Reception: RMG Fridays April 1, 7-10pm

Artists’ Talk: April 9, 2-4pm

The students in Durham College’s Fine Arts Advanced program are, like all creatively engaged artists, involved in the continual process of identifying and pursuing meaningful subjects that pertain to their own evolving bodies of work.

Utilizing experimental freedom and the research and development of distinct strategies relevant to their practice, the student artist learns to further define and focus their unique interests and engage in ever more profound studio work.

An exhibition featuring IRIS group members:

Laura M. Hair, Judith A. Mason, Mary Ellen McQuay, Janice Taylor-Prebble, Margaret Rodgers, Sally Thurlow, Wendy Wallace

Reception: RMG Fridays, March 4, 7-10pm

Artist Talk and FILMIC Catalogue Launch: Sunday, March 6, 1-3pm

The IRIS Group, a collective of women artists, is celebrating its 20^th anniversary in 2016 with an exhibition that revisits ten International Women’s Day projects involving the collection of objects and writings invested with personal or symbolic meaning. These items, with photographic on-site documentation, form part of The IRIS Group’s extensive dialogue concerning women’s issues.

In IRIS at 20, members are creating new works based on the collected and archived objects from women across Canada and internationally. The many faces and donated artefacts and words become part of a major installation in Gallery A, the RMG’s exciting new space.

Artists’ Biographies:

Laura M. Hair is an original member of the IRIS Group who is an exhibiting artist/educator. In her work she references and combines historical and nature based imagery.

Judith A. Mason is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and arts educator whose recent work is an investigation of inner psychological experience and its collective manifestations.

Since 1983, Mary Ellen McQuay’s photo based work has been exhibited extensively, included in public and private collections, published in numerous books and magazines and won national and international awards.

Margaret Rodgers is a visual artist and writer, founder of IRIS, former art teacher at Durham and Centennial Colleges, and past Director/Curator at VAC Clarington. http://www.margaretrodgers.ca

Janice Taylor-Prebble, with a focus on printmaking and painting, discusses reflected human interactions. A graduate of Georgian College and OCAD + Florence, she is also a licensed electrician and has exhibited widely.

Sally Thurlow is a multi-disciplinary artist with a Fine Arts BA from the University of Toronto. Her work is held in private collections across Canada, and at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. She is also a member of The Red Head Gallery in Toronto.

Wendy Wallace is a visual artist and educator with the Durham District School Board, a U of T, Banff Centre and UOIT alumna. She has been exploring the Badlands from Alberta to Montana for the past three summers.

Introduction: RMG Fridays January 8, 7-10pm

Artist Talk: February 7, 2016, 1pm

Closing Reception: Thursday, February 25, 7-9pm

Janice McHaffie wishes to use this residency to create paintings that openly talk about the underlying stigma surrounding conversations around death and dying. McHaffie believes that she is on a quest to encompass, explore and create on canvas abstract pieces that signify and represent both the positive upheavals and the negative breakdowns in life. She wants to portray the world’s rich texture through meaningful and powerful works of abstraction.

In addition to using various academic techniques, McHaffie also uses some abstract art methods that she invented while recovering from a brain injury, during which she lost use of her dominant arm. She now uses one or both her arms to paint. Having conversed with people who have had near-death experiences, she hopes to recreate their vivid visions using colour, line, shapes, balance, form and composition to depict life changing events and the possibilities beyond. The colour in her abstract pieces is usually bold, vivid and helps tell the entire story.

McHaffie also believes in engaging with her audience wholly, painting directly in the gallery space to allow a more fluid interaction between artist and viewer. By the end of her residency, she hopes to create a collage and a sculpture using pieces of paper and ribbon left by the viewers in remembrance of people or animals that they have loved and lost.

About the Artist:

Janice McHaffie is an award- winning Canadian artist from Claremont, Ontario. She has almost 16 years of university level art training including 5 years fine arts at Durham College and a year at OCAD. Having started with stone carving at the University of Guelph in the early 1970’s, her work has progressed and metamorphosed into an eclectic range of paintings with hundreds of her works in public and private collections around the world. She is also the Youth Liaison for Pineridge Arts Council, Pickering.

McHaffie believes she is on a quest to encompass, explore and create both the smooth edges of tranquility and the rough edges of difficulties to replicate the rich textures of life. During the residency, she will be painting abstract as well as figurative artworks for her new series, “Dying and Death: A cultural conversation.” She uses various techniques including those she invented when she temporarily had the use of only one arm after sustaining a brain injury. Having conversed with people who have had near-death experiences, she hopes to recreate their vivid visions using colour, line, shapes and form to depict life changing events and the possibilities beyond.

McHaffie wants to create a body of work that will allow a more relaxed and fluid channel to converse about dying and death. The hope is that her paintings will remove some of the stigma that surrounds conversations of dying and death.

This residency allows the public to view the process in creating these works. McHaffie wishes to share her perspective on life and death through her paintings and to engage with artists residing in the Durham Region.

Join us and celebrate the work of these budding young artists at the opening reception on April 21 at 7pm.

Students at nearly every high school in the Durham District School Board (DDSB) will be exhibiting work at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa for the next four weeks as part of the annual ‘For Art’s Sake’ exhibit.

For Art’s Sake, is a bi-annual event recognizing secondary school visual arts student’s abilities. Secondary schools at the DDSB will be represented by their students who submit works in the form of paintings, photography and sculptures. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa is generously hosting the event.

The DDSB and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery invite you to join us and take some time over the next month to enjoy a leisurely walk through the gallery to recognize our students’ dedication to their passions.

Opening and Artist’s Talk: Sunday, May 29 from 1-3pm

Artist Talk with Sarindar Dhaliwal and the Colour Research Society of Canada: August 13, 1-2:30pm

Organized and circulated by Rodman Hall Art Centre/Brock University in collaboration with The Robert McLaughlin Gallery and The Reach Museum Abbotsford.

Toronto-based artist Sarindar Dhaliwal was born in the Punjab, India, and raised in London, England before moving to Canada in 1968. Working in a range of media that includes installation, video, photography, and drawing, she weaves compelling narratives that explore issues of culture, migration, and identity. Rooted in memories and dreams, Dhaliwal’s work reflects on the dissonance of the immigrant experience, often addressing her childhood experience and perceptions of Eastern and Western customs. Drawing out the themes of personal identity and familial relationships that appear throughout her practice, this exhibition brings together monumental works from Dhaliwal’s oeuvre of the last twenty years, contextualizing her recent interdisciplinary body of work exploring the history and ongoing consequences of the 1947 partition of India. Addressing difficult personal and collective narratives in lush, visually-stunning works that employ vibrant colours and floral motifs, Dhaliwal’s thought-provoking work responds to colonial histories with a critical approach that maintains reverence for wonder and imagination so that, as the artist describes, she may return beauty to the world.

Sarindar Dhaliwal received her BFA with a concentration in sculpture at University College Falmouth, UK, and her MFA from York University. She is currently enrolled in the Cultural Studies PhD program at Queens University. Dhaliwal was the 2012 recipient of the Canada Council International Residency at Artspace in Sydney, Australia. She has exhibited widely in Canada since the 1980s.

 

Opening at RMG Fridays: May 6, 7-10pm

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”

― Judith Thurman

This ongoing series has been shaped during the continuing travels of Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock. The photographs were taken during cross-continental road trips in a family-filled car, to explorations of a new “hometown” in a different country. The images represent the quiet moments that she found among the chaos of travel, as well as the pieces of a place that she grasped onto, and that in return, etched themselves onto her.

Gundlock earned a BFA. in Visual Arts from York University and has been a recipient of both Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council grants. Her previous work centred around the idea of home and tales of the occupants that lived within the walls.

Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock was the CIBC Wood Gundy Emerging Artist winner of RMG Exposed 2015. In conjunction with this exhibition, her photograph Coin Operated Binoculars will be displayed in the Core21 window space in downtown Oshawa until August.

When one thinks of the term Moving Image, early cinema comes to mind. Yet the term “moving” or “move” has various connotations. In exploring The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s collection of over 4500 works that range from paintings and sculpture to photography, drawing, prints, installation and video, themes begin to emerge.

