The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is dedicated to supporting the development of emerging artists in Durham Region. Since 2001, a biannual exhibition introduces the community to emerging artists who were both born and raised or currently reside in the Durham Region, and provides them with the opportunity for recognition by their regional gallery and advancement in their careers. Interestingly, when bringing together three very different artists who share only a geographic affinity, an artistic discourse begins to take shape. Moriarity, Berube and Latimer represent a wide range of artistic practice: Moriarity is a painter, Berube a photographer, and Latimer an experimental film artist.

Marshall McLuhan believed that ‘the medium is the message’- that is to say that the medium is just as important to study as the content, since the characteristics of a medium can greatly affect the understanding of the message it carries. This is the case for all three artists whose chosen devices carry as much weight as the message itself. Through their practice, they strive to merge realities to create something new, whether through a screen, lens or frame.

While Moriarty, Berube and Latimer are influenced by technical devices (internet, cameras, film equipment), each of them, in the end, returns to traditional practice: painting, the dark room, and antiquated film equipment. Their works come together by way of a series of viewfinders – Moriarity uses the internet as an onlooker, Berube uses the camera lens as a bystander, and Latimer uses film equipment to comment on the evolution of technology. In their attempts to make connections with the world and technology, the emphasis is placed on their chosen mediums to bring meaning and understanding to their works.

Repurposing is the act of altering something so it takes on a new function. For many, repurposing is not just a preference, but also a necessary act of survival. While evolutionists may argue that the ability to adapt is central to the survival of a species, repurposing creates space to redefine reality.

There are subtle yet important differences between the terms adapt and re-purpose. The word adapt has many meanings, and within certain discourse, it is often associated with adjustments intended to make a more inclusive world. For example, we may modify a workstation to become wheelchair accessible; hiring practices are adjusted to respond to employment inequity and to encourage greater diversity in the work place. Adapting does not require major systemic change and rarely does it result in redistribution of privilege or empowerment. To adapt is to assume that the status quo should be accepted as is. Society however, presents an onslaught of misdistributions of power and inequality, and for the artists presented in this exhibition, the notion of simply conforming to this reality presents a gross failure of imagination. Instead, they repurpose.

This interactive group exhibition focuses on artists who repurpose and reclaim objects and ideas within their practice, and in doing so present new ways of seeing and understanding the world. Artists include Spanish artist Coco Riot, Jan Derbyshire, Cait Davis, Stephen Fakiyesi, Maria Hupfield and a collaborative video work by Jason Tschantré and the late Lisa Bufano.

In automobiles, the passenger side mirror warns that objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. What it’s saying is that what we think we see is not necessarily accurate— what’s actually there is closer than it looks, a shrinking of reality.

Art is not always what we initially think it is. A photograph of a landscape is actually a pure invention; a painting of a QR code hides its message in the digital stratosphere, and an abstract painting has, as its starting point, an object in the real world. When speaking of his series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral, Monet noted that his subject was not a view of the cathedral but was the act of seeing that view. While car manufacturers must warn drivers that what theythink they see in a mirror is not how the object actuallyshould be viewed and understood, art acts differently. There is no right or wrong way of looking at art, although the more one looks, the more one sees. As the art historian Kenneth Clark notes “looking at pictures requires active participation.”

Works in this exhibition come from the RMG’s expansive permanent collection and focus on the intimate view—the one that insists that we look again in order to see what’s there. Is the distorted figure an actual human, and how does our brain process Op Art? What we’re seeing is not only the objects more closely, but those objects often in ways that we’re not used to seeing them: enlarged, close and cropped views or completely out of our daily context. The RMG collection, which began with a gift of 37 works, now numbers over 4000 and includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, drawings and installation work. This exhibition includes recent acquisitions that continue to shape the collection and reflect, as the mandate states, a dedication to share, explore and engage with our communities through the continuing story of modern and contemporary Canadian art.

 

The concept of individual worth as represented by personal possessions is not new. Over the last century, consumerism has experienced a series of mutations following the Industrial Revolution and the Second World War, spawning our current consumer culture. With an increasing appetite for material ‘things’, the invention and manufacture of goods has exponentially grown with global implications. This is the underlying theme of Ian Johnston: Reinventing Consumption.

