and she pursued higher education in Fine Arts at the University of Hyderabad. She continued her studio practice and worked as a lecturer in Hyderabad. She has been awarded scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2024), Peter N. Thomson Graduate Scholarship (2023), Concordia Merit Scholarship (2022), Charles Wallace India Trust Award (2013), and the Graduate Thesis Research Award (2018) at Western University. She had exhibited in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, Finland, and Canada.
Gloria Martinez-Granados Gloria Martinez-Granados is a Phoenix, Arizona based artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico she migrated to the United States of America with her family at 8 years old. Gloria is an interdisciplinary artist creating with indigenous practices, adding a contemporary approach by including printmaking, assemblage, installation and performance to the more traditional arts of beadwork, stitchwork and weaving. Through this process, she develops themes around identity, dreams, place, home and land. This merges with her experience growing up undocumented in the United States and the legal limbo she lives day to day as a DACAmented person.
Martinez-Granados is a former member of the all women craft collective The Phoenix Fridas. In 2019 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Gloria is an award recipient of the 40th Annual Environmental Excellence Award, Valle Del Sol’s 2022 Profiles of Success honoree and she received the Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Award. She has exhibited throughout the United States, most recently in Georgia at Atlanta Contemporary and Indiana at Herron School of Art and Design. Her work is currently exhibiting at Phoenix Art Museum as part of The Collection: 1960 – Now.
Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural worker and researcher born in her family’s exile in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work seeks to explore the ever-changing social spaces we inhabit and the archival properties of cloth. Through the investigation of the materiality of sound and the understanding of the woven structure as the continuation of our interconnected social gesture, her practice seeks to fabricate embodied instances that participate in the construction of a more equitable society and the creation of new archives of resistance. Soledad’s involvement with music started at a very young age in her hometown of Rancagua, where she studied piano, was part of several bands and participated in voice ensembles. Once in Canada, this interest grew into a more experimental approach to sound, focusing on deconstruction, modular synthesis, instrument building, and the physical/material aspects of sculpting in space with sound. She uses live computer sampling, single oscillator synthesizers, her voice, and handcrafted instruments for her live performances and installations.
In 2014 she started Genero, an audio project/label that focuses on the distribution and representation of women and non-binary artists within the sound realm. Subsequently, in 2017, she co-founded CURRENT “Feminist Electronic Art Symposium and Mentorship,” a multidisciplinary, electronic art program working with women, non-binary, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) artists in Canada and beyond. Her latest collaborative audiovisual project entitled La Parte de Atras de la Arpillera features a collection of interviews with Chilean textile workers whose experiences stitch together the country’s history of resistance.
She studied Film at Universidad ARCIS in Santiago Chile, has a Diploma in Textile Arts from Capilano University in North Vancouver Canada, a Bachelor in Fine Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design in Vancouver and a Master in Fine Arts from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago USA. Soledad has been the recipient of several awards, including the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Artist, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago New Artist Society Full Merit Scholarship, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design President’s Media Award and most recently the Textile Society of America Student and New Professionals Award.
Nazzal Studio is a pioneering brand at the intersection of fashion, ethics, and activism, deeply rooted in Palestinian heritage and resistance. Founded by Sylwia Nazzal during her university years, inspired by her exploration of politics and culture, the brand gained prominence with her graduate thesis collection, What Should Have Been Home, created in 2022-2023. This collection, symbolic of Palestinian resistance, garnered global recognition after events on October 7th, highlighting the need for art that amplifies marginalized voices. Nazzal Studio prioritizes ethical practices, collaborating with refugee women and advocating for community empowerment over mass production. Embracing their role as artists in clothing, they challenge conventional fashion norms while championing important causes.
Roundtable Discussions: Press and Publications and Artist-Run Spaces and Culture Saturday, June 7, 2025, 2-5pm, followed by a reception, 5-7pm Co-presented with Art Metropole and the plumb Featuring: Vincent Bonin, Robert Fones, Peggy Gale, and Luis Jacob; Anthony Cooper, Suzy Lake, Nell Tenhaaf, and Adam Welch
Satellite Exhibitions at Art Metropole and the plumb Details below.
