Opening: RMG Fridays, September 9, 7-10pm
Guest Speakers Forum: October 22, 1-4pm

Feminist writer, poet, and social justice activist, Gloria Anzaldúa describes fantasy and the world of images as being that of “the underworld”, a world where desire and dreams are unattached to our external reality and free from any expectation for reason or convention. Imagining alternative spaces fuels us with the agency to be different, to try on new identities and embodiments, to express individual experience and longing, to disrupt the status quo and to form pathways to change. Through our bodies, our words, our communities and our art, these imaginings find their portals out to the public and find meaning in those who witness, who watch and who carefully listen.

Sometimes our imaginings are hijacked by messages in the media, and by stereotypes and cultural perceptions of the ‘real’. Fantasy and reality, the internal world and the external world interweave when we tell, and are told to believe, stories about our bodies, our minds, our histories, our ancestors, our gods, our identities, our purposes or roles in society. Living with and taking pride in the experience of disability and difference lends itself to dismantling these messages that isolate, exclude, segregate and tell us that we shouldn’t be here.

The Images in Our Heads takes its title from a passage in “Borderlands/ La Frontera” by Gloria Anzaldúa. Writing from the geographical position of the American Southwest, Anzaldúa identifies the cultural, territorial, spiritual and sexual borders in her life, and describes the psychological and emotional states that occur when inhabiting these borders. She talks about a back and forth negotiation between the internal and external forces and understanding of difference. “The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”

Alana McDougall, Syrus Marcus Ware, Alexis Bulman, Jennifer Martin and Andrew McPhail explore the tension between their external reality and what Anzaldúa describes as “the world of the soul and its images.” Breaking apart the visible and invisible, the artists negotiate the ‘real’ and deliver their imaginings of difference as a point of invention, magic, survival, resistance, celebration and unexplored territory.

Visit the exhibition website at theimagesinourheads.ca for the digital catalogue, more information about the artists, curators, programming, and exhibition as well as details about accessibility.

Funding for this project has been provided by a Deaf and Disability Project grant through the Ontario Arts Council.

Childhood is a universal human experience, but it isn’t experienced in a universal way. Ideas about what childhood is or what it should be are shaped by our culture, specific to a time and place. So how can childhood be defined?

UNESCO defines early childhood as: “[a] time of remarkable brain growth, these years lay the foundation for subsequent learning and development.” So while this is experienced by all, discussions regarding more complex aspects of childhood, from school curriculum, to the impact of social media, are just a few topics that have recently emerged into public debate. It is not surprising then that the subject of childhood is a relevant one in many fields, including the visual arts.

Artists have long depicted children and childhood using different conventions. In ancient Egypt, for example, children were depicted very small—often up to the adult’s knee, naked, and with a side hair lock of youth. During the Victorian era, in both England and Canada, middle class children were portrayed as happy and innocent, often dressed in oversized or old-fashioned clothing—to emphasize their physical smallness and the adults’ nostalgia for a lost childhood. This exhibition traces a historical progression of ideas about childhood in Western thought and their representation. Spanning over 100 years (1886-1991), the exhibition is a survey of paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs from The Robert McLaughlin Gallery’s permanent collection of over 4,500 works.

The works reference religious themes, family dynamics, traditions of schooling and discipline, and the shifting cultural ideals around children’s physical, social, and emotional development across both time and socio-geographic lines. Some works depict play and leisure, while others present sketches of a working class childhood.

As the title suggests, adults are encouraged to “ask children” what they think about these artworks. Do the depictions of children remind them of their own experiences? How do they differ? The activities that accompany the exhibition give young visitors an opportunity to interact with the work and introduce their own experiences and views into a gallery setting.

Closing: RMG Fridays, April 1, 7-10pm

Special Event: Durham Folklore Storytellers Present Their Stories, April 7, 7-9pm

“In order to take pleasure in these portraits…it does not seem to be necessary to have known the persons they represent.” – Sadakichi Hartmann

Photographic portraits are taken to document and remember one’s life, and can, in the process, capture the essence of a person’s character. Sadly, the identities of many historic portraits have been lost over time. The lives, personalities, histories and memories once associated with these portraits now a mystery.

When looking at portraits, the subjects gazing back seem to ask the viewer “Who am I?” Usually the first thing a viewer does in a museum or gallery is check the label for the identity of that person. Unidentified portraits are not commonly displayed, but they can stir the imagination. Who are they? What was their life like? The nameless faces looking back ask the viewer to imagine their lives.

We asked the community to help tell the stories of ten unidentified portraits in the Thomas Bouckley Collection. The responses we received were creative and diverse! A man standing in front of a painted backdrop of Niagara Falls, cigarette in hand, becomes a travelling shoemaker who has posted a dating profile in Matchmaker Dolly. A young woman dressed all in black winter clothing is mourning the passing of her love, a hand placed in front of her body hiding the growing baby in her womb. A priest in formal garb contemplates the implications invented technologies have on his congregation. And a handsome young man tries to mask his excitement about the engagement ring burning a hole in his pocket. Submissions included poems, short stories, letters, diary entries, and dating profiles. A jury reviewed the submissions, and the selected entries are featured in this exhibition. Congratulations to the winners!

While in the exhibition space, visitors are encouraged to further engage with the portraits by mounting their own imagined stories on a bulletin board. We may never know the identity of these people or discover more about their lives, yet it is possible to bring them to life through our imagination.

Creative Writing Winners:
Best Overall: Gwen Tuinman for “Confectionary Courtship”

Honourable Mentions:
Donald Wotton for “It’s the Little Things That Really Hurt”
Freda Jepson for “Night Train”

All stories will be available on our blog!

Reception: RMG Fridays, March 4, 7-10pm
Symposium: March 19,  2016 from 10am – 4pm

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has long been acclaimed for documentary, animated and feature films, which are among Canada’s iconic cultural products and exports. But few Canadians know that during a pivotal period in the country’s history—the mid-twentieth century—the NFB also functioned as the country’s official photographer.

Mandated by the federal government to promote the nation, the NFB’s Still Photography Division produced an “official” portrait of Canadian society. The Division commissioned its photographers to travel across the country, where they shot approximately 250,000 images of people, places, work, leisure, and cultural activities. Millions of Canadians as well as international audiences saw these photographs reproduced in newspapers, magazines, books, filmstrips, and exhibitions. The Other NFB looks at the how this agency imagined Canada and Canadian identity, what role photographs played in that imagining, and how the NFB’s photographic archive was—and continues to be—used.

The image of Canada produced by the NFB is celebratory and optimistic. The pressures and hardships of life during the Second World War and in subsequent decades are rarely visible. Instead, the photographs champion the country’s scenic beauty. They extol the Canadian economy in shoots on forestry, mining, and agricultural plenitude, and its booming urban centres. They honour Canadian artists, scientists and politicians. They depict thousands of unidentified citizens, and chart Canada’s increasingly diverse population. They also reflect trends in photojournalism and commercial photography of the day, and are among the most dynamic media images produced in mid-twentieth-century Canada.

The NFB did not construct Canadian national identity through the grand gestures of public monuments or stirring political oratory that we typically associate with nation building. Instead, it produced representations of the everyday, rendered in photography, a common and accessible medium. Such images were powerful in part because they were so familiar, so widely available, and so unassuming: they formed a kind of backdrop to daily life in Canada.

Taken together, the NFB’s Still Division photographs create a composite portrait of Canada made from nationalistic and bureaucratic points of view. The NFB aspired not just to present an image of the country, but the image. As a result, the NFB holds a unique position in the history of Canadian visual culture as a conveyor of shared values and governmental programs in photographic form.

Opening: RMG Fridays January 8, 7-10pm

This ten-year mid-career retrospective of the photographs of Holly King is comprised of four of her most recent series: Twisted Roots, Mangroves: Floating Between Two Worlds, Grand Canyon: Unscene and the recently completed English Cliffs series. Two of the series more clearly represent her constructed work, while the other two are based more obviously in reality. King states that her photographs are a “celebration of sublime beauty in nature.”

