Clean and healthy waterways contribute to the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of a community. Oshawa’s main watershed, the Oshawa Creek, has a history of contamination connected to early industrial development. The creek flows 50 kilometres from its headwaters in the Oak Ridges Moraine to its mouth on Lake Ontario, and played a central role in Oshawa’s historical foundation as a settler community. The lake and the creek were an ideal source of power for early industries but had an environmental impact polluting the waterway with metals and other contaminants. Industrialization along the creek also had an impact on the Indigenous populations who used the Creek for transportation and subsidence, with dams and pollution making the pathway less accessible and healthy. Recreational use of the creek was also effected with quality of water being connected to quality of life for early residents.
GTR Bridge Over the Oshawa Creek, 1910, The Thomas Bouckley Collection.
The Creek was deemed polluted and unsafe for human consumption as early as 1902 due to over 50 years of industrial activities along it. Since 1958, the health and quality of the Oshawa Creek has been monitored closely by the Central Lake Ontario Conservation Authority, and today in cooperation with the City of Oshawa. This exhibition pulls together a selection of photographs to reflect on the history of industry along the Oshawa Creek and to consider the effects rapid development has on the quality of health and life in a growing city.
The Thomas Bouckley Collection is a photographic collection originally compiled by Oshawa historian and collector Thomas Bouckley. It consists of over 3500 images that depict the visual history of this community and is searchable online.
Calling all senior artists! We invite you to take part in this two-part event at the RMG, which begins with a tour of Piecework, a new group exhibition inspired by quilts and quilt-making practices, and concludes with an overview of the Seniors Art Competition and Exhibition, including competition categories and judging criteria. Come get your questions answered!
The Seniors Art Competition and Exhibition is a showcase of creativity and technical skill among members of the Oshawa Senior Community Centres, Oshawa Public Libraries, and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, and more, this annual community exhibition is structured around a competition theme. This year, the theme is nourish.
Local seniors who are 55+ and a member of the RMG, Oshawa Senior Community Centres, or the Oshawa Public Libraries, are invited to submit one artwork for the exhibition. The exhibition runs from August 19 – September 27, 2023 and artwork drop off and registration takes place on Tuesday, August 15 from 10 am-4 pm.
Join us at 1pm on May 10th for an artist-led tour of Emerging Visions, an exhibition that presents thesis projects by the third-year graduating students of the Fine Arts Advanced program at Durham College.
We welcome staff and students from Durham College and any members of the public who want to learn more about specific projects and hear about the journey from conception to fabrication to presentation. This event is free and open to everyone. If there are ways we can support your participation, please contact Hannah at [email protected].
This exhibition is generously supported by the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
We are pleased to present the annual Durham College Thesis Exhibition! Like all visionary explorers, the students in Durham College’s Fine Arts Advanced program are involved in a continual process of identifying and studying meaningful subjects that pertain to their own evolving bodies of work. They first research then develop strategies unique to their practice through experimentation, all the while learning to define and focus their personal interests. This exhibition includes a wide range of subjects, interests, and mediums. Celebrate EMERGING VISIONS with the staff and students of Durham College!
The opening reception will be hosted during RMG Friday: Renewal on May 5, 2023. Then, stop by the gallery at 1pm on May 10th for an artist-led tour of the exhibition. This is your chance to learn more about specific projects and hear about the journey from conception to fabrication to presentation.
This exhibition is generously supported by the RBC Foundation’s Emerging Artist Project.
This event has passed and registrations are closed.
$55/adult
$28/ child under 12
Come join us for tea on Mother’s Day at The RMG!
Berry Hill Food Co. will be hosting seatings on May 13th and 14th. Bring all the moms for delicious prix fixe with tantalizing teas. Then tour our exhibitions and a visit to the RMG Shop. Treat the special people in your life, to local artisan treasures. Guests in for Tea will receive a 10% discount at the Shop.
All reservations are managed by Berry Hill Food Co.
Visit the RMG between April 28th and May 14th to check out the Oshawa Art Association’s 55th Juried Art Exhibition. This exhibition showcases artworks created by artists from across Durham Region.
