On Thursday, Sept. 14, three new exhibitions opened at the Art Gallery of Guelph (AGG) on Gordon St. across from War Memorial Hall. The new exhibitions raise questions of a colonial history laid against the backdrop of landscapes and cultural paraphernalia reopening the dialogue of Canadiana and cultural identity as many celebrate our sesquicentennial as a nation.
150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact
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Curated by the current AGG art director, Shauna McCabe, 150 Acts: Art, Activism, Impact seeks to challenge the dominant narrative of Canadian colonial history by giving voice to diverse Indigenous narratives previously silenced.“150 Acts coincides with Canada’s sesquicentennial, an essential moment of national reflection and an opportunity to query the relationship of nationhood itself to Canada’s Indigeneity,” the AGG’s website reads.The exhibition is a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to include meaningful dialogue between Indigenous communities and histories in the cultural narrative of nationhood.
Featured artists include Norval Morrisseau, Annie Pootoogook, and Oviloo Tunnillie, among others.
My curiosities are not your curios
Curated by Yasmin Nurming-Por — winner of the fifth annual Middlebrook Prize for young curators — My curiosities are not your curios questions “the idea of collections and their institutional and colonial histories,” according to the AGG’s website.“[The collections are] aesthetically pleasing, but they also communicate a lot about the objects within them. [That’s me] thinking about cultural institutions and how people display things in their home. I think there is a real power play that needs to be interrogated there,” Nurming-Por said in an interview with The Ontarion. Artists include Hannah Doerksen from Calgary, Alta.; Faye HeavyShield from Blood Reserve, Alta.; and Lucy Tasseor Tutsweetok from Nunavut. Each artist examines cultural artifacts and how they enter into the larger conversation of Canadiana.
Light in the Land: The Nature of Canada
Scientist, astronaut, and environmental interpreter Dr. Roberta Bondar has compiled a collection of her photography from time spent in the Canadian wilderness. The exhibition explores “varied aspects of the distinctive and significant landscape that is Canada,” the AGG website reads. The three exhibitions promote dialogue between cultural artifacts and landscapes, as My curiosities are not your curios leads right into Bondar’s exhibit. Bondar’s work also promotes a sense of, as the AGG website puts it, “awe, respect, and understanding” of the Canadian landscape akin to Indigenous ways of seeing and reminiscent of the Group of Seven’s work.
Photos by Matteo Cimellaro/The Ontarion