Today the unprecedented movement of people around the globe has garnered international concern. In 2013 the United Nations estimated that 232 million people are currently migrating from their original home countries. There are various reasons for these moves: regional conflict, persecution and economics are among the most obvious motives for leaving one’s country of origin. Many are dispossessed and that feeling of rootlessness becomes defining. So too, do we see the mass movement of animals and birds—an instinctual response to changing seasons.

We live in the second largest country in the world with a vast landscape. The wind blowing the wheat of a prairie field, the rushing waters of a mountain stream, the scuttling clouds across a seemingly infinite sky evoke a sense of constant movement. Our history is in the land, as indicated in the recently found footprints on Calvert Island that are estimated to be over 13,000 years old. Yet disputes about this land also shape identities: from those who choose to define Canada as a coast-to-coast-to-coast nation whose borders (particularly the northern border) must be protected from other nations, to those who question the land rights within these borders based on ignored treaties brought to light most recently in the Idle No More movement.

The RMG collection, strongly defined by mid-century modernism, holds examples of movement in abstraction—colour and line creating illusions of motion. There are also emotionally moving images, both individual and collective, and, too, the physical movement of animal and humans.

There are many entry points into works from a collection that began with a generous gift of thirty-seven works by Painters Eleven member Alexandra Luke. The collection itself is forever moving—new acquisitions making new entry points and connections possible. As the RMG’s mandate makes clear, the gallery is a place dedicated to sharing, exploring and engaging with our communities through the continuing story of modern and contemporary Canadian art.

This exhibition of work by Ray Mead is taken from The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s extensive collection of paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture by members of Ontario’s first abstract expressionist collective, Painters Eleven.

As an overview of his career, the exhibition includes early figurative and still life drawings and paintings. It then moves to his abstract works, both geometric and expressionist. Mead’s later works are luminous abstractions of simplified forms that simultaneously encompass complex compositions. Throughout his career, his work was characterized by the use of rich fields of colour. In a 1977 interview he stated: “I felt Canada gave me a sense of colour much more than a sense of horizons.”

Ray Mead, a member of Painters Eleven, was born in England where he studied at the Slade School of Art. There, he was exposed to the work of Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash. He first encountered semi-abstract work in New York during World War II where he was stationed training bomber pilots. He immigrated to Hamilton in 1946 where he met Hortense Gordon. Mead was particularly influenced by Gordon acknowledging: “she educated me more than any art school.” He had a successful career as a commercial artist for the MacLaren Advertising Company, in both Toronto and Montreal, returning to Toronto in 1987 to paint full time. While attracted to the works of American abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Mead was deeply influenced by European abstractionists such as Nicolas de Staël.

The title of the exhibition, Living Within, references another quote by Mead from 1979: “…a painter really must paint within the history in which he is living.” In examining work that spans a time frame of three decades we have an opportunity to contemplate where Ray Mead is situated in both a Canadian and international context.

Join us for RMG Fridays: Holiday Magic on December 4 and learn more about Ray Mead with a curatorial tour!

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In the age of digital photography and image editing software, the authenticity of photography is often questioned. When photography was invented it was thought to depict objective reality and absolute truth, but almost immediately photographers found ways to alter and manipulate images. Artists sought to establish photography as an art form by finding ways to stylize the results, while others discovered the possibilities of using the medium to deceive the public.

This exhibition focuses on the practice of photo manipulation within local history and the motivations behind it. Generally, reasons to tamper with an image were either aesthetic or deceptive. In the case of the photographs featured in this exhibition, some were altered for aesthetic expression, to add a family member who had either passed or lived far away, novelty items, or to encourage visitors to Oshawa by beautifying street views. There are also various examples of images that were altered using a variety of techniques, including multiple exposure, combination printing, photomontage, overpainting, and retouching on the negative or print.

Photography was one of history’s most impactful inventions; the medium continues to evolve and influence how we see the world. While some photographers today still choose to edit in the darkroom, more and more are embracing the digital age of editing software. Looking back on manipulated photography before the digital age shows that although the technical process has changed the motivations have not. This exhibition includes images from the Thomas Bouckley Collection, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s permanent art collection, the Whitby Archives, Oshawa Public Libraries and the Oshawa Community Museum and Archives.