Johnston’s work addresses three issues: the invention of material objects due to increasing demand, the manufacturing process, and the accumulation of material goods. Several international artistic residencies sparked Johnston’s observation of the similarities, rather than the differences, of consumer behaviour across cultures. Everyday household items are brought to life in Antechamber which includes hundreds of ceramic elements using a vacuum forming technique perfected by Johnston over a number of years. Johnston’s sculptural pieces translate as architectural structures. The Chamber references the artistic process in the form of an inflating nylon bag concealing, and yet revealing found objects underneath. Finally, The Inventor’s Roomis a curatorial display of the tools involved in the creative process.

A thought-provoking commentary on a consumer-driven society, Reinventing Consumption reflects the nature and evolution of our relationship to the material world.

RBC sponsors an exhibition each year for the winner of the Best Overall Submission during the RMG’s annual fundraiser, RMG Exposed. The purpose of this prize is to raise awareness of contemporary photographers and their work. At last fall’s event, Toronto-based photographer Jonathan Groeneweg’s Bleecker Street Co-op Garden took the top award.

Roots in the Garden is a continuation of Groeneweg’s Nature of Urbanity series, which included Groeneweg’s winning photo. That larger body of work was a product of academic research and artistic creation, which led to a Masters of Fine Arts degree at Ryerson University in Documentary Media, a thesis revolving around the important discussion of nature as a product of culture.

Addressing historic and contemporary issues within the discourses of landscape, philosophy, and urban development, Groeneweg creates aerial photo-panoramic composites of urban vegetable gardens. He explores relationships by contrasting mathematical precision and control of constructed space with the organic chaos of foliage and greenery. The vegetable garden is one of our oldest cultural constructs and has come to reflect many of our most cherished human ideals. It combines our rational desire for scientific control with the spiritual process in which we are deeply rooted. The garden is the starting point for the story of humanity’s migration from the wilderness towards the development of civilization in its current state, as well as a focus on things outside of primarily meeting the necessities of life.

The photographs in this series combine digital photographic prints of the Leslie Street Allotment Gardens in Toronto and traditional print embossing techniques to introduce the anomalous human form. This combination creates a subtle interplay between the form of the garden, its maker, and the veil of ‘nature’ surrounding it.

We are grateful to RBC Dominion Securities for sponsoring this exhibition.

Kim Ondaatje is an artist, filmmaker, and cultural advocate whose diverse efforts have greatly impacted the lives of artists in Canada. This retrospective exhibition includes selections from over twenty-five public and private collections across Canada and offers a comprehensive survey of Ondaatje’s career.

Ondaatje’s exploration of painting became a full-time effort by the mid 1960’s following her studies at the Ontario College of Art, McGill University, and Queen’s University. Included in this exhibition are three distinct cycles of work: her earliest forays into minimalist, often abstracted, yet bold landscape imagery; a later, pared-down, subtly toned collection of interior scenes known as The House on Picadilly Street series; and a group of industrial images known as the Factory series. A film from the Factory series is also included.

Over time, Ondaatje’s painting evolved from a conventional style through more formalist abstraction and representational work, investigating place and space. From the landscapes of her early work, through the interiors, and later the factory scenes, Ondaatje’s paintings reveal an artist interested in investigating her surroundings, which in turn helped to widen the scope of the Canadian landscape tradition.

In 2009, together with Tony Urquhart, Kim Ondaatje received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art for Outstanding Contribution for their role (with the late Jack Chambers) in establishing the nonprofit association promoting artists’ rights, Canadian Artist’s Representation (CARFAC).

Ondaatje’s art has been shown in Canada and internationally from the 1960s to the present. This was organized by Museum London with support from the Museums Assistance Program of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

From the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, prints were the only means of dispersing images of Canada. Because they could be captured and produced in significant numbers, the prints satisfied a population eager for scenes of a land of adventure, of critical military encounters, and of settlements that foretold peace and a prosperous future.

Artists obliged the demand for images that appealed to dreams and ambitions of those who would venture through Canada and those who called it home. At times wild and powerful, and sometimes inaccurate, artists created images that appealed to the temperament of the times.

The works in this exhibition are sourced exclusively from the EY Art Collection, one of the largest collections of original prints in private hands in Canada. Never before exhibited to the general public, these images cover a span of over one hundred years and include images of major events, exotic locales, and important individuals.

