Presented in partnership with the Art Gallery of Peterborough and the City of Peterborough.

Opening Reception – Friday, June 7, 7PM – 10PM 

duet brings together work by Jack Bush and Francisco-Fernando Granados to both invoke the aesthetic legacies of modernist abstraction and to initiate a dialogue on contemporary understandings of this period and its visual strategies. By pairing paintings and prints from the mid-twentieth century with site-specific and digital works from a contemporary moment, the exhibition creates a conversation on abstraction that transcends space, time, and medium.

Known for his bold use of colour and iconic compositions, Jack Bush (1909-1977) was a pioneer of post-painterly abstraction and one of the first Canadian artists to gain international recognition. A prominent member of the Painter’s Eleven (1953-1960)–who came together through a common commitment to minimalism and abstraction–Bush helped to solidify the importance of abstraction within the Canadian canon and inspire generations of artists.

As an extension of his interest in form, for the past three years, Francisco-Fernando Granados’ has maintained a near-daily drawing practice informed by the compositional strategies of Jack Bush. Produced on a touch-screen phone, these series of abstract drawings are both an affectionate homage and a quiet subversion. Trained in the history and practice of drawing and painting, Granados was inspired by the National Gallery’s 2014-15 Jack Bush retrospective, an event that closely coincided with the death of his father. The ritual of drawing became folded into a process of mourning and grief that has extended into his everyday life. How does one pay homage? How do we contend with the legacies of those who have come before us?

Grandos’ series towards a minor abstraction and letters are both offerings and provocations. Here, with trained fingers moving across the smooth and familiar surface of a screen, Granados paints to dialogue in a medium that is built for quick exchange. Guiding the abstract compositional impetus away from Modernist concepts of autonomy, the works push towards an open-ended politics informed by his queer and refugee experiences. In duet, the discourse between past and the contemporary is understood as ongoing and reciprocal. The dialogue between Jack Bush and Francisco-Fernando Granados, though displaced by decades, reaches across history in an effort to touch that which seems untouchable, to reshape what seems set.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant.

Opening Reception – Friday, May 3, 7PM – 10PM

The Trees Want to Remain Quiet, but the Wind Won’t Stop brings together two bodies of work by Montreal-based artist Hua Jin. Exploring the relationship between landscape photography and solitude, the works portray different wooded areas as a means of reflecting on both the timeless nature of landscape photography and the constant cyclical nature of a forest. The eponymous work, The Trees Want to Remain Quiet, but the Wind Won’t Stop consists of eight monitors, each depicting a single tree reflected in water, continuously abstracted by the wind. According to Jin, the word landscape in Chinese is expressed as two characters, 风景, the first meaning wind and the second meaning both scene and light, which suggests not only a location but also how it is perceived. The second body of work Forest similarly plays with perception, depicting an old growth forest in Langley BC as a large panorama stretching over twenty-five feet. The meticulous detail captured in the image shows various stages of decomposition alongside growth and renewal with new buds and small shoots emerging from the verdant undergrowth. Jin’s elongation of time and space in both these works offers an eloquent way to see these landscapes anew.

Opening Reception – Saturday, May 11, 2PM – 4PM 

Home Made Home: Patch Work is a new project by Vancouver-based artist Germaine Koh, which explores complex housing issues relevant the Durham Region, and opens a conversation about civic responsibility, housing standards and the potential of alternative building models. For the exhibition, Koh has designed two provisional structures which provide practical solutions for emergency shelter. The first, a modular structure made from recycled materials, and the second, a small-scale building system in the form of a set of reusable panels that can be quickly assembled. Working together with members of the community, each of the panels will be created by various groups offsite and then brought together within the gallery. This framework, much like a patchwork quilt or old-fashioned barn-raising, draws on the skills within the community and provides a structure for individuals to contribute to communal needs. Starting from a DIY ethos, the works in the exhibition seeks to re-imagine housing conditions through models that address specific needs. Other projects by Koh in the Home Made Home series offer more speculative or utopian propositions that envision other possibilities for dwelling and sharing space.

Germaine Koh is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, in the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions and common spaces, often adapting familiar objects to encourage connections between people and with the human and natural systems around us. Her current projects include Home Made Home, a project to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a community project using play as a form of creative practice. Her exhibition history includes the BALTIC Centre, De Appel, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Para/Site Art Space, Frankfurter Kunstverein, The Power Plant, The British Museum, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, Plug In ICA, Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Liverpool, Sydney and Montreal biennials. In 2018-20 she is the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence.

Download the Patch Work Manual for building the small-scale home as seen in the exhibition space here. 

Take a Look Inside

As Oshawa began to expand and industrialize in the early 20^th century, in 1928, the first Business and Professional Buyer’s Guide was published by Alger Press Limited to highlight “manufacturing, business and professional interests” of the city and to generate continual growth.

In 1921, Oshawa had a population of approximately 13 000 people. Of that 13 000 people, 18 are listed in the census as being Chinese. There are no people of Asian descent, including Chinese, listed in any of the previous census record. This photo installation mimics a storefront window façade decorated three red endless knots that allude to the Boston Café, Ontario Laundry and the Globe Diner; three early Chinese establishments within a 5-minute walk of Core21. These three businesses were not included in the Business and Professional Buyer’s Guide.

In the foreword of the Buyer’s Guide, the publishers ask readers to bear with them as it is their first time undertaking a document of this nature and that errors of omission may be present. They cite the following lines from Puck’s epilogue in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

“Gentles, do not reprehend,
If you pardon, we will mend.”

The impetus for the piece is to pay tribute and commemorate local histories have not been chronicled within the downtown core. What was the experience of owning a business in Oshawa for a Chinese family? What was it like to live as a Chinese-Canadian during Oshawa’s industrial boom? What (if any) forms of community were present for these Chinese-Canadians since they were so few in number? Chinese knots are an old form of decor with connotations of luck associated. One of the many symbolisms behind endless knots is that they link ancestors with omnipresence. This installation pays tribute to the legacies created from these first communities to make this largely unseen history visible.

Boston Café (4 King Street E), 1921

Detail from photo of King Street, Oshawa (Ax995.194.1)

The Boston Cafe sign can be seen in the centre, just to the left of the man holding the ‘Go’ traffic sign.

The earliest records show that in the 1921 Canadian Federal Census for Oshawa and the 1921 City Directory

for Oshawa, there were two “nuclear” families living in Oshawa in the 20s and 30s, the Lem family and the Soo family. This Soo family comprised five of the eighteen Chinese people living in Oshawa during that year. They lived on Simcoe Street and Min Soo ran a restaurant called the Boston Café. Directory records show that Soo Min owned the Boston Cafe on 57 King St E until 1930 and then he reappears in 1938 as the proprietor of the Eden Inn on 8-10 Ontario Street. During this time, this part of King street was a ethnically diverse area, with people listed as being Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, and Russian.

Ontario Laundry (29 Celina St), 1928

Hockey and Ontario Laundry, Thomas Bouckley Collection.

The photo on the left was taken at the back of Ontario Laundry, which was on Celina at Athol. Pictured here are 3 uncles of Brenda Joy Lem (photo source): George (the oldest), Uncle Edward (middle), and Uncle Norm (the youngest). Depicted on the right is a woman in a floral patterned dress, in front of Ontario Laundry, Celina St. at Athol. The woman is described by Brenda Joy Lem as her Grandmother, the photo possibly taken by Brenda’s Aunt. Brenda’s family owned the first hand laundry business in the City.

The Globe Diner (13 King Street E), 1921

The Globe Diner, 2503, Thomas Bouckley Collection.

The Globe Diner was located on 13 King Street. In the 1921 Census it shows that this address was a single home rented by  a number of Chinese who were all listed as cooks or waiters, and that the Manager of the Globe Cafe, Lee Chow King (often abbreviated to L.C. King) was the head of household. In the 1928 directory, however, the Globe Cafe is listed as being owned by the Seto Bros. The Seto’s also operated the Waldorf Cafe at 11 Simcoe and later in 1937, the Seto Cafe at 11 Bond Street. In 1985 directory the Globe cafe became the The New Globe Restaurant and is shown as having moved to it’s current location on Athol Street. This photo with the staff members of the restaurant was taken around 1940. Back row, second from left is George Lem, uncle of Brenda Joy Lem. Man in bottom left is the grandfather of Brenda Joy Lem.

Special thanks for Brenda Joy Lem, and Jennifer Weymark and Alex Petrie from the Oshawa Museum for sharing their research and stories. To learn more about the history of early Chinese settlers in Oshawa, consult Brenda Joy Lem’s exhibition Homage to the Heart, and the Oshawa Museum’s ongoing research.

References

Lem, B. and Jansma, L. (2009). Brenda Joy Lem. Oshawa, ON: Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

Weymark, J. (2018). Asian History Month. [online] Oshawa Museum Blog. Available at: https://oshawamuseum.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/asian-history-month/ [Accessed 1 Oct. 2018].

Detail from photo of King Street, Oshawa (Ax995.194.1), Oshawa Museum

Ontario Laundry (2501), Thomas Bouckley Collection, Robert McLaughlin Gallery

Hockey (2502), Thomas Bouckley Collection, Robert McLaughlin Gallery

The Globe Diner (2503), Thomas Bouckley Collection, Robert McLaughlin Gallery