The 1930’s was an era of transition in Canadian art. The influence of European masters in the early 20th century had brought a sense of internationalism to Canada, while a new generation of American painters created a thirst for modernism. The conservative Canadian art world was long established on traditional, figurative works of art, particularly landscape paintings displayed in the collective work of the Group of Seven. Outside influences, however, meant that at the same time some artists were working to develop new forms of representation, offering a fresh approach. Abstracted Lenses explores the transition in Canadian art from the objective to the nonrepresentational, highlighting the processes involved and the pioneers who initiated abstract art in Canada.

Through experimentation, a few artists working in Canada aimed to purify art by fracturing, manipulating, and striping their subjects down to their core elements. Emphasizing a harmonious relationship between line and form, they were able to harness an ideal abstract quality, in essence re-imagining the perceived world around them. This innovative approach used colour as a vehicle to convey mood or atmosphere rather than signify an element of nature and an emphasis on overall design was favoured. The systematic process of non-figurative artwork sought to create a universal art form, which significantly helped awaken fundamentally new approaches to creative expression.

The exhibition includes selections from the RMG’s permanent collection featuring Henrietta Shore, Bertram Brooker, Jock Macdonald, and Kathleen Munn.

Geographic neighbours Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario share a border, as well as a distinctive urban environment. Christopher McNamara, an artist interested in sound as much as the visual experience, works on both sides of this border, and through his work reveals a narrative imbued with technology and fascinated with the pace of everyday experience.

This exhibition includes two works that explore the sights and sounds of cities caught by camera, and relocated to installation and short film. His latest work, Falling in Place, is inspired by a somber short story of the same name written by the artist’s father, Eugene McNamara. It tells us the account of a young woman, a pianist, and the accompanying tale of the train engineer who drives the locomotive that eventually strikes her. It is a haunting tale (told through three 3D films that are shown simultaneously) reinterpreted into unsettling, but beautiful, films.

In the work Amulet City: On Location, McNamara provides us with a city populated by narratives, stories housed in tiny buildings constructed complete with billboards and branded signs. The buildings reveal the influence of geography on the artist, and yet they are not tied to any specific location. These miniature landscapes create a sense of nostalgia, yet embody a place that never was.

This exhibition brings to the forefront small details of lives lived and makes them iconic, in effect creating familiar worlds we sense we may have inhabited.

 

Each year at our fundraiser RMG Exposed we hold a juried photography competition that strives to increase awareness of contemporary photography while supporting our institution’s education and community programming. Tom Ridout’s entry was the winner of Best Overall Submission at RMG Exposed 2012 and received the RBC Emerging Photography Award. This exhibition is the result.

Ridout’s educational foundation and years of experience in landscape architecture has provided him with an understanding of natural and constructed urban landscapes. This insight forms the basis of his photographic projects. His approach to photography is technical; maximizing clarity, avoiding abstractions of focus, colour manipulation, or perspective distortion. This camera-centred approach refuses computer software from injecting a signature, and instead offers images in clear, highly realistic detail.

In this series, Ridout has studied structures, specifically those that are impacted by scaffolding. In German, the term “eingehüllt” means shrouded, wrapped, or cocooned. The shrouds covering structures ultimately change and inform the understanding of what lies within as the interaction between the original structure and the scaffolding cover together create a visual synergy of light and form.

The add-ons to the architecture are typically there as part of a repair effort, but the result is the creation of a new structure altogether, one that is visually much different than what lies beneath. This temporary carapace redefines our perceptions, and ultimately, can function as an analogy to how we perceive other people, cultures, and environments.

To accompany Richard Harrington: Arctic Photographer, we have organized Perspectives: Collecting Inuit Art, an exhibition that provides a glimpse of the varying tastes of collectors seeking northern art. It includes prints donated by a collector to the RMG permanent collection, as well as the sculptural treasures from the RMG’s vault and from local residents Donald and Patricia Dodds’ and Elsie Tait’s collections.

Two suites of prints from the RMG collection will be exhibited for the first time: a portfolio of twelve by Kenojuak Ashevak and six by Jamasie Teevee. Kenojuak was born on the southern coast of Baffin Island in 1927 where, from an early age, she produced traditional dolls and beaded sealskin work. She was one of the first Inuit women to begin drawing at Cape Dorset (now more often referred to as Kinngait) after James Houston introduced print-making to the area in the 1950s. Her strong forms with vibrant colours come, as she says, “out of my thoughts and out of my imagination.”

The six prints by Jamasie Teevee, who was born in the Kimmirut area in 1910, depict life in traditional Inuit camps—stylistic renderings of Inuit beside summer encampments; dogsleds on the move and colourfully clothed young hunters. These stonecuts are based on personal experience of living on the land.

While printmaking techniques were introduced through Houston, carving among the Inuit has a rich history of over 4000 years and includes objects of both aesthetic and spiritual importance. In the later part of the twentieth century, with southern market demand for work by Inuit artists, the use of material began to expand from the more usual whale tusk to soapstone, argillite and serpentinite. The exhibition includes examples of early, small ivory carvings that the Hudson Bay Company purchased directly from the carvers and later work done in soapstone—at times larger sculpture that was a response to the tastes of the southern market. Artists include Tivi Ilisituk, Cain Irqqarqsaq, Moses Pov, Kenojuak Pudlat, and Timothy.

Richard Harrington was born in 1911 in Hamburg, Germany. He immigrated to Canada in the mid 1920’s, and went on to become one of our most respected photographers. His career led him to over 100 countries, and more than 2400 of his photographic stories were published in numerous magazines and books.

In 1947 Harrington made a trip to Inukjuak in the eastern Arctic, and his desire to see the far north was stirred. Over the next decade, he made five additional trips north and his resulting photographs now form a historical record of a vanishing way of life, as the Inuit people were soon to abandon their nomadic lifestyle to settle into permanent camps.

This exhibition features photographs from several of these trips. Complimenting them, are a number of sculptures from the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s impressive Inuit art collection that reference Harrington’s last trip to the Arctic in 1959. During that trip, he visited the Nunavik settlement of Puvirnituq to document carving techniques, particularly those of Charlie Sivuarapik, whose work had become well-known in the late 1950s. Harrington’s photos of the carver were used in an article for Canadian Geographic Journal in 1960. The sculpture Inuit Hunter with Caribou and Dog shown in several photographs is included in this exhibition.

Presenting photography by a non-Inuit artist and carvings by an Inuit artist together provides a new context for visitors to view these historical records of a time and place that has profoundly changed in the last 50 years.

German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that “ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects: not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” The second in a series of exhibitions featuring works from local collectors, this exhibition highlights one aspect of Toronto and Prince Edward County-based collector Terri Lipman’s collection: women artists. Her collection consists of furniture, artefacts, paintings, sculpture, drawings, and fibre works but in particular, the RMG shares her interest in the work of Canadian women artists.

As a child Lipman made regular trips with her mother to art galleries and antique shops and her parent’s home was filled with Canadian art, modern Scandinavian design and mid-century pottery. Ranging from work by mid 20th century and contemporary Canadian women artists to anonymous folk and design work, Lipman’s interest in “hand works” has obviously steered her own collection. Through collecting, she has formed wonderful relationships not only with the artwork, but with the artists, as well.

While the work in this exhibition is diverse, what conjoins them for Lipman are impressions where reality is tinged with reverie, stories intimated, lessons learned and all conveyed thoughtfully through a myriad of materials. As much as the artworks, Lipman is interested in the journey of collecting: where it began; where it is today; and where it is going.

The exhibition includes work by Pegi Nicol Macleod, Jori Smith, Mary Wrinch, Heather Goodchild, Lisa Diquinzio, Shary Boyle, and Naomi Yasui among others.

Photography allows a moment in time to be captured and maintained long after it has passed. Candid images rely on spontaneity—when a subject is unaware, or are in mid-action.

French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson who coined the term “The Decisive Moment” said: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.”

This exhibition presents candid moments captured on film depicting Oshawa’s past residents. They are not contrived, posed, or formal portraits but instead capture the spirit of a moment or event.

Vessna Perunovich was born and raised in a state that no longer exists. Although she has departed from ex-Yugoslavia more than 20 years ago, the theme of exile and longing are still being echoed in most of her work. From the time she started her career in Canada in 1988 until today, she has worked in a diverse range of media, including painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, video and performance. Neither Here Nor There is the first survey exhibition of her video works, presenting artwork realized in the last seven years of her practice.