In 1970, a large piece of raw canvas was hung outside the window of artist Tom Dean’s studio on Saint Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. Measuring 23 feet by 6 feet, the canvas bore gigantic lettering fashioned from glittering blue and gold sequins spelling “GOOD-BYE.” This intervention marked the artist’s very first public presentation—an address of farewell that launched an art career spanning over five decades, exceptional and still evolving. Boundless and expansive, fluidly transcending media, style, space, and norms, Dean’s work continues to challenge conventional categories of artistic production and meaning-making.
Driven by two essential inquiries—why “GOOD-BYE” then, and why Tom Dean now—the exhibition GOOD-BYE revisits the artist’s life in early 1970s Montreal. It brings together a rarely seen body of work—early conceptual artworks on canvas and in sculptural forms—and archival materials from that period, documenting the artist’s extensive and active engagement with the local alternative art scene and broader cultural milieu.
GOOD-BYE travels back in time to map and remap the vision and ambition projected by the artist at the time, while simultaneously standing in the present—behind the passage of history—to reevaluate and reflect on its significance in today’s context.
During the run of Tom Dean: GOOD-BYE at the RMG, two satellite projects will be exhibited by our programming partners Art Metropole and the plumb.
Art Metropole(AM) will feature a display of Tom Dean’s works drawn from their inventory, including several print and publication projects that highlight the many collaborations between the artist and AM over several decades.
Where: Art Metropole, 896 College St, Toronto, ON
When: TBC
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 6pm
the plumb will present an evolving exhibition of Tom Dean’s drawings. Spanning several decades, these works offer an intimate glimpse into Dean’s artistic practice—one that is at once conceptual and playful.
Located in the lobby of the plumb, the exhibition will feature a rotating selection of Dean’s drawings, with a new body of work introduced each month until the end of 2025. Small publications produced by the RMG will be released and distributed throughout the exhibition’s run. Many of these drawings, most of which have never been exhibited, were uncovered during the archival research leading up to his exhibition at the RMG.
Together with GOOD-BYE, this exhibition offers a layered exploration of Dean’s evolving thought processes and artistic methods.
Where: the plumb, 1655 Dufferin St, basement, Toronto, ON
When: April 25, 2025 – ongoing
Hours: Saturday & Sunday, 2-5pm
Tom Dean (b. 1947) is a conceptual artist, known for his work in a diverse range of media including sculpture, installation art, performance, drawing, and printmaking. Playing on tensions between the ordinary and mythical, his works reference both everyday objects and classical icons, alluding to the dream world of the psyche and matters of the soul, while always residing in the intensely material world of desire and the body. He received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (2001), was selected to represent Canada at the 1999 Venice Biennale, and was honoured with the Toronto Arts Award for Visual Arts in 1996. His work can be found in major collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée d’Art Contemporain, and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Yan Wu is a curator, writer, and translator whose work explores the intersections of contemporary art, architecture, and public space. She is currently the Public Art Curator for the City of Markham and is pursuing a PhD at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Wu has co-translated Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss, Six Years by Lucy Lippard, Rock My Religion by Dan Graham, and Formless by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss into Chinese. Commissioned by M+ in Hong Kong, she co-translated John Cage’s Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel (2020) into Chinese and contributed the Chinese text for the online exhibition Marcel Duchamp: Lessons for a Creative Life from Boîte-en-valise.
Leila Timmins is the Senior Curator at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.
Likkle Acts brings together four series of photographs by Pickering-based artist Christina Leslie. Set in Jamaica, each body of work explores both her familial relationships and the complex history of the Caribbean. Delving into themes of memory, migration, and the sugar industry, Leslie adopts a variety of photographic processes to convey how she views the past and present as interconnected and multifaceted. Framing the exhibition, the Patois title references an African proverb made popular by Bob Marley’s song Small Axe: “If you are the big tree / We are the small axe.” This cumulative power of small gestures is conveyed throughout the exhibition, showing that when small actions are multiplied, they can have a meaningful impact.