While King is not out to deceive the viewer with her constructed landscapes, her sets have, until now, remained in the studio. With this exhibition, she has included two viewing boxes: elegantly designed cabinets into which one peers and sees a landscape built using forced perspective. Her meticulously rendered “rocks and trees” are visible for all, outside the context of her enlarged photographs. The box becomes a personal space for the viewer, a point of contemplation. King notes that with this structure, she hopes to “construct a partially believable poetic place.”

Montreal-based artist Holly King, manufactures both the beautiful and sublime and is interested in “the tension between artifice and illusion generated.” King has said that her work is a “search for a deep silence.” Her photographs, both constructed and real, serve, through a vastness of scale, depth of colour or the richness of the blacks in her monochromatic work, to allow the viewer to delight in the beautiful, and to savour the silence in the face of the sublime.

The RMG will also present Holly King’s photograph Chalk Shoreline in the windows of Core21, a co-working space in downtown Oshawa. This project is the first of a series of artworks in the windows of downtown businesses, and an on-going partnership with the RMG and Core21.

A 120 page, bilingual hardcover, publication will accompany the exhibition and be available at the RMG Shop and ABC Art Books Canada. The publication includes colour images, portfolios and essay by Francine Paul and Linda Jansma.

Born in Montreal, King studied visual arts at Laval University, where she earned her BFA in 1979. She then studied visual arts and modern dance at York University, completing her MFA in 1981. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally and her work is widely collected, including institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Art Gallery of Ontario among others. She teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

Read the catalogue!

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in collaboration with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) will present Beyond Measure: Domesticating Distance this fall. The exhibition brings together the works of five contemporary South Asian artists as they examine the voids and brims of living in a diaspora. Tazeen Qayyum, Abdullah M.I. Syed, Asma Sultana, Surendra Lawoti and Meera Margaret Singh critically dissect cultural duality and the resulting hybrid identities.

They share accounts that add to an overarching collective narrative that has come to describe an in-between space. Hovering between recollection, narration and reflection their works record acts of searching for the familiar in the foreign, of repurposing the past in the present and of locating oneself within displacement. Working with performance and installation, photography and sculpture, writing and sewing and moving image and text, their multidisciplinary practices echo the diversity of their layered experiences.

Emanating from personal narratives, the works carry a deliberate autobiographical significance as each artist dissects the fissures and dislocations caused by distance. Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, England, Australia, Brazil, America, and Canada provide the spaces and intertwining histories for these accounts shaped by movement. The exhibition collocates these works to further understand, as well as complicate, ideas of familiarity and strangeness, nostalgia and paranoia, and community and the individual.

Read the catalogue!

As host of TORONTO 2015’s boxing and weightlifting competitions, Oshawa continues to celebrate the spirit of sport. This exhibition showcases the history of athletics in Oshawa, with historical photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection.

Athletic competition in almost every sport has been an integral part of life in Oshawa for nearly 150 years. Summer sports such as golf, lacrosse and baseball and winter sports like hockey and curling are deeply rooted in Oshawa’s history, acting as popular past-times in Oshawa since the late 1800s. Originally competing amongst other local teams, as the population in the area grew, sports teams began to compete with neighbouring towns and eventually on a provincial, national, and international level. From Oshawa’s earliest days, large outdoor parks such as Prospect Park and Alexandra Park have been used as sport facilities, where hundreds of spectators would gather to watch baseball and lacrosse games, as well as bicycle races and tennis matches.

Oshawa’s athletes and sports teams continue to achieve success today. Perhaps most notably, the Oshawa Generals hockey team, a great source of pride in the community since 1937, have won multiple championships over the years and produced legendary players such as Bobby Orr and Eric Lindros. For decades, Oshawa’s numerous professional athletes have trained and competed on the national and international stage, bringing home top awards from competitions around the world. This exhibition provides a window into the lives of local teams and athletes by tracing the rich legacy of Oshawa’s sporting history.