Inspired by Black fantasy and science fiction narratives, this solo exhibition by Pickering-based artist Aaron Jones presents a new installation that combines video, collage works, photomurals, and a multi-channel soundscape. Finding inspiration from exploring the vast northern shoreline of Lake Ontario, Jones’ nuanced approach brings insights to land-based practices, placemaking, local histories, and world-building methodologies.
The immersive soundscape combines field recordings of natural areas around the Humber River with samples of electronic sounds from a theremin. The audio creates a moody atmosphere that unfolds across different areas of the space, and is paired with a new video work and photo-murals taken near shores of Lake Ontario. In the video, a ghostly presence moves throughout a landscape that is both familiar and uncanny. Meant to evoke an experience of haunting within his childhood home, Jones employs this phantom figure to pay tribute to its ongoing presence in his life, opening possibilities of new worlds and access to other realms.
Jones describes this work as an, “attempt to affirm a spiritual-symbiotic relationship to nature” through which he, “hopes to evoke a sense of disorientation, where the spectral spaces feel hyperreal, yet beautifully strange.” In a period defined by socio-ecological uncertainty, the work proposes ways of being in tandem with the natural world, and considers what it means to be human beyond the body. By constructing imagined spaces from images of thriving and overgrown urban areas, Jones proposes an idealized relationship to the world that considers environmental futurity and celebrates abundance. Here, bold fictions are defined by the unknown, and viewers are challenged with seeing themselves within the uncertainty.
Exhibition Publication
View a digital copy of the publication for this exhibition here.
Aaron Jones describes himself as an image-builder who reconfigures materials from books, magazines, newspapers and personal photos into new characters and realities. His collages and photo-based installations are a form of self-and world-exploration; he uses paper as a medium, where rips and tears become painterly brush strokes. Through a cathartic practice of constructing and deconstructing, Jones joins opposing visuals and colours in search of ‘peace’; a spiritual satisfaction. Recently, Jones has been exploring his birthplace of southern Ontario. The circumstances of the last two years have sparked a consideration of how he might survive off his own basic skills and natural resources. Jones has been exploring the natural landscape, as well as researching plants, wildlife, and the natural conditions near his mother’s home in Pickering, to understand their offerings and inner workings. His new intimately scaled, figurative collages are set against large-format pictures of rural landscapes and a video performance, contrasting scale and the ethereal with the real.
Born 1993 in Toronto, Jones graduated with a BA from OCADU in 2018. His work has been included recently in a special project for Nuit Blanche and the Art Gallery of Ontario’s We Are Story: The Canada Now Photography Acquisition exhibtion. He’s also been included in the exhibitions Three Thirty at Doris McCarthy Gallery, From the Ground Up at NIA Centre for the Arts, Ragga NYC at Mercer Union, all in Toronto, and Propped at Oakville Galleries, Oakville, ON. Jones was awarded The Gattuso Prize for his exhibition Closed Fist, Open Palm for the 2020 CONTACT Photography Festival.
Aaron Jones is represented by Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto.
Installation of Fountain of Dreams at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2023. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.
This exhibition is supported by TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment.
Topographies is a new body of work by Winnipeg-based artist Anna Binta Diallo, exploring map-making and world-building. Inspired by the rich visual histories and formal qualities of maps, this new installation explores the metaphoric and symbolic possibilities of representation. If a map is a translation of the important elements and characteristics of a particular place during a moment in time, this exhibition asks, what happens when the view is expanded? How do you contain a multitude of perspectives across geographies, times, and cultures? What richness is revealed through these layered forms of meaning-making?
For Topographies Diallo employs a personal archive of historical and outdated maps to re-interpret them as the basis for a new body of sculptural works. Exploring the sedimentary layers that form various imagined terrains, the work builds on this concept as a metaphor for the layered histories, material cultures, and human/non-human flourishing that happens within a place over time. Using layers of Plexiglas, the hung panels form large-scale topographies, consisting of cut-out shapes, textures, and found imagery, interpreted as vertical landscapes that include fossilizations of visual information, and clues of human habitation. Employing the use of light, space, layering, and depth, these new works are a material departure from Diallo’s recent work, proposing new ways to convey a narrative that continues to expand on previous research on folklore, language, history, and transcultural identity.