Capturing Canada provides an opportunity to see almost one hundred of these prints. An important part of the corporate art collection of EY, these works are being shown in 2014 as EY celebrates its 150th anniversary. Through dynamic images of Niagara Falls, our vast Arctic territories, major Canadian cities, and the building of the railway, Capturing Canada demonstrates the legacy of EY’s contribution to the history of both Canada and its art.

The Thomas Bouckley Collection exhibitions typically include images that depict the exterior facades of historic buildings. This is with good reason; looking at the outside of a building is important for the local historic record. It also helps us to draw a mental map of how Oshawa used to appear. The focus is usually on ‘where’ people lived, worked, visited, and not often on ‘how’ they lived. But interior views can be much more revealing when it comes to social history.

The collection of images in this exhibition offers a more transparent view into the private spaces of Oshawa’s past residents. These interiors provide a glimpse into domestic life and working conditions, and offer a human connection to the spaces. Some of the photographs show private spaces within homes, others show stores or factories, but all of them make us think more about the occupants and purpose of the space, rather than where the building was located and what it architecturally looked like. What can these interior views reveal about their past occupants?

In the fall of 1955, Painters Eleven member Jock Macdonald wrote to a friend that he had recently moved to a first floor apartment at 4 Maple Avenue in Toronto. Here he would meet young art dealer Av Isaacs, who lived on the second floor of the house, and artist Michael J. Kuczer, who lived on the third floor. Kuczer and Macdonald would spend time together for the next five years, until the latter’s death in 1960, discussing each other’s painting and arguing about art. The influence that the men had on each other’s work is obvious.

Born in Winnipeg in 1910, Kuczer began to both paint and play the violin at the young age of seven, and as a high school student, enrolled in the Winnipeg School of Art where he was taught by LeMoine Fitzgerald. Of his meeting with Fitzgerald, he would state: “[he] led me into the world of art as none other could possibly have done.”

Despite receiving a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, Kuczer would pursue his music studies, also with a scholarship, at the Royal College of Music in London. During the twenty-year period that he lived in England he always painted, mostly landscapes, portraits and nudes, until taking a drawing course at St. John’s Wood School of Art where one of his fellow students introduced him to abstract art. Kuczer returned to Canada in 1949 and taught music and painting. The friendship he formed with Macdonald a few years later was, as he writes: “stimulating and in turn affected my work.”

The paintings in this exhibition, completed between 1955 and 1965, use a rich and varied palette and often, a central element. These lyrically abstract works were a move away from the artist’s earlier, more cubist abstract works and a subtle move towards the hard edge paintings that would occupy him until his death in 1975.

Of his work as a painter, Michael Kuczer said: “My greatest desire is to express as well as possible the inspiration that first prompts a painting.”

We thank Marilyn Westlake for her generosity in lending us the work in this exhibition.

 

The Canadian Group of Painters (CGP) began as a collective of twenty-eight artists from across Canada. Formed in 1933 as a direct outgrowth of the Group of Seven, the CGP was the first group to aspire to cross-country representation of modern artists. The group was intentionally diverse; it included women, who made up almost one-third of the membership. Indeed it was Isabel McLaughlin, life-long patron of the RMG, who was elected the first non-Group of Seven (and first female) president in 1939, a position she held for more than six years.

CGP exhibitions travelled across Canada and the US, often raising debate and controversy on the state of art and culture in Canada. The subject matter had great variety, and included figurative works, landscapes, abstraction, and realism. What made the group such a vital force was its engagement with modern life—in subject matter, artistic approach and social activity—against the background of the Depression, World War II and postwar reconstruction.

The CGP brought together many of Canada’s most recognized artists such as B.C. Binning, Jack Bush, Emily Carr, Charles Comfort, Paraskeva Clark, Prudence Heward, Yvonne McKague Housser, Jock Macdonald, Pegi Nicol MacLeod, and Isabel McLaughlin, among others, who showcased powerful works of art for a national audience. The works presented in A Vital Force: The Canadian Group of Painters are from the group’s first twenty years of exhibitions, from 1933 to 1953. This is the first major touring exhibition to focus exclusively on the CGP by bringing together significant paintings from public and private collections across Canada.

This exhibition is organized and circulated by the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, in partnership with The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and Queen’s University Archives, with the generous support of the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage.