Opening reception: Friday, November 2, 7-10pm

In Anishnaabemowin, inaabiwin means “movement of light” and is used to describe lightning.

Indigenous peoples embody a relational approach to understanding and interacting with the world which allows them to engage more deeply through complex relationships with themselves and the natural world. Through colonization, this way of being and knowing has been compromised.

The artists in this exhibition use their varied art practices to reclaim these ways of being and knowing, hoping to restore compromised connections and encourage audiences to follow. As we seek to understand our place in the world, relearning these relations is essential, and will help us navigate today’s challenges and thrive on the lands we call home.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers will be encouraged to think about and feel their own relations and how they connect to larger worldviews. This project will be guided by Indigenous voices through researched texts, as well as through conversations and visits with respected knowledge keepers.

Inaabiwin is also a metaphor for the work of the artists presented in this exhibition, who have remarkably profound and active practices that each evoke a strong visceral response.

Art Gallery of Mississauga: July 4th – September 22, 2019
Ottawa Art Gallery: October, 2019 – January, 2020
Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery: February 7 – May 3, 2020

We are grateful for the additional support provided by the Ontario Arts Council for this exhibition.

Click here to view the publication online.

In an otherwise empty gallery space, six reflective panels are positioned in a ring, facing inward, catching one another in their reflection, creating channels of infinite regress. A dancing figure in the form of a spiraling flurry of silk appears within a reflective frame, disrupting the mirrored image, and moves from one panel to another, seemingly crossing the space that spans between each. As the figure traverses the circumference of the ring it appears infinitely in the cross reflection, where viewers and the dancer appear to share the same physical space.

The movement of the dancer is reminiscent of Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance of the 19th century. Fuller was a choreographer, costume designer, dancer, and an inventive stage designer published in Scientific American. Credited as a pioneer of modern dance, she used her voluminous robes as a performative sculptural object, radically positioning dance within a conceptual realm. The choreographed movement of the dancer’s robes in this installation, create metamorphic and ephemeral sculptural structures that pass through shifting tones and colours. A trail of mercurial forms emerge from the silk robes, tracing its movements, vivid, and fleeting, the structures grow as tendrils that delineate her path and diminish in her wake. Viewers are invited to explore these structures as augmented reality, using viewing devices provided by the gallery.

Performed by Katie Ewald

Mount St. Vincent University Art Gallery: January 12 – March 3, 2019
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery: June 20 – September 15, 2019
Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery: October 4 – January 5, 2020
Kelowna Art Gallery: Spring 2020
Dunlop Art Gallery: Fall 2020

Opening reception: Friday, June 1, 7-10pm. Click here to register for a free bus from Toronto.
Catalogue launch: Saturday, June 9, 2-4pm. Click here to register for a free bus from Toronto.

What happens when surfaces glitter, gleam, sparkle, and shine? In Glimmers of the Radiant Real, radiance, that quality of projected light we associate so often with the marvelous and the modern, is subverted by the relationship between the quality of a surface and what it covers, reflects, or contains. Surface is the point of contact for the body, it’s skin and texture and touch. The glistening, shining surfaces of works by Katie Bethune-Leamen, the Broadbent Sisters, Daniel Griffin Hunt, Sanaz Mazinani, Sandy Plotnikoff, Mary Pratt, Cole Swanson, Catherine Telford-Keogh, and Xiaojing Yan manipulate the viewer’s perception of dimension through reflections and refractions, thereby un-forming the object and making the familiar strange.

The artists and works featured in the exhibition use a variety of materials to generate these surface effects, from glass to gold, foil, plastic, and pearls. Each material has its own qualities of shine and reflection, and each combination of qualities reacts with a work’s source and subject to yield a different effect: gilded insect wings sketch a house’s morbid geography, material treatments upend expectations of form and colour, and dollar-store detritus, sunk in resin, seems to glow behind glass. For the viewer, the result is a combination of material familiarity and perceptual distortion.

In video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation, these works invite us to transform as they do, through interactions with surfaces that dazzle, using light to obscure or fracture the images and clarity we expect. They answer a craving for radiance, a desire to be like them, shining and seemingly limitless. They offer the promise of the object made new, but even if they speak in the same material language of the glittering and the precious, the modern, and the transcendent, they speak its opposite, too, a language of obscurity and disappearance, complicating the shining and ideal. They layer the surface substances that gloss the world we know, offering glimmers of a radiant reality where light becomes, not truth illuminated, but something else.

Fore more information, please visit glimmersoftheradiantreal.ca

Curated by: Ruth Jones and Sam Mogelonsky

Art Gallery of Peterborough: October 6, 2018 – January 6, 2019
McIntosh Gallery: January 17 – March 16, 2019

Opening reception: September 7 at 7pm

Are you an apartment dweller? Do you ever wish the outside of your apartment said as much about you as the inside? Hunderwasser, the Austrian painter, suggested that residents of urban spaces should be able to paint, as far as they could reach, the outside of their apartment walls.

During his residency earlier this year, Jeff Mann worked with Oshawa Housing Residents and Eastdale C.V.I. students to create over 100 small drawings based on Hundertwasser’s idea that
occupants of buildings should be able to paint the exterior wall of their apartment as far as they can reach.

Jeff Mann, who was resident artist at ArtLab from Jan 24- March 4 2018.

 

The first public appearance of what would become Painters Eleven occurred when seven of the artists showed their work at the Simpson’s department store in Toronto in October, 1953. The concept of an exhibition of abstract art and home furnishing was the idea of William Ronald, a commercial artist working at Simpson’s and his colleague, Carry Cardell. It was during a publicity shoot for this exhibition that the seven suggested that they add more to their number and become a formal group of abstract painters. Their first meeting as a group would be held at the Thickson’s Point cottage (on the Oshawa/Whitby border) of Alexandra Luke. Painters Eleven would be in existence from 1953-60 as a vehicle to promote the members’ individual work and the role of abstraction in Canadian art.

Canadian abstraction followed the wave of abstraction that began to appear in the United States, particularly New York City, after World War II. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline were seminal figures within this modern, revolutionary movement that looked to surrealism for inspiration.

While the Oshawa Art Gallery was founded above a store on Simcoe Street in downtown Oshawa in 1967, it would become, in 1969, The Robert McLaughlin Gallery with the donation of thirty-seven works from the collection of Alexandra Luke and a generous donation towards the construction of the first gallery by her husband Ewart McLaughlin. The RMG was named after Ewart’s grandfather, Robert. Luke’s donation included work by all of the members of Painters Eleven and helped to establish, in 1970, the RMG’s unique focus on collecting and exhibiting the work of Ontario’s first group of abstract painters.

Since 1967, the RMG’s collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints by members of Painters Eleven has grown to over 500 works. Numerous exhibitions have been organized including the 1979 exhibition Painters Eleven in Retrospect, as well as solo exhibitions of individual members. The collection also includes an extensive archives with exhibition reviews, interviews and photographs.

Opening and artist talk: Sunday, February 11th, 1-3pm

Oshawa based artist, Grant Cole is drawn to the formality of everyday life depicted in the Thomas Bouckley Collection of historical photographs. The Bouckley Collection is a visual history of Oshawa that focuses on significant events, people and place. While Cole’s work typically explores his own personal successes and failures, his subjects in his latest work, inspired by the collection, are depicted with what identifies their success, whether an object, uniform, skill, or profession. While the purpose of photography at the turn of the 20th century was for documentation purposes, to Cole’s modern lens, the subjects chose how they wanted to be portrayed and remembered, whether through fashion, poses, or objects. These things are then presented in reduced detail and finished in a high gloss, which highlights their perceived importance.

The work, XXX simply depicts a gold carriage. The carriage is meaningful in Cole’s work for various reasons: it symbolizes order and wealth, and it was, as he notes, “a path to enlightenment for Oshawa.” For the city, carriages have a long and important history. In its heyday, Oshawa’s McLaughlin Carriage Company was the largest carriage manufacturer in the British Empire. The industry helped put Oshawa on the map, and Cole believes it was a “means for Oshawa to understand itself.” The carriage, therefore, is an emblem for the city’s success.