By assembling imagery from a diverse set of archival sources, this immersive installation maps a new world, evoking themes of place-making and stewardship, as well as the consequences of colonial histories and conquest, divisions, and ownership. Together, the works in Topographies explore how our perception of land and ground can transform, interwoven with our experiences and history, mutating and morphing like the earth’s crust.
Exhibition Publication
View a digital copy of the publication for this exhibition here.
Anna Binta Diallo is a multidisciplinary visual artist who explores themes of memory and nostalgia to create unexpected works about identity. She was born in Dakar (Senegal, 1983), grew up in Saint-Boniface (Manitoba), and lived more than fifteen years in Montreal/Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang. She completed her BFA at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Arts (2006) and received her MFA from the Transart Institue in Berlin (2013). Her work has been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally (Finland, Senegal, Mali, Taiwan, and Germany), in institutions such as Centre CLARK, QC, Museum London, London ON; Contemporary Calgary; MOCA Taipei; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, and featured in Biennales such as Momenta and Bamako Encounters. In 2022, she unveiled her first public artwork, a mural integrated into the architecture of the Espace Denis Savard, in the Verdun Auditorium in Montreal. She is the recipient of several awards, prizes, and distinctions, notably from the Conseil des Arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2021, she was a finalist in the Salt Spring National Art Prize, was awarded the Barbara Sphor Memorial Prize from the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, and received the Black Designers of Canada Award of Excellence. In 2022, she was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. Her works are part of numerous public and private collections, including; EQ Bank; RBC Royal Bank, and Scotiabank. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, on Treaty 1, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples and the Métis Nation. Anna Binta Diallo is represented by Towards Gallery.
Installation of Topographies at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2023. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.
The artist gratefully acknowledges support from the Canada Council for the Arts for this exhibition.
This exhibition is supported by TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment.
Queering the Collection brings together a selection of artworks from the RMG’s permanent collection and seeks to expand upon the established interpretations of these artworks by looking at them through a queer lens. The artworks were selected taking into account records and documentation that suggest these artists lived outside of gender and sexuality binaries and in doing so, questions why these facts have been historically removed from conversations about the artist and their work.
“Queer” as a term is often used as shorthand for the wider 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Historically used as a slur, it was reclaimed during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s as a way to refuse stigmatization. Today the term remains controversial, but is rooted in the urge to challenge normative systems and relations, question accepted boundaries, and reject societal expectations. It is a way of being in the world, a shared sense of understanding and community with other queer people. In the current global context, when the rights of queer people are being simultaneously recognized and all but erased, examining historical queerness feels increasingly urgent, acknowledging that we have always been here, and provides a sense of ancestry to young queer people.
Queerness has always been present in the arts but has been historically dependent on artists remaining invisible and unnamed. Rediscovering and acknowledging the queer stories of these artists, explicit or covert, adds a valuable layer to the interpretation of their work. The featured artists have used their artwork as an outlet to explore themselves, seek change, and redefine the world around them. Some artists lived openly, sharing their lives and experiences publically through art, some we may only be able to speculate about, while others lived quietly during a time when their private lives were criminalized. They have used their artwork to express the pain of losing loved ones to AIDS, the joy of queer relationships, and the banality of everyday life; essential human experiences often only permitted in private spaces for many queer people in history and even today.
Queering the Collection invites viewers to consider a new lens of interpretation when looking at these works. In questioning how society interprets our histories, we establish foundational methods for being curious and questioning how we live today, and think critically about our role in the world.
Installation of Queering the Collection at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2023. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is very excited to host our first artisan market of the year in partnership with the City of Oshawa.
The RMG Spring Artisan Market will take place on Sunday, June 11th from 11-4PM. Our market will be conducted indoors, alongside the Oshawa Peony Festival.
Featuring high-quality artisans from across the GTA, we strive to provide a unique and local shopping experience.