In Morant Bay (2018) and St. Thomas, JA (2024), Leslie illustrates how belonging is built and maintained in everyday life through small acts of care, work, and communal rest. Alongside portraits and informal encounters, Leslie captures streetscapes and landscapes in a documentary style. These bodies of work reflect the artist’s impulse to maintain and deepen a connection to place through photography. Distinct from the documentary style of these series, Pinhole Parish (2023-2024) represents the artist’s personal reckoning with memory and the rupture of migration. Constructed using improvised pinhole camera lenses from materials at hand, the soft-hued images are dreamy and out of focus, visualizing the influence of intergenerational storytelling and an intangible veil between the past and present. Adopting a wider perspective, Sugar Coat (2021-2024) considers how collective memory is shaped by presence and absence in historical records and public spaces. Drawing from research on the transatlantic slave trade and the history of the sugar industry, this series presents narrative images that have been painstakingly encased in sugar. In this work, Leslie highlights resistance to colonial oppression, pointing to acts of rebellion big and small.
Christina Leslie is an artist based in Pickering, Ontario. She earned her BFA in 2006 at OCADU in Toronto and her MFA at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, USA in 2022. Her photographs have been featured in numerous publications and exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her latest series “Sugar Coat” has been exhibited virtually on Ain’t Bad Magazine (2021), Featureshoot.com (2022), PetaPixel.com (2022), and in-person at BAND Gallery (2023). She has exhibited nationally and internationally at GAMU (2009), Royal Ontario Museum (2010), Pier 21 (201, Art Gallery of Windsor (2017), Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives (2020), Prefix ICA (2021), and McMaster Museum of Art (2022). Much of her photographic practice revolves around the themes of de-colonialism, identity, immigration, issues of marginalization, history, memory, race, and her West Indian heritage. She often utilizes text and alternative and historical photographic processes to produce her photographs. She is a member of an all-female photography collective, Silver Water Collective and is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto.
Installation of “Christina Leslie: Likkle Acts” at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2024. Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Exhibition presented by Partners in Art with additional support from the Ontario Arts Council, Alterna Savings, and Durham Community Foundation.
Help us celebrate the opening of Christina Leslie’s solo exhibition Likkle Acts! This event is free and open to everyone. If there are ways we can support your participation, please contact Hannah at [email protected]. Christina Leslie is an artist based in Pickering, Ontario. She earned her BFA in 2006 at OCADU in Toronto and her […]
Walk through the exhibition Christina Leslie: Likkle Acts with exhibition curator Hannah Keating. Hannah will explain how the works were made and the stories and ideas that motivated Christina to create them. Curatorial Tours are free and open to everyone. They provide deeper insight into the themes, context, and content of our exhibitions. Seating options […]
Come out to hear Christina Leslie share insights and reflections on Likkle Acts with exhibition curator Hannah Keating. The talk will shine a light on Leslie’s practice, research, and the innovative photographic processes that she used to create the works in Likkle Acts. Join us at 1pm for a reception catered by Starapples. The artist […]
Free. Registration is required. This is a how-to workshop for artists! Part creative workshop, part career conversation, we’re excited to have Christina Leslie lead a two-part session on photo emulsion transfers and gallery representation. Inspired by her Sugar Coat series in Likkle Acts, Leslie will show participants how to lift a photographic image from one […]
Contemporary Kids is an exhibition bringing together contemporary artists who make art with and for children. Within the framework of contemporary art, the interests and cultural production of children are often excluded. The artists in this exhibition embrace the unique perspectives that children can bring to art and see play as a crucial entry into artistic explorations.
Artist duo Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley) have created an immersive installation for the exhibition that allows children to play, reflect, and rest. Exploring art and movement with their bodies, kids are encouraged to work alone or with others to weave, stretch, and hoist a web of ropes and soft sculptures.