Cole does not want to be perceived as criticizing the idea of purposely presenting one’s self in a particular way. Despite the falseness and at times exhausting effort involved with how we want to be perceived, there are many things we highlight about ourselves worth “parading”: accomplishments, successes, skills, interests, etc. The things we put on parade about ourselves is a way of proclaiming our identity and place. As Cole says, “as long as your successes are real, flaunt them!” As an artist presenting artworks in an exhibition, Cole is himself claiming his own identity and place in Oshawa.

Andil Gosine moved to Oshawa, from Trinidad, at the age of 14. His formative teen years in the city are revisited in these works, in which he both shares his personal desires and vulnerabilities, and exposes the enduring impact of struggles he and his family experienced. Told as an “autobiography in flora,” the exhibition is organized chronologically, with works about the prelude to and enduring aftermath of his teenagehood in Oshawa bookending re-imagined archival materials from his experience here.

Gosine uses the Ixora flower as a key icon throughout. Indigenous to India and other parts of Asia, the flower was brought by his indentured labour ancestors to Trinidad, where it is now ubiquitous. Through this show, Gosine brings them to Canada as an offering to the place and people of Oshawa, who impacted his life path in complicated ways.

Tours: Thursdays 5-9pm, Saturday & Sunday 12-4pm. Free, drop-in.

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 7-10pm

Imagine, if you will, that two artists while exploring a second-hand bookstore in downtown Toronto, come upon an old battered copy of James Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. While idly flipping though it they discover a hand drawn map of what looks like Algonquin Park. On the map there is a mysterious symbol with the initials “TT” drawn within it. Their curiosity is sparked and they purchase the book.

They decide to track down whatever the symbol indicates. Five years later, and after several trips to Algonquin Park, they discover a small cairn and within it find a tin box containing a leather journal with the initials G.N. embossed on its cover. The artists look through the journal and discover that it chronicles a never before known friendship between the journal’s author and Tom Thomson. This journal – if authenticated – would change forever what we know about Tom Thomson and his life.

Imagine.

And that is what is being done with Betwixt & Between: An Untold Tom Thomson Story. Lead artists Joel Richardson, Germinio Pio Politi, and Nyle Johnston, build upon what we know about Thomson, investigating the contradictions and mysteries, in order to produce this project. There are some facts about the artist which are incontrovertible. Yet many aspects of his life remain within the realm of conjecture and (sometimes contrarian) supposition. It is said that if Tom Thomson had not existed, Canada would have had to invent him.
The heart of the project lies in the (85% authentic) story of an imagined friendship between Tom Thomson and George Nadjiwon, a young man from Cape Croker reserve. The time period that is covered in the exhibition includes key dates in Canadian history and looks at issues including the treatment of Indigenous peoples, women’s rights, independence and ideas around nationhood while addressing constructed historical narratives that ignore or obscure different voices.

The historical events being explored in this exhibition are still relevant, especially the injustices perpetuated against Indigenous people. The development of this exhibition has been guided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations and with ongoing dialogue and guidance from the participating Indigenous artists and advisors.

Betwixt & Between is a multilevel platform project that incorporates new technologies such as Augmented Reality and virtual experience through an interactive app that fully integrates with and is reflective of the exhibition.

Virginia Eichhorn, Curator

Click here to submit your images.

What does home mean to you? A new, community-led and informed exhibition looks to explore this. Home can be many things – a feeling, place, person – whatever the case, there’s no place like home.

Members of the community are invited to participate in this exhibition by hashtagging photos that reflect what home means to then with #feelslikehome. Submitted images will be printed and included in a crowd-sourced exhibition project that illustrates how home and a sense of community can be one and the same. Tag us using @rmgoshawa on Instagram and @theRMG on Twitter

The hope is to fill the exhibition space from floor to ceiling with printed 4 x 6 pictures.

While typically, community driven exhibitions ask the community to respond to its collections, this time, the RMG will respond to the community. The RMG’s Curator of Collections will select photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection that highlight reoccurring themes around the feeling of home.

The Thomas Bouckley Collection was started when local historian Thomas Bouckley put his photo documentation of Oshawa together with collected images. This collection is continually growing as Oshawa grows and develops.

#FeelsLikeHome is proudly sponsored by Royal Service Real Estate Inc.