The installation Neither Here Nor There is a collection of eight video works in which Perunovich plays with her own position in the border space of her identity. Exploring the notion of place and its complex and contradicting nature to both entice and alienate, Peruovich situates herself in relationship to environments, both real and imagined. A Toronto-based visual artist, Perunovich has exhibited at numerous international biennales in Cuba, Albania, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece.

 

Vessna Perunovich is a Toronto-based, internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist who works in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, installation, and performance. Born in 1960 in Serbia, she earned both her Bachelor of Fine Arts (1984) and her Master of Fine Arts (1987) at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She immigrated to Canada in 1988.

Perunovich has exhibited at International biennials in Cuba, Albania, England, Portugal, Yugoslavia, and Greece as well as across Canada. She has attended residencies in Berlin, New York, Banff, Bursa (Turkey), and Mileseva (Serbia). Her survey exhibitions Borderless and Emblems of Enigma toured prestigious galleries and museums across Canada and Europe. Her work has been reviewed in numerous magazines and periodicals, including Canadian Art, Espace Sculpture, World Sculpture Magazine, Umelec, and Border Crossings among others. Perunovich is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts (2005), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council Grants and Chalmers Development Grant. Her work is included in many public and private collections, and is the subject of two monographs: (W)hole, 2004 and Emblems of the Enigma, 2008.

Perunovich is a sessional teacher at the Ontario College of Art and Design and she has lectured at various schools and Universities including the University of Guelph, Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Faculty of Arts and Letters in Havana, Cuba and others. She is an Artistic Director for the Toronto Arts & Fashion Festival [FAT]. Vessna Perunovich is represented by Angell Gallery.

Automotive design began as a simple evolution from the horse and carriage; initially a form and function proposition, design started to change as a result of the 1925 Art Deco fair in Paris. The importance of style took hold in the consciousness of the buying public, and by the 1940’s, the significance of sophisticated design in the manufacture of a car became paramount.

The evolution slowed during war times, as manufacturing focus was placed on military efforts. Many design staff were called up to service; a Cadillac plant in Detroit began turning out tanks less than eight weeks after the last 1942 model car came off the line. In the years following World War II, the American Dream took shape. A vision of prosperity emerged, one that included the perfect family, a modern home, and the ownership of a vehicle. This was the new American way of life; it presented an opportunity, and a thirsty market, for automotive manufacturers. The market was more sophisticated, World of Tomorrow exhibits at the 1939 World’s Fair were influential, and science fiction magazines and comics boomed in sales. The future was nothing short of an obsession, and the styling of rockets, bombs, and twin-tail airplanes dominated popular culture.

When war ended in Europe, manufacturers reactivated their design studios. The influence of a war era, a glimpse to the future, and a desire for sophisticated design permeated and in-house designers turned out illustrations as artistic as they were functional. The illustrations in the exhibition Future Retro, organized by Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are sourced from this golden age of automotive design. The illustrations and design proposals included in this exhibition present a vision of the future, rooted firmly in an era past.

 

In 1985, the RMG was given over fifty prints by Laurence Hyde from the estate of his teacher, Charles Goldhamer, who had amassed an impressive collection of Hyde’s work, including the only known copy of the Seven Ages of Man series.

Born in England in 1914, Hyde came to Canada at the age of twelve. Two early encounters were of particular importance to his career: in 1928, he saw Lawren Harris’ paintings at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the AGO), and in 1932 he met the artist Thoreau Macdonald. These experiences led Hyde to Toronto’s Central Technical School where he took classes under Goldhamer, Robert Ross, and Carl Schaefer.

During his career, Hyde would primarily produce wood engravings, a method that uses hardwood blocks, cut across the grain. Because of the hardness of the wood, very fine, precise lines can be achieved and the prints are quite small.

After completing art school, Hyde worked for Golden Dog Press. There he worked on his own engravings, including a series on Macbeth and the unpublished Discovery series. He also produced illustrations as a freelance artist, and in 1942, began working for the National Film Board’s animation department where he worked until his retirement in 1972.

Hyde was able to convey powerful stories through compositions of light and dark imagery within a very small format. Each work has a strong, individual presence that shows the artist’s technical virtuosity and ability to convey emotion through simple imagery.