Alongside these interactive artworks, Amy Wong presents a body of work she produced with her son Rudi. Illustrating the creative negotiations that constitute intergenerational relationships, this work also reveals the vital connection between Wong’s studio practice as an artist and childcare strategies as a parent. Hannah Jickling and Reed H. Reed also present a survey of artwork that was created with children. Developing experimental curriculum for classroom settings, the artists have been thinking alongside kid collaborators for several years. Adopting a critical lens and youthful perspective, they have created an expansive collection of publications, prints, and sculptures inspired by their collaborative projects.
Altogether, the work in Contemporary Kids is a celebration of the unique ways children see and engage with their environment. The exhibition is a playground for all ages, serving as a reminder to find joy and fun in each other’s company and seek creative problem solving in an ever-changing world.
About the Artists:
Hannah Jickling + Reed H. Reed have been collaborating since 2006. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed-matter and artists’ multiples. They have facilitated many collaborative research projects with children, most notably Big Rock Candy Mountain (2015–ongoing). In 2017 they published Multiple Elementary with YYZBOOKS, part exhibition catalogue, artists’ book, and candy store advertisement. Multiple Elementary explores the elementary school classroom as a site for the invention and reception of contemporary art practices.
Jickling and Reed are recipients of numerous awards including the Ian Wallace Award for Teaching Excellence (2016, Emily Carr University), the Mayor’s Arts Award for Public Art (2017, City of Vancouver), the Sobey Art Award Longlist (2018, National Gallery of Canada and the Sobey Art Foundation), the 2018 VIVA Award (Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts). Together, they have presented work at: Western Front (Vancouver), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Mitchell Gallery (Edmonton), Arts League (Houston), the Malmö Art Academy (Malmö, SE), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Studio XX (Montreal), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Gallery TPW (Toronto), Kelowna Art Gallery, Theatre of Research (Hamburg), Westfälischer Kunstverein, (Münster, DE), the Tate Liverpool (UK) and the Ruskin School of Art (Oxford, UK).
Jickling and Reed are currently based between xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ/selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in territories – working to locate their practice between urban/southern and rural/northern contexts. They teach part-time at the Yukon School of Visual Arts.
Leisure is a research-based collaborative art practice between Montreal-based artists Meredith Carruthers (1975) and Susannah Wesley (1976). Recent projects on friendship, collaboration, material exploration and intergenerational exchange include: Having Ideas by Handling Materials (Oakville Galleries, 2023), The Ceremony (Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, 2021), Conversation with magic forms (most recently exhibited at CAG Vancouver, 2020), the solo retrospective How one becomes what one is (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2018), Panning for gold/Walking you through it (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017) and Dualité/Dualité (Artexte, Montreal, 2015). Upcoming exhibitions include their curation and participation in the 5th Virginia McClure Ceramic Biennale (2024, McClure Gallery), a group exhibition at the Tartu Art Museum, Estonia (2024), and a solo exhibition at Optica (2025). Wesley and Carruthers are currently working on a precedent setting collaborative PhD candidacy in Research-Creation within Concordia University’s Individualized Program.
Amy Wing-Hann Wong (b. 1981, Toronto, she/they) is an Angry Asian Feminist disguised as an oil painter. Her practice ranges from painting-based installation to collaborative projects that explore the politics of making noise and thinking through together. Often inverting private and public spaces, Wong asserts ways in which a leakiness and messiness of things can aspire towards feminist and decolonial ways of being. Their practice oscillates between varying systems of representation to evoke non-linear, personal narratives. They often work with what they consider a bad idea or a cliché to redefine them on their terms. Wong completed her BFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, MFA at York University in Toronto, Ontario and post-graduate studies at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Rudi Sun-Yu Wong (b. 2017, Toronto, he/him) is in grade 1 at Iroquois Junior Public School. He knows a lot about bugs, gemstones, outer space, and poop jokes. He loves arts and crafts, swimming, and dancing. Wong lives with his mom, aunt and grandparents in Scarborough and with his dad downtown. He has two dogs and an aquarium of fish and shrimp and farts and plants and rocks and also water. Past collaborations between Amy and Rudi include Room for Taking Care at OCADU Graduate Gallery, Toronto ON; Exchange Piece at the Design TO Festival; A Glitter of Seas at Dreamsong, Minneapolis, MN.
Installation of Contemporary Kids at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2024. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheild.
To celebrate the opening of our new exhibition Contemporary Kids, the RMG is hosting a party for families! Join us for a free day full of fun and engaging activities! 10:30-11:30am: Backyard Story Time at the RMG Join us in The Backyard for a pride-themed Story Time with librarians from the Oshawa Public Library, including […]
Join curator, Hannah Keating for a guided tour of Contemporary Kids, which includes work by Shaya Ishaq, Hannah Jickling + Reed H. Reed, Leisure (Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley), and Amy Wong. Thursday Curatorial Tours are free and open to everyone. They provide deeper insight into the themes, context, and content of our exhibitions. Seating […]
Experience the magic of outdoor story time at the art gallery! Through books, songs, games, and creative activities, storytellers from Oshawa Public Libraries will spark your imagination in The Backyard at the RMG! This event is free and no registration is required. Offered alongside the exhibition Contemporary Kids, this year’s Backyard Story Time themes are inspired […]
Experience the magic of outdoor story time at the art gallery! Through books, songs, games, and creative activities, storytellers from Oshawa Public Libraries will spark your imagination in The Backyard at the RMG! This event is free and no registration is required. Offered alongside the exhibition Contemporary Kids, this year’s Backyard Story Time themes are inspired […]
This exhibition has been financially assisted by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, a program of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, administered by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund Corporation.
Exhibition support also provided by Companies Who Care and Canada Mats.
On June 7, 2024, The Big Hat was featured on CBC Arts. Read the article here.
Rooted in a family tradition of carpentry and ironwork, Tony Romano’s practice reimagines found objects and reworks raw and recycled materials into playful works that explore cultural narratives. Spending time in scrap metal yards as a child, Romano has long been fascinated by the endless reincarnation of metal, and how a once used and loved object could be melted down and transformed into something new. This endless recyclability propels him to consider the narrative possibilities of his materials and the memories and stories held within them. In The Big Hat, Romano has created a new series of sculptures and video that tell a cautionary tale of an imagined whirligig community reckoning with the arrival of a greedy professor who convinces the whirligigs to trade their simple life for a life of labour. Whirligigs are kinetic garden ornaments that move or spin with the wind. Traditionally, they are made of wood or metal and depict rural activities such as farming. They can be both decorative and functional, determining the direction of the wind and warning off unwanted pests. In The Big Hat, Romano imagines whirligigs as autonomous beings with dreams and memories of their own, with scrap, raw, and recycled metal being the stage on which their entire world is built upon.
Join us in celebrating the opening of The Big Hat on Friday, April 5 from 7-10pm as part of RMG Fridays: The Big Hat. Remarks to take place in the exhibition at 7:15pm.
Tony Romano (b. 1978, Toronto) holds a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions include Night Thoughts, BEERS London, The Branch In The Salzburg Mine, Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, The Last Act, Articule, Montreal, Onward Future, Oakville Galleries, Notary Moon, MacLaren Art Gallery, Barrie, and Oversea/Undersea, Kulturhust, Stockholm.
Join us in celebrating the opening of Kenatentas on Saturday, January 27 from 2-3:30pm. More details here.
Raechel Wastesicoot is a mixed Kanien’kehá:ka beadworker born and raised in Oshawa and currently based in Toronto. Growing up just minutes from the gallery, the RMG has long served as a personal site of inspiration and respite to Wastesicoot. In her debut exhibition, Kenatentas, she has created twelve beaded artworks in response to paintings and drawings from the RMG’s Permanent Collection by members of Ontario’s abstract collective, Painters Eleven. Presented alongside short poems written by the artist, each work, while formally referencing its historical counterpart, recalls a very specific moment or relationship in Wastesicoot’s life that has challenged or changed her.
Wastesicoot began beading in 2020 as a way of connecting to her Mohawk culture. For thousands of years, the practice of beading has been utilized by Indigenous Peoples to record and share cultural knowledge. Enduring today, beadwork has been taken up en masse by a new generation of young Indigenous artists. As a social activity, beading circles promote community-building and knowledge sharing, carving pathways to wider networks of cultural dialogue. As an individual practice, the slowness is described by many as meditative and healing.
In Kenatentas, Wastesicoot intimately revisits moments of her past, bead by bead honouring, and in some cases rewriting, the stories that have made her who she is today. Using playful materials and colours, she nurtures her younger self and tends to intergenerational trauma deeply rooted in the place that for 22 years she called home. Hung alongside the artwork that inspired her as child, Wastesicoot asserts herself, and by extension, contemporary Indigenous beadwork, within the ongoing story of abstraction in Canada.
Raechel Wastesicoot is a mixed Kanien’kehá:ka beadworker and land-based communications specialist. Her mother’s family is from the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, and her father’s family immigrated to Toronto from Northern Italy in the early 1960s. Her spirit name is Mein-gun Kwe, meaning wolf woman, which was gifted to her by an Ojibway Elder. Following a teaching passed down to her: from the land, for the land, and by the land, her beadwork comprises contemporary pieces featuring upcycled, vintage, and harvested materials. With the land and sustainability at the centre of her approach, the pieces she creates aim to have as minimal an impact on the environment as possible, and heavily feature gifts from the land, including antler, fur, hides, and porcupine quills.
This exhibition is presented with support from the Government of Ontario through the Tourism Relief Fund.
Join artist Raechel Wastesicoot and exhibition curator Erin Szikora for a chatty and informal online conversation about the making of Kenatentas. Delivered in the format of an online beading circle, we invite audience members to tune in with a beading or crafting project of your own. Join the conversation and learn more about the materials, […]
Dreaming of the worlds we want to live in allows us to take the first steps towards creating them. How can we use what we know today to collectively envision a better world for tomorrow? When you imagine the future, what do you hope to change about the past?
World-builders, shapeshifters is a group exhibition that invites us to gather, dream, and speak about love, grief, and togetherness. It braids together six early and mid-career Indigenous artists making speculative work about where they’ve been to better understand where, together, we can go. Exploring themes of decolonial love, joy, kinship, and abundance, the exhibition uses Indigenous Futurism as a device to imagine and believe into being, a world where everyone’s sovereignty is respected, our success is shared, and our flourishing is mutual.
Alex Jacobs-Blum is a Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ (Cayuga) and German visual lens-based artist and curator. Her research focuses on Indigenous futures and accessing embodied Ancestral Hodinöhsö:ni’ knowledge. The core of her practice and methodology is a strong foundation in community building, fostering relationships, empowering youth, and Indigenizing institutional spaces. Her creative process is rooted in cyclical storytelling and challenging hierarchical power structures. Jacobs-Blum endeavours to facilitate transformative change infused with love and care, guided by anti-oppressive and anti-racist modalities.
Jacobs-Blum received a Bachelor of Photography at Sheridan College in 2015, where she was awarded the Canon Award of Excellence for Narrative Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Centre[3] for Artistic + Social Practice, the Woodland Cultural Centre, and Critical Distance Centre for Curators.
Kat Brown Akootchook is a Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe visual artist and educator belonging to the Oneida Nation of the Thames, Bear Clan. She is a multidisciplinary beadworker and creator known for her printmaking and design. She blends contemporary & traditional elements with a sense of humour and a heart for activism. She often uses her art to call attention to Indigenous rights movements and youth education.
Kat currently splits her time between Southern California and her homelands of Southern Ontario. She is most known for her “Land Back” design, which she created at the Native Action for Mauna Kea, and can be seen on t-shirts across Turtle Island. Her beadwork and designs are used for authentic contemporary Native representation on television and by musicians.
One of her biggest goals is to be that auntie who helps and breaks down the gatekeeping that can sometimes prevent Native people from accessing traditions which have been forcibly taken from us – reclaiming our land, ways, and expression is an honour and a joy.
Kay Nadjiwon is a two-spirit/non-binary Anishinaabe lens-based artist working in Treaty 13. They are currently completing their BFA in Photography at Toronto Metropolitan University and are an MFA candidate. Their artistic practice focuses on issues of identity, memory, trauma and belonging. Nadjiwon uses archival materials, alternative processes and interdisciplinary methods to situate feelings of grief as a site for social connection. Their practice includes photography, video, collage and installation.
Natalie King is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist, facilitator and member of Timiskaming First Nation. King’s arts practice ranges from video, painting, sculpture and installation as well as community engagement, curation and arts administration. King is currently a Programming Coordinator at Xpace Cultural Centre in Tkaronto.
Often involving portrayals of queer femmes, King’s works are about embracing the ambiguity and multiplicities of identity within the Anishinaabe queer femme experience(s). King’s practice operates from a firmly critical, anti-colonial, non-oppressive, and future-bound perspective, reclaiming the realities of lived liv es through frameworks of desire and survivance.
King’s recent exhibitions include Come and Get Your Love at Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto (2022), Proud Joy at Nuit Blanche Toronto (2022), Bursting with Love at Harbourfront Centre (2021) PAGEANT curated by Ryan Rice at Centre[3] in Hamilton (2021), and (Re)membering and (Re)imagining: the Joyous Star Peoples of Turtle Island at Hearth Garage (2021). King has extensive mural making practice that includes a permanent mural currently on at the Art Gallery of Burlington. King holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University (2018). King is currently GalleryTPW’s 2023 Curatorial Research Fellow.
Nishina Shapwaykeesic-Loft is Kanien’kehá:ka from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She is a 2S queer, multi-disciplinary artist in a wide spectrum of mediums. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from York University in Theatre Production and Design.
She works in the theatre industry with a specialization in costuming. She is a mural artist working with StART as a project coordinator and an indigenous advisor. She is the Associate Programmer for the Toronto Queer Film Festival and has worked in programming for imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival. She continues to grow within her field and explore new opportunities.
Sheri Osden Nault is an artist, community worker, and Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Western Ontario. Their work spans mediums including sculpture, performance, installation, and more; integrating cultural, social, and experimental creative processes. Their work considers embodied connections between human and non-human beings, land-based relationships, and kinship sensibilities as an Indigenous Futurist framework. Methodologically, they prioritize tactile ways of knowing, and learning from more than human kin. Their research is grounded in their experiences as Michif, nêhiyaw, and Two-Spirit, and engages with decolonizing methodologies, queer theory, ecological theory, and intersectional and Indigenous feminisms. They are a member of the Indigenous tattoo revival movement in so-called Canada, and run the annual community project, Gifts for Two-Spirit Youth.
Recent notable exhibitions include bringing to light what came from inside, as part of the Images Festival, Toronto; BEHOLD|EN, at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Kwaatanihtowwakiw – A Hard Birth, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2022; Hononga at Hoea! Gallery in Aotearoa (New Zealand), 2021; Where the Shoreline Meets the Water, the ArQuives, Toronto, 2020; Off-Centre at the Dunlop Art Gallery, 2019; and Li Salay at the Art Gallery of Alberta, 2018.
Installation of World-builders, shapeshifters at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2023. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
This exhibition is presented with support from the Maada’ookii Committee, Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, the Downie & Wenjack Foundation and Hudson Bay Foundation through Oshki Wuppowane: The Blanket Fund, and the Government of Ontario through the Tourism Relief Fund.
